In a time of darkness and great peril for democracy, when America’s colony and proxy Israel assassinates journalists first in any act of war to erase evidence of crimes against humanity in Palestine, when Biden has fist bumped the apex predator of a savage monarchy who ordered or later granted immunity to the perpetrators of the brutal and nightmarish assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, Julian Assange walks free as a triumph of the will to resist tyranny and state terror.
With him go our hopes for a better future than we have made of the past.
Assange remains a figure of the second of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
As V.S. Naipaul coined the phrase in his novel India: A Million Mutinies Now, so now I paraphrase it; let us unleash a million Wikileaks now, and let no darkness remain in the Pandora’s Box of our histories.
As I wrote in my post of December 4 2021, Victory for a Free Press in the Trial of Julian Assange; America’s persecution of Julian Assange for exposing our government’s war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and throughout the world has seen a stunning reversal today in a British court’s refusal of extradition for trial, on the grounds that the American prison system is unsafe and amounts to a death sentence, but which left the greater question of the possibility of a fair trial for political prisoners in the American justice system, and its role in the repression of dissent, unresolved. This judgement of our judicial system and our carceral state by our closest ally illuminates fatal flaws for which a reckoning is long overdue, for ours is not a free nation.
Julian Assange and Jamal Khashoggi are parallel cases which test and interrogate the liberty or tyranny of governments and of societies; canaries in the coal mine of totalitarian darkness.
Shall we cherish or silence and punish those who call out the villainies of secret power and the atrocities our governments perpetrate in our name? This is a key question in our choice of who we want to become, peoples imprisoned and enslaved in submission to authority which subjugates others, or a free humankind which questions and resists those who would enslave us.
Britain has today given us an answer, one which defies the imperialism of America and the fascism of Trump’s regime, and recalls Churchill’s reply to the Nazi invasion of France in his three major speeches of 1940. Today as then, we celebrate the restoration of humankind’s moral compass as a tidal change in our history, one which dawns with America’s repudiation of Trump and the start of the Biden Presidency and which I hope will ripple throughout the world as a force of liberation. To tyranny and to fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again.
Yet while we celebrate this victory for a free press and the global resistance to state tyranny and terror, and the assault on truth and on journalism as a sacred calling in its pursuit, we must recognize that the equivocal nature of the ruling on this test case in Britain has exposed the flaws of our current system of justice in regard to the defense of truth and of truthtellers.
As written by Jonathan Cook in Counterpunch;” Journalism as espionage:
Significantly, Judge Baraitser backed all the Trump administration’s main legal arguments for extradition, even though they were comprehensively demolished by Assange’s lawyers.
Baraitser accepted the US government’s dangerous new definition of investigative journalism as “espionage”, and implied that Assange had also broken Britain’s draconian Official Secrets Act in exposing government war crimes.
She agreed that the 2007 Extradition Treaty applies in Assange’s case, ignoring the treaty’s actual words that exempt political cases like his. She thereby opened the door for other journalists to be seized in their home countries and renditioned to the US.
Baraitser accepted that protecting sources in the digital age – as Assange did for whistleblower Chelsea Manning, an essential obligation on journalists in a free society – now amounts to criminal “hacking”. She trashed free speech and press freedom rights, saying they did not provide “unfettered discretion by Mr Assange to decide what he’s going to publish”.
She appeared to approve of the ample evidence showing that the US spied on Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy, both in violation of international law and his client-lawyer privilege – a breach of his most fundamental legal rights that alone should have halted proceedings.
Baraitser argued that Assange would receive a fair trial in the US, even though it was almost certain to take place in the eastern district of Virginia, where the major US security and intelligence services are headquartered. Any jury there would be dominated by US security personnel and their families, who would have no sympathy for Assange.
So as we celebrate this ruling for Assange, we must also loudly denounce it as an attack on press freedom, as an attack on our hard-won collective freedoms, and as an attack on our efforts to hold the US and UK establishments accountable for riding roughshod over the values, principles and laws they themselves profess to uphold.
Even as we are offered with one hand a small prize in Assange’s current legal victory, the establishment’s other hand seizes much more from us.
Vilification continues
There is a final lesson from the Assange ruling. The last decade has been about discrediting, disgracing and demonising Assange. This ruling should very much be seen as a continuation of that process.
Baraitser has denied extradition only on the grounds of Assange’s mental health and his autism, and the fact that he is a suicide risk. In other words, the principled arguments for freeing Assange have been decisively rejected.
If he regains his freedom, it will be solely because he has been characterised as mentally unsound. That will be used to discredit not just Assange, but the cause for which he fought, the Wikileaks organisation he helped to found, and all wider dissidence from establishment narratives. This idea will settle into popular public discourse unless we challenge such a presentation at every turn.
Assange’s battle to defend our freedoms, to defend those in far-off lands whom we bomb at will in the promotion of the selfish interests of a western elite, was not autistic or evidence of mental illness. His struggle to make our societies fairer, to hold the powerful to account for their actions, was not evidence of dysfunction. It is a duty we all share to make our politics less corrupt, our legal systems more transparent, our media less dishonest.
Unless far more of us fight for these values – for real sanity, not the perverse, unsustainable, suicidal interests of our leaders – we are doomed. Assange showed us how we can free ourselves and our societies. It is incumbent on the rest of us to continue his fight.”
As I wrote in my post of May 3 2024, A Sacred Calling to Pursue the Truth: On World Press Freedom Day; On this thirty first World Press Freedom Day I call for the universal recognition of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth which supercedes the rights of any state to authorize and enforce versions of it in service to power and identitarian politics, and for a United Humankind in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal rights, which include the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; to Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and to preserve the independence of the press and the transparency of all governments as institutions which must answer ultimately to their people.
Freedom of the press and of information, the right to speak, write, teach, organize, research and publish in an environment of transparency of the state, along with rights of protest and strike, are instrumental to the agency of citizens and to the idea and meaningfulness of democracy.
Any power or authority held by a government of any form is granted by its citizens or has been appropriated from them unjustly, and it is the highest principle of natural law as articulated in our Declaration of Independence that we may seize and reclaim it at any time it is held without our participation and co-ownership, or used against our general interests.
True democracy as a free society of equals requires the four ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and one thing more; an engaged electorate of truth tellers who will hold our representatives and the institutions of our government responsible for enacting our values
Like the role of a free press in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, the role of a citizen is to be a truth teller. Both serve Truth, and truth is necessary to the just balance of power between individuals which is the purpose of the state.
I explored the implications of parrhesia and Foucault’s extension of this classical principle as truth telling in my post of May 27 2020, On Speaking Truth to Power as a Sacred Calling; I found myself responding with candor to a conversation today in which a friend, a fearless champion of the marginalized and the wretched of the earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, expressed fear of retribution in calling out the police as an institution of racist state force and control, thereby illustrating the mechanism of silencing on which unjust authority depends.
Of course this was a preface for an act of Breaking the Silence; I did say they are my friend.
Here is the beginning of that conversation; “Today I’m going to do something stupid.
On my Facebook and Twitter feeds I am going to express a viewpoint that I have long held to myself. A viewpoint I believed, if ever made public, would kneecap my dreams of a political career and public service.
Today I realized my silence was just a vestige of my own internalized oppression and respectability politics, and f*** respectability. It has never, and will never, save us. So here goes: here’s why I am a #PoliceAbolitionist”
What followed was a brilliant and multivoiced discussion of the role of police violence in white supremacist terror, as an army of occupation whose purpose is to enforce inequality and elite hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and to subvert the institutions and values of democracy, and of the use of social force in a free society of equals. This is among the most important issues we face today and questions some of the inherent contradictions of our form of government, of which George Washington said, “Government is about force; only force.”
But this is only indirectly the subject on which I write today; far more primary and fundamental to the institution of a free press is the function of other people’s ideas of ourselves, of normality and respectability, in the silencing of dissent.
To our subjugation by authorized identities, I reply with the Wicked Witch; I will fuck respectability with you, and their little dog normality too.
Authorized identities and boundaries of the Forbidden are about power, and we must call out the instruments of unequal power as we see them. Foucault called this truthtelling, and it is a crucial part of seizure of power and ownership of identity; always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
Against state tyranny and terror, force and control, let us deploy parrhesia and the performance of our best selves as guerilla theatre. Go ahead; frighten the horses.
Often have I referred to this key performative role in democracy as the Jester of King Lear, whose enactments of mockery and satire, the exposure and deflation of the mighty as revolutionary seizures of power which reclaim that which we the people have lent them when it is used unjustly, are necessary to maintain the balance of interests in a society in which government is co-owned equally by its citizens and has as its overriding purpose the securement of the freedom and autonomy of individuals and of their universal human rights.
Without citizens who refuse to be silenced and controlled by authority, democracy becomes meaningless.
So with my arts of rhetoric and poetry as truthtelling, and with my praxis of democracy in my daily journal here at Torch of Liberty; to incite, provoke, and disturb.
For democracy requires a participatory electorate willing to speak truth to power.
To all those who defy and challenge unjust authority; I will stand with you, and I ask that all of us do the same.
As written in his newsletter by Michael Moore, in an essay entitled Why I Posted the Bail Money for Julian Assange 14 Years Ago; “For over 14 years, I have fought for his freedom and his rights as a journalist to share the truth as he uncovers it to the public. On Monday night, we learned that he would be set free and be allowed to return home. He would face no further harassment or threats from the American government. Although 14 years of his life were stolen from him by a government of, yes, war criminals, they were never able to lay a hand on him.
On the day I posted $20,000 in bail money in 2010 to help get him released, I wrote the following statement about why I did so and why I believe he is owed our eternal thanks for exposing the truth about the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Hopefully, someday, this country of ours will apologize to him for this torture. In the meantime, let us all draw from him the kind of courage that is needed during our darkest times of aggression and the funding of foreign slaughter with our tax dollars. It is also my hope that we will sometime soon return to having a vital and vibrant press that exists to uncover the lies and protect us, the citizens, from those who would seek to end our democracy.
For now, this is, indeed, a happy day. Be well, Julian. And know that the good people of this world will never forget your sacrifice.
Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.
Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.
So why is WikiLeaks, after performing such an important public service, under such vicious attack? Because they have outed and embarrassed those who have covered up the truth. The assault on WikiLeaks and Assange has been over the top:
Sen. Joe Lieberman (Gore’s Democratic running mate in the 2000 election) says WikiLeaks “has violated the Espionage Act.”
The New Yorker’s George Packer calls Assange “super-secretive, thin-skinned, [and] megalomaniacal.”
Sarah Palin claims he’s “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” whom we should pursue “with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.”
Democrat Bob Beckel (Walter Mondale’s 1984 campaign manager) said about Assange on Fox: “A dead man can’t leak stuff … there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”
Republican Mary Matalin says “he’s a psychopath, a sociopath … He’s a terrorist.”
Rep. Peter A. King (R-NY) calls WikiLeaks a “terrorist organization.”
And indeed they are! They exist to terrorize the liars and warmongers who have brought ruin to our nation and to others. Perhaps the next war won’t be so easy because the tables have been turned — and now it’s Big Brother who’s being watched … by us!
WikiLeaks deserves our thanks for shining a huge spotlight on all this. But some in the corporate-owned press have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks (“they’ve released little that’s new!”) or have painted them as simple anarchists (“WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!”). WikiLeaks exists, in part, because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. The corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their job. There’s no time or money anymore for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don’t want those stories exposed. They like their secrets kept … as secrets.
I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago. Take a look at this photo:
That’s President George W. Bush about to be handed a “secret” document on August 6th, 2001 — just one month before 9/11. Its heading read: “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” And on those pages it said the FBI had discovered “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.” Mr. Bush decided to ignore it and went fishing for the next four weeks.
But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden’s impending attack using hijacked planes?
But back then only a few people had access to that document. Because the secret was kept, a flight school instructor in San Diego, who noticed that two Saudi students took no interest in learning how to perform takeoffs or landings, saw nothing strange about that and did nothing to inform any authorities. Had he heard about the bin Laden threat through the media, might he have called the FBI? (Please read this essay by former FBI Agent Coleen Rowley, Time’s 2002 co-Person of the Year, about her belief that, had WikiLeaks been around in 2001, 9/11 might have been prevented.)
Or what if the public in 2003 had been able to read “secret” memos from Dick Cheney as he pressured the CIA to make up “facts” that he wanted in order to build his false case for war? If a WikiLeaks had revealed at that time that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, do you think that the war would have been launched — or rather, wouldn’t there have been calls later on for Cheney’s arrest?
Openness, transparency — these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt. What if within days of August 4th, 1964 — after the Pentagon had made up the lie that one of our ships was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin — there had been a WikiLeaks to tell the American people that the whole thing was made up? I guess 58,000 of our soldiers (and 2 million Vietnamese) might be alive today.
Instead, secrets killed them.
I have joined with filmmakers Ken Loach and John Pilger and writer Jemima Khan in putting up the bail money for Julian Assange — and we hope the judge will accept this and grant his release today.
Might WikiLeaks cause some unintended harm to diplomatic negotiations and U.S. interests around the world? Perhaps. But that’s the price you pay when you and your government take us to war based on a lie. Your punishment for misbehaving is that someone has to turn on all the lights in the room so that we can see what you’re up to. You simply can’t be trusted. So every cable, every email you write is now fair game. Sorry, but you brought this upon yourself. No one can hide from the truth now. No one can plot the next Big Lie if they know that they might be exposed.
And that is the best thing that WikiLeaks has done. WikiLeaks, God bless them, will save lives as a result of their actions. And any of you who join me in supporting them are committing a true act of patriotism. Period.
I stand today in absentia with Julian Assange in London and I ask the judge to grant him his release. We are willing to guarantee his return to court with the bail money we have wired to said court. I will not allow this injustice to continue unchallenged.
— Michael Moore
(P.S. You can read the statement I filed yesterday [ December 13, 2010 ] in the London court here.)
Back in December of 2010, three days after I wrote that statement and provided the court with my portion of Julian’s bail, the court granted Julian Assange his freedom based on our bail money. He then continued his appeals through the British Courts. After 18 months, facing certain extradition, he entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London seeking asylum. In April of 2019, upon leaving the Ecuadorian embassy after confining himself there for nearly 7 years, he was immediately arrested by British authorities and held at the request of the United States for possible extradition and trial in the US. He was incarcerated in Britain’s maximum security prison, Belmarsh, for over 5 years fighting his removal to the United States. The British courts, though, refused to turn Assange over to the Americans — in part because British law, as in most western democracies, refuses to extradite prisoners to any country that has the death penalty. His case dragged on through both the Trump and Biden administrations until finally, yesterday, the U.S. government gave in and agreed to a plea deal that would immediately grant Assange his freedom and allow him to return home to Australia.
So far, neither the U.S. Justice Department nor the British government has sought the arrest of those who fraudulently led both countries into invading Iraq under the lie that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attacks.
In addition, the British court informed me when Assange skipped bail and took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy that they would not be returning my $20,000 in bail money. I have been assured, though, that the British government has used my contribution to finally help put into writing a first-ever written Constitution for the United Kingdom — something they have been promising to do since June of 1215.”
The Fifth Estate Official Trailer
Julian Assange – The Unauthorised Autobiography by Julian Assange
On this day two years ago half our nation’s people were stripped of meaningful citizenship and their bodies declared property of the state by the Supreme Court.
Of this ongoing patriarchal-theocratic horror and crime against humanity I wrote in my summation of that year’s liberation struggle and electoral politics in America in my post of December 28 2022, This Year Was Defined in Politics by Resistance Against the Patriarchy and the Issue of Women’s Rights of Bodily Autonomy; 2022 was defined in politics by resistance against the Patriarchy and the issue of women’s rights of bodily autonomy, both globally in the glorious and spectacular revolution against theocracy and patriarchy originating in Chile and throughout Latin America, and here in America the mass resistance to the end of Roe v Wade which galvanized a historic blue wave in our midterm elections.
While this has always been a wedge issue used by elites and forces of reaction to make women vote against their own interests, freedoms, and equality, and its resistance rode the wave of change of the #metoo movement, something has shifted and become new in this arena, forever transforming the ground of struggle and redefining the terms of debate; it is now an existential crisis central to the survival of democracy itself, and women are responding not with the subjugation of learned helplessness, but with the fury of the oppressed and the solidarity of a dehumanized class.
In 2022, women realized they are enslaved and have begun resistance and revolutionary struggle. Patriarchal authority has lost its legitimacy, and begun its inevitable collapse. Without its fig leaf of theocratic lies and illusions, with the amoral brutality of its systemic and historical forces and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, there is only one way this ends.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Here follows my journal on this Defining Moment for America as it happened :
June 24 2022, The End of Women’s Right of Bodily Autonomy; The Supreme Court has just declared women’s bodies to be property of the state, and mass protests have once again erupted throughout America.
This is an area of ideological fracture and polarization in which few persuadable voters remain on either side, the classic wedge issue by which Patriarchy and sexual terror subjugates and dehumanizes us, and through which our enslavement by hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege legitimize their regimes of weaponized faith.
Electoral politics and legislative change have failed, for in our system a few unelected and corrupt judges, infiltration and subversion agents placed at the apex of social power by hegemonic elites to replace democracy with theocracy, can rule by fiat in total disregard to the will of the people. Our Justice system has lost its legitimacy and become a junta, and this we must resist.
After all our hopes and dreams for Liberty and a free society of equals, we’re back to the Underground Railroad.
As written by Emily Janakiram & Lizzie Chadbourne in Truthout; “As reproductive rights organizers have long anticipated — and as a leaked memo all but confirmed last month — the Supreme Court has ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The decision came in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which involves a Mississippi law prohibiting all abortions after 15 weeks except in the case of medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality. This suit is part of an effort by the right to legally challenge what was previously the constitutionally protected right to abortion in Roe, and the court has sided with the state of Mississippi to repeal that right. This ruling undoes the federal protection of abortion, resulting in the total or near-total ban of abortion in 26 states.
The right has long been organizing for this moment, creating “trigger bans” in expectation of Roe’s overturn, as well as mobilizing to harass and intimidate patients in places where abortion remains legal, like New York and Washington, D.C. Republicans are poised to attempt passing a federal ban on abortion.
Despite Justice Samuel Alito’s claim that the ruling does not affect contraceptive access, the anti-abortion right has also opposed hormonal contraception, the copper IUD and the morning-after pill on the grounds that they are “abortifacients” since from their perspective, human life begins at conception and these methods prevent the fertilized egg from implanting. Last month, Louisiana lawmakers deliberated over a bill which would have criminalized both the IUD and the morning-after pill. The bill ultimately failed, but we can expect to see similar initiatives gaining ground in states hostile to abortion rights.
The anti-abortion right frames the overturn of Roe as an act of democracy, “returning the decision to the states,” and correcting federal overreach. This is misleading at best. The states in which abortion is now illegal are heavily gerrymandered and undemocratic themselves; it is simply not true that abortion bans reflect the will of the people. In fact, a majority of Americans — about 60 percent — believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
The consequences of abortion restrictions in red states prior to this moment have been disastrous as residents have been forced to travel out of state to access care at significant personal cost. Texas’s notorious Senate Bill 8 law resulted in a significant number of patients from Texas with a gestational age past six weeks traveling to Oklahoma for abortion appointments — until Oklahoma passed a total abortion ban, leaving Texans seeking abortions with even fewer options.
We can expect this situation to spread further across the country, with abortion patients forced to travel even longer distances to access abortion. Of course, this will place an undue hardship on patients without the means to travel out of state — whether that be due to the financial burden, lack of access to child care, sick leave, or other reasons.
The right has long been organizing for this moment, creating “trigger bans” in expectation of Roe’s overturn, as well as mobilizing to harass and intimidate patients in places where abortion remains legal.
More grotesquely, abortion patients will not only have to face undue financial and logistical hurdles to access essential health care — but they will also have to brave the police, or in some cases, state-funded vigilantes, in order to do so. Texas’s SB 8 law allows literally anyone to file suit against someone who “aids or abets” in an abortion — though not the abortion patient themselves. Someone who drives a patient to a bus so that they can receive an abortion out of state could be sued, and the plaintiff would be awarded $10,000 in damages. Abortion patients themselves cannot be sued.
While the law has been carefully designed so that there is no criminal penalty — and thus, ironically, protecting it from certain legal challenges — it still invites police violence against abortion patients. Recently, 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera of South Texas was arrested and detained under suspicion of having induced her own abortion after a stillbirth. Even if the states that criminalize abortion only penalize providers and those who “aid and abet” abortion, patients themselves can still be subject to police violence in cases of self-managed abortions, which will become the only recourse available to many patients who cannot travel out of state to a clinic. Although only a handful of states currently criminalize self-managed abortion specifically, in over half the states there have been criminal investigations into pregnancy loss based on suspicion of self-managed abortion. People from communities that experience heightened levels of policing and state surveillance and who choose to self-manage their abortions will be at an increased risk of criminalization.
Even when abortion patients manage to reach less-restricted states, safe and unfettered abortion access in those places is by no means a given either. Many clinics are already functioning at capacity even before the heightened influx of patients from other states, and the anti-abortion movement has set its eyes on cities like New York. Their base has been galvanized to confront “the evil of abortion” at its center — the clinics where abortions happen. When abortion is halted in over half the states, we can expect that campaigns of harassment will expand at clinics in less-restricted states by anti-abortion groups shifting their focus to regions where abortions are still performed legally.
Abortion patients will not only have to face undue financial and logistical hurdles to access essential health care — but they will also have to brave the police, or in some cases, state-funded vigilantes, in order to do so.
In New York City, the Archdiocese leads a campaign of clinic harassment every month in all five boroughs — with the blessing and sanction of the police. The police do not help patients enter the clinic safely but escort the clinic harassers — whom they seem to be on friendly terms with — and threaten and intimidate clinic defenders. It is no secret that the police and the far right are closely allied, in some cases one and the same; we cannot count on them to protect abortion patients. We will need a militant response to counter the right in less restricted states.
Moreover, the criminalization of providing abortion care and aiding and abetting abortion puts pregnant people in grave danger. Some states may make “life of the mother” exemptions. But most United States hospitals are either for-profit or religiously affiliated nonprofits with ideological opposition to abortion. There is seldom a clearly demarcated point at which an abortion becomes absolutely, unambiguously medically necessary. A private health care facility may not risk criminal charges in order to save a patient’s life. Notoriously, Savita Halappanavar died of sepsis in an Irish hospital when doctors refused to perform an abortion because, though her pregnancy was no longer viable, a fetal heartbeat was still detected. As of this writing, an American woman, Andrea Prudente, is set to be airlifted out of Malta, the only country in the European Union with a total abortion ban. Even though her pregnancy is no longer viable, and without an abortion, she risks the same fate, a fetal heartbeat is still detected and doctors refuse to provide an abortion. Of course, the U.S. leads the developed world in mortality during childbirth. With the end of Roe, it will become even more dangerous to give birth in the U.S.
Many reproductive rights organizations advise that pro-choice activists put aside “coat hanger” imagery and refrain from dwelling on history of dangerous back-alley abortions. This is not to erase the history of violence that accompanied abortion bans, but because it unproductively obscures the abortion situation as it exists today. Self-managed abortions are safer than ever, thanks to the advent of the abortion pill and networks that provide access through the mail; and even abortions in the home can be performed safely using aspiration. In fact, they are more safe than home births, belying the right-wing canard that abortion and the abortion pill is more dangerous than childbirth. The right uses this lie to push for the closure of clinics and make obtaining the abortion pill unduly burdensome.
