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
The monstrosity of God, the State as embodied violence, Authority as tyranny and terror; all of these recursive and interdependent systems of oppression and dehumanization originate in the dynamics of the Father as Lawgiver.
In this year of the Last Stand against fascism in America as the Party of Treason attempts to finalize the fall of our democracy and impose theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror on our nation under the figurehead of Traitor Trump and his Theatre of Cruelty, let us interrogate the systems of oppression of those who would enslave us and perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Carceral states of force and control are but the family writ large, as fear weaponized in service to power, as authorized identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and as divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness enforced by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
All this we must Resist.
This is the first revolution we must fight, each of us as we grow up and become human as we ourselves imagine and wish to be; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of July 21 2020 How Patriarchy Works: Unequal Power, Identities of Sex and Gender, Autonomy Versus Authorization, Complicity and Responsibility, and the Social Use of Force
Here I began thinking about the murder of Vanessa Guillen, toxic masculinity and violence, and the military as an atavism of rape culture in tidy categories of Hegelian-Marxist history and the dialectics of revolutionary struggle, when I quickly realized that patriarchy is a spectrum disease which corrupts and subverts its victims and its perpetrators alike, and this is its true terror.
At the intersection of power asymmetries and identities of sex and gender lie issues of authorization versus autonomy, with crucial consequences for complicity and responsibility in our legal system which arbitrates the social use of force.
In her now classic work Ring of Power, Jean Shinoda Bolen interprets Wagner’s great opera in terms of patriarchal forces which dehumanize us because they cripple and steal our capacity to love. Of particular interest here is the figure of Brunhild as Daddy’s Avenger and victim of internalized oppression.
So I looked again, but this time not at the primary struggle for power and ownership between male perpetrator and female victim, but at two female monsters who are parallel figures as enablers and accomplices of sexual terror, Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Moreover they are characters embedded in fairytale narratives with which we are all familiar; the etiology of their disfigurement and monstrosity lies in the malign effects of inequality as a moral debasement and leprosy of the soul. For the study of such things I return to Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece Cat’s Eye, her novels Interlunar and Life Before Man, to the thematic companion volumes The Handmaid’s Tale and The Edible Woman, and to the foundational critical work by Sharon Rose Wilson, The Fairytale Sexual Politics of Margaret Atwood.
A study of Margaret Atwood is illuminating and instrumental to understanding the elements of patriarchy and the operations of its systems, especially in the context of female on female violence in secondary order power relations. Allow me to elaborate.
Cat’s Eye presents a narrator, Elaine Risley, who is a trapped Rapunzel in a world of ghosts, witches, cruel stepsisters, vanishing princes, and a merciful fairy godmother. The story draws ideas mainly from Anderson’s Snow Queen and Grimm’s Rapunzel, secondarily from Anderson’s Ice Maiden and Grimm’s Girl Without Hands.
Fearful door images echo Grimm’s Fitcher’s Bird; Risley’s dreams and visions are filled with images from medieval art, paintings of the Annunciation, Ascension, and the Virgin. The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of Atwood’s vision; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort.
Of her characters, Cordelia from Shakespeare’s King Lear is among her finest; Mrs. Sneath is a cannibal goddess who resembles Baba Yaga and is linked to the figure of cat-headed Maat in this story.
Thematically Cat’s Eye is an investigation of the Rapunzel Syndrome; the wicked witch who imprisons her, the tower she is trapped in, a rescuer. Margaret Atwood’s driving conflicts are female-female, though her plots foreground sexual power and its political reflections.
Life Before Man offers The Wizard of Oz, The Nutcracker ballet, Anderson’s Snow Queen, a host of tales from Grimm including The Girl Without Hands, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Cap, Fitcher’s Bird, and The Robber Bridegroom. Secondary intertexts include Wilde’s Salome, Dante’s Inferno, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Coleridge’s Kublai Khan, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, and Mother Goose rhymes, mainly Little Miss Muffet. It’s a sort of Grand Tour of our civilization and the history of our private inner space and the disastrous and grotesque ways we collide with each other. Also, wonderful and illuminating reading.
Interlunar reimagines Cocteau’s Orphee, the ballet Giselle, both the Grimm and Anne Sexton version of The White Snake, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Motifs include death, pestilence, filth, eating, power, the journey, healing, hands, blindness and vision. Themes of guilt and shame, love, destruction, sacredness, creation, fertility, and metamorphosis are to be found in this richly imagined novel.
The Edible Woman is a linked text with The Handmaid’s Tale; do read both together. Herein the main embedded stories are Hansel & Gretel, The Gingerbread Boy, Goldilocks, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, and her protagonist Marion plays all of these roles as well as those of Little Red Cap, the Robber Bride, and Fitcher’s bride.
The Handmaid’s Tale gives a voice to Bilhah, the Biblical Handmaid, revisions Little Red Riding Hood as an extension of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, and tells the story of the Christian disempowerment of the Goddess as presented in the great film The Red Shoes.
Margaret Atwood’s parodies of Grimm operate on three levels; thematic, images and motifs, and narrative structure. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we have themes of family and especially female-female conflict, gender and sexual power asymmetries, and the initiation and heroic journey. Motifs and images include dismemberment, cannibalism, fertility, labyrinths and paths, and all manner of disturbing sexual violence. Plot devices include a variety of character foils, doppelgangers, disguises and trickery of stolen and falsified identity.
Among Margaret Atwood’s Great Books, The Handmaid’s Tale is a universally known reference both because it has been taught for over a generation in every high school in America as a standard text and because of the extraordinary television series, arguably the most important series ever filmed. We teach it for the same reasons the show is popular; a visceral and gripping drama with unforgettable characters, a mesmerizing plot, and an immediate and accessible story which empowers and illuminates.
It depicts the brooding evil and vicious misogyny of Christianity and Fascism as two sides of the dynamic malaise of patriarchy and authority, as drawn directly from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, but also from contemporary culture as it contains satires of identifiable public figures, organizations, and events. Serena is based on Phyllis Schlafly, and Gideon is the nation of Pat Robertson and the fundamentalists who seized control of the Republican Party around the time of the novel’s writing; Margaret Atwood’s motive in part was to sound an alarm at the dawn of the Fourth Reich and its threat to global democracy.
It remains to be seen whether the forces of tyranny or of liberty will prevail in the end. Each of our lives is a contest between these forces, our private struggles reflected in the society and human civilization we share.
And this is the great lesson and insight of Margaret Atwood; each of us is both a Handmaid and a Serena, trapped within the skin of the other. She locates the primary conflict within ourselves, and transposes the Jungian conflict between Anima and Animus with that of the Shadow in terms of sex, gender, and power.
So we return to our Brunhilds and twin monsters Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell, who Janus-faced represent corruption and perversion, the dual spheres of action of feminine power turned against itself by the forces of patriarchy and shaped to the uses of predation and misogyny.