Laws against aiding and abetting abortion — and the ensuing climate of fear, secrecy and isolation — are what kill pregnant people, not self-managed abortions.
However, the secrecy in which abortions have had to happen historically is what made them so dangerous — that people don’t know how such abortions can be performed safely, or even the basic facts of pregnancy (a situation that’s especially dire in red states given a lack of sex education in schools). This secrecy is enforced by the police. Laws against “aiding and abetting abortion” — and the ensuing climate of fear, secrecy, and isolation — are what kill pregnant people, not self-managed abortions.
If we are to resist abortion bans, each one of us must be prepared to aid and abet abortion, whether that’s being trained in administering a self-managed abortion, buying and donating abortion pills, driving someone across state lines to receive an abortion, participating in clinic defense, or donating to an abortion fund. But we cannot lose sight of the ultimate goal: a mass movement to establish free abortion on demand as an inalienable right.”
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Roe v Wade has been overturned. Here’s what this will mean; “Millions of women are now less free than men, in the functioning of their own bodies and in the paths of their own lives.
The story is not about the supreme court. Today, the sword that has long been hanging over American women’s heads finally fell: the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, ending the nationwide right to an abortion. This has long been expected, and long dreaded, by those in the reproductive rights movement, and it has long been denied by those who wished to downplay the court’s extremist lurch. The coming hours will be consumed with finger pointing and recriminations. But the story is not about who was right and who was wrong.
Nor is the story about the US judiciary’s crumbling legitimacy, or the supreme court’s fractious internal politics. In the coming days, our attention will be called to the justices themselves – to their feelings, to their careers, to their safety. We will be distracted by the stench of partisanship and scandal that emanates from the shadowy halls of One First Street; by the justices’ grievance-airing and petty backbiting in public; or by their vengeful paranoid investigation into the leak of a draft of Samuel Alito’s opinion some weeks ago. We will be scolded not to protest outside their houses, and we will be prevented, by high fences and heavy gates and the presence of armed cops, from protesting outside the court itself. But the story is not about the supreme court.
The story is not about the Democratic politicians, whose leadership on abortion rights has been tepid at best, and negligent at worst, since the 1990s. In the coming days, people who have voted to uphold the Hyde Amendment, a provision that has banned federal funding of abortion since 1976 – effectively limiting the constitutional right to an abortion to only those Americans wealthy enough to afford one – will tell us how terrible this is. They will issue statements talking about their outrage; they will make platitude-filled speeches about the worth and dignity of American women. They will not mention their own inaction, persisting for decades in the face of mounting and well-funded rightwing threats to Roe. They will not mention that they did nothing as all that worth and dignity of American women hung in the balance; they will not mention that most of them still, even now, oppose doing the only thing that could possibly restore reproductive freedom: expanding the number of justices on the courts. But the cowardice, hypocrisy, and historic moral failure of national Democrats is not the story. And certainly, the story is nothing so vulgar as what this withdrawal of human rights might mean for that party’s midterm election prospects.
The story is not, even, about the legal chaos that will now follow. It is not about the fact that in 13 states, today’s order has made all abortion immediately illegal, the consummation of sexist ambitions that had long been enshrined in so-called trigger laws, provisions that have been on the books for years and decades that ban abortion upon the court’s reversal of Roe – misogyny lying in wait. Nor is the story about the other 13 states that will almost certainly ban abortion now, too, meaning that the procedure will be illegal in 26 of the nation’s 50 states within weeks.
The story is not about how legislatures, lawyers and judges will handle these laws; it is not about whether they will allow merciful exemptions for rape or incest (they won’t) or impose draconian measures that aim to extend the cruelty of state bans beyond their borders to target abortion doctors, funders, and supporters in blue states (they will).
The story is not about the cop who will charge the first doctor or the first patient with murder – that’s already happening, anyway. The story is not about the anti-choice activists, sneering in their triumph, who will say that they only want the best for women, and that women can’t be trusted to know what’s best for themselves. The story is not about the women who will be imprisoned or committed at the behest of these activists, or the desperate pregnant people, with nowhere to turn, who will be ensnared by them into deceitful crisis pregnancy centers or exploitative “maternity ranches”.
The real story is not about the media who will churn out the think pieces, and the crass, enabling both-sidesism, and the insulting false equivalences and calls for unity. It is not about the pundits who will scold feminists that really, it is the overzealous abortion rights movement that is to blame; that really, women must learn to compromise with the forces that would keep them unequal, bound to lives that are smaller, more brutal, and more desperate. The story is not, even, about those other rights – the rights to parent, and to marry, and to access birth control – that a cruel and emboldened right will come for next.
The real story is the women. The real story is the student whose appointment is scheduled for tomorrow, who will get a call from the clinic sometime in the next hours telling her that no, they are sorry, they cannot give her an abortion after all. The real story is the woman waiting tables, who feels so sick and exhausted these past few weeks that she can barely make it through her shifts, who will soon be calling clinics in other states, hearing that they’re all booked for weeks, and will be asking friends for money to help cover the gas, or the plane, or the time off that she can’t afford. The real story is the abortion provider, already exhausted and heartbroken from years of politicians playing politics with her patients’ rights, who will wonder whether she can keep her clinic open for its other services any more, and conclude that she can’t. The real story is the mom of two, squinting at her phone as she tries to comfort a screaming toddler, trying to figure out what she will have to give up in order to keep living the life she wants, with the family she already has.
The real story is about thousands of these women, not just now but for decades to come – the women , whose lives will be made smaller and less dignified by unplanned and unchosen pregnancies, the women whose health will be endangered by the long and grueling physical process of pregnancy; the women, and others, who will have to forgo dreams, end educations, curtail careers, stretch their finances beyond the breaking point, and subvert their own wills to someone else’s.
The real story is in the counterfactuals – the books that will go unwritten, the trips untaken, the hopes not pursued, and jokes not told, and the friends not met, because the people who could have lived the full, expansive, diverse lives that abortions would allow will instead be forced to live other lives, lives that are lesser precisely because they are not chosen.
The real story is the millions of women, and others, who now know that they are less free than men are – less free in the functioning of their own bodies, less free in the paths of their own lives, less free in the formation of their own families.
The real story is not this order; the real story is these people’s unfreedom – the pain it will inflict and the joy it will steal. The real story is women, and the real story is the impossible question: how can we ever grieve enough for them?”
As I wrote in my post of May 14 2022, The Women’s March for Freedom; Throughout America today women have seized the streets in mass action for the right of bodily autonomy, the first of all rights of property and the defining quality of citizenship, for without ownership of our own bodies there is no freedom, and we are all made property of the state.
Democracy and dehumanization hang in the balance in the issue of women’s reproductive rights; but also life itself, for access to healthcare is a precondition of the right to life and thus among the first of all implied rights guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Without this, no other rights are meaningful.
This is a fight against enslavement and death, and for our equality as human beings and liberty as citizens.
How shall we give answer to our dehumanization and the theft of our citizenship?
Let us say to Gideonite patriarchy and to fascist tyranny with Dylan Thomas;
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
At stake here are issues affecting every American citizen and other persons within the boundaries of our law; freedom versus dehumanization as a means of enslavement, and our universal human right of access to healthcare as a precondition of our right to life.
How can the Gideonite fundamentalists and atavistic forces of Patriarchy deny the right of bodily autonomy, the first of all rights of property, our right to choose our own use of that body which speaks to the definition of being human and to the fundamental rights of a citizen in a democracy as a voting co-owner of our government, on the basis of our right to life which derives both from our citizenship and our humanity as a natural condition, when the right of the mother to life precedes that of her fetus and renders her the sole medical authorizing party in any such matter?
Only a woman’s right to choose her own destiny matters here, and no state or any other authority which operates in the place of a father or husband under the Patriarchal legal fiction of in loco parentis, nor the will or judgement of any other persons especially actual fathers and husbands, has any just role in a free society of equals; all else is slavery.
If one abrogates the separation of church and state and claims Biblical authority as a justification for government policy, surely an act of hubris if not madness, on abortion and for a definition of life, life clearly begins with breath.
As William Tyndale wrote in his beautiful poetic reimagination of traditional sources published as the King James Bible; “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” Genesis 2:7.
This is reinforced elsewhere; “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host” Psalms 33:6. And again; “Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived,” Ezekiel 10. And yet again; “If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust,” Job 34: 14-15.
Plus there’s the abortion method authorized in Numbers 5:11-31, the Ordeal of the Bitter Water, and the penalty for causing an abortion outside of this ritual such as by a violent blow, which is a fine paid to the woman’s husband because it is a crime against property or future economic benefit and not a crime against person as there is no life before breath or natural birth.
Abrahamic faiths regard as human only those who have been ensouled at first breath upon being born; prior to birth we are not human but part of the mother’s body; a fetus has no rights other than hers, and hers is the only legitimate voice regarding one’s own body as the primary right of property from which all others derive. This is because Abrahamic faiths regard the body as an organic machine and not a person until it is animated with a soul.
To argue that abortion is murder is to argue that there is no soul, that we are human prior to the animating breath of the Infinite, and that as mere beasts and organic machines each of our cells are individually sacrosanct and legally persons. Haircuts and manicures are murder in this absurd construction.
Let us not mistake the purpose and intention of those who would seize women’s power of bodily autonomy as both a human being and a citizen; this has nothing to do with faith, and everything to do with power.
As I wrote in my post of May 6 2022, There Is No Freedom Without That of Bodily Autonomy: On the Patriarchal Enslavement and Dehumanization of Women in the State Capture of Liberty and Equality in the Supreme Court’s Revocation of the Right to Abortion; There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
Our Supreme Court just declared half of humankind to be less than human and property of the state, not merely as patriarchal enslavement but also as dehumanization and theft of citizenship. Next will be the right of women to vote, then of all nonwhite persons, then the right to own property and act legally in one’s own name will be restricted to white men as it was at our founding; no matter where it begins with subversion of democracy and the equality of all human beings, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Women’s reproductive rights exhibit dual aspects as both an issue of liberty, our freedom to choose our own identity without coercion by the state, and as a healthcare issue, as universal free access to healthcare is a precondition of our right to life and therefore a Constitutional guarantee upon which none may legally infringe.
This is a direct attack on the idea of citizenship which is central and foundational to democracy, on the personhood and self ownership of all women, and on our values and ideals of freedom and equality.
It is a telling sign of intent that Alioto has cited as precedent the law which legalized witch burning centuries go in his opinion claiming that the right to abortion is unconstitutional, as MSN has pointed out.
Once again, unequal power has been captured and institutionalized by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as a fascism of weaponized faith and systemic Patriarchy.
America’s Supreme Court, now a political bureaucracy of authoritarian power and without legitimacy, and which has delegitimized all law in America and subverted our courts as instruments of repression of dissent and the carceral state, the true goal of the Fourth Reich in the capture of our institutions and systems of Justice, has outlawed the universal right of abortion and given a woman’s power over her own body to the state.
Yes, we all knew this was coming but it is a life disruptive event and a point of fracture in our history. This we must resist with mass action and legislative judo, but the forces of patriarchy and fascism are enormously against us. What happens next, if half of humankind can be dehumanized as property of the state and citizenship with our universal human rights becomes meaningless? In this moment, all is in motion and chaotic change, but this is also a chance of action and a measure of the adaptive range of our system. Patriarchy has made a move which is irredeemable and cannot be walked back, and they are exposed; its our move now.
If we want to keep our system of Justice as a guarantor of our universal human rights and of our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens, and the meaning of citizenship itself, we must reform the Supreme Court. I suggest limiting terms to that of the President who appointed each member, or limiting terms and holding a vote to elect Justices on a one citizen one vote basis so that it is no longer a political appointment.
This must be part of a Restoration of democracy which redesigns our system to guarantee majority rule. We must abolish the electoral college and the parceling of votes by state, and change to a one citizen one vote direct electoral democracy.
The blindfold of Justice has slipped, and we must restore her impartiality to divisions including those of gender and race.
As I wrote in my post of October 3 2021, Women’s March for Reproductive Rights and Freedom of Bodily Autonomy; Institutionalized sexual terror and state tyranny in the legislative assault on women’s reproductive rights and the primary freedom of bodily autonomy were challenged in a mass action yesterday throughout America, organized by the Women’s March and coordinated with the riveting testimony in Congress of three of our representatives who have had abortions, Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal, and Barbara Lee.
There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
We can triumph over this wave of theft of our liberty which seeks to redefine the relationship of individuals to the state and render citizenship meaningless if we act in solidarity with coordinated mass action and legislative process. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me in 1982 in Beirut by Jean Genet goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Anger, fear and desperation: people reflect on two years since fall of Roe
EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton's first interview on the implications of this week's Roe v. Wade news: "It is not just about a woman's right to choose. It is about much more than that."
The Handmaid’s Tale: Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders, by Karen A. Ritzenhoff (Editor, Contributor), Janis L. Goldie (Editor, Contributor)
A friend has written a brilliant, insightful, and very emotionally charged essay on the subject of queer identity, finding ones tribe, and being ostracized by ones role models due to the fracture and balkanization of identities of sex and gender in queer culture. To be a Painted Bird is a tragedy on the scale of a private Holocaust, and some of this seems to me to be a result of increasing specialization and siloing of LGBT subcultures, and also a shocking failure of solidarity. If those who are marginalized by normative society do not stand united, surely they will become vulnerable to silencing and erasure.
I am not a member of this community, and can not speak from within this space, nor have I much studied what seem to be a highly diverse, nuanced, intentionally baffling and obscure as in-group coding, misdirection, and confusion, and complex set of authorized identities within the community of outlaws of sex and gender, so am utterly clueless about how such representations and choices are negotiated. I suspect this is true for many potential allies who would stand with any human who stands alone, but may not know how to do so, or recognize when someone is in pain.
Sadly, it may be also be true for those whose awareness of desire, sexual orientation, and identities of sex and gender are emerging or in transformative processes of change, and who may feel confusion, ambiguity, and dislocation not as freedom and joy but as crisis and trauma, especially those who become aware of differences and chasms of meaning between themselves and others, and must cope with authorized identities of sex and gender as systems of oppression which manifest as isolation and disconnectedness at best and as shaming, dehumanization, and persecution at worst as consequences of negotiating identities in a social context of judgement, ridicule, and massively unequal power.
The universal human struggle for autonomy here collides disastrously with authorized identities and a Theocratic-Patriarchal Gideonite value system which reinforces heteronormative narratives as submission to authority, in parallel with the need for belonging and membership in the quest to find a tribe within a society riven with hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, wherein our negotiations between self and others are mediated by elite hegemonic forces of dominion, whose lies and illusions, like a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, can falsify and steal our souls.
The awakening to total freedom as a self created being can be both wonderful and terrible. How do we safeguard that freedom? What does our duty of care for each other require of us as mentors and stewards for each other’s limitless possibilities of becoming human?
We also have a need for another kind of work, one whose intention is to provide guidance in finding ones tribe among the full spectrum of multilayered and wonderfully diverse smorgasboard of choices available in our society now, chess pieces in a great game of human being, meaning, and value, and reveals and opens the limitless possibilities of becoming human and discovering communities of wellbeing and mutual aid which can foster such a journey of introspection for the young and curious, without authorizing a prescriptive set of identities.
Identity is not a static frame into which one must fit oneself regardless of our pluralities; we are all pluralities, we are all in processes of change and growth, and our nature, to paraphrase Freud’s delightfully wicked phrase “polymorphously perverse”, obeys but one law; anything goes.
Are we not both Harley Quinn and the Joker, bound together in one flesh?
Does the range of choices act as an intrinsic limit on autonomy? If so the task of becoming human involves chaos, disruption, reimagination, and transformation, as I believe; the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes. As Guillermo del Toro wrote in Carnival Row; Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.
Audubon publishes a wonderful field guide to birds, which usefully describes their glorious and beautiful differences and uniqueness without suggesting it is better to be a falcon than a dove; each have a niche in the system of life, as do we all. We need a version for humans; Queer Tribes, and How to Find Yours.
This raises the question of how we discover who we want to become. If I were designing an instrument for this purpose in terms of sexual orientation, I would base the process not on prescriptive authorization of identities like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, which involves both submission to authority and overdetermination as a limiting factor, and also tends to lock one in to rigid and unchanging categories of being, but on descriptive taxonomy and a tool with which I am very familiar, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which could easily be modified for the discovery of identities of sex and gender.
Our masquerade of identities of sex and gender as culture, ethnicity, and performance can be played as a game or as live action theatre; here I offer you a ritual act of Chaos and Transformation which is useful in disrupting order and randomizing the masks we wear. Begin each new day with a set of possible selves to perform; write down three masculine and three feminine characters you know well enough to perform, roll a six sided dice to find today’s persona, and live as that character until tomorrow, when you can become someone entirely different. And regardless of who you are today, you will have five more selves in reserve.
Such constructions of identity as performance flow from the nature of self as a development of the persona or Greek theatrical mask characters speak through; a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we solved problems in adaptation, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle to create ourselves.
And what of the underlying forces of love and desire from which such structures and figures are made?
Milan Kundera, paraphrasing Plato in Phaidos, wrote; “Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost”. To this I would add a conditional which directs us to the function of love in the construction of identity; love also reveals us to ourselves, for we choose those we love as figures of who we wish to become.
We choose those we love and share our lives with in part because they represent potential selves and qualities we aspire to realize within ourselves, as informing and motivating sources and shaping forces. This is what it means to become human, and why interdependence is at the heart of becoming human. Our values are revealed in our circle of partners and friends.
Love is dangerous because it is free, uncontrollable, wild. Love redeems, transforms, and reimagines; love totalizes and transcends. Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioners, because that is exactly what it is.
As I once said to Jean Genet, it is a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.
Love and desire are linked as forces beyond reason and our own control; this is why they bear redemptive and transformational power, and confer autonomy in our self-construal and becoming human. Choice and volition have nothing to do with it; there is only the ground of struggle and seizures of power between those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh versus the falsification of authorized identities.
We are made of stories, both the ones we tell about ourselves and the ones others tell about us, and the first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?
When you begin to question the boundary and interface between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery.
May the new truths you forge bring you joy, and don’t forget to run amok and be ungovernable.
Joker X Harley: Bad Things
Here are my three essays interrogating identities of sex and gender:
March 8 2024 International Women’s Day: Interrogating the Idea of Woman and Identities of Sex and Gender As Performance Art and Revolutionary Struggle, Identities of Sex and Gender Part 1 of 3
March 9 2024 A Sorting Hat of One’s Own: A General Theory of Identities of Sex and Gender as Processes and Functions of Personality, Identities of Sex and Gender Part 2
Tonight as darkness falls, the full moon rises, and the wildness calls to me once again with its songs of chaos as freedom and as beauty, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden, violations of normality, and seizures of power from Authority as revolutionary struggle, the wildness in me gives answer and soon will become uncontrollable as a tidal force of passion, truths immanent in nature and written in my flesh which must be lived and set free, and I will run amok and be ungovernable.
A maker of mischief, I.
For like all human beings I am a thing of nature cursed with the vision to transcend the limits of my flesh, through poetic vision and the rapture and exaltation of love and desire, and in this liminal moment on the cusp of becoming I write to all those who in the performance of otherness as seizure of power over the ownership of themselves become Unconquered and free, self-created beings unbound by any law or tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue, including all those who question and challenge authorized identities of sex and gender, many of whom are now enacting recapitulations of the annual celebrations of June’s Pride Month. The liminal time of the parades may have passed, but this is no reason our revels must now be ended; the revolution is within us, who in refusal to submit to authority become Unconquered and free, agents of change and Bringers of Chaos as Living Autonomous Zones.
Let us embrace the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.
For law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
In Mariupol the Abyss began to look back at me, and I am shaped by my history to dread purposes as a thing without pity, fear, or remorse. I wonder now, could I have become something other than a monster, had I chosen differently, to abandon rather than stand in solidarity with my fellow human beings? But then I would be complicit in their suffering, as America is in Gaza and the Palestinian Genocide, and no longer human.
How if the best we can do is to try to claw something of our humanity back from the darkness, before it annihilates us all, and maybe save somone else from becoming as I am? Our lives are dragons teeth, sown in the shadows of terror and unanswerable forces of dehumanization, but from which multitudes arise.
O my brothers, sisters, and others, let us arise and resist, and abandon not our fellows, let us embrace our monstrosity and place our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, if only for one last time of glory and refusal to submit.
When those who would enslave us come for us and for others, as they always have and will, let them find not a humanity subjugated by learned helplessness and division, but united in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights. If we do this, we may hope to remain human.
Let us reply to Netanyahu and Putin, and to all tyrants with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
This day we fight.
What do I mean by the enigmatic principle, Embrace Our Monstrosity?
Many of the modern pathologies of disconnectedness from our nature are born of the need for control and of fear of our inchoate passions as threatening otherness, an internalized oppression which has riven the human soul, divided and abstracted us from ourselves as part of the processes of nature. This is a madness of inauthenticity, falsification, power, control, dominance, vanity, greed, myths, histories, and authorized versions of truth which valorize war and authorize elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, all of which arise from an Original Sin of ownership of nature which abstracts us from ourselves as the otherness of our own flesh and the truths written therein, as in the allegory of Adam Naming the Beasts.
Patriarchy, racism, sectarian division, and other identitarian forms of power, operating in mutual interdependence with capitalism, which Jean Genet called necrophilia and William S. Burroughs reimagined as the Algebra of Need, and its prefigural developmental stages of elite hegemony and political forms monarchial aristocratic feudalism and then as nationalist imperialism, all find anchorages in civilization as control of threatening nature and our fear and hatred of ourselves.
Jung described the primal disunity we must heal within ourselves; “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and become torn into opposite halves.” He was speaking of psychosis and the work of reintegration and becoming human, but it applies equally to dialectical civilizational processes of history wherein we have found ourselves conflicted and at war with nature on multiple fronts.
As the state is embodied violence, the historical processes of civilization which create it are also expressions of the conflicted human soul and the primary struggle for ownership of ourselves and self-creation versus authorized identities. 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.
Here I think also of Camille Paglia’s magisterial critique of Patriarchy as a civilizational task of controlling nature, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. In the case of Emily Dickinson, metaphysical ax murderess whose poetry is a savage and relentless struggle with Patriarchy and avenging of its countless victims, she writes;” Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.”
Personally I adore Emily Dickinson as a figure of Liberty; she reminds me of an ancestor of mine who was a member of the Paris Commune, an anarchist revolutionary, abolitionist, and suffragette called the Red Queen in reference to the character from Alice in Wonderland, after her preferred method of assassination. Hers was a simple doctrine; to take the enemy’s power, go directly for and behead the apex predator of a system of oppression, second totalize elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, from the shadows and in the most savage and terrifying ways possible, and then put everything they owned and controlled, all that serves unequal power, to the torch.
Once the true nature of our captivity and enslavement by elites has been realized, and Authority exposed as a seducer and betrayer whose apologetics of power are but lies and illusions, the choice between freedom and rebellion or dehumanization and subjugation becomes horribly clear, a chiaroscuro of terror and the grandeur of resistance.
So also with the plunder and capitalist exploitation of our common natural resources in service to wealth and power which is driving the existential threat of ecological collapse and human extinction, for it is rooted in the same fear, drive to dominance and control, and internalized oppression as in the sexual terror of Patriarchy or the white supremacist terror which threatens our democracy.
Our lives become expressions of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and in the context of liberation and revolutionary struggle to win a reimagined humanity which heals our disunity with nature through the embrace of our otherness and our true and authentic selves which dwell among the chasms of darkness of our passions, through transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden, refusal to submit to Authority, violations of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue, and other Acts of Chaos and Transformation, we may heal the flaws of our humanity, the brokenness of the world, and the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which Schiller identifies as “the disgodding of nature.”
Here I look to stories of our own to balance those of submission to Authority and denial and control of our nature. William S. Burroughs, whose bizarre fairytales haunted the nights of my youth, forged such a myth in his novel The Wild Boys, which I describe in my celebration of his work as follows; The Wild Boys envisions feral youths in rebellion against the Authority that created them, set in a dystopian future in which man’s animal nature has been betrayed by civilization but which also has the power to redeem him, the final part of his Anarchist trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil.
As he wrote it during the period of his visits, I have often wondered how much of it was drawn from his conversations with my father, who mythologized our family history with the absurd claim that we are not human but werewolves, beings of the Wild Hunt, magic, and darkness, unbound by any law and with the blood of ancient terrors in our veins, and had been driven out of Bavaria in 1586 for that reason. Drachensbrute, Brides of the Dragon, my ancestors were called by Martin Luther, whose fame for grand defiance of Church law eclipsed his infamy as a witch hunter and brutal torturer of women.
The Wild Boys extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as control of our animal nature.
David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau here mingle and intertwine. Certainly it is among the many stories I have adopted as part of my personal myth and identity, which include Milton’s rebel angel, the visions of William Blake, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast, and the iconography of Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, a pantheon and ancestral family with the wonderful image of the titan Typhoeus as a chthonic ape with his three gorgon daughters Madness, Death, and Desire; really, what more could one ask for?
Such myths offer models of harmony with nature in the figure of the werewolf as a controlling metaphor for the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves. Rather than a thing of clay animated as the toy of a tyrant deity of alien and unfathomable motives as in the Abrahamic faiths, we can free ourselves from the dehumanizing legacies of our Patriarchal and Authoritarian histories by looking to counter-narratives of freedom, such as the werewolf defined as a being of wildness and uncorrupted nature.
Myths about were beings tell us how we humans view ourselves and our relationship with the natural world in specific historical contexts.
The bite is an interesting metaphor, and is akin to other forms of the medical model of madness which describes transpersonal and other states of awareness as a degradation or dehumanization rather than exaltation and participation in something greater than we are, and as an intrusive force from outside rather than a sign of our natural condition; allegories and metaphors of the desacralization of nature and the falsification of ourselves, part of the story of the human cost of the industrial and authoritarian age like the loss of magic in the age of iron.
In terms of story, there are many unexplored possibilities for the reimagination of were beings as heroes of authentic being versus normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, and champions of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
Like the exhibitions in a carnival freak show, monsters help us define our limits and establish boundaries by providing examples of the truly other.
What is human?
Transgression explores and redefines our boundaries; indeed is necessary to growth and the discovery of possibilities of being. Let us parse the meaning of our reactions to violations of norms and to the truly other with great care, particularly with regard to the use of social force and control to authorize normality and codify and enforce virtue.
As the anthropologist Sam Dubal relates in his book Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army, modern Uganda provides a case study of the tribal warrior societies our werewolf myths are based on, a group who modeled themselves on gorilla warbands to achieve a higher state of being than human and reawaken our connection with nature and our natural selves, and whose acts of terror were in part ritual transgressions of the Forbidden, as were the crimes of Jean Genet. While the anticolonial warriors of the 19th century Leopard Society in Africa, Boxers in China, or Thugee in India may not be accessible to us, in the LRA we have ready examples of the use of savaging and primalism in war.
When thinking about werewolves we must place our mythologies in the context of stories told about them as monsters and figures of terror by their enemies, just as the Christians did witches or the European peoples claimed by Church and King did the Viking berserkergangr with whom they struggled for dominion.
All divisions and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness authorized by those who would enslave us demonize the many in service to the power of the few.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
How we imagine and honor the wildness of ourselves is reflected in how we imagine and honor the wildness of nature; our idea of the werewolf reflects our relationship with our animal nature, and with nature itself. If you think of your animal nature as evil, hostile, subhuman, barbaric, a thing of bottomless appetites to be controlled as Freud conceptualized what he provocatively called our polymorphously perverse nature, it is a fearsome thing, a degradation checked only by the restraining force of law; the doctrine of the innate depravity of man, corollary of original sin, being the basis of all law and of the carceral state, an idea very useful in subjugating us to authority.
But if instead our freedom and wildness is beautiful, and nature to be celebrated rather than feared, humankind is restored to wholeness and harmony with nature. This is perhaps a better way to study the idea of our wildness and harmony as animals and beings of nature expressive of its forces; look inside yourself and question your feelings and ideas about sex, death, and the possibilities of becoming human in a universe of imposed conditions which owe nothing to normality and other peoples ideas of virtue.
To be a Wolfman is to be without limit, autonomous, free, to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and dwell among the unknowns of our maps of human being, meaning, and value. To live in harmony with our nature is to abandon dominion and live as one wild thing among others in a free society of equals, without tyrants, elites, or inequalities, for all living beings are equal and merit honor, especially the ones we must consume.
Do not be deceived by the lies and illusions of those who would enslave us and steal our souls; our wildness is a thing not of terror or debasement, but of freedom and of beauty; and it awaits within you as a wisdom of your own darkness, which holds nothing which is not yours. Claim your wildness, and be free.
As I wrote in my post of October 28 2023, Let Us Be Wolfmen: Embrace the Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves; On these Nights of the full moon, a cosmic event of enormous powers of change and transformative rebirth, let us embrace our monstrosity as Bringers of Chaos in the destabilization of order, disruptions of normality, transgressions of the Forbidden, and seizures of power from Authority in revolutionary struggle.
To all those who would enslave us as tyrants of unequal power, let us bring a Reckoning.
Now is the time of the Wolf and of the sacred hunt as love and as solidarity in liberation struggle, dyadic forces of the embrace of nature. Here is a ground of struggle signified by the figure of the wolfman as embodiment of our true nature uncorrupted by the subversions, lies, and falsifications of Authority; the image of human nature and our best selves.
Who are we when liberated from the legacies of our history and systems of unequal power? What is this truth we pursue in the pursuit of those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh?
As I wrote in my post of February 14 2022, On the Redemptive and Transformational Power of Love: the Case of Valentine’s Day and the Festival of the Wolf; Valentine’s Day is a holiday we can celebrate as an unambiguous good, without conflicted historical legacies; named in honor of a man who was executed on February 14 278 AD for performing gay marriages in defiance of Imperial law, adelphopoiesis or brother-making which refers to his marrying Roman soldiers not to their girlfriends but to one another, the wedding of same sex couples under Christian law which Emperor Claudius II forbid as related by John Boswell in his Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.
The modern custom of sending messages to one’s lover, whether a forbidden love or not, originated in 1415, with a message sent by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
So we have in one holiday defiance of authority, transgression of the Forbidden, and the injunction to seize the gates of our prisons and be free.
But this holiday is far more ancient, dating from the sixth century BC and encoding the historical memories of primordial rites of fertility called Lupercalia, the Festival of the Wolf. Rites which echo through our flesh and find form not only as Valentine’s Day as a celebration of the uncontrollable and liberating power of love which exalts us like a madness, but also as a form of the Wild Hunt which we know as the story of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf.
Angela Carter got it nearly right in The Company of Wolves; so also with season two, episode three of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Midnight approaches, and as I ready my wolfskin for the sacred Hunt I think not of the ravishment of our passion but of the redemptive and transformative power of love, of its unique function as a force of healing and reconnection, and of transgression of the Forbidden and defiance of authority as a seizure of power over the ownership of oneself.
Of this I have written tonight a spell of poetic vision, awakening, and transformation, which I share with you here. Good hunting to you all.
Love Triumphs Over Time
When first I learned of love,
And realized that in loving others we humans were not merely escaping
the boundaries of our lives and the flags of our skins
As transcendence, rapture, and exaltation
But discovering ourselves and those truths written in our flesh
And the limitless possibilities of becoming human
Among the unknown topologies of being marked Here Be Dragons
In the empty spaces of the maps of our Imagination
Beyond the doors of the Forbidden
Where truths are forged,
And in the years since I have always known this one true thing;
We are more ourselves when we are with others
Because humans are not designed to be alone
For we are doors which open one another
And restore each other to ourselves in an indifferent world
When we are savaged and broken and lost;
Love is the greatest power of all the forces
which shape, motivate, and inform living things
Love creates, love redeems, love transforms,
Love triumphs over the pathology of our disconnectedness
From Beauty, from the Infinite, and from the community of humankind;
Love triumphs over Time.
Thus for the embrace of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves as love; also it manifests as resistance, seizures of power, and revolutionary struggle. As I wrote in my post of May 24 2022 The Problematization of Tuesday: Why Do We Celebrate Tyr’s Binding of Fenris One Day Each Week?;
How much of our humanity are we willing to sacrifice in order to confront and limit evil?
This is always the true question of Resistance; not of the origin of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, of the renouncement of love as the cost of power nor the redemptive power of love to free us from its grip and from those who would enslave us, not of our dehumanization, commodification, and falsification as theft of the soul nor of our power to become Unconquered and free in refusal to submit to authority, not of addiction to power and the hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness of hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil nor of seizures of power and revolutionary struggle for the ownership of ourselves against authorized identities of unequal power. The question we must face is simply this; how much of ourselves are we willing to trade for our liberty?
Resistance is always war to the knife, under imposed conditions of struggle against those who do not recognize us as fellow human beings, and who have shifted the ground of struggle beyond all limits and all laws, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden to subvert and degrade our humanity and all human being, meaning, and value, and here is where we must meet them.
Who so ever acts to subjugate us beyond all laws and all limits may hide behind none. I am a hunter of tyrants and fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. Let us give to fascists, tyrants, and all those who would enslave us the only reply it merits; Never Again!
Here the myth of Fenris and Tyr may illuminate us, for in sacrificing his hand to bind the wolf which represents his animal nature as all devouring need there is an exchange of qualities, a hierosgamos and transformative rebirth as they unite and become dyadic forces. It is a myth which reflects and refers to the human transformation of wolves into dogs, predators into partners in hunting and war, and in which the breaking of the oaths and bindings which create and sustain the universe, human nature, and civilization are part of the processes of self creation and transformative rebirth, the work of Chaos in the reinvention of the world and our liberation from imposed orders of meaning and authorized identities.
Of Chaos as the principle of freedom I have written often and will again, for I am a Bringer of Chaos and a maker of mischief for tyrants; but here I wish to speak to you of the true nature of the myth of the Binding of Fenris as a metaphor and allegory of our primary ground of struggle as our relationship with the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
For there are two paths we can travel in this; that of control and domination of our nature, as Freud described us with his delicious phrase as “polymorphosly perverse”, chthonic forces to be surmounted and harnessed, or that of Jung, who wrote of shadow work as unification with our monstrosity, especially that which provokes disgust, revulsion, fear, and horror in us.
Here is a myth we can interpret and live as binding our animal nature, or as binding together with our animal nature as a primary human act of becoming. One leads to exploitation and dominance of nature and inevitably to our own extinction; the other to harmony, interdependence, and a sustainable civilization.
First we must situate the figure of Fenris as an archetypal wolf in the context of our fear of nature and its myths and allegories, and then interrogate the consequences of our denial of our own nature for how we have chosen to be human together.
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
I question and challenge the idea of normality, the authorization of identities, and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue.
When you begin to question the boundary and interface between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
One could think of the Binding of Fenris as slavery, abjection, degradation to an animal state or pathological denial of our nature which results in unequal social power as patriarchy, hegemonic elites, capitalism and ecological devastation; or its mirror reverse, hierosgamos, transformative rebirth, interdependence, and harmony with nature.
As we enter the liminal time of this night’s Full Moon celebrations, allegories of the performance of ourselves as a guerilla theatre of disruption and the frightening of the horses, I say to you all, my brothers, sisters, and others; Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery. May the new truths you forge bring you joy.
Thus I write of the wolf that lives within us, in celebration of our monstrosity and beauty; sometimes you have to let your demons out to dance.
Death is the ultimate life disruptive event, the mirror image of Chaos as creative force and the adaptive potential of a system. This day I have re-enacted the stages of grief process as I relive an event of 2021, caught in the labyrinth of its story, and as always with such complexes of memory, history, and identity I emerge through its passage with changed perspective.
Some stories can shatter our lives, but also free us from the legacies of history and the limits of our former selves.
This is a story which has become interwoven with my annual reading of Sartre’s works in celebration of his birthday, a juxtaposition which I find wholly appropriate, illuminating, and strangely hopeful.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
We choose our friends and lovers from among those reflections which embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves or fully integrate into our consciousness and personality; and it is the interface between these two bounded realms, the Ideal and the Real, which I am driven to interrogate today.
Here is where the art of questioning lives, at the intersection of Socratic method and classical rhetoric, the dialectics of history, and the problematization of our motives, feelings, and processes of ideation through the methods of psychotherapy.
We speak of the juxtaposition of imaginal and actual realms of being as a form of Dadaist collage as pioneered by Tristan Tzara and instrumentalized as methodology by William S. Burroughs which creates the universe of our experience, of the discontiguous, relative, ambiguous, and ephemeral nature of truth described by Akutagawa in Rashomon Gate and the methods of fiction exemplified by Raymond Queneau as applied to identity and self construal, and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty as dyadic forces of the psyche which work themselves out through our relationships with ourselves and with others. These three parallel and interdependent processes shape who we become, and how we instrumentalize others in our self creation.
We must first own the fact that dealing with our memories of someone is not the same as the lived experience of our history; it is all one sided and has been moved into an interior space of performance, and in which reimagination and transformation is ongoing. The map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski teaches us, nor is our idea of a person equal to the actual person themselves.
What parts of myself do I embody as a figural space into which to grow in the character whom I have thought of as Cleopatra, with all of the ambivalence, power, legacies of cultural history, and liminality such an identification implies, how do I imagine her now, and what kind of story have I cast us in?
I think of her now in terms of Rachel McAdams’ wily, sophisticated, and transgressive Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, as she became throughout the twelve years of our work in liberation struggle for the independence of Palestine, with elements of Millie Bobby Brown’s fearless, brilliant, and utterly without boundaries Enola Holmes as she began, bearing onward the colours of a beloved and presumed martyred family member in the course of investigating his disappearance. I am reasonably certain that this is not how she saw herself.
For illumination as to how a Palestinian woman might imagine herself, the characters she may choose to play as role models and the stories she may embody as ritual enactments, even a highly unusual one such as she, we may look to the wonderfully rich culture of Palestine’s female film directors and authors; of auteurs Annemarie Jacir, Maysaloun Hamoud, Mai Masri, and Farah Nabulsi, and of novelists Susan Abulhawa, Liana Badr, Ghada Karmi, Sahar Khalifeh, Hala Alyan, and Sahar Mustafah.
Bearing in mind that all such reading lists are nothing less than a set of authorized identities. As Margaret Atwood so splendidly demonstrates in her works, our intertexts are primary in the construction of our identities, including those of sex and gender, as mimesis and as dialectical processes of history.
And this is where it never ceases to be fascinating, the study of human being, meaning, and value and the limitless possibilities of becoming human. For in the sphere of our relationships with others, parallel and interdependent with our relationships between the masculine and feminine halves of our psyche, each co-evolves with the other in recursive processes of growth and adaptation to change in the construction of identity.
I say again; we interpret the actions of others and form relationships on the basis of our self-construal and ideas of ourselves, and we use our relations with real people to shape who we wish to become.
How does this work out in real life? As a personal example of the discontiguous gaps of meaning in the interfaces between bounded realms of masculine and feminine personae, a free space of creative play, I offer the artifacts of memory of a figure which may or may not align with the martyr I know only by her Code Name: Cleopatra.
Of the Last Stand in which we met and forged an alliance, betrayed and caught in a trap which we turned against our enemies who had trapped themselves in with us, which I think of as the final battle scene in the film Mr & Mrs Smith, this operatic quest was set in motion by the conflict of dominion between Hamas and al Qaeda in Gaza during August of 2009, during which the forces of light prevailed over those of darkness in the victory of Hamas, with Israel playing each against the other through infiltration agents, spies, deniable assets, and use of a special Recon team masquerading as various Arab factions to commit atrocities against presumed rival Arab groups in a classic policy of divide and conquer, as Israel did in the tragedy of October 7 as a casus belli for the imperial conquest of Palestine and genocide of her people and continues to do in the Gaza War. This space of play was complicated by clan vendettas such as hers, and the usual political and religious fragmentation, crime syndicates, mercenary forces, tribalism, corruption, and the shadow wars of foreign states.
Our paths crossed several times over the next twelve years, always in memorable circumstances, sometimes as allies and others as rivals, often as both. Which of these is the real and true version of her, or of myself? Such iterations of our images are without number, like the captured and distorted selves in funhouse mirrors aligned to reflect into Infinity.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I contrast with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. Islam itself is a form of this sacred duty, for the faithful are commanded to learn throughout their whole lives, no matter the source or where it leads; the most radical position regarding truth and universal education of any faith I know of, especially when contrasted with the contemporaneous Christian burning of books. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, evil genius of the C.I.A.’s Counterintelligence Service on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are embodied violence and houses of illusion.
The Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat uses the phrase, in a story about the creation of a fictitious officer bearing documents designed to trick the Nazis into preparing for the invasion of Europe somewhere other than Sicily, a case of which I had read long ago become a series I watched with rapt attention because each of us is created by our stories exactly like this false identity attached to the body of a derelict. Within each of us, a team of authors, archetypes and transpersonal figures like the anima which concerns us here, create our personae through stories, a network of memories, histories, and identity; and they do so for their own purposes, which we do not always control or understand.
As T. S. Eliot has written in Gerontin, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities”
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as Shakespeare teaches us in Act IV, Scene 1 of The Tempest, a line spoken by Ariel. For if we are ephemeral and insubstantial beings, constructions of our stories, this also means that the ontological nature of human being is a ground of struggle which can be claimed by seizures of power.
The first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
As I wrote in my post of June 21 2021, The Hope of Humankind: On Becoming Autonomous Zones as Agents of Chaos and Transformative Change; A friend has written in despair of our significance and hope for the liberation of humankind, of the impactfulness of our lives and our struggles which balance the flaws of our humanity against the monstrous and vast forces of a system of dehumanization, falsification, and commodification; for to be human is to live in a state of existential crisis and struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Today is the birthday of Jean Paul Sartre, and so this event finds me reading once again his magnificent reimagination of Jean Genet in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr; Genet who set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982.
Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.
We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said “Fix bayonets?”
And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty nine years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the first of many Last Stands.
This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell with its iconic crack, I am broken open to the suffering of others and the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.
This morning I awoke to a call to identify the body of a friend missing and believed killed in Gaza by Israeli terrorists in the savage street fighting which followed the rocket attacks of last week, which I was unable to do; I searched for my friend in this sad and ruined form, like the skin of a wild thing which has sung itself utterly away, and could recognize nothing.
Where is my friend, agile, lithe, mercurial, fearless, insightful, quick and quick witted, who always had four scenarios running and three escape routes, who survived against impossible odds through improvisation and leveraging chaos, whose vision could discern true motives within the secret chambers of the human heart and play them like an instrument as songs of rapture and terror, who chameleon-like and protean could shift identities as needed and behind their masks move among her enemies unseen?
I never knew her true name; perhaps she no longer had one, as is true for so many of us who play the Great Game of futures and the possibilities of becoming human, a term popularized by Rudyard Kipling in the novel Kim. My own names are numberless as the stars, like those of an actor who has played multitudes of roles in films and theatres of many kinds.
She first entered my orbit during the victorious struggle of Hamas against al Qaeda for dominion of Gaza in August of 2009 in Rafah, an Egyptian Palestinian drawn into the maelstrom of war like countless others by family duty and vendetta.
Yet she said no to authority at great peril when she could have said yes and become a slave, stood in solidarity with others when she could have run; this was a choice, one which confers agency, autonomy, and self-ownership as a seizure of power in a limited and deterministic context. Refusal to submit is the primary human act, one which cannot be taken from us, wherein we become Unconquered and free, and able to liberate others.
So it is that we may escape the wilderness of mirrors in which we wander, a realm of lies and illusions, captured and distorted images, falsification and the theft of the soul. For the authentic self, the image which we seize and claim as our own, flies free of its mad circus of seductions and traps. Hence we achieve our true selves and form, in rapture and exaltation as beings of our own uniqueness.
Impossible that such grandeur could be reduced to its material form, like the abandoned shell of a fantastic sea creature which has grown beyond its limits and moved on, to realms unknown.
The lines spoken by Hamlet while holding the skull of his friend Yorick came unbidden to my thoughts; “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?”
For twelve years you danced with death, and danced away laughing, until today.
Farewell, my friend; I’ll see you in the eyes of the defiant ones, who bear your fire onward into the unknown, and with it I hope your laughter. Our successors will need both fire and laughter, if the future we win for them is to be equal to its price, and worth living in.
Our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus from which warriors arise; from each, multitudes. For we live on as echoes and reflections in the lives of others, in the consequences and effects of our actions, in the good we can do for others which gathers force over time, and in the meaning, value, and possibilities we create.
How can choosing death and freedom be better than submission to authority and its weaponization of fear and force?
My experience of accepting death in confronting force and violence finds parallels in the mock executions of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maurice Blanchot, and I’m not done challenging state terror and tyranny and forces of repression. I’m going to stand between people with guns and their victims in future, as I have many times in past, and here I find resilience among my motivating and informing sources; Sartre’s total freedom and authenticity won by refusal to submit, and Camus’ rebellion against authority which renders force meaningless when met by disobedience and restores our humanity from forces of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, give me the ability to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
And all who are mortal share these burdens with me. In this all who resist subjugation by Authority are alike as Living Autonomous Zones, bearing seeds of change; we can say with the figure of Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
We are all Nikolai Gogol’s hero in Diary of a Madman, caught in the wheels of a great machine he services, like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. But we know that we are trapped and enslaved, and we know how and why; we know the secrets of our condition which our masters would keep silent, and in refusing to be silent we can free ourselves and our fellows. This Michel Foucault called truth telling; a poetic vision of reimagination and sacred calling to pursue the truth which bears transformative power.
So here I offer all of you words of hope for moments of despair, the horror of meaninglessness, the grief of loss, and the guilt of survivorship.
Your voice has defied our nothingness, and resounds throughout the chasms of a hostile and dehumanizing world; gathering force and transformative power as it finds a thousand echoes, and begins to awaken refusal to submit to authority and to heal the pathology of our falsification and disconnectedness.
The voice of even one human being who bears a wound of humanity which opens him to the pain of others and who places his life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who in resistance to tyranny and terror, force and control, becomes unconquered and free, such a voice of liberation is unstoppable as the tides, an agent of reimagination and transformation which seizes the gates of our prisons and frees the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Despair not and be joyful, for we who are living Autonomous Zones help others break the chains of their enslavement simply by condition of being as well as action; for we violate norms, transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, expose the lies and illusions of authority, and render the forces of repression powerless to compel obedience.