Melania’s message on the coat she wore to tour a migrant concentration camp, “I really don’t care. Do U?’ and Ghislaine’s self-description in Vanity Fair, “‘I do it the way Nazis did it with the Jews,” reflect the disease of power in its political and sexual contexts, and as a First Cause of both racist hate crimes and crimes of sexual terror. Unequal power is a precondition of them both.
And these are direct quotes from enablers and accomplices of crimes against humanity which define the limits of the human, and who are not marginal figures whose malign violations of our values and dehumanization of others occurred in a trailer park brothel or secret sweatshop of slave labor but at the pinnacle of our society’s ruling class. Their existence is an indictment of the flaws of our nation and of our civilization, and a measure of the distance we have yet to travel in the realization of a true free society of equals.
As Margaret Atwood said in her 2015 lecture to West Point cadets; “Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say, ‘It can’t happen here.’ Anything can happen anywhere, given the right circumstances.”
My Family: Pantheon of Typhoeus and his daughters; detail from Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze
Image source
The Freudian Horror of Patriarchy, a reading list
Sigmund Freud: the Creepy Great-Uncle of Horror (and Feminism)
On this the birthday of Jerzy Kosinski, I reflect on and interrogate my personal relationship and history with his great novel, which I used as an intertext and mirror in healing from trauma during my teenage years, much as did he in reimagining his childhood therapy journal as he was psychosomatically mute for five years after Liberation by the Russian Army at the age of nine.
I too created myself as revolutionary struggle during this crucial period of growing up, framed by my witness at the age of nine of Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969 People’s Park Berkeley, our nation’s most massive incident of police terror in which I was near or momentarily dead from the force wave of a grenade, and my near execution by a police death squad in Sao Paulo Brazil in 1974 during my direct actions with the Matadors to rescue the abandoned street children who were being bounty hunted in a state campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Identity confusion and self-creation as freedom from authorized identities and imposed orders of being, meaning and value, from the boundaries of the Forbidden and other people’s ideas of virtue, the mark of Otherness conferred by death, Last Stands in defiance of authority and carceral states of force and control beyond hope of victory or survival, and the existential crisis of becoming human in liberation struggle against the systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization which arise from the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; in all of this I found reflection in Jerzy Kosinski’s embrace of our monstrosity and fearless gaze into the Nietzschean Abyss and what Joseph Conrad called The Heart of Darkness.
The Painted Bird, I.
As I have written in celebration of Jerzy Kosinski’s birthday:
Identity, power, justice, the depravity and perversity of man and the origins of evil; these are the great themes which animate the works of Jerzy Kosinski.
His unique brand of Catholic Existentialism, a Pauline Absurdism like that of Flannery O’Connor and referential to Camus and Freud as much as Augustine and the Bible, has never been widely understood. Nor has the influence of his training as a sociologist and historian in the Soviet university system of Poland behind the Iron Curtain, prior to his escape to political asylum in America.
Jerzy Kosinski embraces the Infinite as the Absurd; though his works can create the effect of reading Samuel Beckett, Kobo Abe, or Thomas Ligotti, his intent is to tilt against Nihilism and the forces of disorder, not to endorse them. His episodes which reveal the depravity of humankind and the fallenness of political authority, like those of Jean Genet’s novels, are inversions of Catholic rituals intended as satires of the state as embodied violence.
In some respects he can be compared to de Sade, but only to a point; where de Sade was a satirist who wrote as a revolutionary act and campaign of destabilization against the authority of Church and State, Jerzy Kosinski plays the opposite side of the board, marshalling conserving forces to defend absolute and universal human values.
For his novels, often thinly veiled autobiographies and referential to historical events, are manuals of survival in circumstances of overwhelming force, dehumanizing oppression, and existential terror as systems of oppression.
Among these we may include his satires of American culture including Being There, and the magnificent nightmare of Europe under fascism, The Painted Bird. His finest nonfiction is The Future is Ours, Comrade, written within two years of his 1957 escape from Poland under Soviet dominion. All of his works bear the weight of his scholarship as a historian and sociologist.
His novels are metafictional commentaries on the roles he played in life, both chosen and those forced on him by others. Perhaps only Philip Roth has struggled more as a writer for control of his own identity, when those whom he claimed he not in turn claim him, and few have suffered more. I believe that each of us has the right as human beings to reinvent ourselves, and to be who we choose.
Being There is a precious and delicate confection of a fable, which transforms a universal myth into a new one for our time in spare language that a child might grasp. The film version starring Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine is also compelling and beautiful; I made a practice of watching it every month for years since I was at university, and rereading the novel which I taught in high school. It has become a part of who I am, this story, and I hope that you will love it as do I. But before I can take you on a walk through this novel, we must understand its context in the novel for which it is a coda, The Painted Bird.
The Painted Bird is an unforgettable paen of horrors as lived by the author as a child wandering alone in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, victimized and powerless, a figure of Europe, civilization, and all humanity.
I cannot say I advise anyone to open the lid of this particular box and look within; I cannot even say that it is good for you. Exposure to evil of this magnitude and festering malignity, raw and unanswerable, is a disruptive and corrosive, destabilizing and subversive event, at once destruction and liberation, much like the history it describes. Here the boundaries of the human are charted.
What has it done for me, this Pandora’s Box of a story? Perhaps only to help me find the will to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. For myself, this has been enough.
I have lost count of such Last Stands during my decades of revolutionary struggle and resistance to fascism since that fateful day in 1982 Beirut during the siege, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance he had appropriated from that of the Foreign Legion in Paris 1940 and set me on my life’s path. I too have looked into the Abyss, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me, since Mariupol and possibly before, and I must now and always question my actions as a man without fear, mercy, or remorse.
I am become as history has made me, a monster who hunts other monsters; with death the alternative to survival, with subjugation, falsification, and dehumanization pervasive and omnipresent existential threats on the one hand and those truths written in our flesh and to which we must bear witness, and our glorious liberty and uniqueness on the other, and with only solidarity and our faith in each other to heal the pathology of our disconnectedness and the divisions of authorized identities as elite hierarchies of otherness and belonging, love to redeem the flaws of our humanity, and hope to answer the terror of our nothingness and the brokenness of the world, we each of us must struggle to become human, even when we must trade fragments of our humanity for the hope of future possibilities of becoming human and for the lives of others, who may one day escape the shadows of history in which we dwell.
Last Stands; naming these forlorn hopes so makes them sound grand and heroic, but they are nothing of the kind. Not acts of virtue bearing the force of redemption, but choices to remain Unconquered as a free and self-created being conferred by refusal to submit against unanswerable force and impossible odds; a human thing, and a power which cannot be taken from us. As Jean Genet said to me on that fateful day, in a burning house, in a time of darkness, in a lost cause; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
Each of these Defining Moments has created unique imaginal spaces as mimesis which cannot be escaped; I will forever be crawling through tunnels of utter darkness covered in the blood of those I could not save while the earth trembles with impending collapse as I was in Mariupol 2022, and numberless other such moments. But as in Camus’ allegory of Sisyphus I bore the burden of my humanity onward and became Unconquered and free, and so can you.
This is what is important; to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows, as Genet’s Oath of the Resistance goes. What matters are not the horrors I have survived and which have shaped me to the thing that I am, a monster who hunts other monsters, and who has traded pieces of his humanity to do so and win a space of free creative play and time for others to discover and create new kinds of human being, meaning, and value which I may never find or dream; but that in refusal to submit I emerged from the darkness and despair into the light, and so can we all.
We may not be able to escape the legacies of our history or the consequences of our humanity, nor find balance for the terror of our nothingness nor bring healing to the brokenness of the world; but we can refuse to submit and become Unconquered as free and unique beings, a power which cannot be taken from us and can return us to ourselves.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
Here follows my celebration of Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday:
A novel translated from his native Polish and reconstructed from notes written while the author was psychosomatically mute for five years after his liberation by Russia at the age of nine, as a therapy journal, it is unique among the literature of madness and psychoanalysis. The Painted Bird is the voice of this traumatized child; its authenticity is incontestable even though the government of Poland has attempted to discredit it as the Witness of History as part of its policy of denial as regards complicity in the Holocaust.
Of this I say: evil wears many masks. It can be massively destructive when given the authorized power of governments, armies, official papers and decrees, but this is not its exclusive domain, nor where it is born.
For the tortures and abuse suffered by the narrator are not inflicted upon him by officials carrying out a policy or because he is a member of a persecuted group like the Jews, though he is sometimes mistaken for a gypsy, but by ordinary villagers simply because they can. Indeed, much of the novel is a series of episodic vignettes in which brutalized villagers commit unspeakable crimes against one another. These episodes form a journey of initiation and are organized as Stations of the Cross: labyrinthine as is the symbolism of a great cathedral.
The universality of evil and the depravity of man are the subjects of his great work, and this is what elevates it beyond the conditions of time and place. The Painted Bird affirms traditional values in that it cleaves to the interpretation of the Bible on which our government is based, derived from the idea of sin. In the absence of the restraining force of law, the most ruthless tyrant or criminal wins. As George Washington said, “Government is about force, only force.”
True, the social use of force cuts many ways, especially when wielded by the juggernaut of governments; my point is that Jerzy Kosinski has written a very Catholic novel which offers an apologetics of law and order any government might welcome. That this is not generally understood may be due to no one having thought to compare him to Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, or other fellow Catholic authors with whom he belongs.
Indeed, The Painted Bird has been misunderstood as Holocaust literature and originally misrepresented by the publisher as nonfictional testimony, which backfired as it made the author and his work vulnerable to the lies of his political foes. He himself became a Painted Bird, ostracized and tormented by his fellows both as a child and as an author, and both functioning on the basis of a public denial of his identity as a Polish Catholic. The tribes he claimed did not in turn claim him, as his faith led him to identify evil as a universal human flaw and not the intrusive weapon of a despised enemy outsider.
The Painted Bird thematically recapitulates Measure For Measure, Shakespeare’s savage morality play which examines concepts of state power, justice, and the theology of the depravity of man on which our legal system is founded. Jerzy Kosinski has organized and fictionalized his therapy journal along lines paralleling the Bard’s play, while reversing its revolutionary critique of authorized force.
Running through all his novels are interlinked narratives supporting Freud’s theory that humans are polymorphosly perverse until they learn to control their animal nature, and against Rousseau’s idea that the natural man is not bound by social contracts made prior to his birth or without his consent and participation, and may without concern disregard such laws, which is the legal basis of the American Declaration of Independence and a keystone of the Supreme Court’s rulings on the Constitution. And so we have the doctrine of Natural Law, a startling bit of anarchy at the founding of our nation, which goes directly to the heart of Jerzy Kosinski’s theme of power relations and defense of a universal and imperative moral order. By moral order I mean human rights as an absolute and universal principle, independent of tribe and tradition; the classic conservative critique of ethical and cultural relativism.
The logical extension of this line of reasoning denies the legitimacy of the American state, and aligns with the British claim that our revolution, at its origin anticolonial and antiaristocratic, has no basis in law, and with the claim of all states to rule their citizens without their consent personally as a contract.
Among the finest interrogations of this idea of moral order as authoritarianism can be found in Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.
In Jerzy Kosinski’s world, like that of William T. Vollman, moral order balances on a social contract guaranteed by force; a brutal and fallen world, but one in which true heroism is possible.
Little wonder that, once he became rich and famous on the basis of this book, his subsequent novels were mainly elaborately constructed Baroque fantasies of vengeance and the championing of the powerless. They also continue his exploration of Dante’s Inferno, displaying the consequences of sin and his role as an avenging angel. His work foregrounds personal sin as the origin of social evils; vanity and greed, materialism and the loss of communion as connection with others as well as the Infinite, sexual terror as a means of ownership and dehumanization, all the facades which abstract us from ourselves and one another. He wrote them to avenge the child he had once been, but also to shield others by exposing injustices.
And this is what killed him: his quixotic knight-errantry, truthtelling, and the authorial turning over of stones. Though his death was reported as a suicide, with a final note as proof, this is inconsistent with his obsessive survivalism, vigilante justice, secret identities, use of his public role as concealment, and his appropriation of intelligence tradecraft to evade enemies which included the Soviet Union he had escaped, and his personal mission of hunting evildoers. In life as in his fiction, Jerzy Kosinski was an avenging trickster who like the heroes of the messianic films The Magic Christian and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory constructed elaborate Dante-esque traps as purgatorial rituals. This is the author who became a role model for me as I worked through my trauma with his novel as my guide to becoming human; a Dark Knight and Avenger. He would have never abdicated his chosen role as a protector of innocents, for this is what sustained him and gave his tragedies and traumas meaning and made them bearable.
Jerzy Kosinski died as his forebears did, when their lances shattered on the unstoppable tanks of the invaders in a final charge of traditional meaning and value against a nihilistic barbarian modernity, glorious and beautiful as was the defense of the Great Siege of Malta, and bearing to the last the only title that matters, that of Invictus.
So we come to Being There, a deceptively simple story based on the fables of Krylov which retells the Biblical Fall of Man and Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and the return of Christ as the Second Adam from Exile as a redeemer.
As does his work as a whole and The Painted Bird especially, Being There presents at once a path of spiritual rebirth which unifies Catholic sin and Existential freedom, a Freudian political theory of government as force, a Sartrean critique of identity as a social construction, and a theory of history which re-evaluates and diverges from both Biblical teleology and Marxism, and written by a man who was once the Soviet Union’s greatest sociologist with a deeply personal stake in the issues and themes of his work rooted in profound childhood trauma.
First, it is a masterpiece, directly addressing the themes developed in The Painted Bird in the context of America, a new home where Jerzy Kosinski found celebrity, wealth, and power, (I would like to say safety, but these things cannot buy safety, and security is an illusion) but also a dehumanizing commodification, superficial materialism, and implicit class system with which he was not wholly comfortable even though he had married into the apex of New York society.