This is the primary revolutionary struggle which precedes and underlies all else; the seizure of ownership of ourselves from those who would enslave us.
Such is the hope of humankind.
Here Be Dragons; Negotiating the Interface Between Bounded Realms, a Study in Film and Literature: the Anima or Inner Woman of my Platonic Ideal Versus the Ghosts of Memory of a Lost Friend, Wherein the Discontiguous Boundaries of Identity Become a Space of Free Creative Play Among Unknowns
How I remember our meeting, betrayed and standing together against the world: Mr & Mrs Smith final gunfight scene
How I imagine her now:
Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes Montage to Britney Spears’ version of Bobby Brown’s My Perogative
Enola Holmes Montage to Fifth Harmony’s That’s My Girl
Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
21 يونيو 2024 نحن نوازن بين رعب العدم ومتعة الحرية الكاملة، وعيوب إنسانيتنا مع قوة الحب الفدائية، وانكسار العالم مع أملنا العبثي في الإمكانيات اللامحدودة لنصبح بشرًا: في عيد ميلاد سارتر ، وتأبين
الموت هو الحدث المدمر للحياة، وهو صورة طبق الأصل للفوضى كقوة إبداعية وإمكانات تكيفية للنظام. لقد قمت هذا اليوم بإعادة تمثيل مراحل عملية الحزن بينما أعيش من جديد حدثًا وقع في عام 2021، عالقًا في متاهة قصته، وكما هو الحال دائمًا مع مثل هذه التعقيدات من الذاكرة والتاريخ والهوية، أخرج من خلال مروره بمنظور متغير.
يمكن لبعض القصص أن تحطم حياتنا، ولكنها تحررنا أيضًا من إرث التاريخ وحدود ذواتنا السابقة.
هذه هي القصة التي أصبحت متشابكة مع قراءتي السنوية لأعمال سارتر احتفالا بعيد ميلاده، وهو تجاور أجده مناسبا تماما، ومضيئا، ومفعما بالأمل بشكل غريب.
ألسنا القصص التي نرويها عن أنفسنا، لأنفسنا وللآخرين؟
نحن نختار أصدقاءنا وعشاقنا من بين تلك التأملات التي تجسد الصفات التي نرغب في استيعابها في أنفسنا أو دمجها بالكامل في وعينا وشخصيتنا؛ وهي الواجهة بين هذين العالمين المحدودين، المثالي والواقعي، والتي أنا مدفوع لاستجوابها اليوم.
هنا يعيش فن التساؤل، عند تقاطع المنهج السقراطي مع البلاغة الكلاسيكية، وجدلية التاريخ، وإشكالية دوافعنا ومشاعرنا وعمليات التفكير من خلال أساليب العلاج النفسي.
نحن نتحدث عن تجاور العوالم الخيالية والفعلية للوجود كشكل من أشكال الكولاج الدادائي الذي ابتكره تريستان تزارا واستخدمه ويليام س. بوروز كمنهجية تخلق عالم تجربتنا، الكون غير المجاور والنسبي والغامض والزائل. طبيعة الحقيقة التي وصفها أكوتاجاوا في بوابة راشومون وأساليب الخيال التي جسدها ريموند كوينو كما هي مطبقة على الهوية وتفسير الذات، وإضفاء المثالية على الجمال المذكر والمؤنث كقوى ثنائية للنفسية تعمل من خلال علاقاتنا مع أنفسنا ومعنا. آحرون. تشكل هذه العمليات الثلاث المتوازية والمترابطة هويتنا، وكيف نستخدم الآخرين في خلق أنفسنا.
يجب علينا أولاً أن نعترف بحقيقة أن التعامل مع ذكرياتنا عن شخص ما ليس مثل التجربة المعاشة لتاريخنا؛ كل ذلك من جانب واحد وتم نقله إلى مساحة داخلية للأداء، حيث تتواصل عملية إعادة التصور والتحول. الخريطة ليست الإقليم، كما يعلمنا ألفريد كورزيبسكي، ولا فكرتنا عن الشخص تساوي الشخص الفعلي نفسه.
ما هي الأجزاء من نفسي التي أجسدها كمساحة مجازية أنمو فيها في الشخصية التي فكرت بها على أنها كليوباترا، مع كل التناقض والقوة وموروثات التاريخ الثقافي والحدية التي ينطوي عليها هذا التحديد، كيف أتخيل؟ هي الآن، وما نوع القصة التي ألقيتنا فيها؟
أفكر بها الآن من حيث شخصية إيرين أدلر الماكرة والمتطورة والمتجاوزة لراشيل ماك آدامز في شيرلوك هولمز، كما أصبحت طوال اثني عشر عامًا من عملنا في النضال من أجل التحرير من أجل استقلال فلسطين، مع عناصر من شخصية ميلي بوبي براون الجريئة، رائعة، وبدون حدود تمامًا، إينولا هولمز كما بدأت، تحمل ألوان أحد أفراد العائلة المحبوبين والمفترض أنه شهيد أثناء التحقيق في اختفائه. أنا متأكد إلى حد معقول أن هذه ليست الطريقة التي رأت بها نفسها.
من أجل إلقاء الضوء على الكيفية التي يمكن أن تتخيل بها المرأة الفلسطينية نفسها، والشخصيات التي قد تختار لعبها كنماذج يحتذى بها والقصص التي قد تجسدها كتشريعات طقسية، حتى لو كانت غير عادية للغاية مثلها، قد ننظر إلى ثقافة فلسطين الغنية بشكل رائع المخرجات والمؤلفات السينمائيات في فلسطين؛ المؤلفون آن ماري جاسر، ميسلون حمود، مي المصري، فرح النابلسي، والروائيون سوزان أبو الهوى، ليانا بدر، غادة كرمي، سحر خليفة، هالة عليان، وسحر مصطفى.
مع الأخذ في الاعتبار أن جميع قوائم القراءة هذه ليست أقل من مجموعة من الهويات المعتمدة. وكما توضح مارغريت أتوود في أعمالها بشكل رائع، فإن تناصاتنا أساسية في بناء هوياتنا، بما في ذلك هويات الجنس والجندر، كمحاكاة وعمليات جدلية للتاريخ.
وهذا هو المكان الذي لا تتوقف فيه أبدًا عن روعة دراسة الإنسان والمعنى والقيمة والإمكانيات اللامحدودة ليصبح إنسانًا. لأنه في مجال علاقاتنا مع الآخرين، بالتوازي والمترابط مع علاقاتنا بين النصفين المذكر والمؤنث من نفسيتنا، يتطور كل منهما مع الآخر في عمليات متكررة من النمو والتكيف مع التغيير في بناء الهوية.
أقول مرة أخرى؛ نحن نفسر تصرفات الآخرين ونشكل العلاقات على أساس تفسيرنا لذاتنا
نفكر في أنفسنا، ونستخدم علاقاتنا مع الأشخاص الحقيقيين لتشكيل ما نرغب في أن نصبح عليه.
كيف يعمل هذا في الحياة الحقيقية؟ كمثال شخصي على فجوات المعنى غير المتجاورة في الواجهات بين العوالم المحدودة للشخصيات الذكورية والأنثوية، ومساحة حرة للعب الإبداعي، أقدم مصنوعات ذاكرة شخصية قد تتوافق أو لا تتوافق مع الشهيد الذي أعرفه فقط. باسمها الرمزي: كليوباترا.
من “المواجهة الأخيرة” التي التقينا فيها وشكلنا تحالفًا وخُدرنا ووقعنا في فخ انقلبنا عليه ضد أعدائنا الذين حاصروا أنفسهم معنا، والذي أعتقد أنه مشهد المعركة الأخير في فيلم السيد والسيدة سميث، بدأ هذا المسعى الأوبرالي بسبب صراع الهيمنة بين حماس وتنظيم القاعدة في غزة خلال شهر أغسطس من عام 2009، والذي انتصرت خلاله قوى النور على قوى الظلام في انتصار حماس، حيث لعبت إسرائيل كل منهما ضد الأخرى من خلال التسلل. عملاء وجواسيس وأصول يمكن إنكارها واستخدام فريق ريكون خاص متنكر في زي فصائل عربية مختلفة لارتكاب فظائع ضد الجماعات العربية المنافسة المفترضة في سياسة كلاسيكية فرق تسد، كما فعلت إسرائيل في مأساة 7 أكتوبر كسبب للحرب لـ الغزو الإمبراطوري لفلسطين والإبادة الجماعية لشعبها وما زالت تفعله في حرب غزة. كان مجال اللعب هذا معقدًا بسبب الثأر العشائري مثل انتقامها، والتشرذم السياسي والديني المعتاد، وعصابات الجريمة، وقوى المرتزقة، والقبلية، والفساد، وحروب الظل للدول الأجنبية.
لقد تقاطعت مساراتنا عدة مرات على مدى السنوات الاثنتي عشرة التالية، دائمًا في ظروف لا تُنسى، أحيانًا كحلفاء وأخرى كمنافسين، وفي كثير من الأحيان كلاهما. أي من هذه هي النسخة الحقيقية والحقيقية لها، أو لنفسي؟ مثل هذه التكرارات لصورنا لا حصر لها، مثل الذوات الملتقطة والمشوهة في مرايا المرح المصطفة لتنعكس في اللانهاية.
برية المرايا، عبارة من ت.س. إليوت جيرونتن، هو الذي أستخدمه لوصف مرض تزوير أنفسنا من خلال الدعاية والأكاذيب والأوهام، وإعادة كتابة التاريخ، وأسرار الدولة، والحقائق البديلة، والإيمان الاستبدادي الذي يلتهم الحقائق. وهذا يتناقض مع نقيضه، الصحافة وشهادة التاريخ باعتباره السعي المقدس للبحث عن الحقيقة. الإسلام نفسه هو شكل من أشكال هذا الواجب المقدس، فالمؤمنون مأمورون بالتعلم طوال حياتهم، بغض النظر عن المصدر أو المكان الذي يؤدي إليه؛ الموقف الأكثر تطرفًا فيما يتعلق بالحقيقة والتعليم الشامل لأي دين أعرفه، خاصة عند مقارنته بحرق الكتب المسيحية المعاصر. لقد جعلنا أنفسنا مزيفين من قبل أنظمة السلطة المهيمنة النخبوية مثل النظام الأبوي، ومن قبل أولئك الذين يريدون استعبادنا، من خلال الاستيلاء على قصصنا باعتبارها سرقة للروح.
جيمس أنجلتون، العبقري الشرير في خدمة مكافحة التجسس التابعة لوكالة المخابرات المركزية والذي بنى جون لو كاريه عليه شخصية جورج سمايلي، استخدم هذه العبارة بشكل سيئ السمعة بهذا المعنى أيضًا، وأصبحت عالمية في جميع أنحاء مجتمع الاستخبارات الذي شكله وأثر فيه خلال الحرب الثانية. الحرب العالمية وتداعياتها الحرب الباردة. في إشارة إلى السيرة الذاتية التي كتبها ديفيد مارتن عن نفسه بعنوان برية المرايا، وصفها أنجلتون بأنها “عدد لا يحصى من الحيل والخداع والحيل وجميع أدوات التضليل الأخرى التي تستخدمها الكتلة السوفيتية وأجهزة استخباراتها المنسقة لإرباك وتقسيم البلاد”. الغرب… مشهد مائع دائمًا حيث تندمج الحقيقة مع الوهم. وبطبيعة الحال، فإن كل ما نسبه إلى السوفييت كان صحيحًا بالنسبة له، ولوكالته، ولأميركا أيضًا، ولكل الدول، لأن الجميع عبارة عن عنف متجسد وبيوت من الوهم.
تستخدم Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat هذه العبارة، في قصة حول إنشاء ضابط وهمي يحمل وثائق مصممة لخداع النازيين للتحضير لغزو أوروبا في مكان آخر غير صقلية، وهي الحالة التي قرأت عنها منذ فترة طويلة أصبحت سلسلة لقد شاهدت باهتمام شديد لأن كل واحد منا خلقته قصصه تمامًا مثل هذه الهوية الزائفة المرتبطة بجسد مهجور. داخل كل واحد منا، فريق من المؤلفين والنماذج الأولية والشخصيات العابرة للشخصية مثل الأنيما التي تهمنا هنا، يخلقون شخصياتنا من خلال القصص وشبكة الذكريات والتواريخ والهوية؛ وهم يفعلون ذلك لأغراضهم الخاصة، التي لا نتحكم فيها أو نفهمها دائمًا.
وكما كتب ت.س. إليوت في جيرونتن: “بعد هذه المعرفة، أي مغفرة؟ فكر الآن
التاريخ لديه العديد من المقاطع الماكرة، والممرات المفتعلة
والقضايا، تخدع بالهمس بالطموحات،
يهدينا بالباطل”
نحن مادة تُصنع منها الأحلام، كما يعلمنا شكسبير في الفصل الرابع، المشهد الأول من «العاصفة»، وهي عبارة قالها آرييل. لأنه إذا كنا كائنات زائلة وغير جوهرية، نبني قصصنا، فإن هذا يعني أيضًا أن الطبيعة الأنطولوجية للإنسان هي أرض صراع يمكن الاستيلاء عليها من خلال الاستيلاء على السلطة.
السؤال الأول الذي يطرحه أ
لقصة هي، قصة من هذه؟
يبقى دائمًا الصراع بين القصص التي نرويها عن أنفسنا وتلك التي يرويها الآخرون عنا؛ الأقنعة التي نصنعها لأنفسنا وتلك التي صنعها لنا الآخرون.
هذه هي الثورة الأولى التي يجب علينا جميعا أن نقاتل فيها، النضال من أجل ملكية أنفسنا.
فمن سنصبح إذن؟ يسأل أنفسنا عن الأسطح والصور والأقنعة التي تتفاوض في كل لحظة حول حدودنا مع الآخرين.
تجيب عليها ذاتنا السرية، ذات الظلام والعاطفة، الذات التي تعيش خارج المرآة ولا تعرف حدودًا، غير مقيدة بالزمان والمكان، ولا نهائية في الإمكانيات؛ من تريد أن تصبح؟
كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 21 يونيو 2021 ، أمل البشرية: أن تصبح مناطق حكم ذاتي كوكلاء للفوضى والتغيير التحويلي ؛ لقد كتب صديق يأسًا من أهميتنا وأملنا في تحرير البشرية ، وتأثير حياتنا ونضالاتنا التي توازن عيوب إنسانيتنا ضد القوى الوحشية والواسعة لنظام التجريد من الإنسانية والتزوير والتسليع ؛ أن تكون إنسانًا يعني أن تعيش في حالة أزمة وجودية ونضال من أجل امتلاك أنفسنا.
اليوم هو عيد ميلاد جان بول سارتر ، ولذا وجدني هذا الحدث أقرأ مرة أخرى إعادة تخيله الرائع لجان جينيه في سانت جينيه: الممثل والشهيد ؛ جينيه الذي وضعني على طريق حياتي بقسم المقاومة في بيروت صيف 1982.
كان جنود الاحتلال قد أضرموا النار في المنازل في الشارع الذي أسكن فيه ، ودعوا الناس للخروج والاستسلام. كانوا يعصبون أعين أطفال من فعلوا ويستخدمونهم كدروع بشرية.
لم يكن لدينا أي سلاح آخر غير زجاجة الشمبانيا الفارغة التي انتهينا للتو من تناول وجبة الإفطار المكونة من كريب الفراولة ؛ سألت “أي أفكار؟” ، فهز كتفيه وقال “أصلح الحراب؟”
ثم أعطاني مبدأ العمل الذي عشت من خلاله تسعة وثلاثين عامًا حتى الآن ؛ “عندما لا يكون هناك أمل ، يكون المرء حراً في القيام بأشياء مستحيلة ، وأشياء مجيدة.”
سألني إذا كنت سأستسلم فقلت لا. ابتسم وقال: “ولن أفعل”. ولذا أقسمني على القسم الذي ابتكره في عام 1940 في باريس في بداية الاحتلال لمثل هؤلاء الأصدقاء الذين يمكن أن يجمعهم ، وقد أعيدت صياغته من القسم الذي كان قد أقامه كجندى. قال إنه أفضل شيء سرقه على الإطلاق ؛ “نقسم على ولائنا لبعضنا البعض ، أن نقاوم ولا نستسلم ، ولا نتخلى عن زملائنا.” لقد أصبحت الآن حاملًا لتقليدًا يتجاوز عمره الثمانين عامًا وصنعت في أكثر الصراعات المخيفة والأكثر رعبًا التي عرفها العالم على الإطلاق ، قبل وقت قصير من توقعي أن أحترق حيًا في الأول من بين العديد من المدرجات الأخيرة.
كانت هذه لحظة تزويري ، هذا القرار باختيار الموت على القهر ، ومنذ أن أصابني الجرس ، أدق الجرس. ومثل جرس الحرية بصدعه الأيقوني ، أنا منفتح على معاناة الآخرين وعيوب إنسانيتنا. كانت هذه أعظم هدية حصلت عليها على الإطلاق ، هذا التعاطف الناجم عن جرح مقدس ، ولن أتوقف أبدًا عن الدعوة إلى الحرية ، ولن أتردد في الرد لأنني قادر على الدعوة إلى التضامن مع الآخرين.
استيقظت هذا الصباح على اتصال هاتفي للتعرف على جثة صديق مفقود ويعتقد أنه قُتل في غزة على يد إرهابيين إسرائيليين في قتال الشوارع الوحشي الذي أعقب الهجمات الصاروخية الأسبوع الماضي ، وهو ما لم أستطع فعله ؛ لقد بحثت عن صديقي في هذا الشكل الحزين والمدمّر ، مثل جلد الشيء الوحشي الذي غنى بنفسه تمامًا ، ولم يستطع التعرف على أي شيء.
أين صديقي ، رشيق ، رشيق ، زئبقي ، شجاع ، ثاقب وسريع الذكاء ، الذي كان دائمًا لديه أربعة سيناريوهات قيد التشغيل وثلاثة طرق للفرار ، والذي نجا من الصعاب المستحيلة من خلال الارتجال والاستفادة من الفوضى ، والذي يمكن لرؤيته أن تميز الدوافع الحقيقية داخل الغرف السرية من قلب الإنسان ولعبها كآلة موسيقية مثل نشوة الطرب والرعب ، من الذي تشبه الحرباء والبروتين يمكن أن يغير الهويات حسب الحاجة وتتنقل وراء أقنعةها بين أعدائها غير المرئيين؟
لم أعرف اسمها الحقيقي قط. ربما لم يعد لديها واحدة ، كما هو الحال بالنسبة للكثيرين منا الذين يلعبون اللعبة الكبرى للمستقبل وإمكانيات أن يصبحوا بشرًا ، وهو مصطلح شاعه روديارد كيبلينج في رواية كيم. أسمائي لا تعد ولا تحصى كنجوم ، مثل أسماء الممثل الذي لعب أدوارًا عديدة في الأفلام والمسارح من أنواع عديدة.
دخلت فلكي لأول مرة خلال كفاح حماس المنتصر ضد القاعدة للسيطرة على غزة في أغسطس من عام 2009 في رفح ، وهي فلسطينية مصرية انجرفت إلى دوامة الحرب مثل عدد لا يحصى من الآخرين بسبب واجب الأسرة والثأر.
ومع ذلك ، قالت لا للسلطة في خطر كبير عندما كان بإمكانها أن تقول نعم وتصبح عبدة ، ووقفت متضامنة مع الآخرين عندما كان بإمكانها الركض ؛ كان هذا اختيارًا يمنح الوكالة والاستقلالية والملكية الذاتية كاستيلاء على السلطة في سياق محدود وحتمي. إن رفض الخضوع هو الفعل الإنساني الأساسي ، الذي لا يمكن أن يؤخذ منا ، حيث نصبح غير مقيدين وأحرارًا ، وقادرين على تحرير الآخرين.
لذلك قد نهرب من برية المرايا التي نتجول فيها ، عالم الأكاذيب والأوهام ، الصور الملتقطة والمشوهة ، التزييف وسرقة الروح. بالنسبة للذات الأصيلة ، فإن الصورة التي نلتقطها ونطالب بها على أنها صورنا ، تطير خالية من سيركها المجنون من الإغراءات والفخاخ. ومن هنا نحقق ذواتنا وشكلنا الحقيقيين ، في نشوة الطرب والتمجيد ككائنات فريدة من نوعها.
من المستحيل اختزال هذه العظمة إلى شكلها المادي ، مثل القشرة المهجورة لمخلوق بحري رائع نما إلى ما وراء حدوده وانتقل إلى عوالم غير معروفة.
جاءت السطور التي قالها هاملت بينما كان ممسكًا بجمجمة صديقه يوريك غير محظورة على أفكاري ؛ علقت هنا تلك الشفاه التي قبلتها ، ولا أعرف كيف كثيرًا. حيث يكون الإستهزاء بك الآن؟ الخاص بك gambols؟ أغانيك؟ ومضات الفرح الخاصة بك ، التي لن تضبط الطاولة على هدير؟ لا أحد الآن ، للسخرية من ابتسامتك؟ “
لمدة اثني عشر عاما رقصت مع الموت ورقصتي ضاحكة حتى اليوم.
الوداع يا صديقي. سأراكم في عيون التحدي ، الذين يحملون نيرانكم نحو المجهول ، ومعها أتمنى أن تضحكوا. سيحتاج خلفاؤنا كلا من النار والضحك ، إذا كان المستقبل الذي نربحه لهم هو أن يكون مساوياً لسعره ، ويستحق العيش فيه.
حياتنا مثل أسنان التنين التي زرعها في الأرض الأمير الفينيقي قدموس الذي نشأ منه المحاربون. من كل جموع. لأننا نعيش كأصداء وانعكاسات في حياة الآخرين ، في عواقب وتأثيرات أفعالنا ، في الخير الذي يمكننا فعله للآخرين الذي يجمع القوة بمرور الوقت ، وفي المعنى والقيمة والإمكانيات التي نخلقها.
كيف يكون اختيار الموت والحرية أفضل من الخضوع للسلطة وتسليحها بالخوف والقوة؟
تجربتي في قبول الموت في مواجهة القوة والعنف تجد أوجه تشابه في الإعدام الوهمي لفيودور دوستويفسكي وموريس بلانشو ، ولم أنتهي من تحدي إرهاب الدولة والاستبداد وقوى القمع. سأقف بين الأشخاص المسلحين وضحاياهم في المستقبل ، كما فعلت مرات عديدة في الماضي ، وهنا أجد مرونة بين مصادري المحفزة والمعلمة ؛ تم كسب الحرية الكاملة لسارتر برفضه الخضوع ، وتمرد كامو على السلطة الذي يجعل القوة بلا معنى عندما يقابلها العصيان ، يمنحني القدرة على شق طريقي للخروج من الأنقاض والقيام بموقف أخير آخر ، بعيدًا عن الأمل في النصر أو حتى البقاء على قيد الحياة. .
وجميع البشر الفانين يشاركونني هذه الأعباء. في هذا كل الذين يقاومون الاستعباد من قبل السلطة هم على حد سواء مناطق حية ذاتية الحكم ، تحمل بذور التغيير. يمكننا القول مع شخصية لوكي ؛ “انا أعاني الارهاق لتحقيق غاية مجيدة.”