Both novels are meditations on Otherness; in one the bird which is painted to look different is pecked to death by his fellows, and in Being There someone who is truly different moves among us unhindered because he wears the colors of whatever flock he finds. Themes of concealment and illusion, identity and membership, the protection of assimilation or the danger and loneliness of being different are exhibited in both great books.
Change the protagonist and we have the myth and horror story of the skinwalker, a monster or cannibal predator who walks among us in disguise, or the tragic figure of the Elephant Man, whose virtue and beauty are hidden behind a hideous mask of flesh. Or an anonymous hero, a Batman-like figure standing the night watch for us all, as was the author Jerzy Kosinski to the last.
Second, Being There is powerful because it enacts a universal mythic pattern, and then breaks the pattern to create a new myth, maybe one more useful to us now.
What follows are my lecture notes on Being There, which I would hand out to my classes of High School Juniors and Seniors in the Honors Program and AP English (AP courses being preparatory classwork for taking the AP subject exams which can earn college units if passed- like A levels in British schools) and read aloud in parts as the class progressed through the book, stopping to ask questions and start discussions. I taught Being There as an introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; it can also be read as a companion text to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, which shares its sources in Arthurian myth.
The works of Jerzy Kosinski came into my life through the influence of my mother, Coleridge scholar and expert on religious symbolism in medieval art, a Catholic university trained psychologist, biologist, and English teacher who, at my insistence after some time of Kosinski being a presence of references in our home while she wrote a study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet hospital case notes of his childhood therapy as compared to his own notes written between the ages of nine and fourteen ending when he regained the power of speech and which later became the basis of his novel, gave me The Painted Bird to read when I was seventeen. As one can imagine, we talked about it a lot.
I myself would not now do as she did then; its simply too disturbing and can cause real harm, though I was working though the trauma of battle and near execution by a police death squad in Brazil the summer before high school. If you are a survivor of private Holocausts, it can be useful; I might say the same of Kathy Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School, which I have taught to high school students who were survivors of sexual terror as was she.
As to other influences on the text of my lecture notes, I wrote it during my first year of teaching high school, and while I used it without changes for many years as a discussion prompt it reflects my interests and understanding at the time; I was in my third year of university and taking courses in Celtic Literature and Arthurian Romance while I wrote it, and reading Emma Jung’s Grail studies. My interpretations are also shaped by deep and lifelong interests, sparked by reading Frazier’s Golden Bough in sixth grade, in Joseph Campbell and comparative mythology, fairytales, the archetypal psychology of Jung and Hillman, and a Great Books education through my teenage years. As I could count on no particular literary background among my students, to frame a discussion I had to tell the story; hence the brief retellings of references.
On Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There: a reading guide
Being There is a fable, a retelling of the story of the Original Man, and of his exile from Paradise and his redemption of the world as the Holy Fool. It parallels the story of Christ, the Fall of Adam and the return of the world to an Edenic state through the second Adam, the Innocent who goes shod in the temple. In Being There, the hero’s quest takes him to a citadel of Fallenness, where he must heal the wound of a Fisher King, in an initiation pattern found in Celtic pagan and Arthurian sources.
Early Christian legend says that Jesus was crucified on Calvary, the Mound of the Skull, where the skull of Adam is buried. He is depicted in early art as being hung from the Tree of Life rather than nailed to a cross, just as Odin hung from the World Tree Ygddrasil, a sacrifice to himself, in order to gain knowledge of the runes, universal organizing and informing principles. In the body of Jewish folklore and mystical gnosis called Cabala, the Tree of Life is a series of emanations from the Infinite called the sephiroth, worlds which form a ladder between our world and the Divine. Through astral projection and other practices, the cabalist reunites pairs of opposing principles within himself, just as the Redeemer of the Basilidians mounted through the planetary spheres to acquire their powers. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life were understood to be aspects of the same linking system.
Many mythic systems trace humanity to an Original Man, actually an inner man in whom all participate and share in the human spirit. This is clearly true of Adam, but also of the Purusha in India and Chung Ko in China, among others.
Parallel myths are structured on the idea of the Universal Monarch, such as Arthur, the Once and Future King. In both Christianity and Buddhism, the hero is a Holy Fool who forsakes the role of Universal Monarch for that of Redeemer, just as Chance, incapable of relating to the world except as an innocent, will accidently become the President of America and restore the nation’s spirit.
Chance is evicted from the Garden of Eden and is cast into a fallen world; in the film the fallen state of the world surrounding his home is more clearly contrasted with the idyllic garden than in the book. When Chance is introduced to the world during a television interview, he unknowingly proposes to govern as a gardener tends his garden, returning it to a state of order and harmony. Chance is the Redeemer bringing about the Kingdom of God.
The lawyers who evict Chance are clearly Tempter figures; Chance defeats them when he declines to make a claim against the old man’s estate, as doing so would have kept him in Paradise and prevented him from fulfilling his role as Redeemer. While sitting under the Bo tree awaiting his vision of Enlightenment, Buddha is tempted by Mara in his terrible and seductive forms. Christ is also tempted, both to display his powers and to become World Monarch in a riddle match with Satan, prior to his vision of the Shekinah or Holy Spirit. But the Holy Fool must descend into the fallen world if he is to redeem it, and so in Islam the serpent is revered as Iblis, the Instructor, a guide of the soul and faithful servant of the Infinite. In all his forms, the Holy Fool must reject the role of Universal Monarch for that of Redeemer.
People constantly misunderstand Chance; they misinterpret his words in their own context. He is both the sum of images he has internalized from television and the images others make of him; he is all mankind. He is a mirror; Jason kills the Medusa by polishing his shield to a mirror surface so that she sees herself and turns to stone. Chance has the power to transform others because he is the Inner Man in an innocent, unfallen state. Eve tells Chance, “You make me free. I reveal myself to myself, and I am purged.”
After leaving the Garden, Chance comes by accident to live in another house, the mansion of a powerful financier, Mr. Rand, and his wife, Eve. The mansion is a Castle Perilous, a material and fallen cage for a Fisher King. Chance goes from the Garden to this second house, and from a triadic relationship with the Old Man and the maid, Louise, to another with Mr Rand and Eve.
Both Mr Rand and the Old Man are dying; to understand the interaction between the major characters in Being There, let’s compare it to the mythic pattern in the Arthurian tale of Parsifal and the Grail Quest. Parsifal is an innocent, raised in seclusion as were Buddha and Chance. Parsifal goes into the world dressed as a fool or jester, riding an ass, and defeats his opponents in combat simply because he is too ignorant to be afraid and never hesitates to charge. He undertakes to find the Grail and bring it to Arthur, who is so sick he can’t get out of bed for seven years, during which time there is famine in the land. The period of the Wasteland is a representation of the fallen state of the world, which can only be healed through spiritual renewal. Parsifal reaches the Grail Castle, whose lord, the Fisher King, is in a position identical to Arthur’s; he is sick and his land is barren. The Fisher King is wounded through the thighs; just as Arthur fell ill when he lost Guinevere, the Fisher King fell ill when the virgin in whose lap his feet must rest was slain. Both rulers are cut off from the source of spiritual renewal and empowerment. Parsifal heals the Fisher King and gains a vision of the Grail by asking the question Buddha asked of his charioteer; “What is wrong with you?” Many other knights on the Grail Quest had failed to ask it, to much wailing and sorrow.
Like Parsifal, Chance is a figure of the Holy Fool, the child who points out that the Emperor has no clothes. When Mr Rand tells Chance, “I’m not afraid of dying anymore. I’m ready to trade the Horn of Plenty for the Horn of Gabriel,” it is clear that in Chance he has found redemption.
From Garden to Wasteland and back again; Chance’s progression follows the quest of Dante for Beatrice, but without a transformative realization. Part of this initiation pattern can be seen in the tension of images between the Garden and the Wasteland.
The image of the Garden has an interesting history; in the Koran it is called Hasht Bihesht, the Eight Paradises visited by Mohammed on his Night Journey. Like the labyrinth-gardens of medieval Europe, the Islamic water garden reflected the order of a universe unfolding according to divine will, represented a plan of progress on the pilgrim’s journey toward the Infinite, and provided an immediate metaphor of rebirth in its cycles of decay and growth.
Dante’s vision of a multileveled universe is similar to the Koran’s; they also share the concepts of a divine mercy and justice in the afterlife, a vision gained in an Otherworld journey, and conceptualize the Infinite as inclusive of the feminine, the Beloved.
The English word “Paradise” has its roots in the Persian pairi, around, and deiza, wall; a walled garden. Its Greek form, paradeisoi, comes from Xeonophon’s Socratic discourse, the Oeconomics, a history of the Persian war of 400 B.C. Virgil referred to the sacred groves around Roman temples as a paradisus. The word first appeared in Middle English as paradis in 1175 in a Biblical passage” God ha hine brohte into paradis.”
The identification of Paradise with the Garden of Eden happened quite early, during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews from which they were released by Cyrus the Great in 538 B.C. During this time, Judaism assimilated the Sumerian-Babylonian Paradise, the Garden of the Gods, from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh describes his vision of the Garden: “In this immortal garden stands the Tree, with trunk of gold and beautiful to see. Beside a sacred fount the Tree is placed, with emeralds and unknown gems is graced.”
Thus, at the end of the human journey we are brought to the beginning again. From its earliest times, Indo-European myth has held the idea of the afterlife as a return to the source and origin of life.
In Being There, the Garden is contrasted with the Wasteland, the pervading economic malaise linked to the impotence and illness of both Mr Rand and the President as types of the Fisher King.
Arthur’s Wasteland is a divine punishment for his inhumanity; Arthur mab Uthr means not “son of Uther” but “the Cruel”. The Historia Brittonum records that he once hanged two dozen children; in another incident he cut off the noses of the female relatives of a man who disturbed his banquet. Geoffrey of Monmouth based the figure of Arthur on the historical Macsen Wledig, a Welshman who became Emperor of Rome in 383 with the support of the legions in Britain. His story is told in the Mabinogi, in the tale of Culwich and Olwen. The literature of early Arthurian romance was written largely by monks both as a criticism of the system of chivalry and to connect Christianity to the Celtic literary heritage.
Mythically, Arthur, a name meaning “the Bear”, is a figure of the Celtic Lord of the Animals. The usual pattern has him paired with a double-aspected Goddess who is both Mother and Bride, in Celtic terms Gog and Magog, literally son, son of Mother. Grendel and his mother are another example.
In Being There, Chance’s relationship with the black maid, Louise, is superceded by that of Eve, Mr Rand’s wife. The dynamics between Louise and Eve are understandable in terms of the Goddess figures in the original sources from which the story of Eden was drawn in Genesis.
Adams first wife was Lillith, a sensual black demoness who lived in a cave. An embodiment of the forces of nature, she is represented as a Trickster figure in medieval Jewish folklore. Adam, himself Lord of the Animals, both claimed them and completed their creation in naming them. Adam was born both male and female, a figure of wholeness split into the sexes when Eve was made from his female half.
Eve’s banishment from the Garden is an Underworld journey paralleled by the story of Demeter and Persephone. Persephone, daughter of Demeter as Eve is the Maiden aspect of Lillith, is abducted by Pluto, King of the Underworld, to reign as his queen during winter. Demeter descends to the underworld to rescue her, and wins her freedom for half of each year, during which the land is fruitful.
The transformation of Yahweh from King of the Underworld to an all-knowing, all-powerful creator was never complete in Judaism; until Roman times the Goddess was worshipped on a separate altar beside God. Even today, God’s wife, the Shekinah or Wisdom, is recognized in Jewish rituals such as the Lekha Dodi, which welcomes the Bride of God into the temple. In Christianity she became the Holy Spirit and Mary Theotikos, god-bearer or Mother of God. The Black Madonna found on many Catholic altars is a survival of Lillith, the Great Mother.
The Wasteland period in Arthurian romance begins when Arthur’s queen, Guinevere, is abducted by the mad Lancelot du Lac, a champion of the spirits, in Saxon called alven or elves, in Gaelic called sidhe. She is reclaimed in a cataclysmic war against the sidhe led by Morgan LeFay, the Faerie Queen. After his death, Arthur is sent drifting in a boat toward the Isle of Avalon, the realm of faerie, signifying his completion of the initiation process and return to the feminine source of being.
The Ramayana parallels major features of this initiation pattern. Rama is a Universal Monarch who wanders the jungle for nine years in a Wasteland period. His wife, Sita, who is a figure of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and wife of Vishnu the Incarnator, is abducted by Ravanna, King of the Demons. She is Tempted by Ravanna to become Queen of the Underworld, but remains faithful to Rama. Rama, acting as Lord of the Animals, gathers an army of six million monkeys and a number of bears and attacks Ravanna’s island. Together with Hanuman the Monkey King, he reclaims Sita in a battle which pits demons against men, beasts, and gods; rather like the war in Irish mythology of the Tuatha deDanaan against the demonic Fomorians who dwell beneath the sea.
The pivotal moment in Being There occurs when Chance fails to respond to Eve’s attempt at seduction. Incapable of sexual interest or Temptation, of initiation through assimilation of the feminine unconscious, Chance fails to unite with the Shekinah. The pattern of initiation, of internalizing projections or de-objectifying the Other, is disrupted. His mind, and the creative potential expressed by sexuality, is crippled by the wound of the Fisher King.
Kosinski leads the reader to expect a transformative event in this scene, and then diverges wildly from the expected. The jarring discontinuity alerts us to his real intent and contribution; the creation of a new myth, a modern myth in which man has no defining relationship to the world and must make his own.