نحن جميعًا بطل نيكولاي غوغول في يوميات رجل مجنون ، عالقون في عجلات آلة رائعة يخدمها ، مثل تشارلي شابلن في فيلمه Modern Times. لكننا نعلم أننا محاصرون ومستعبدون ، ونعرف كيف ولماذا. نحن نعرف أسرار حالتنا التي سيصمت أسيادنا ، وفي رفضنا الصمت يمكننا تحرير أنفسنا وزملائنا. هذا ميشيل فوكو دعا قول الحقيقة. رؤية شعرية لإعادة التخيل والدعوة المقدسة لمتابعة الحقيقة التي تحمل قوة تحويلية.
لذلك أقدم لكم جميعًا كلمات الأمل في لحظات اليأس ، والرعب من انعدام المعنى ، والحزن من الخسارة ، والشعور بالذنب من البقاء على قيد الحياة.
لقد تحدى صوتك العدم لدينا ، ويتردد صداه في جميع أنحاء فجوات عالم معادٍ وغير إنساني ؛ تجمع القوة والقوة التحويلية لأنها تجد ألف صدى ، وتبدأ في إيقاظ رفض الخضوع للسلطة وشفاء أمراض تزويرنا وانفصالنا.
صوت إنسان واحد يحمل جرحًا إنسانيًا يفتحه على ألم الآخرين ويضع حياته في الميزان مع أولئك الذين أسماهم فرانتس فانون معذبو الأرض ، والضعفاء والمحرومين ، والمسكومين والمسلمين. المموه ، الذين في مقاومة الاستبداد والإرهاب ، القوة والسيطرة ، يصبحون غير مقهرين وحررين ، صوت التحرير هذا لا يمكن إيقافه مثل المد والجزر ، عامل إعادة التخيل والتحول الذي يستولي على أبواب سجوننا ويحرر الإمكانيات اللامحدودة من أن يصبح إنسانًا.
لا تيأس وكن مبتهجًا ، لأننا نحن الذين نعيش في مناطق حكم ذاتي نساعد الآخرين على كسر قيود استعبادهم ببساطة بشرط أن يكونوا فعلًا ؛ لأننا ننتهك الأعراف ، ونتجاوز حدود المحرمات ، ونكشف أكاذيب وأوهام السلطة ، ونجعل قوى القمع عاجزة عن فرض الطاعة.
هذا هو النضال الثوري الأساسي الذي يسبق ويؤسس كل شيء آخر. الاستيلاء على ملكية أنفسنا من أولئك الذين يستعبدوننا.
هذا هو أمل البشرية.
The Scream, Munch
Jean Paul Sartre, on his birthday June 21
There is no literature without Sartre.
In our great quest to create ourselves and become free and independent beings throughout our lives, to test the limits of the human and grow beyond them into the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of being, meaning, and value, to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden as seizures of power and revolutionary struggle, and in our performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, we may look to Sartre among others as iconic figures of Liberty, for the terror of our nothingness in a universe without imposed meaning can be balanced with the joy of total freedom.
Sartre wrote for the Resistance fighters who must claw their way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, without hope of victory or even survival. If I have learned anything in my very long and strange life, it is that this describes all of us, every last one, for such is the defining human 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 ownership of ourselves.
One must read the novel Nausea, the play No Exit, the short story The Wall, the philosophical essay Being and Nothingness and its guide To Freedom Condemned, the lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, and his magnificent work of literary scholarship and iconography in which he creates a figure of the human ideal, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr.
Nausea begins his engagement with Heidegger’s “An Introduction to Metaphysics” which he read in 1935 and “Being and Time” read by Sartre in 1940-41, and Husserl as interpreted by Levinas, ongoing through the critical formative period between 1930, when he began writing it, and 1943, when he published Being and Nothingness. These are his primary sources in forging Existentialism; though his literary references are no less important. He prefaces the novel with a quote from Celine; “He is a fellow without any collective significance, barely an individual.”
In Saint Genet he reimagines the archetypal Trickster-Rebel figure of Romantic Idealism, subsuming Milton’s fallen angel and Nietzsche’s truth teller and herald of the death of God in Zarathustra into a Modernist Orphic myth in which Genet’s crimes, Absurdist mock Catholic rituals of deauthorization, subversion, delegitimation, and liberation, his Surrealist use of ecstatic trance and derangement of the senses as poetic vision, and his literary performances of self-reinvention provide a model for seizure of oneself as the primary human act of self-creation and autonomy. Here is a magisterial allegory of the praxis he sought to articulate for the values of Existentialism in Notebooks for an Ethics; he should have written it as fiction rather than essays, for he shows in Saint Genet with devastating clarity what is obscure in his telling.
Poor Genet; I mention once again that he was a friend of mine, for a few brief weeks of terror and hope which changed my life during the 1982 Siege of Beirut, for the man never escaped the angelic rebel Sartre made of him in this magnificent work, into which was poured all of Sartre’s own hopes and dreams for a better humankind in the terrible war against the Nazis.
Sartre wrote many beautiful and illuminating works, but Saint Genet is his New Testament and vision of a new Adamic Man, free from the legacies of our histories and the systemic forces of our dehumanization. For close to forty years now I have struggled to achieve such a thing, both as personal transformation and as revolution.
I have failed countless times to claw back something of our humanity from the terror of our nothingness, as I did this spring in Mariupol and last year in Panjshir and al Quds, and what few triumphs I may claim are secrets lost to history, but this is unimportant; what matters is to refuse to be subjugated and to stand in solidarity and abandon not our fellows, to place our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the marginalized, the silenced and the erased. Only do this, and you can say that you have lived as a human being.
Beyond this there are some few small works of Jean Paul Sartre, which may reasonably occupy one throughout a lifetime. And whatever time you may spend in his company, it will reward you as time well spent.
Where do we begin, and where do we go from here?
A reading list on Existentialism and Sartre:
Sartre: A Philosophical Biography, by Thomas R. Flynn provides an excellent guide to his life and work.
For an insightful discussion of Existentialism which gives you a seat at the table during its founding, read Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others.
The Labyrinth: An Existential Odyssey with Jean-Paul Sartre, by Ben Argon is a graphic novel of rats caught in a maze and trying to discover a path to freedom, as are we all.
We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939-1975, collects the best from the ten volumes of essays published as Situations. As the publisher describes; “Here Sartre writes about Faulkner, Bataille, Giacometti, Fanon, the liberation of France, torture in Algeria, existentialism and Marxism, friends lost and found, and much else.”
Conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre provides an engaging overview of his ideas on politics, literature, and philosophy. I thought it hilarious to witness him discussing feminism with Simone de Beauvoir; among the Lost Books yet unwritten is one in which someone like the terrifying and delightfully funny Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things To Me, interrogates this exchange in fiction.
Literary Essays, which discusses William Faulkner, Francois Mauriac, John Dos Passos, Jean Giraudoux, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Ernest Hemingway, and the longer single volume critical works Baudelaire and Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness, are brilliant views of great literature through the eyes of one of its masters.
Existential Psychoanalysis, and the screenplay he wrote for John Huston, The Freud Scenario, together provide his views on the subject, and Betty Cannon’s Sartre and Psychoanalysis: An Existentialist Challenge to Clinical Metatheory, explores it from the viewpoint of a therapist.
Also useful on Existentialist Psychotherapy are Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy, by Viktor E. Frankl, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, by Lacan, and Philosophy of Existence, by Karl Jaspers.
If one is to be castaway on a tropical island for the foreseeable future, there is Sartre’s final obsessive study of Gustave Flaubert, The Family Idiot. Hazel E. Barnes’ Sartre and Flaubert provides a guide to the four volumes and fifth unfinished work which absorbed Sartre’s last ten years. Her enormous Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature of Possibility, introduced Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus to America in 1959, and remains a thorough overview.
Truth and Existence, his rebuttal to Heidegger’s Essence of Truth, discusses key concepts of freedom, authenticity, bad faith, and truth.
Notebooks for an Ethics, an enormous lifelong project to extend the work he began in Being and Nothingness, records his struggles to forge a consistent system of thought and develop a praxis or code of action from his ontology.
The massive and ponderous Critique of Dialectical Reason, and the theatrical defense he made of it before the assembled luminaries of European communism recounted in the lecture What is Subjectivity?, a rebuttal to Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, might together represent a study of his whole mature political thinking.
And his massive interrogations of ideas of history in Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 1: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History, and Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History, are great followup studies.
Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, by Tilottama Rajan is an excellent history of relevant ideas.
The A to Z of Existentialism, by Stephen Michelman is a dictionary of 300 entries clarifying the ideas of its major figures including Sartre, De Beauvior, Camus, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and others.
May you find joy, love, hope, seek poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our world, free yourself of things you wish to escape and let go of in the bonfire dance, perform your uniqueness and find your glorious purpose.
For guidance in the celebration of Midsummer I turn to Shakespeare’s beautiful manual of rituals A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written to codify the pre Christian faith of the British Isles in the way that Wagner and his lover Ludwig of Bavaria designed the Ring trilogy and the Brothers Grimm recorded the oral traditions of fairytales to preserve that of Germany.
Shakespeare, however, had other purposes, which may serve us well in revolutionary struggle, for A Midsummer Night’s Dream demonstrates the interdependence of his two great themes; first that love redeems the flaws of our humanity and can transcend the limits of our flesh as it reveals the truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and can return to us our true selves as liberation from authorized identities and falsification. Second that transgression is a gateway to liberty as an autonomous and self-created being, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the limits of normality, and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, three things I practice as a sacred path to the truth and as revolutionary struggle. A golden thread of anarchy and critique of power in the state as embodied violence informs all of Shakespeare’s theatre.
Happily, the Dream also charts a course of poetic vision as reimagination and transformation as an explicit dream navigation guide of ecstatic trance, much like the Tibetan Book of the Dead and aligned with the whole project of Surrealism.
A Trickster god’s labyrinth of transformation, the redemptive power of love, the liberation conferred by transgression and reversals of order, the truth of ourselves set free and returned to us in the gaze of a lover, rituals of ecstasy and vision; may your dreams this Midsummer be full of fearless wonders and joys.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream film trailer
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Ted Hughes
On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism and theocratic tyranny, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning, being, and value through control of our educational system, far too much of our media, and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
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?
We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. Our stories live within us, and we also live within them. Who owns these stories also owns ourselves.
Shall we tip our hats and say “yowza” to those who would enslave us, or shall we defy and challenge them unto their destruction?
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, of 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, identity, or condition of being, 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 and for ownership of ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?
As written by Dale Kretz in Jacobin, in an article entitled Juneteenth Is About Freedom; “Today, as we celebrate Juneteenth, we should remember not only the struggle against chattel slavery but the struggle for radical freedom during Reconstruction — snuffed out by the reactionary forces of property and white supremacy.
“It’s a funny thing how folks always want to know about the War,” mused Felix Haywood about that central fixation of American memory. Haywood had been born in slavery some fifteen years before the Civil War near San Antonio, Texas. “The war weren’t so great as folks suppose,” he told his interviewer, a member of the Federal Writer’s Project collecting testimony from surviving ex-slaves in the late 1930s. “Sometimes you didn’t knowed it was goin’ on. It was the endin’ of it that made the difference.”
Juneteenth marks the day — June 19, 1865 — that the enslaved people of East Texas at long last received word of their freedom as well as the freedom of a quarter million others in the state. Two months had passed since the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s forces at Appomattox and two and a half years since President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves still held in Confederate-controlled areas “forever free” and pledging the federal government to the recognition and maintenance of their freedom.
Juneteenth has been widely celebrated every year since US general Gordon Granger first made the announcement to a crowd of black and white onlookers in Galveston in June 1865. It remains one of the most powerful currents of emancipationist memory in the United States — a counterdemonstration to the noxious propaganda of the Lost Cause.
By their very nature, commemorations tend to simplify events, to strip away the freighted complexities of the past in search of one more usable, if not celebratory. Juneteenth deserves celebration. But the circumstances of the original Juneteenth also deserve our fullest appreciation, for in that confounding history of emancipation in Texas we might glimpse prophetic outlines of the very meaning of freedom in the post-slave — but far from post-racial — United States.
“Hallelujah Broke Out”
Felix Haywood’s account of isolated south-central Texas reveals less about the Civil War itself than the war that was American slavery. He and others on the ranch found that life “went on jus’ like it always had before the war.” Work, worship, whippings — all meted out as usual.
But the flurry of wartime activity in the trans-Mississippi East infiltrated Texas in other, subtler ways. From time to time, Haywood recalled, “someone would come ’long and try to get us to run up North and be free. We used to laugh at that,” he chuckled, for “there wasn’t no reason to run up North. All we had to do was to walk, but walk South, and we’d be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande. In Mexico you could be free” no matter your color. Though Haywood and his family never fled southward, they knew of hundreds who did.
Texas served as a very different sort of beacon. From the 1860 census to June 19, 1865, the enslaved population of Texas nearly doubled. During the war, more than 150,000 enslaved people had been forcibly relocated to the relative safety of Texas, the frontier of the slaveholding Confederacy. Torn from nearby Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, among other states, those enslaved men and women were the rearguard of the massive forced migration enacted in the six decades before the Civil War, a commercial riptide that pulled over a million enslaved men, women, and children toward the cotton kingdom of the lower Mississippi Valley.
As the war unfolded across the South, those fugitive slaveholders who stole themselves and their human chattel westward to Texas merely delayed what was becoming the inevitable, as the concerted actions of enslaved peoples and the United States Army weakened slavery at every turn. Historians estimate that half a million enslaved people absconded from their plantation labor camps during the war; those who remained engaged in what W. E. B. Du Bois famously termed the “general strike.”
Having heard Haywood’s rather unexciting account of the war in remote San Antonio, his interviewer felt pressed to inquire how the former slave knew “the end of the war had come.”
“How did we know it?” the freedman asked incredulously, “Hallelujah broke out. . . . Soldiers, all of a sudden, was everywhere — comin’ in bunches, crossin’ and walkin’ and ridin’. Everyone was a-singin’. We was all walkin’ on golden clouds.” Haywood recited one of the anthems heard that day:
Union forever,
Hurrah, boys, hurrah!
Although I may be poor,
I’ll never be a slave —
Shoutin’ the battle cry of freedom.
Up to that point in his interview, Haywood’s account of the Civil War was distant, even dismissive. But the announcement of freedom — of Juneteenth — forever punctuated his memory. “Everybody went wild,” he suddenly exclaimed. “We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us that way but ourselves. We was free. Just like that.” Right away, the erstwhile slaves of Texas “started on the move. They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they’d know what it was — like it was a place or a city.”
The landing of US forces at the port of Galveston in June 1865 underscored what the formerly enslaved already knew — and what historians are only beginning to fully appreciate: freedom relied not simply on declarations, laws, and amendments in distant Washington, but on the force of arms. The Juneteenth announcement required enforcement by the 1,800 federal soldiers assigned to the state to make freedom meaningful for the freedpeople of Texas.
The Meaning of Freedom
Though black people had long nurtured their own understandings of what freedom might entail, in June 1865 the very legality and defensibility of their newfound status was anything but certain. Scarcely two weeks had passed since the surrender of Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith’s division in Galveston, though the fighting did not so much disappear as devolve into rampant guerilla warfare and anti-black terrorism.
Lincoln had fallen to an assassin’s bullet two months prior to the Juneteenth announcement, succeeded by the embodiment of racist and reactionary Unionism, Andrew Johnson. The Thirteenth Amendment, which formally abolished involuntary servitude, had passed both houses of Congress in January but was still in the process of state ratification. Newspapers in Texas were predicting that slavery would survive in the state at least another ten years thanks to northern industrialists’ rapacious desire for cotton.
Entering the fray, the official announcement on June 19 might not have settled the matter of emancipation, but it did contain the outlines of a new order. General Granger’s declaration informed “the people of Texas that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.”
But as the army of liberation turned into an army of occupation — and one imperfectly dedicated to protecting the rights and lives of black Southerners — commanders like Granger stressed that freedom came with many strings attached. “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” In other words: work for your old masters, and don’t gather together, especially at places, to borrow Haywood’s phrase, “closer to freedom.”
Making good on the implied threat of the June 19 proclamation, the Galveston mayor, with the tacit approval of the provost marshal, rounded up black refugees and runaways and returned them to their owners. Others were dragooned into working for the army.
“With the proclamation of freedom came a practical lesson in its duties,” the Galveston Daily News reported on June 22. “On Monday morning, a guard of Federal soldiers scoured the streets,” rounding up every “loose” freedman “they could lay their hands on, to go to the country and cut wood, man steamboats, or assist in such labor as was necessary for the army. A panic soon seized the new class thus conscripted,” the reporter jeered, “but the quick feet of the white soldiers and the persuasive and pointed argument of the bayonet brought them to a sense of their obligation to support the government which had given them their freedom.”
The new order was to be based on wage labor. But because of the severe cash shortage throughout the post–Civil War South, many planters were unable to pay wages; sharecropping thus emerged as a compromise between wage slavery and actual slavery. Black farmers would rent their land from white planters and pay for it using a portion of their crop come harvest time, usually a quarter to a half.
Employers were free to void the contracts for virtually any “offense,” seizing thereafter the entire harvest and evicting the black sharecropping family from their land, exposing them to vagrancy laws and the dragnet of the convict lease system, what has aptly been called “slavery by another name.” Such was the vaunted ideal of contract freedom.
Sharecropping emerged as a compromise between wage slavery and actual slavery.
It took a while for news of emancipation to reach black Texans in the most remote parts of the state — and even longer for it to register with their enslavers. Susan Merritt, enslaved in northeast Texas, reckoned it must have been September when she heard the news. As Merritt recalled in her own Depression-era interview, one day while she and others were picking cotton a stranger rode up to the house — “a government man,” with a “big book and a bunch of papers” — and demanded to know why the planter hadn’t surrendered ownership of his workers. It was from this man — likely an official of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency designed to oversee the transition to freedom and market relations — that Merritt first learned she was free.
Yet she and others were still compelled to work for their old enslaver for “several months after that.” Oft-enacted threats of gunning down deserters doubtless kept many on the plantation. The relative impotency of the US Army and Freedmen’s Bureau emboldened planters. Freedpeople found themselves as precarious tenants, locked into labor contracts that looked more like debt peonage than the freedom they had long envisioned.
As the Freedmen’s Bureau began to establish itself in Texas that fall, reports circulated that its officials were planning to consult with local planters trained in the “management” of black workers — a far cry from the agency’s founding mission. The original charter had included provisions to distribute hundreds of thousands of acres of land that had been abandoned by or confiscated from rebel planters over the course of the war.
By the spring of 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau controlled roughly 900,000 acres of “government land,” enough for nearly twenty-three thousand black homesteads. General William Tecumseh Sherman, moreover, had issued Field Order No. 15 back in January, arranging for the parceling out of some 485,000 acres to freedpeople in the South Carolina Sea Islands and Lowcountry in 40-acre plots, land on which the general had ordered “no white person whatever . . . will be permitted to reside.”
But the counterrevolution came in October 1865. President Johnson unceremoniously revoked Sherman’s order and commanded the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau to denationalize the government’s lands — returning it to the rebel planters Johnson had recently pardoned en masse.
In the emancipated South, then, black dispossession went fist in glove with the coerced imposition of “free” labor. At the same time, Northern capitalists and federal officials conspired to prevent widespread black landownership — the very thing freedpeople almost universally regarded as the precondition for freedom in a post-slave society. One sixty-year-old freedman of the Mississippi Valley commented to a Northern journalist shortly after the war, “What’s de use of being free if you don’t own land enough to be buried in?”
From Reconstruction to Jim Crow
Black-led protests during the final months of 1865 were widespread, though on small scales and usually in response to specific inciting confrontations. One ex–slaveholding planter complained to the Waco Register that although several of his fellow planters deigned to sign contracts with their new black employees, he estimated that three-fourths of the freedpeople in his area “look forward to Christmas as the dawn of the millennium, when meat and bread will come as a matter of course.”
Many black families indeed refused to sign the loathsome contracts for the coming season, waiting on the promise of land redistribution. Among white Southerners, especially of the planter class, fevered rumors spread of an impending Haitian-style revolution. The pervasive fear in the winter of 1865–66 was soon given a label: the Christmas Insurrection Scare. But in the end, it proved to be just that. Promises broken, freedpeople reluctantly entered into labor contracts.
The freedpeople of Texas had plenty of reason to be fearful, however, as some thirty-eight thousand Confederate parolees returned with a vengeance. In addition to raiding the treasury in Austin, the rebels of the failed Confederate state harassed, brutalized, and killed freedpeople at will. As Du Bois noted in Black Reconstruction, the pervasive anti-government, anti-black terrorism so widespread across the South was perhaps the worst in Texas. Simply acting free was grounds for white retaliation. The occupying US Army, meanwhile, lacked either the capacity or will to make black freedom meaningful. In any event, the return to peacetime in 1871 and the swift demobilization of the army spelled disaster for the formerly enslaved.
At the twilight of slavery, then, a new system of dependency and precarity greeted freedpeople in Texas and across the emancipated South — vastly different from the freedom dreams of the formerly enslaved. For their part, the enslavers-turned-employers routinely griped about perceived obstinacy of their black workers — that is, their resistance to being rendered docile vectors of their employers’ will. They complained that “labor is incompatible with their ideas of freedom.” Threats and orders from on high appeared to register little with them. One planter, in a letter to the Dallas Daily Herald, sneered that “they do not believe anything that we tell them or which we may read from papers that is at variance with their ideas of freedom.” It was partly a matter of trust, but even more so a matter of political struggle and conviction that kept them at odds with their exploiters.
After the fall of Reconstruction, that great experiment in biracial democracy, black workers channeled their organizing efforts into various associations such as the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, formed in Houston County, Texas, in 1886. Then came the ascent of the Populist Party in the early 1890s, which depended — especially in the former slaveholding states — on the mobilization of black voters. Texas in particular witnessed a surge of black support for the Populist Party and soon became a Populist stronghold.
The Populist Party was the only meaningfully biracial political party that existed. It was also the only party that spoke to the needs of hundreds of thousands of black sharecroppers in the benighted South.
In the words of C. Vann Woodward, Populism offered to working-class blacks and whites “an equalitarianism of want and poverty, the kinship of common grievance and a common oppressor.” Under unprecedented threat, the two established parties conspired to race-bait and red-bait the Populist Party to death. They succeeded. By the mid-1890s the Democratic Party had cynically adopted a few planks of the Populist platform, coopted some of its leaders, and cast black voters into the electoral oblivion of the increasingly disenfranchised South.
What Juneteenth Means Today
“We knowed freedom was on us,” Felix Haywood recalled in the late 1930s, “but we didn’t know what was to come with it. We thought we was goin’ to get rich like the white folks. We thought we was goin’ to be richer than the white folks, ’cause we was stronger and knowed how to work. . . . But it didn’t turn out that way. We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make ’em rich.”
Juneteenth is worth celebrating for its promised end to human bondage, but its history also reminds us of the “counterrevolution of property” waged against the revolution that was the American Civil War — a conflict that ultimately freed four million black people once legally held as property, a conflict wherein more than 140,000 formerly enslaved men enlisted and countless other black men and women lent their fullest devotion.
It’s common to say nowadays that the Civil War is unfinished. We can, after all, readily point to the ubiquitous battles over so-called Civil War monuments (better understood as monuments to Jim Crow that merely adopt the iconography of the war). But the most enduring legacy of the Civil War is not symbolic or cultural but substantive and economic. Not only did sharecropping prevail into the 1960s, but the particular formulation of freedom exacted upon black people in the emancipated South can be said to weigh like a nightmare on the living, to borrow Marx’s phrase.