The Temptation as an Underworld journey to reclaim the feminine creative force and emerge fully human, becoming an Original Man, is found in three sources which form a historical progression within a literary tradition. The direct antecedents of Being There are the story of Pwyll in the Mabinogi, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Wagner’s Parsifal.
In the first story of the Mabinogi, King Pwyll meets Arawn, King of the Underworld, while riding in the forest. They agree to trade places for a year; Arawn casts a spell which makes each look like the other. During this time, Pwyll is Tempted by Arawn’s Queen, but resists her. His initiation complete, Pwyll returns home to become a just and merciful king. The second half of the story articulates a linked myth, the Underworld journey of the goddess Rhiannon, which parallels that of Persephone.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a more sophisticated story, a synthesis of Christian and pagan Celtic elements. Gawain, linked to Parsifal in other stories as a contrasting-complementary character, is a development of the Irish hero Cuchulainn. The Green Knight is both Christ and the Green Man, Celtic god of vegetative rebirth whose leafy face can be seen as a decorative motif in English churches. A parallel trickster-initiator figure in Islam is the Green Genie Khidr.
Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are feasting at Camelot when a strange knight enters the hall bearing an axe, a man made of vines and leaves in green armor. He issues a challenge, and by the laws of chivalry the request of a guest cannot be denied once he has been admitted to the hospitality of the castle; one of them must strike off his head, after which the Green Knight will return the blow. Gawain agrees, to avoid Arthur’s loss of honor. He chops off the Green Knight’s head, and the Knight picks up his head and speaks; “In one year you will come to my castle, and I will return the blow.”
Gawain sets out on his quest a year later, and comes to the Castle Perilous, where he is tempted by its Queen. He resists, and is given her magic lace girdle to wear. Dressed in the Queen of the Underworld’s clothes, he goes to meet the Knight at a cavern called the Green Church. The Green Knight swings but stops his blow, just nicking Gawain’s neck in an act of redemption. The Green Knight tells him that the Castle Perilous is his own, and its Queen the wife of the Green Knight.
Parallel elements include the Underworld journey and Castle, the Temptation by an Underworld Queen, an exchange of identities with an Underworld King, and a wandering or Wasteland period. The Beheading Game is a retelling of Cuchulainn’s contest for the kingship of Ulster in the epic Bricriu’s Feast.
Chance is sent on an Underworld journey to Mr. Rand’s house, is Tempted by Eve, and takes the place of the Fisher King. The seduction scene is where the story of Chance breaks the initiation pattern. Like the Old Man, Chance bears the wound of the Fisher King. In the first chapter we learn, “The soil of his brain, the ground from which all his thoughts shot up, had been ruined forever.”
In Wagner’s opera Parzival, the theme of Redemption also hinges on a Temptation. Anfortas, the Fisher King, is wounded by the Spear of Longinus, which pierced Christ’s side at the Passion. Parzival’s experience with his objectified Other in the form of the sensual Kundry’s kiss triggers his despair and eventual redemption. The Holy Fool becomes Redeemer through unification with the unconscious.
Chance’s tragic flaw prevents him from undergoing a transformative initiation; he is the Holy Fool as pure symbol. Kosinski uses the interruption of a mythic pattern as social critique; the mold of man is broken. Like Theseus, we must find our way through the Labyrinth of the Minotaur, but without Ariadne’s Thread to guide us. Like Mersault in The Stranger, Chance is the ultimate image of modern man’s pathology of disconnectedness. He is, perhaps, the only Redeemer we deserve.
Or, perhaps Kosinski’s message is a more simple, hopeful one: First, we must recognize that we are on a journey toward becoming human. Second, we have no map of transformative process to guide us. Therefore, each of us must reinvent how to be human.
Chance’s redemptive power rests on his innocence; he is the child who speaks truth to power, who knows the Emperor has no clothes, an Adamic man in his uncorrupted state, the Fool who can achieve a vision of the Infinite.
Bodidharma, the founder of Zen, once had an interview with the Emperor of China.
The Emperor said to him, ” I have donated money to the poor, I have built orphanages, hospitals, and monasteries. How much merit have I accumulated in heaven?”
Rejoice with me in the spectacle of the monster brought to judgement, his numberless crimes and perversions and those of his treasonous and dishonorable minions and collaborators in a loathsome regime of patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror as theocratic fascism and tyranny, designed and perpetrated for the purposes of infiltration and subversion of democracy and capture of the state, are displayed before the stage of history and the world as defining limits of the human and branded into the soul of America.
Like the thief’s brand of Milady de Winter in Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, may the actions of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, forever remind us who the enemies of Liberty truly are, regardless of the masks they wear and the web of lies in which they seek to trap us as the raw material of their power.
Saboteurs of our justice system and agents of the Fourth Reich have conspired to deny us a public viewing of the trial, a trial whose functions are not limited to the espionage of one Russian agent and ex President, but include the restoration of the legitimacy of the justice system, of America as both state and idea, and of democracy globally.
We must see the monster disempowered to harm us, exposed and cast out, if we are to find catharsis in this morality play, for Trump is a figure of the diseased heart of America as a Sin Eater for all of his followers and those who voted for him and his policies of division and theft of the soul. We must purge our destroyers from among us; most especially those who once believed his lies and enabled him as voters and co-conspirators including the whole of the Republican Party must now be granted the chance to disavow him and free themselves of their subjugation to theocratic fascism, or be judged with him by history.
This process of catharsis and the Restoration of America is by now years along since the January 6 Insurrection marked the high tide and collapse of fascism in America, progress we can measure by the few supporters who came to the trial in response to Trump’s dogwhistled orders to storm the court as a demonstration of power, as compared to the masses who perpetrated the storming of Congress in the Insurrection. Trump is still proclaiming madness and issuing terroristic commands, but almost no one is listening anymore.
The tide of fascist tyranny and terror in America has turned, and now is the time to bring a Reckoning for its evils.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter ; ““DONALD TRUMP UNDER ARREST, IN FEDERAL CUSTODY.”
It was quite a chyron from CNN, marking the first time in the history of the United States that a former president has been charged with federal crimes. And in this case, what crimes they are: the willful retention, sharing, and hiding of classified documents that compromise our national security. Trump’s own national security advisor John Bolton said, “This is material that in the hands of America’s adversaries would do incalculable damage to the United States. This is a very serious case and it’s not financial fraud, it’s not hush money to porn stars, this is the national security of the United States at stake. I think we’ve got to take the politics out of this business when national security is at stake.”
Cameras were barred in the courtroom as Trump pleaded not guilty to the 37 charges in Miami today. Presiding magistrate judge Jonathan Goodman ordered Trump not to communicate with witnesses about the case, including co-defendant Waltine Nauta, then released him on his own recognizance, that is, without needing to post bail. Special prosecutor Jack Smith was in the courtroom; ABC’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott reported that Trump did not look at Smith.
Then Trump went back to his residence in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he gave a speech that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who is close to the Trump camp, described as low energy, focusing on his insistence that he had a right to keep the classified documents (which experts agree is nonsense and amounts to a confession) and that the indictment was “the most evil and heinous abuse of power.” Right-wing Newsmax and the Fox News Channel (FNC) carried the speech; CNN and MSNBC did not.
FNC has been hemorrhaging viewers since it fired Tucker Carlson, a threat to its bottom line that might have been behind its chyron tonight attacking Biden by claiming “WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.”
In statements similar to the one from FNC, right-wing pundits spent the day flooding Twitter and other social media with furious insistence that Trump is being unfairly prosecuted, followed by attacks on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and with allegations that there are tapes of President Biden accepting bribes—allegations that Biden openly laughed at this evening.
But that performative outrage among leaders did not translate into support on the ground in Miami. Law enforcement had been prepared for as many as 50,000 protesters, but only a few hundred to a thousand turned out (one wearing a shirt made of an American flag and carrying the head of a pig on a pole).
The lack of supporters on the ground was significant. Since the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, much of Trump’s power has rested on his ability to call out his base to silence opponents by threatening violence. That power was in full force on January 6, 2021, when his loyalists set out to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president, believing they were operating under the orders of then-president Trump.
Since then, though, more than 1,000 people who participated in the events of January 6 have been charged with crimes, and many have been sentenced to prison, while Trump, who many defendants say called them to arms, has skated. That discrepancy is likely dampening the enthusiasm of Trump’s supporters for protest.
Today Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out that the audacity of Nevada’s militia-related Bundy family simply grew as family members launched successive stands against the federal government without significant legal repercussions. Republican politicians cheered on their attacks on federal officials for political gain, while Democratic politicians didn’t push to go after them out of concern that a show of federal power would alienate Nevada voters.
Trump’s threats and determination to stir up his base seem to reflect a similar consideration: if he can just rally enough support, he might imagine, the federal government will back off.
Federal officials permitting politics to trump the rule of law in our past have brought us to this moment.
After the Civil War, officials charged Confederate president Jefferson Davis and 38 other leading secessionists with treason but decided not to prosecute when the cases finally came to trial in 1869. They wanted to avoid the anger a trial would provoke because they hoped to reconcile the North and South. They also worried they would not get convictions in the southern states where the trials were assigned.
In the end, between President Andrew Johnson’s pardons and Congress’s granting of amnesty to Confederates, no one was convicted for their participation in the attempt to destroy the country. This generosity did not create the good feeling men like General Ulysses S. Grant hoped it would. Instead, as Civil War scholar Elizabeth Varon established in her book on the surrender at Appomattox, it helped to create the myth that the southern cause had been so noble that even the conquering northern armies had been forced to recognize it. The ideology of the Confederacy never became odious, and it has lived on.
The same quest for reconciliation drove President Gerald R. Ford to grant a pardon to former president Richard M. Nixon for possible “offenses against the United States” in his quest to win the 1972 election by bugging the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Washington, D.C., Watergate Hotel.
Ford explained that the “tranquility” the nation had found after Nixon’s resignation “could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States.” The threat of a trial would “cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.”
In an echo of 100 years before, Ford’s generosity did not bring Nixon or his supporters back into the fold. Instead, they doubled down on the idea that Nixon had done nothing wrong and had been hounded from office by his “liberal” enemies. Nixon himself never admitted wrongdoing, telling the American people he was resigning because he no longer had enough support in Congress to advance the national interest. Although his support had collapsed because even members of his own party believed he was guilty of obstructing justice, violated constitutional rights of citizens, and abused his power, Nixon blamed the press, whose members had destroyed him with “leaks and accusations and innuendo.”
The willingness of government officials to ignore the rule of law in order to buy peace gave us enduring reverence for the principles of the Confederacy, along with countless dead Unionists, mostly Black people, killed as former Confederates reclaimed supremacy in the South. It also gave us the idea that presidents cannot be held accountable for crimes, a belief that likely made some of the presidents who followed Nixon less careful about following the law than they might have been if they had seen Nixon indicted.
Holding a former president accountable for an alleged profound attack on the United States is indeed unprecedented, as his supporters insist. But far from being a bad thing to stand firm on the rule of law at the upper levels of government, it seems to fall into the category of “high time.”
As written by Jerry LeClaire in his Indivisibles newsletter; “If you have not yet taken the time read the Indictment in the case of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump and Waltine Nauta (Trump’s valet), click that link and read. It should be every American’s civic duty to do so. The original document is eminently readable and thoroughly documented chronicle of former President Trump’s flagrant disregard for the law. So far, nearly all the Republicans who have gone on record about the latest Trump indictment (with the notable exception of Mitt Romney), have bizarrely claimed that it is a miscarriage of justice, politically motivated, and spells the death knell for the rule of law in our country. If any of these know-nothings have actually read the indictment or understand how the rule of law actually works, you certainly could not tell it from their inane commentary.
I’m sure there are many other examples, but that of U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) interviewed on ABC News by George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, June 11, is breathtaking in the whataboutism and misinformation that are quickly becoming the Republican blare machine’s main talking points. It really is worth your time to listen—because this is the garbage that you will likely hear again and again—all by way of avoiding any actually serious discussion of the merits of the indictment itself—and the evidence that underpins it. Senator Graham, who possesses a Doctor of Jurisprudence from the University of South Carolina, must know that he is engaging in gross misinformation. Beyond the usual off-the-point whataboutism of emails and laptops, Graham suggests that the content of the Espionage Act under which Trump is indicted only applies to the most egregious examples of overt spying and bulk transfer of sensitive information to foreign adversaries (think Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange). This is a smokescreen that depends on the Republican faithful’s ignorance of the law. They all need to read the indictment.
Where’s Cathy McMorris Rodgers on the indictment? We can take a clue in her official statement issued August 9, 2022, the day after the FBI exercised the court-authorized search warrant of Mar-a-Lago and seized 102 documents with classified markings Trump had conspired to keep. Her statement starts off predictably by characterizing the search and seizure as an “FBI Raid of President Trump’s Residence”, evoking an portrait of battering rams and rough treatment. It goes on:
“Last night’s unprecedented raid and seizure of documents from President Trump’s private residence is alarming and raises a lot of questions. I am deeply concerned about the appearance that the Biden administration is weaponizing the FBI and Department of Justice to target a political opponent, which would be an egregious abuse of power. This sends a dangerous message to the American people that their Constitutional rights can be trampled because of their political beliefs.”
McMorris Rodgers’ statement sets up this bizarre double-speak Republican talking point: because he was once president any act that challenges Donald Trump’s actions must be politically motivated and cannot possibly be the actual legitimate workings of the rule of law. Since he was once president Trump must be above the law, while, at the same time. exercising a legitimate search warrant is “an egregious abuse of power”. If she reads the indictment, it should be evident to her that not indicting Trump based on the evidence therein would itself be an abandonment of the rule of law.