Over the past year of the pandemic, political leaders on both sides of the aisle spoke and acted like modern-day Gordon Grangers, brandishing the freedom to work and the threat that we “will not be supported in idleness.” The meager stimulus checks, barely a few weeks’ worth of subsistence for most families, made good on this threat.
So did conservatives’ shameless assaults on unemployment benefits, which they roundly denounced as disincentives to work. Like the ex-slaveholding planters of old, they betrayed a bone-deep belief in the natural laziness of the working class and an unstinting opposition to a different vision of freedom. To that end, too, they devoted themselves to austerity and anti-distributive economics, to incapacitating the welfare state while ramping up the punitive one — and setting it against black-led protests for something closer to approximating the promise of “absolute equality.”
“It was the endin’ of it that made the difference,” Felix Haywood said of the war. This Juneteenth, let’s remember how slavery ended, and how freedom remained — and remains — elusive. And that nobody can make us free but ourselves.”
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her journal Letters From An America; “On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army, but it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.
Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived to take charge of the soldiers stationed there. On June 19, he issued General Order Number 3. It read:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
The order went on: “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
While the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing enslavement except as punishment for a crime had passed through Congress on January 31, 1865, and Lincoln had signed it on February 1, the states were still in the process of ratifying it.
So Granger’s order referred not to the Thirteenth Amendment, but to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that Americans enslaved in states that were in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” Granger was informing the people of Galveston that, Texas having been in rebellion on January 1, 1863, their world had changed. The federal government would see to it that, going forward, white people and Black people would be equal.
Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought for the United States and worked in the fields to grow cotton the government could sell. Those unable to leave their homes had hidden U.S. soldiers, while those who could leave indicated their hatred of the Confederacy and enslavement with their feet. They had demonstrated their equality and their importance to the postwar United States.
The next year, after the Thirteenth Amendment had been added to the Constitution, Texas freedpeople gathered on June 19, 1866, to celebrate with prayers, speeches, food, and socializing the coming of their freedom. By the following year, the federal government encouraged “Juneteenth” celebrations, eager to explain to Black citizens the voting rights that had been put in place by the Military Reconstruction Act in early March 1867, and the tradition of Juneteenth began to spread to Black communities across the nation.
But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.
In summer 1865, as white legislators in the states of the former Confederacy grudgingly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, they also passed laws to keep freedpeople subservient to their white neighbors. These laws, known as the Black Codes, varied by state, but they generally bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in the fields owned by white men; prohibited Black people from meeting in groups, owning guns or property, or testifying in court; outlawed interracial marriage; and permitted white men to buy out the jail terms of Black people convicted of a wide swath of petty crimes, and then to force those former prisoners into labor to pay off their debt.
In 1865, Congress refused to readmit the Southern states under the Black Codes, and in 1866, congressmen wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Its first section established that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It went on: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That was the whole ball game. The federal government had declared that a state could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.
The addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 remade the United States. But those determined to preserve a world that discriminated between Americans according to race, gender, ability, and so on, continued to find workarounds.
On Friday, June 16, 2023, the Department of Justice—created in 1870 to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment—released the report of its investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) and the City of Minneapolis in the wake of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer. The 19-page document found systemic “conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law,” discriminating against Black and Native American people, people with behavioral health disabilities, and protesters. Those systemic problems in the MPD’s institutional culture enabled Floyd’s killing.
Minneapolis police performed 22% more searches, 27% more vehicle searches, and 24% more uses of force on Black people than on white residents behaving in similar ways. They conducted 23% more searches and used force 20% more on Indigenous Americans.
The Justice Department’s press release specified that the city and the police department “cooperated fully.” The two parties have “agreed in principle” to fix the problem with sweeping reforms based on community input, with an independent monitor rather than litigation.
While the Senate unanimously approved the measure creating the Juneteenth holiday last year, fourteen far-right Republicans voted against it, many of them complaining that such a holiday would be divisive.
How we remember our history matters.”
As written by Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic, in an article entitled Balancing the Ledger on Juneteenth: The debate over reparations highlights the dual purpose of the holiday: celebrating emancipation but also demanding accountability for historical and present wrongs; “In 2019, Juneteenth will be celebrated as emancipation was in the old days: with calls for reparations. As the country marks 154 years since news of the end of slavery belatedly came to Texas, the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the subject of reparations for black Americans. It is a watershed moment in the larger debate over American policy and memory with regard to an enduring sin.
The hearing marks a return to the early black-American celebrations and jubilees, which were staged even as formerly enslaved people beseeched the Freedmen’s Bureau or the Union Army for land. And that’s for good reason. Juneteenth has always had a contradiction at its core: It is a second Independence Day braided together with reminders of ongoing oppression. Its spread from Texas to the rest of the United States accelerated in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., as a sort of home-going for King and other victims of white-supremacist violence, fusing sorrow and jubilation.
For decades, the successes of the civil-rights movement elevated the jubilation. But in recent years, the tenor of Juneteenth has changed. Black Americans see more clearly just how deep white supremacy rests in the country’s bones. The sorrow now predominates, and with it comes an urgency to hold power to account, and to remember who and what is owed.
Amid the wreckage of Reconstruction, the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction in America, a celebration of freedom demanded and claimed, and a lamentation of the collapse of an era in which the country could have truly made good on its promises to the enslaved. In it, he made a prediction. “This the American black man knows: his fight here is a fight to the finish,” Du Bois wrote. “Either he dies or wins. If he wins it will be by no subterfuge or evasion of amalgamation. He will enter modern civilization here in America as a black man on terms of perfect and unlimited equality with any white man, or he will enter not at all. Either extermination root and branch, or absolute equality. There can be no compromise. This is the last great battle of the West.”
For Du Bois, the path to a full liberation included restitution, land redistribution, the guarantee of a quality education, and positive and proactive protections for civil rights for the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Until those goals were achieved, he predicted, black Americans would be consigned to an unsteady state of second-class citizenship that would always tend toward oblivion. To Du Bois, if true material equality could not be enforced and racial hegemony smashed even by might of victorious arms, then it was proof that white supremacy would always have the power to escape any cage placed around it. Securing reparations, and a companion package of reforms that actually siphoned power from white elites and gave it to black laborers, was not just a practical necessity, but a moral test.
Of course, America failed that examination. None of Du Bois’s aims were accomplished in full. Redemption destroyed Reconstruction, and Jim Crow enacted another century of formalized and state-enforced theft from black people by white people. Even the end of Jim Crow was marked by an incomplete reconstruction. Black civil-rights leaders were assassinated in waves, and the economic and housing reforms pushed at the end of the civil-rights movement were never realized. Affirmative action was diminished by white resistance, and, against the wishes of Justice Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court eliminated racial quotas. Black farmers never received anything near full compensation for land stolen with the assistance of the federal government, and the proactive protections of the Voting Rights Act were largely dismantled by the Court in 2013.
Du Bois’s prediction now seems prophetic. The rejection of labor protections gave rise to sharecropping and reified a racial wealth hierarchy that has never been overturned. The failure to redistribute land from the enslavers to the enslaved that Du Bois chronicled led directly to the Great Migration, as black families fled their homes in search of genuine opportunity. Arriving in cities such as Chicago, they were met instead with a new round of dispossession. Discriminatory contract buying of homes in Chicago cost them between $3 billion and $4 billion. The absence of proactive protections for the black vote paved the way for disenfranchisement, and for the unsteady state of voting rights. The civil-rights-era efforts by the federal government to enforce equality were abandoned in many places, restoring a segregated health-care system and segregated schools.
Now, however, a growing body of research and reporting has tied those rejections of pro-equality policies to visible racial disparities in health and wealth. These linkages in many cases have provided data to back concerns within black communities that have long been dismissed as conspiratorial ravings. Yes, police really are stealing from black communities by way of discriminatory tickets. Yes, much of the conservative push to enact more restrictive voting laws is intended to dilute black voting power. Those linkages are empowering in a way, cutting through decades of gaslighting and disbelief. And they all point to the potential utility of reparations, not just as a way to address the legacy of slavery, but as the only way to reckon with the caste system that America allowed to be built as it looked the other way after slavery’s end.
The idea of reparations is somehow both avant-garde and extraordinarily old. Its reemergence stems from a broad reassessment of the trajectory of black America’s material conditions, and a realization that even with the extraordinary efforts of individual black people and some political and economic protections, true equality always appears just out of reach.
The reparations debate now necessarily extends beyond slavery, drawing from Jim Crow and more recent discriminatory practices in the North and West. Scholars are producing estimates of exactly how much wealth was stolen by tools such as restrictive covenants and mass incarceration. And, critically, researchers have also clearly outlined exactly how state power helped produce the wealth of those who have it: through favorable tax policy, social insurance, powerful institutions, and massive land and wealth transfers. America has pursued most of the programs Du Bois desperately wanted to create during Reconstruction. But the country has enacted them mostly for white people instead of the scions of the enslaved.
There is a ledger, and more and more black Americans believe it must be balanced. Resistance to that notion is perhaps best encapsulated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said on Tuesday: “I don’t want reparations for something that happened 150 years ago … We’ve tried to deal with the original sin of slavery by passing civil-rights legislation and electing an African American president.” Conveniently, McConnell did not mention Jim Crow, the reason it took 100 years for civil-rights legislation to be passed after the Civil War. And if he does view the election of President Barack Obama as a duly appointed form of reparations, then McConnell’s own resistance to, and repeated stonewalling of, Obama’s presidency deserve some probing.
In American politics, as President Donald Trump’s career suggests, time and inertia confer legitimacy. The national celebration of emancipation has reverted to a purely historic endeavor, one stripped of the demand for full equality. Slavery has been relegated to a hazily indistinct past, and the ways in which it obviously influenced modern law are elided. Among those who wish to share in the font of white political power, this mythology is purposeful and empowering.
Memory, however, is powerful enough to expose myth. And memory is the purpose of Juneteenth. The testimonies of people who were enslaved, as well as their children, grandchildren, and distant descendants, are integral parts of the holiday. In predicting that the black community would either attain equality or be eliminated “root and branch,” Du Bois underestimated the strength of memory, which has allowed the black community to endure.
On Juneteenth, it seizes the narrative, reminding the country of its original debt, and the debts it has since accrued. And this Juneteenth, that reminder will be delivered in the seat of American power. This is, and has always been, the highest purpose of jubilee: to deliver a moral accounting.”
A Life in Chains: The Juneteenth Edition: Novels, Memoirs, Interviews, Testimonies, Studies, Official Records on Slavery and Abolitionism, Frederick Douglass, Harriet E. Wilson, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Lydia Maria Child, William Wells Brown, Charles W. Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Booker T. Washington
On this day four years ago the Fourth Reich regime which had captured America shed its mask and its fig leaf of legitimacy spun of lies and illusions as Trump with feral malice and the arrogance of power chose to launch his re-election campaign using the inverted Red Triangle worn by political prisoners of the Nazi death camps in reference to his own political opponents and to Antifa, to my knowledge the only force in our century to ever defeat in battle and on its own ground the United States of America as a captured state of the Fourth Reich and its terror forces of combined federal secret police of Homeland Security and their disavowable assets of white supremacist terror which included the Oathkeepers militia of former military and police.
The Red Triangle became a symbol of liberation and victory over fascism and tyranny as well as Resistance when the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf declared the defeat of their regime and officially ceded federal control of New York, Seattle, and Portland to the people as Autonomous Zones.
It has also been adopted as a symbol of Resistance and liberation struggle by the bold young rebels occupying our university campuses in the divestiture protests and in Palestine itself, whose meaning outsiders confuse and make ambiguous.
In the context of Palestinian Resistance and liberation struggle, its direct origin is the flag of the 1916 Arab Revolt, whose colours were adopted from the 13th-century Arab poet Safi al-Din al-Hili;
“Ask the high rising spears, of our aspirations
Bring witness the swords, did we lose hope
We are a band, honor halts our souls
Of beginning with harm, those who won’t harm us
White are our deeds, black are our battles,
Green are our fields, red are our swords.”
Red are our swords; become a symbol of Palestinian national identity and the cause of Arab unity throughout over a century of wars, it has also fused with the Red Triangle as a symbol of Antifascist Resistance, of anticolonial and revolutionary struggle, and of independence movements through the alliances and networks of Left solidarity and action which have propagated since the Second World War. This is especially true of the Marxist and former Soviet allied Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine founded by George Habash, which re-aligned with Hamas and Hezbollah versus both Arafat’s PLO-Fatah and Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union.
I will be wearing my Red Triangle, assigned by the Nazis to political prisoners including social democrats, liberals, socialists, communists, anarchists, gentiles who assisted Jews, trade unionists, and Freemasons, as a badge of honor and victory in the liberation of the Autonomous Zones, a symbol of Antifa, in honor of all the victims of the Holocaust yet to be avenged, and as a promise to all those throughout the world yet to be liberated from fascism and tyranny.
This I do as a sign of solidarity with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. As Benjamin Franklin demonstrated so ably with his bundle of arrows, paraphrasing the founder of the Iroquois Confederacy Tadadaho Canasetoga the Peacemaker, “One arrow can easily be broken; many arrows together are unbreakable”.
Let the Red Triangle signal to those who would enslave us; We are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of September 24 2020, Leading the Charge Into the Future: the New York , Portland, and Seattle Autonomous Zones; In accord with Trump’s directive, the US Department of Justice has designated three cities, including Seattle, Portland, and New York City, as “anarchist” jurisdictions, officially ceding control to the free peoples who have seized their birthright and returned private property to the commons from which it was stolen and legitimacy from the government which has squandered it.
Henceforth let us call those cities for which power and ownership has been transferred to us by the President of the United States, Attorney General William Barr, and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, by their true names; the New York, Seattle, and Portland Autonomous Zones.
May they be the first of many, throughout America and the world.
As I wrote in my post of June 18 2020, Beneath the Republican Mask: Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator; Mark of the Red Triangle; Thanks for showing us what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Just when we thought there was no depravity which remains unexplored by our Clown of Terror, no violation of American values or degradation of humanity yet unseen in the outrages and mad performances of Traitor Trump, he launches his re-election campaign using symbols of the Holocaust.
If there was any doubt as to his true motives and intentions in his relentless and savage campaign to subvert democracy and seize authoritarian power as tyrant of a regime of white supremacist terror, this open declaration of Nazi allegiance should erase all doubt.
All that remains is for each of us to choose if we will face judgement and the witness of history with or against fascism and tyranny. Which future shall we leave for the next generation as our legacy?
As Eoin Higgins writes in Common Dreams, in an article entitled Their Masks Are Off’: Facebook Removes Trump Ads Using Nazi Concentration Camp Symbol Used to Signify Political Prisoners; “Nazis used the red triangle to mark political prisoners and dissidents, and now Trump and the RNC are using it to smear millions of people protesting racist police violence.
Social media giant Facebook on Thursday took a rare step of intervening in the platform’s political discourse by removing ads run by President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign using symbols from Nazi concentration camps after sustained outcry from advocacy groups.
“Public outcry works,” tweeted Jewish advocacy group Bend the Arc: Jewish Action. “But the Trump campaign must be held accountable for its bigotry—and so must Facebook for enabling it.”
The president’s campaign used an inverted red triangle in an ad to represent antifa, or antifascism, but as critics immediately pointed out, the symbol has an extremely dark and fascist past.
According to the Washington Post; “A red inverted triangle was first used in the 1930s to identify Communists, and was applied as well to Social Democrats, liberals, Freemasons and other members of opposition parties. The badge forced on Jewish political prisoners, by contrast, featured a yellow triangle overlaid by a red triangle.”
“We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told the Post. “Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.”
In a statement, Bend the Arc CEO Stosh Cotler said that “Trump and his cronies have used carefully-targeted antisemitic rhetoric and imagery to go after their opponents, while inciting violence against Jewish and Muslim people, immigrants, Black people, and people of color.”
“Make no mistake, the President of the United States is campaigning for reelection using a Nazi concentration camp symbol,” Cotler said. “Nazis used the red triangle to mark political prisoners and dissidents, and now Trump and the RNC are using it to smear millions of people protesting racist police violence. Their masks are off.”
And now Trump is running once again in hope of completing his mission of subversion of democracy and the degradation of America into a theocratic white ethnostate. While his ally Netanyahu demonstrates for us all Trump’s vision of a future America, and the horrific consequences of theocracy, tyranny, and wars of genocide and ethnic cleansing perpetrated in the name of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Let us remember and never forget in all of history the flaws in our systems which he has exposed and leveraged and the crimes against the ideals and institutions of a free society of equals and our universal human rights he has perpetrated.
Fifty two years ago today the Watergate break in began the fall of Richard Nixon and his criminal regime of repression of dissent and sabotage of American institutions of government, ideals, and values, a horrific precursor of the Fourth Reich capture of our nation in the Stolen Election of 2016 and the regime of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump.
Nixon’s carceral state of force and control, white supremacist terror and patriarchal sexual terror, and the imperial Thousand Day Vietnam War began with his sidekick Joe McCarty and the Blacklist Era also called The Red Scare; and though exposure delegitimized Nixon and toppled him from his throne the Fourth Reich regarded his Presidency as an incremental victory which moved our nation closer to the 1980 capture of the Republican Party by a fascist cabal under the fig leaf of Pat Robertson’s Gideonite fundamentalism, the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, the Bush dynasty whose founder prior to the Second World War was the exclusive banker for Thysson Krupp and personally handed Adolf Hitler the money to fund the Beer Hall Putsch, and finally that of Donald Trump, heir to a fortune founded by a sex trafficker in the Klondike Gold Rush who abducted and sold Native American tribal women, chained like captive animals in horse stalls, similar to the origin of the word “crib” in Black slang to refer to one’s home as this was used throughout the Confederacy as well. John Hawkes wrote the iconic novel Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade about the Trump family in 1985; and people wonder why the Grabber, who once bought a beauty contest to peep at teenage girls in the changing room, is a rapist, misogynist, and sexual terrorist.
Herein I intend not to diminish the many crimes of Richard Nixon, but to place him in historical context as the first American victory of the Fourth Reich in capturing the state through the Presidency, and who opened the way for all that came later.
Nixon made an annual pilgrimage to Mexico City during his Presidency to meet with what he called his spiritual advisor, Josef Mengele. The results of that discipleship can be read in the methods of repression of dissent used in America against counterculture movements of all kinds and in Vietnam; methods later used in the imperial phase of our history after 911 to centralize authority in the counterinsurgency model of policing, which treats all suspects in a crime as terrorists, the militarization of policing, and the coordination of deniable assets like the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, Patriot Front, The Base, Atomwaffen Division, and other fascists with Fourth Reich infiltration agents within the police and Homeland Security in tyranny and terror, treason and the subversion of democracy.
Watergate was the birth of the January 6 Insurrection.
As written by the Spanish philosopher Santayana in the 1905 treatise The Life of Reason; “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Winston Churchill paraphrased this in a famous speech of 1948 as; “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
As written in The Washington Post, in an article entitled Transcript: 50th Anniversary of Watergate: Inside the Case:
“MR. BALZ: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Dan Balz, chief correspondent here at The Post. We are beginning our coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in with two men who helped assemble the legal case against President Nixon. Richard Ben-Veniste was chief of the Watergate taskforce in the Office of Special Prosecutor. Secretary William Cohen was a freshman on the House Judiciary Committee, newly elected in 1972 from the state of Maine. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you both for being with us.
MR. COHEN: Good to be with you, Dan.
MR. BALZ: So, let’s begin at the beginning. June 17, 1972, the burglars are arrested at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building. Richard, how did you first hear about it, and what did you think about it?
MR. BEN-VENISTE: I first heard about it when I was a US attorney assistant in New York City, and thought it was a crazy intrusion. But before we get into the substance, let me just say, if I may be permitted, what a great honor it is to share this conversation with Bill Cohen, who is a great American patriot and defender of the Constitution.
MR. COHEN: Richard, thank you very much. And I would say the same. My admiration for you goes just as strongly in your direction.
MR. COHEN: Thank you.
MR. BALZ: Thank you, both.
Secretary Cohen, you were running for office that summer when the news broke about the break-in? How did you hear about it? What did you think about it? And frankly, did it ever come up in the context of your campaign?
MR. COHEN: It did not. I had just been elected to be the Republican nominee for the congressional district, and I had planned a 650-mile walk all the way from New Hampshire to Canada. So, my focus was on how was I going to conduct that walk, how would I be able to endure it physically, et cetera. And so my focus was just on relating to the people of Maine. I was staying at homes picked at random individually every night. And so my focus was on connecting to the people of Maine and my district. And the issue what happened, I hadn’t heard about it, read about it. But it really wasn’t central to anything I was thinking or saying. And, frankly, it was dismissed initially as just a, quote, “third-rate burglary.” And that’s what it had seemed–it had seemed to me at the time.
MR. BALZ: The investigation initially was under the auspices of the US Attorney’s Office with Judge Sirica presiding in the courtroom. Later, Elliot Richardson, newly appointed attorney general, appointed Archibald Cox as the special prosecutor. Richard, why the shift? What was the mandate for Archibald Cox? And how did that office get put together?
MR. BEN-VENISTE: The appointment of a special prosecutor I think flowed from the fact that Judge Sirica was very unhappy with the presentation before him in the Watergate break-in case, where the original burglars were being tried. He believed that there were higher-ups involved, and yet there was no questioning about higher-ups. There was no mention of anyone beyond the seven who were indicted. And therefore, there was a lot of political concern about whether things were being cabined that should not have been. And the Democratic majority in the Senate made clear to the president that in order to confirm his appointment of Elliot Richardson as attorney general, Richardson would have to agree to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Watergate matter with a degree of independence that would allow for exploration of all the evidence, no matter how high it went.
MR. BALZ: And let me ask you both this question. There were ultimately multiple investigations. There was the special prosecutors’ investigation. There was the Senate Select Committee under Senator Sam Ervin, and then ultimately there was the House Judiciary Committee in the impeachment proceedings. To what extent did these investigations cooperate with one another, get in each other’s way? Richard, could I start with you? And then, Secretary Cohen, I’d like to ask you that and then follow up with another question to you.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, first, it started with the FBI, which did a remarkable job. The US Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia then continued the investigation and made a lot of progress. The problem was at the–at the very highest levels of the Justice Department the investigation had been compromised and information was flowing back to the White House about the investigation and instructions were given to the prosecutors that they could not go beyond the original authors of the break-in as far as those who were arrested. And so each of the institutions you’ve mentioned played an important role. There was no coordination between us as the special prosecutor who took over on the federal investigation side with the Senate committee. In fact, Archibald Cox was upset that John Dean was granted immunity by the Senate. But we managed to prosecute him anyway. And Dean, to his credit, despite the fact that he could have fought for years because of the various promises that had been made to him by others, agreed to plead guilty to one count felony and cooperate with the prosecution. And so he became our primary witness in the trial. And then, once we had the tapes, essentially, the matter was sealed, because no one could get away from their tape-recorded conversations showing their culpability in a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice.
MR. BALZ: We’ll get to the tapes in a minute. Secretary Cohen, so the special prosecutor is moving forward. At that point, the Ervin committee is starting to hold public hearings that were riveting the country that summer. What’s going on in the House, and particularly in the House Judiciary Committee at that point?
MR. COHEN: Well, it really didn’t start to get energized in the House until Saturday Night–the Saturday Night Massacre. There had been an impeachment resolution that had been introduced by Father Robert Drinan. But Tip O’Neill then said let’s not move on that. And so we really were not doing much of anything other than watching what was taking place on–during the Ervin committee hearings. But once the Saturday Night Massacre took place where Elliot Richardson resigned, Bill Ruckelshaus resigned, and Mr. Cox was fired, that set in motion, really the directive came to start looking into what an impeachable offense is. And so we really weren’t active until that moment. As far as I’m concerned, I was not.
MR. BALZ: You raised the next point that I was going to get to, which is the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon was obviously angry and frustrated at this point about the demands for the tapes, and decided to get rid of Archibald Cox. He asked Elliot Richardson to do it. Richardson declined and resigned. He asked Bill Ruckelshaus, who was the deputy attorney general to do it. He declined. He tried to resign but was fired before he could actually resign. It was left to Robert Bork, who was then the relatively new solicitor general to carry out the deed. As you mentioned this evening, the–October 1973 became infamously known as the Saturday Night Massacre. I’d like everybody to listen to how John Chancellor of NBC News reported the events of that day and evening.
[Video plays]
MR. BALZ: Richard, walk us through that moment. I mean, this is an extraordinary moment in the history of the country. Nothing like this has ever been seen before. We’re in the middle of a very, very fraught investigation. Suddenly the leader of this investigation, the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, has been fired. What’s going on in the office at that point? What’s the mood? How do you think you’re going to be able to go forward?
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, we didn’t know how we would be able to go forward. In fact, while Archibald Cox was fired, we were not, because we were Justice Department employees and Nixon didn’t have the right to fire us. But he said that our office was disbanded. The FBI showed up in force, therefore trumping the rule of law with force. We’d never seen anything like this and–in this country, and we never expected to see anything like it again, until January 6th. And that was quite extraordinary. So the use of force instead of allowing a proper appointed special prosecutor to carry out his responsibilities–so the American public, the press, and the Congress–which had been interested to some extent, of course, in the Ervin committee hearings, were not galvanized by those hearings, and still continued to give the benefit of the doubt to the sitting president.
Now, with the resignation of two very important law enforcement officers in the country, and the firing of an independent special prosecutor, people began to ask quite, quite properly, what was Nixon hiding? And so there was a dramatic shift, in my view, following this Saturday Night Massacre where people began to suspect there was a whole lot more to the Watergate affair than had been led on, as Bill Cohen said earlier, this White House characterization as a third-rate break-in, was in fact a reflexive reaction by the government of Richard Nixon to cover up and to hide not only who was behind Watergate, but a variety of other violations of laws serious in nature, that even Attorney General John Mitchell characterized as the “White House Horrors.” These included the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, the proposed firebombing of the Brookings Institution, the use of thugs to rough up anti-war demonstrators, the use of the IRS against political enemies of the president, the unlawful wiretapping of journalists. And the list went on and on and on with an enemies list compiled by the White House to use the power of government against individuals whose only offense was to oppose President Nixon politically.
MR. BALZ: Secretary Cohen, you indicated that this was a dramatic event. How did it affect attitudes inside the Congress? To what extent did it in fact move the investigation toward an impeachment in a significant way?
MR. COHEN: Well, the House Judiciary Committee was then charged with determining whether or not impeachment proceedings should be initiated against the president. If I can just add a personal note here, once Elliot Richardson resigned and a new prosecutor had to be appointed, Leon Jaworski was appointed by Richard Nixon. The Democrats, certainly on the committee, and I think representing a broader spectrum in the–in the House itself, were opposed to having Jaworski appointed, that Nixon should not have the right to appoint a special prosecutor. It should go through a court system. The Washington Post, by the way, was opposed at that time to having Jaworski appointed. And on a personal level, it was the very first op-ed I had ever authored to The Washington Post, and I wrote an op-ed saying that the Democrats were wrong; they should not interfere with Jaworski being appointed, because, as Richard just mentioned, the staff was not dismissed. The staff was still there, and Jaworski would beholden–be beholden to that staff. So, I wrote an op-ed and The Washington Post, I guess for one of the first times, reversed its editorial position and supported the recommendation I had made. And Dave Broder, the great Dave Broder came to me and said, how did you do that? And all I did was basically say that now Jaworski was a captive of Richard Ben-Veniste and the other staff members who were going to pursue that to the end. I haven’t discussed that before, but that’s how that came about.
MR. BALZ: That’s a fascinating story.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, I don’t know if he was my captive, but he was the captive of the evidence. And once we got not only a new special prosecutor, but before he arrived, we got the first tranche of tapes, because Nixon did a 180 and then said all right, I will give you the tapes. And he gave us most of them without 18 and a half minutes, which was deliberately deleted from one of them. But he gave us enough. And I sat down and listened, I think as the first person outside of a small coterie of folks at the Nixon White House, to what was on those tapes, and particularly the so-called cancer on the presidency conversation, where John Dean tried to convince the president to end the coverup and to allow people to come forward and take their medicine, but stop it before the president himself was engulfed by the cancer of the Watergate coverup. And yet, Nixon on tape in his own voice, irrefutable evidence, said, no, you need to continue to pay hush money to the burglars. And by the way, here’s how you can get away with lying under oath before the Senate and the grand jury.
MR. BALZ: Richard, there’s a vivid scene in Garrett Graff’s new book about Watergate, which is a wonderful, comprehensive history of the whole scandal, that you and a few others were gathered in your office listening to the tapes for the first time and struggling, I suspect, to actually hear them because they’re scratchy, and they’re not perfect audio. But it felt as though in reading about that that you were even more shocked than you thought you might be by what you were hearing and that you and others came out of that with a much firmer conclusion about what Nixon had done and his culpability. Is that right?
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Absolutely. Absolutely right, Dan. We didn’t know what would be on those tapes, if anything. It could have all been a ploy to get rid of Cox and there would have been nothing there. And so we listened to those tapes. And as a federal prosecutor before Watergate, you know, I had heard surreptitious tape recordings, and they are of various different qualities. But the March 21 conversation was so explosive. It had Nixon saying, look, you need to continue paying hush money to the burglars so they don’t give up who was behind ordering the break-in in the first place and reveal all the other untoward things, illegal things that they had done.
And that night, a final payment to Howard Hunt, one of the burglars, in the amount of $120,000 I believe, was made. So Nixon at that point, as far as we know, there was no evidence of his ordering the Watergate break-in or anything other than what we could surmise from other people’s testimony. But nothing approached the fact that here is Richard Nixon, the president of the United States, ordering the continuation of an illegal obstruction of justice, and that obstruction of justice then goes forward. Not only that–and Jaworski, who we called in immediately to listen to the tape, and he sat there in stone silence, shaking his head from time to time–heard Nixon in the most cavalier way explain away how one might try to avoid a charge of perjury while still being untruthful before the grand jury and congressional committees. Never was there any conversation about doing the right thing other than Dean trying to end the conspiracy, in which he played an important role himself and had agreed that he would have to go to jail and take the consequences. But Nixon refused and the coverup continued. So, it was absolute evidence of Nixon’s active role, not only knowledge of but active role in continuing the obstruction of justice.
MR. BALZ: Secretary Cohen, how important were the tapes in affecting the attitudes and positions of people on the Judiciary Committee? And if the tapes had never been released, would Nixon have been impeached?
MR. COHEN: I don’t think so. Because if the tapes hadn’t been released, we would have been left with the edited transcripts. And so you had not only expletives deleted–by the way, which are important–it gives tone and texture to what was really being said–but also irrelevant portions being omitted. So, who is to decide what’s irrelevant? And at one point, President Nixon tried to get a deal worked out with the special prosecutor that John Stennis would listen to the tapes. Well, of course, John Stennis was hard of hearing for openers, and so that didn’t go down very well.
But ultimately, within the committee itself, it was still very divided. Republicans for the most part said this is just the Democrats trying to overturn the election because they lost so heavily. This is not something that hasn’t been done before. We’ve got to hang together. I think–well, we voted. Ultimately the Rodino letter that was approved voted to send a second letter to the president to get the tapes. And once we heard the tapes, I sat down, as other members did–I had the headphones on, as you pointed out, very hard to hear–and I went through the transcripts that we had and measured those against the words that we saw on the page. And it became very clear to enough of us on the Judiciary Committee, enough Republicans to make it bipartisan to say that impeachment proceedings should go to the House for a vote and then to the Senate.
But without that, I think there was enough doubt in the–on the Republican side. Certainly, there was still Tom Railsback, Henry Smith, Ham Fish Jr, et cetera, and Caldwell Butler in particular, members who were really concerned with the edited transcripts. But once the tapes came through, I think that pushed even the most conservative of the Republicans to say that they were impeachable offenses that we believe needed to be brought to the full House, and then to the Senate.
MR. BALZ: Before we get to the Articles of Impeachment themselves, Richard, there’s one other big event that happens in the spring of 1974, and that’s when seven senior members of the Nixon administration are indicted. HR Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, Chuck Colson. What was the thinking about doing all of those as one big indictment as opposed to serial indictments? And what was the shape of the evidence that allowed you to go forward with such an impactful decision?
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, our coverup indictment that charged a conspiracy to obstruct justice did in fact include the individuals that you mentioned. And the interesting part of it was that Leon Jaworski was very reluctant to name Richard Nixon. But we on the task force–and this may go back to Bill’s earlier point–said to Jaworski, that, look, the evidence is clear that Nixon has participated in the conspiracy actively. We can’t hide that. And indeed, these tapes might not be admissible as evidence in a court of law if the participants in the conversation, were not members of the conspiracy themselves. So, we need to do the right thing here. The right thing is to name Richard Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator, even though we had made the decision that with an active investigation in Congress, the more appropriate method of dealing with presidential criminality would be through the impeachment process. But as far as the criminal indictment of the others were concerned, these tapes were essential evidence. And I agree with Bill that if the tapes had not existed, if Nixon had not installed the taping system, if we had not found out about it through the testimony of one of Nixon’s aides, Alex Butterfield, if Nixon had destroyed the tapes rather than holding out, holding out and then ultimately capitulating, I believe he would have been able to serve out his term as president, a wounded president. Nevertheless, I don’t think there would have been the votes to remove him from office with a two-thirds vote of the Senate.
MR. BALZ: We’re nearly out of time, so I want to jump forward. Ultimately, the House Judiciary Committee votes three articles of impeachment. There’s a smoking gun tape released. Nixon resigns.
Secretary Cohen, let’s come up to the present day. We’ve had two presidents impeached since then, Presidents Clinton and Trump. Twice in all cases, they were acquitted by the Senate. We’re in a very polarized environment. Is the impeachment process any longer a viable tool to hold a president to account?
MR. COHEN: Well, I think the impeachment process itself is being invoked too frequently. I quoted Lord Chancellor Somers during the House investigation back in ’74. He said impeachment is like Goliath’s sword to be removed from the temple on great occasions only. And I think that when we start talking about Bill Clinton or the attempt to impeach Donald Trump, it’s just being used too frequently and not on great occasions. I think today, for example, the investigation underway against former President Trump is different. And ultimately, it comes down to the rule we tried to follow during the Nixon impeachment. The notion is power has to be entrusted to someone, but no one can be trusted with power. That is fundamental to our founding fathers, why they devised a system of checks and balances because they understood human nature, that power is pursued by ambitious people, that power that goes unchecked will be abused. And therefore, we have to find a way to check it as much as possible.
And so that was a lesson coming out of Watergate. You had President Nixon, who said I prefer–I want loyalty. Over competence, I want loyalty. You had president–former President Trump saying I want loyalty. Call me “You’re fired.” I wanted loyalty to me. And so the notion we have gotten away from is the commitment to the Constitution as opposed to the individual. And that I think is the lesson of Watergate. I think it’s a lesson that we could derive throughout. But really, impeachment has to be used on great occasions. And those occasions come when you absolutely pursue a policy, which not only tries to subvert the Constitution subtly, covertly, but to do it openly through the use of force, as we saw with the assault on January 6th. So, I think impeachment is a process that needs to be there. But we need to respect it and hold it for the really important occasions, which go to the central part of placing loyalty to the Constitution, not to any president.
MR. BALZ: That’s very helpful advice.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well, I agree. There’s also–there’s also a criminal responsibility. And particularly after a president has left office, he is vulnerable to prosecution. Nixon, for all of his authoritarian tendencies and his criminality did not, in my view, pose an existential threat to our democracy. Donald Trump, on the other hand, does and did. And that’s a very significant difference. There’s a difference in 50 years gone by of our respect for the truth and the rule of law and the education of Americans, as to what it means to be a patriotic American. And we have lost a great deal there. And without getting into a long discussion of that, we were in danger, serious danger in the events leading up to January 6th. And if in fact a few things had gone the other way, we would have been in a horrendous mess. And we need to straighten that out through education and through individuals like Bill Cohen, who put America first, party second. That has to be the rule.
MR. BALZ: Well, we’ll see where the January 6th Committee ends up, and we’ll see where the Justice Department ends up in this current moment. Unfortunately, we are out of time. I want to thank both of you, Richard Ben-Veniste and Secretary William Cohen for being here on the first of three episodes that we’re going to be doing looking at the history of the Watergate break-in and the Watergate scandal. Gentlemen, thank you again very much for being with us.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Thank you so much.
MR. COHEN: Thank you, Dan.
MR. BALZ: Again, I’m Dan Balz. And thank you, all of you for watching and being with us today. To check out what future programming we have, go to WashingtonPostLive.com. You can look there and register and see what other events are coming up. Once again, thank you and good day.”
This year’s anniversary of Watergate falls within days of the death of the great truthteller Daniel Ellsberg, whose witness of history and courageous exposure of tyranny and state terror brought down the monstrous Nixon and his regime of war crimes and atrocities against our own citizens in the repression of dissent in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. To him and countless others like him in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, no matter the source or where it leads, we owe the endurance of our civilization and the ideas of universal human rights and citizenship in a free society of equals on which it is founded.
As memorialized by Heather Cox Richardson in her journal Letters From An American; “In one of the quirky coincidences that history deals out, Daniel Ellsberg died today at age 92 on the eve of the fifty-first anniversary of the break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Ellsberg was a military analyst in the 1960s, disturbed by the gulf between what the government was telling the public about the war in Vietnam and what he was seeing behind the scenes.
After serving as a Marine, Ellsberg earned his doctorate at Harvard and joined the RAND Corporation, where he learned to apply game theory to warfare. By 1964 he was an advisor to Robert McNamara, who served as defense secretary under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In 1967, Ellsberg was part of the team tapped by McNamara to compile a history of the conflict in Vietnam to evaluate the success of different programs.
Ellsberg was concerned by investigators’ conclusions. The 7,000-page secret government study detailed U.S. involvement in Vietnam from Harry Truman’s presidency to Lyndon Johnson’s. It outlined how successive presidents had lied to the American people, expanding the war with promises of victory even as the costs of the war mounted and the chances of victory moved farther and farther away.
Ellsberg copied the secret study and shared it with congressmen, who buried it. Finally, Ellsberg shared the report with a New York Times correspondent on the condition the reporter would only take notes and would not copy the pages. But the correspondent broke the agreement, believing the documents were “the property of the people” who had paid for them with “the blood of their sons.”
On June 13, 1971, the New York Times began to publish what became known as the Pentagon Papers, showing how presidents had lied to the American people about the nation’s involvement in Vietnam. President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, warned the New York Times that the publication was jeopardizing national security and warned that the government would prosecute. The editors decided to continue publication—the Supreme Court later agreed that the newspaper had the right to publish the information—while Ellsberg leaked the report to other newspapers.
The study ended before the Nixon administration, but the president was deeply concerned about it. The report showed that presidents had lied to the American people for years, and Nixon worried that the story would hurt his administration by souring the public on his approach to the Vietnam War. Worse, if anyone looked at his own administration, they might well find evidence of his own secret actions in the Vietnam arena: the Chennault affair, in which a Nixon ally undermined peace talks before the 1968 presidential election in order to undercut Johnson’s reelection campaign, and what was then the undisclosed bombing of Cambodia.
News of either could, at the very least, destroy Nixon’s reelection campaign.
Nixon became obsessed with the idea that the Pentagon Papers proved that opponents were trying to sink his campaign for reelection.
Frustrated when the FBI did not seem to be taking an investigation into Ellsberg seriously enough, in July 1971, Nixon put together in the White House a special investigations unit to stop leaks. And who stops leaks?
Plumbers.
Officially known as the White House Special Investigations Unit, Nixon’s “plumbers” burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist on September 9, 1971, hoping to find damaging information about him that would discredit the Pentagon Papers. (Their burglary, showing gross governmental misconduct, was later key to the dismissal of charges against Ellsberg for leaking the report.)
Some of the plumbers began to work with the Committee to Reelect the President (aptly called “CREEP” as its methods came to light) to sabotage Nixon’s Democratic opponents by “ratf*cking” them, as they called it, planting fake letters in newspapers, hiring vendors for Democratic rallies and then running out on the unpaid bills, and planting spies in Democrats’ campaigns.
Finally, CREEP turned back to the plumbers.
Early in the morning on June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard at the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C., noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.
The White House denied all knowledge of what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and most of the press took the denial at face value. But two young reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, followed the sloppy money trail behind the burglars directly to the White House.
The fallout from the burglary gained no traction before the election, which Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7 percent of the vote. But the scandal erupted in March 1973, when one of the burglars, James W. McCord, Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing, saying that he had lied at his trial, under pressure to protect government officials. McCord had been the head of security for CREEP, and Sirica, known by reporters as “Maximum John,” later said, “I had no intention of sitting on the bench like a nincompoop and watching the parade go by.”
Sirica made the letter public, White House counsel John Dean promptly began cooperating with prosecutors, and the Watergate scandal was in full swing. On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in American history to resign.
Ellsberg decided to release the Pentagon Papers to alert the American people to the fact that their government was lying to them about the Vietnam War. But he helped set in motion a series of events that determined the shape of the political world we live in today.”
In his own words as interviewed by Davids Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘I’ve never regretted doing it’: Daniel Ellsberg on 50 years since leaking the Pentagon Papers; “When the police arrived, a 13-year-old boy was photocopying classified documents. His 10-year-old sister was cutting the words “top secret” off each page. It seemed their dad, Daniel Ellsberg, had been caught red-handed.
But the officers were responding to a false alarm and did not check what Ellsberg and his young accomplices were up to. “It was a very nice family scene,” the 90-year-old recalls via Zoom from his home in Kensington, California. “It didn’t worry them.”
So night after night the photocopying went on, the crucial means that allowed strategic analyst Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers, a secret report that exposed government lies about the Vietnam war. The New York Times began publishing excerpts 50 years ago on Sunday.
The papers, a study of US involvement in south-east Asia from 1945 to 1967, revealed that president after president knew the war to be unwinnable yet continued to mislead Congress and the public into an escalating stalemate costing millions of lives.
After their release Ellsberg was put on trial for espionage and faced a potential prison sentence of 115 years, only for the charges to be dropped. Once branded “the most dangerous man in America”, Ellsberg is now revered as the patron saint of whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
So, half a century on, is he glad he did it? “Oh, I’ve never regretted for a moment doing it from then till now,” he says, wearing dark jacket, open-necked shirt and headphones against the backdrop of a vast bookcase. “My one regret, a growing regret really, is that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.
“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, don’t do what I did, don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.”
Ellsberg’s own experience in Vietnam was formative. In the mid-1960s he was there on special assignment as a civilian studying counter-insurgency for the state department. He estimates that he and a friend drove about 10,000 miles, visiting 38 of the 43 provinces, sometimes linking up with troops and witnessing the war up close.
“By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out.
“By ’68 with the Tet offensive, by ’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on [president Richard] Nixon. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it, however long it took.
“But the other side of it was that Vietnam became very real to me and the people dying became real and I had Vietnamese friends. It occurs to me I don’t know of anyone of my level or higher – any deputy assistant secretary, any assistant secretary, any cabinet secretary – who had a Vietnamese friend. In fact, most of them had never met a Vietnamese.”
Only recently, as he prepares for the 50th anniversary, has Ellsberg dwelled on how doubts about the war went higher in the political hierarchy than is widely understood. “The Pentagon Papers are always described as revealing to people how much lying there was but there was a particular kind of lying that’s not revealed in the Pentagon Papers.
“Yes, everybody was lying but for different reasons and for different causes. In particular, a very large range of high-level doves thought we should get out and should not have got involved at all. They were lying to the public to give the impression that they were supporting the president when they did not believe in what the president was doing.
“They did not agree with it but they would have spoken out at the cost of their jobs and their future careers. None of them did that or took any risk of doing it and the price of the silence of the doves was several million Vietnamese, Indochinese, and 58,000 Americans.”
But Ellsberg did break the silence. Why was he, unlike them, willing to risk life imprisonment for a leak that he knew had only a small chance of ending the war? He says he was inspired by meeting people who resisted being drafted into military service and, unlike conscientious objectors, did not take alternative service.
“They didn’t go to Sweden. They didn’t get a deferment. They didn’t plead bone spurs like Donald J Trump. They chose a course that put them in prison. They could easily have shown their protests in other ways but this was the strongest way they could say this war is wrong and it’s a matter of conscience and I won’t participate in it.
“That kind of civil courage is contagious and it rubbed off on me. That example opened my eyes to the question, what can I do to help end this war, now that I’m ready to go to prison?”
In 1969 Ellsberg was working as a Pentagon consultant at the Rand Corporation thinktank in Santa Monica, California, and still had access to the secret study of the war, which by this time had killed about 45,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. He decided to take the plunge.
“I said I’ve got in my safe at Rand 7,000 pages of documents of lies, deceptions, breaking treaties, hopeless wars, killing, et cetera and I don’t know whether it’ll have any effect to put it out but I’m not going to be party to concealing that any more.”
Ellsberg had a friend whose girlfriend owned an advertising agency with a photocopier, or Xerox machine. Over eight months he spent many nights making copies of the Pentagon Papers, twice with the help of his 13-year-old son Robert.
He explains: “He was going to hear that his father had gone crazy or was a spy or was communist and I wanted him to see that I was doing this in a businesslike way because I thought it had to be done. And also to leave him with the precedent in his mind that this is the kind of thing he might have to do some time in his life and that there were times you had even to go to prison, which I thought would happen shortly.”
The owner of the agency often mis-set the office alarm and so often the police would come, including twice when Ellsberg was at work. But he kept his cool. “The first time I was at the Xerox machine. I look up at the glass door, there’s knocking on it and two police outside. ‘Wow, these guys are good, how did they get on to this?’
“But I remember covering the top secret pages with a magazine and I closed the Xerox cover where I was copying these things and opened the doors and, ‘What can I do for you?’ But there were a few seconds there of thinking, ‘Well, this is over.’”
Ellsberg tried and failed to persuade members of Congress to put the papers in the public domain. On 2 March 1971 he made contact in Washington with Neil Sheehan, a New York Times reporter he first met in Vietnam. After Sheehan’s death aged 84 earlier this year, the Times published a posthumous interview with him suggesting that Ellsberg had felt conflicted over handing over the documents.
Ellsberg responds: “He seemed to believe, according to that story, that I had been reluctant to give it to the Times. It’s hard to imagine that he believed that but maybe so. At any rate, that was not the case. I was very anxious for the Times to print it.”
The New York Times did so on 13 June 1971. The night before, Ellsberg had gone to the cinema with a friend to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. “We stayed up and saw the early morning edition around midnight and so that was marvelous.”
The initial reaction was nil on the Sunday when they came out
The Nixon administration obtained a court order preventing the Times from printing more of the documents, citing national security concerns. But Ellsberg leaked copies to the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers, prompting a legal battle all the way to the supreme court, which ruled 6-3 to allow publication to resume.
This stirring showdown over press freedom – retold in Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film The Post, in which Ellsberg is played by the British actor Matthew Rhys – had a bigger impact that the Times’s first article. “The initial reaction was nil on the Sunday when they came out,” Ellsberg says. “The Times was baffled and dismayed. Nobody reacted at all.
“It was Nixon’s fatal decision to enjoin them and the willingness across the country to commit civil disobedience and publish material that the attorney general and the president were saying every day, ‘This is dangerous to national security, we can’t afford one more day of it.’ Nineteen papers in all defied that. I don’t think there was any other wave of civil disobedience like that in any respect I can think of by major institutions across the country.”
But the government wanted revenge. Ellsberg spent 13 days in hiding from the FBI but eventually went on trial in 1973 accused of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property. The charges were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct and illegal evidence gathering against him – crimes which ultimately contributed to Nixon’s downfall.
The high-profile trial had ensured huge media coverage of the Pentagon Papers. But Ellsberg says: “The effect on Nixon’s policy was zero. The war went on: a year later, the biggest bombing of the war and then, at the end of that year, 18 months later, the heaviest bombing in human history.
“So as far as one could see, as I said at the time, the American people at this moment have as much influence over their country’s foreign policy as the Russian people had over the invasion of Czechoslovakia.”
Nixon resigned over Watergate in 1974 and the Vietnam war ended the following year. In the decades since, Ellsberg has continued to champion Manning, Assange, Snowden and others charged under the Espionage Act. The climate, he warns, has become more restrictive and punitive than the one he faced 50 years ago.
“The whistleblowers have much less protection now. [President Barack] Obama brought eight or nine or even 10 cases, depending on who you count, in two terms, and then Trump brought eight cases in one term. So sources are much more in danger of prosecution than they were before me and even after me for 30 years.”
Last month the nonagenarian Ellsberg returned to the fray by releasing classified documents showing that US military planners pushed for nuclear strikes on mainland China in 1958 to protect Taiwan from an invasion by communist forces, a scenario that has gained fresh relevance amid rising US-China tensions.
It is a dare for prosecutors to come after him again. If they do, he wants to see the Espionage Act tested by the supreme court. He argues that the government is using it much like Britain’s Official Secrets Act even though America, unlike Britain, guarantees freedom of speech through the first amendment to the constitution.
“We don’t have an Official Secrets Act because we have a first amendment but that has not been addressed by the supreme court,” says Ellsberg, still going strong after an hour-long interview. “So I’m willing to see this case go up to the supreme court. Not that I have any desire to go to prison or not. And it would have to move fairly fast to get me in prison in my lifetime.”
What does Ellsberg symbolize and mean for us as an iconic figure of what Foucault called truthtelling? As written by Erik Baker in The Baffler, in an article entitled Daniel in the Lion’s Den: On the moral courage of Daniel Ellsberg; “STEVEN SPIELBERG’S FILM The Post begins with Daniel Ellsberg in Vietnam. The year is 1966. The official story from the Pentagon, at that time largely unquestioned in U.S. media, is that the war is going well. That is a lie—the first of the many deceptions that will unravel spectacularly in the years to come. As Spielberg tells it, that thread begins to fray here, in the Vietnamese jungle, with an unassuming bureaucrat sent to survey the progress of the campaign against the Viet Cong. Ellsberg, played by a dashing Matthew Rhys, insists on accompanying a patrol on their nighttime exercises. The RAND wonk looks surprisingly comfortable in body armor, toting an automatic rifle. Then it all comes undone: a VC ambush, blood in the muck, muzzle flare from invisible enemies in the misty shadows. Our hero is shaken. On the plane home, he tells his boss’s boss, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, that the war is not going well at all, actually. McNamara agrees. But when the plane lands he disembarks and greets the press with a grin, continuing to lie through his teeth. A shaken Ellsberg returns to his office at RAND, opens his safe, and contemplates a thick stack of papers. Next, the Xerox machine.
It’s a compelling story, and it’s almost true. Ellsberg really was a high-ranking war planner before he copied and leaked the Pentagon Papers; he really did go to Vietnam and witness the quagmire firsthand; he delivered the bad news personally to McNamara on the flight back, who really did lie to the press on the tarmac. But that was not the moment that Ellsberg decided to become a whistleblower. I believe it is impossible to fully appreciate the profundity of Ellsberg’s subsequent heroism—and the magnitude of our collective loss, with his death on Friday at the age of ninety-two—without understanding the period of hesitation that preceded it. Ellsberg, always his own harshest critic, would call it moral weakness. Whatever you want to call it, the truth is this: After he returned from Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg went back to work. He didn’t photocopy anything. The most drastic action he took, in fact, was to call off his engagement with his future wife, Patricia, an anti-war journalist who refused to stop holding his feet to the fire.
Daniel Ellsberg never let anyone off the hook that easily, including himself.
“I’m trying to do the best I can to moderate the killing,” she recalls him telling her. Ellsberg had a better case than most. A PhD economist, Ellsberg was one of the world’s leading experts on decision-making under uncertainty; his research led him to an absolutist opposition to the atomic bomb that was not shared universally in the Pentagon—even before Richard Nixon, infamously cavalier about the prospect of a nuclear exchange, entered office. After learning more about the United States’ nuclear weapons protocols early in his career in the defense bureaucracy, Ellsberg became—and remained for the rest of his life—terrified that the risk of nuclear war was higher than almost anyone understood. And he told himself, quite persuasively, that the need to prosecute his nuclear safety campaign within official channels outweighed whatever moral compromises inhered in his continued cooperation with the machine waging immoral and unwinnable war in Vietnam.
Ellsberg’s great moral achievement was not turning against the Vietnam War. That was the bare minimum we could expect of a thinking, feeling person in those years. Rather, it was overcoming the seductive power of this story, the exculpation he initially furnished to himself and to his dovish friends: I can do more good from here, on the inside. There is a miraculous harmony between my career interests and the cause of harm reduction. What’s the alternative?
Ellsberg didn’t decide to exile himself from the elite circles in which he swam until he acquired an answer to this all-too-familiar rhetorical question. It came at a conference of the War Resisters League at Haverford College in August 1969, over two years after his return from South Vietnam and a year after the conclusion of the damning Pentagon study he would later release to the world. At the conference, Ellsberg heard firsthand from the draft resister Randy Kehler, who expressed his excitement that he would soon join his comrades in prison. Kehler’s testimony reconfigured Ellsberg’s mental universe. Here was living proof that there was an alternative after all: prison. The only honorable way to deal with an unjust government was to welcome its retribution. A more moderate slaughter wasn’t good enough, not if you were still responsible for pulling the trigger—behind the sandbags at Khe Sanh, or from your office in Arlington or Santa Monica.
Ellsberg left Kehler’s speech and shut himself in an empty campus restroom, where he wept on the floor for an hour. Then, and only then, did he open the safe that contained the Pentagon Papers.
Spielberg’s presentation is comforting because it allows viewers to imagine that we would have acted as Ellsberg did were we in his situation—because we, too, would have figured out that the war was bad, and that was all it took. But evidence to the contrary is all around, not merely ubiquitous but woven into the very fabric of life-making in our damnable society. We are all looking away from something. We eat our slave-labor chocolate; we pay our taxes to a state built on genocide that will without a doubt use some of those dollars to perpetuate atrocities we may never know about in far-flung corners of its empire. “You don’t want on this jury men of middle age,” advised a psychologist retained by the team that defended Ellsberg and his collaborator Tony Russo for leaking the Papers. “These are people who in the course of their lives might possibly have sacrificed principle for the sake of career, for the sake of family, and they lived with that compromise, and they will have a lot of disdain, even contempt for two men who did it for the sake of principle and took the risk.”
Ellsberg’s example is an enduring challenge not only to the resentful complacency of the Silent Majority but to a left that has come increasingly to tolerate middle-class careerist compromise in the half-century since Ellsberg’s prosecution. It’s not our fault, exactly. The unions were eviscerated; the Black revolutionaries were killed; the war resisters were jailed; academics and nonprofit executives filled the vacuum. That’s not to say that one can’t be useful to the cause with a PhD: as evidence, witness the life of one Dr. Daniel Ellsberg. But it requires an uncommon ethos of self-suspicion, as Ellsberg understood well. “I’ve come to realize the fear of being cut out from the group of people you respect and whose respect you want and normally expect keeps people participating in anything, no matter how terrible,” he reflected to a documentarian in 2009. Few of us are immune to that fear, and the rationalizations it brews in the professional mind. I teach at a university that accepted millions of dollars from Jeffrey Epstein, celebrates its relationship with Henry Kissinger, and has a pattern of insulating star faculty from accountability for sexual abuse. It’s a good job. I tell myself I can make things better.
To conclude that there is no choice but to cooperate with evil is always to overlook something, some false assumption, some value inaccurately taken to be paramount.
We shouldn’t begrudge most people for wanting to find a way to sleep at night, though surely some could stand a bit more tossing and turning. It is more problematic when those rationalizations begin to infect our collective reflection on matters of political principle and strategy. Perhaps it really is the case, as many on the left have come to believe since 2016, that the best way to advance the cause of socialism is to work to elect unusually noble Democratic politicians to Congress and the White House. But it is also awfully convenient, at least for those of us who could imagine ourselves staffing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s West Wing. Ellsberg’s fundamental insight was not that it is impossible in theory to use the machinery of the American state to effect positive change, but that people—smart, well-intentioned people especially—underestimate the moral confusion that festers in the corridors of power. D.C. bureaus are overflowing with backslappers happy to extol the bravery of the most craven political decision-making. The cafeterias all serve lotus flowers for lunch: soon you forget even that there is something you have forgotten.
Ellsberg had a particularly acute grasp of what the historian Garry Wills has called “Bomb Power,” the way that the very existence of the United States’ nuclear arsenal fundamentally constrains the possibility of exercising democratic oversight of the nation’s military. The power to annihilate all human civilization cannot sanely be disposed of by popular vote. The bomb is a weapon suited only to a benevolent dictator, and that is how the United States came to envision the presidency in the nuclear age—culturally, politically, and even legally. Autocracy, of course, was easier to produce than benevolence. The bomb demands secrecy; secrecy demands lying; and lying demands lawlessness. “The public is lied to every day by the president, by his spokespeople, by his officers,” Ellsberg once asserted. “If you can’t handle the thought that the president lies to the public for all kinds of reasons, you couldn’t stay in the government at that level.” He left the contrapositive unstated: anyone who remains in government after obtaining a reasonably high-security clearance is ipso facto comfortable with the systematic mendacity built into the institution of the modern presidency. Even the ostensible good guys.
And yet nuclear disarmament has more or less disappeared from the agenda of the contemporary American left. Four years spent shuddering at the thought of Donald Trump with his finger on the button did essentially nothing to make the issue an organizing priority for any of the nation’s major left-wing organizations. This disinterest tracks the broader marginalization of anti-war and anti-imperialist commitments on the left; even the Democratic Socialists of America is too often willing to tolerate elected officials who dutifully vote to fund the American war machine as long as they espouse the proper progressive positions on health care and tax policy. At its worst, some members of the “populist” left today sneer at past generations’ anti-war politics as an extravagance that alienated the left from the concerns of ordinary working people (a category whose membership seems so often to stop at the U.S. border). For those who experienced the crushing disappointment of Barack Obama’s reign, which entrenched the power of an imperial presidency he had sworn to dismantle, it is easy to become fatalistic—to treat the perpetuation of American war crimes as an inevitability, against which one can only hope to adduce some positive accomplishments on the domestic front. This way of thinking increasingly distorts even the way we narrate history: hey, Johnson and Nixon killed a lot of Vietnamese people and told a lot of lies about the war, but they gave us Medicare and the EPA, so that has to count for something.
Daniel Ellsberg never let anyone off the hook that easily, including himself. He never forgot the lesson he learned in the summer of 1969: there is always an alternative. To conclude that there is no choice but to cooperate with evil is always to overlook something, some false assumption, some value inaccurately taken to be paramount. “If we have the will and determination,” Ellsberg told protesters on the fifth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, we have “the power to change ourselves and history.” Most of us in the United States have been disempowered in a thousand ways large and small: as workers, as consumers, as citizens. But being disempowered does not mean that we are powerless, only that exercising our power will not be frictionless. It will hurt.
When it all seems too much to ask, we will always have the memory of Daniel Ellsberg. It’s a bright June day in Boston, 1971. The press swarms around Ellsberg outside of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where Ellsberg has come to turn himself in and face the wrath of the state for leaking the Pentagon Papers. One of the journalists asks him if he’s afraid to go to prison. Ellsberg smiles, as if he is grateful to the reporter for posing the question, the same question that set him to weeping in the bathroom at Haverford two years earlier at the start of it all. And he responds: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”
Beings of darkness and light are we, defined by the boundaries of our chiaroscuro which represent our Janus-like masculine and feminine halves; each creates the other and seeks to realize and awaken itself as a unitary and whole being through dreaming the other.
Often have I written of the primary human act of rebellion and refusal to submit to authority, of negotiations and seizures of power versus authorized identities including those of sex and gender, of the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle as both systems of oppression and as the limits of our forms, but when we interrogate our idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty we must also consider that such systems of signs and representations also describe the work of integration and the origins of human consciousness.
The human psyche is both male and female within itself, anima and animus in Jungian terms, because the soul is born from this dynamism, and we can seize control of our own evolution and processes of adaptation and becoming human through embrace of our darkness and chthonic elements of our unconscious, shadows which include the side of us which is the opposite gender of our conscious identity and sometimes of our absurd flesh in which we are bound to this life, this reality, this system of social contracts and agreements about human being, meaning, and value and about how to be human together, this sideral universe.
How do we negotiate the boundaries and interfaces of our masculinity and femininity, processes of change which are recursive, chaotic, nuanced and complex, relative, conditional, ephemeral, a dialectics of truths and illusions and of authorized identities, simulacra, falsifications and systems of oppression versus our autonomy and self-creation, and a ground of struggle which lies at the heart of becoming human?
As I wrote in my post of February 14 2024, On the Redemptive and Transformational Power of Love: the Case of Valentine’s Day and the Festival of the Wolf; Valentine’s Day is a holiday we can celebrate as an unambiguous good, without conflicted historical legacies; named in honor of a man who was executed on February 14 278 AD for performing gay marriages in defiance of Imperial law, adelphopoiesis or brother-making which refers to his marrying Roman soldiers not to their girlfriends but to one another, the wedding of same sex couples, legal and sanctified under Christian law, which Emperor Claudius II forbid as related by John Boswell in his Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.
The modern custom of sending messages to one’s lover, whether a forbidden love or not, originated in 1415, with a message sent by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
So we have in one holiday defiance of Authority, transgression of the Forbidden, and the injunction to seize the gates of our prisons and be free.
But this holiday is far more ancient, dating from the sixth century BC and encoding the historical memories of primordial rites of fertility and poetic vision called Lupercalia, the Festival of the Wolf. Rites which echo through our flesh and find form not only as Valentine’s Day as a celebration of the uncontrollable and liberating power of love which exalts us like a madness, but also as a form of the Wild Hunt which we know as the story of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf.
Angela Carter got it nearly right in The Company of Wolves; so also with season two, episode three of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Ah, to be a Wild Thing, and free.
Midnight approaches, and as I ready my wolfskin for the sacred Hunt I think not of the ravishment of our passion, which seizes and possesses us with nameless ecstasies and totalizing truths written in our flesh, but of the redemptive and transformative power of love, of its unique function as a force of healing and reconnection, and of transgression of the Forbidden and defiance of Authority as a seizure of power over the ownership of oneself.
Of this I have written a spell of poetic vision, awakening, and transformation, which I share with you here. Good hunting to you all.
Love Triumphs Over Time
When first I learned of love,
And realized that in loving others we humans were not merely escaping
the boundaries of our lives and the flags of our skins
As transcendence, rapture, and exaltation
But discovering ourselves and those truths written in our flesh
And the limitless possibilities of becoming human
Among the unknown topologies of being marked Here Be Dragons
In the empty spaces of the maps of our Imagination
Beyond the doors of the Forbidden
Where truths are forged,
And in the years since I have always known this one true thing;
We are more ourselves when we are with others
Because humans are not designed to be alone
For we are doors which open one another
And restore each other to ourselves in an indifferent world
When we are savaged and broken and lost;
Love is the greatest power of all the forces
which shape, motivate, and inform living things
Love creates, love redeems, love transforms,
Love triumphs over the pathology of our disconnectedness
From Beauty, from the Infinite, and from the community of humankind;
Love triumphs over Time.
Idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty and identity live at the origins of our power of love and the forms it takes in our lives; If my female side could perform our truth on the stage of the world as songs, without any limits whatever, what would we sing?
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina | Straight to Hell Music Video Trailer | Netflix; because I love this version of Persephone’s myth. How if we must seize our power or be subjugated to that of others?
Little Red Riding Hood – Amanda Seyfried’s cover of the song; sung in a fragile voice filled with such anguish, loneliness, and the absurdity of hope.
I dare the darkness and the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human, beyond all boundaries of the Forbidden. Where is the wolf who can match my daring and embrace together the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves?
Wednesday dances; How if we must tell our stories, or be rewritten and falsified by others? I find it interesting that Jenna Ortega chose a queer cruising anthem for her signature dance, which confuses and conflates in ambiguous meanings the rituals of mating and hunting, as this Netflix series does as an extended metaphor and allegory of subversions of authorized identities of sex and gender
So for the anima; what of the animus? Who speaks for me in masculine register?
Lucifer’s Song of Love: Cover of Wicked Game by Ursine Vulpine & Annaca
“Monster” – Imagine Dragons (cover by Runaground on youtube)
With film montage of Marvel’s Loki; let us embrace our monstrosity and proclaim; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
David Bowie sings of Resistance, beyond hope of victory or survival: Shoshanna prepares for German Night in the film Inglorious Basterds, a song I post to signal that I now begin a Last Stand; that I am about to do something from which I see no possible chances of survival. This I have done more times that I can now remember, yet I remain to defy and defend. Love too is a total commitment beyond reason, a glorious mad quest to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
References
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, by John Boswell
The Wild Boys envisions feral youths in rebellion against the Authority that created them, a dystopian future in which man’s animal nature has been betrayed by civilization but which also has the power to redeem and liberate him, the final part of Burroughs’ Anarchist Trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil.
He did claim to be possessed by the Toad as a chthonic spirit, identical with Nietzsche’s Toad which the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra, a novel I later adopted as a counter-text to the Bible, feared he must swallow as a symbol of our animal nature. Burroughs claimed to be Nietzsche’s successor on this basis, as avatar and priest of all that is reviled, disgusting, loathsome and bestial within us, which he identified with Lovecraft’s Tsathoggua and transferred to me as a successor and avatar.
As I never conceptualized or ascribed negative qualities to my own shadow self, I experienced this simply as a seizure of power and not as possession by a malign entity. For myself, from childhood and in a family utterly free from the consequences of Freud’s father as lawgiver or from Abrahamic ideas of God as Authority, I imagined nature as truth and freedom, and nothing to be feared.
The magic Burroughs and my father practiced was based equally on his friend Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche called Acephale, the mythos of his model H.P. Lovecraft, and elements of shamanism, traditional ritual magic from grimoires, and the occultism of Aleister Crowley. A decade and more later, Burroughs would be claimed as a founder of Chaos Magic, and his host of invented literary methods designed to destroy systems of control represented an ars poetica which was also a personal faith, including the cut-up method, playback, dreams, out of body travel, mandalas and gates to alternate realities, ecstatic trance and vision, curses, demonology, tarot; I still have the deck of tarot cards he gave me and taught me to use. To this my father brought the family Voodoo, werewolf mythology, ancestral history interwoven with versions of Grimm’s fairytales, and his brilliance as a theatre director; he directed some of Edward Albee’s plays, and I grew up from the age of four listening to them discuss drama during rehearsals from a center front seat in the theatre, which often interrogated Albee’s direct influences and references among his fellow Absurdists Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter, but included sources in Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, Antonin Artaud, and Eugene Ionesco.
As Burroughs wrote The Wild Boys during the period of his visits, I have often wondered how much of it was drawn from my father’s ideas and the claim of our family history that we are not human but werewolves, and had been driven out of Europe for that reason; Martin Luther referred to my ancestors as Brides of the Dragon, and we were driven out of Bavaria in 1586 at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions. He was writing it during the Stonewall Riots, which may be a more direct context as a fictionalization of the witness of history. Like much of his fiction, it is also filled with episodes both historical and imagined and set in mirror worlds of exotic locations like Mexico and Morocco transformed as Orientalist fantasies or gateways to underworld realms.
When I asked him, at the age of ten or so, if I was in his book and what he was writing about, he said; “Freedom, nature as truth and civilization as addiction to wealth and power and theft of the soul, and how our pasts get mixed up with our futures.”
The Wild Boys reimagines The Egyptian Book of the Dead, of which fellow Surrealist and poet Philip Lamantia was a scholar and a source for Burroughs, also the subject of his final novel The Western Lands as is its direct model H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, references Octave Mirbeau, Bataille, Genet, and extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as restraint or binding and limit of our nature. David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; wildness as nature and freedom here mingle and intertwine.
All the works of William S. Burroughs are masterpieces of anarchist liberation and transgression, Surrealism and occult mysticism, even if difficult because they are told in collages of random and nonlinear episodes which he described as vaudeville turns, with an iconography that is bizarre and obscene. In spite and possibly because of this, they remain among the great classics of world literature, revealing endless chasms of darkness and infinite possibilities of rapture and illumination.
The Toad is summoned by performance of that which is loathsome to you; as embodiment of disgust, horror, degradation, and what Freud called the Uncanny. It is a type of the Guardian of the Gates of Dreams who must be eaten to transform it into a Guide and ally or protector in underworld journeys. In the Dreaming one may assume its two Battle Forms, the Grendel-like water dragon and the chiropteran raptor as depicted in the film Dracula, and as a chthonic figure of underworld illumination confers powers of insight into others secret desires similar to Lucifer’s power in the Netflix series which fictionalizes the great question of Lacan, What do you desire?, as well as the ability to enter the dreams of others as does Freddy Kruger in the Nightmare films based so faithfully on the cult of the Bhairav in Tibetan Buddhist-Shaivite Tantric faith. I discovered much parallelism between the magic of my childhood and that of the Vajrayana Buddhist Kagyu order of monks in Kathmandu of which I was once a Dream Navigator.
Burroughs had a whole pantheon and system of magic worked out from Lovecraft and Crowley, but that is a different story. What I find interesting is that like Crowley’s mirror image angels and demons who are really the same being, Burroughs’ reimagination of Lovecraft’s mythos has his Others as both good and evil, like wrathful and beneficent aspects of Tibetan gods.
In the end all that matters is what you do with your fear, and how you use your power.
William S. Burroughs, a reading list
Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, Ted Morgan, William S. Burroughs
Torch of Liberty 