I await McMorris Rodgers’ slippery words in response to the federal indictment. Will she actually read it? Will she still spout the words “weaponization of the ______”, the phrase no doubt hatched and pushed out to the media by Republican Party operatives as focus-group-tested propaganda?
The best I have read from among those commenting on the indictment is Robert Hubbell’s legally-informed June 11th Substack post in which he puts the indictment and the upcoming trial into perspective:
The trial is designed to achieve two purposes: To punish Trump for his crimes and to dissuade future bad actors from repeating those crimes. In short, the trial is not—and can never be—a solution to the political problem of a potential Trump second term.
If Trump wins a second term, the trial will be irrelevant, even if Trump is convicted before the election. As a second-term president, Trump can manipulate the DOJ to fire special counsel Jack Smith and reverse the conviction somehow, as the DOJ did for Michael Flynn, or he can grant himself a self-pardon. (I do not believe a self-pardon would be constitutional, but if Trump grants himself one, it will be a “get out of jail free card” for the duration of the appeal through the Supreme Court.)
The only solution to the political problem of a Trump second term is to defeat Trump (or any other GOP contender) at the ballot box.
There is a corollary: If Trump regains the Presidency, we will have, thereby, abandoned the rule of law and along with it any pretense that the law applies equally to everyone.
Republicans will twist logic in knots trying to pretend that the grand jury in the Southern District of Florida that voted to indict Trump based on the evidence presented to them by the Department of Justice and Jack Smith was somehow “politically motivated”. Read the indictment. Don’t let them get away with it.
Keep to the high ground, Jerry”
As written by Gunthan Rao in CNN, in an article entitled History is Not On Trump’s Side; “Here we are with another scandal involving former President Donald Trump. What’s new, right? But there’s something that hits differently about this one.
In the past, Trump’s alleged misdeeds have usually been primarily about himself—about making himself richer, or more powerful, or to protect himself from the law. By allegedly violating the Espionage Act and hoarding classified documents, Trump (who has denied wrongdoing) has taken things to a far darker place. A quick look at the history of government record-keeping shows us that Trump is thumbing his nose at our system of government and at the rule of law itself.
Prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment and press conference laid out in devastating detail just how serious the charges are against the former president. In the classified documents that Trump allegedly took from the White House to his residences are deep secrets about the United States’ military and even its nuclear program. The law required Trump to return these documents to the National Archives; Trump knew better, too, since the prosecution has him on tape admitting that he had retained sensitive military information that he had not declassified.
At a more philosophical level, Trump’s alleged actions speak to something else; they flout a basic theory of how our government works.
Hundreds of years ago, when a government official stepped down from an official post, it was customary for them to take with them the records of their time in office. It was in keeping with an elitist theory of power.
Powerful members of the gentry were routinely tabbed to be sheriffs, tax collectors, inspectors and other key roles. They were expected to use their status to do these jobs, as people deferred to their rank and power. Often, they worked out of their homes, so that the workings of government were indistinguishable from their daily life.
In short, their government work was very much their business, even if they were serving the public good. This approach to governing was still very much in vogue by the American Revolution and at the nation’s founding.
However, in the 19th century a new, more modern concept of government slowly took over. Perhaps best explained by the famed German sociologist Max Weber, this new vision was that government work now took place outside of the home and instead in government buildings and bureaus.
In this new modern understanding of the state, it was crucial that government offices be understood to be distinct from the individuals who might serve them. Officeholders were now expected to fulfill their duties by defined administrative rules, rather than by leveraging their status and personal power.
Over time, the professionalization of the government workforce would feature the rise of a civil service, the emergence of bureaucratic experts and the establishment of administrative law. In the 20th century, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Administrative Procedures Act became the foundation for an increasingly complex and regulated system of government organization.
The Presidential Records Act of 1978, passed in the wake of President Richard M. Nixon’s Watergate scandal, was another example of this evolving system. After resigning in disgrace and to avoid impeachment, Nixon wanted to keep records of his time in office to save what was left of his reputation. In 1974 Congress passed a law specifically to prevent Nixon from withholding records and followed it up a few years later with The Presidential Records Act, which explicitly designates presidential records as public records. Presidential records now belong to the American people, not to the President whose administration may have produced them.
This historical context lets us see Trump’s latest misdeed for what it is—a fundamental rejection of the rule of law. In this light, we might see Trump’s actions as part of the conservative effort to dismantle the federal government’s administrative power. But Trump goes even further because his is not a principled ideological manifesto but the simple idea that he, like kings, ministers, and those old self-interested officeholders from centuries ago, is above the law.
By insisting that official records from his administration are his “papers,” and that he can do as he pleases with them, Trump harkens back to a bygone time when government was the exclusive domain of the rich and powerful, and when the elite kept their papers as bespoke mementos of their public works.
Are we still a nation of laws? Or have we been so beaten down by the Trump era that we’re willing to backslide to a seemingly distant past? At stake in this, the latest trial of Donald J. Trump, then, is more than just legalese about government protocol about classification and record keeping. This is about the rule of law.”
As written by Barbara McQuade in MSN, in an article entitled New Indictment Proves Trump Is A Triple Threat to National Security; “The indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Florida last week includes one inescapable conclusion — former President Donald Trump is a triple threat to the national security of the U.S.
Trump’s 37 counts allege violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice, false statements and conspiracy. The indictment describes audacious conduct, alleging he lied to the National Archives, the Justice Department and even his own lawyers and orchestrated the concealment of boxes of documents when the Justice Department came to visit. But the language that most stood out to me as a former national security prosecutor related to the descriptions of the documents themselves. Of course, special prosecutor Jack Smith cannot reveal in detail the sensitive information within these records, but even the general nature of the secrets Trump allegedly stored across Mar-a-Lago, including in a bathroom and a ballroom, is bone-chilling.
According to the indictment, the documents included information about:
The defense and weapons capabilities of both the U.S. and foreign countries.
U.S. nuclear programs.
Potential vulnerabilities of the U.S. and its allies to military attack.
Plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.
Trump has, of course, denied that he did anything wrong and minimized his gross abuse of power as the “boxes hoax.” One of his lawyers has compared Trump’s retention of national secrets to having an overdue library book. But clearly, this case is about far more than an administrative slip-up.
Instead, the indictment charges Trump with misconduct that recklessly placed our national security and foreign relations and the safety of the U.S. military and intelligence community in danger. Some of the documents Trump allegedly retained were marked “top secret,” designating information that, if disclosed, could cause exceptionally grave harm to the national security.
The indictment is a first step toward accountability for Trump’s alleged abuse of power. But, for a number of reasons, he will remain a threat until he is convicted — and perhaps even beyond that.
First, the indictment demonstrates the risk Trump poses to our country as a former president. As commander-in-chief, Trump was entrusted with knowledge of every aspect of our national security, from the placement of missiles to the nuclear codes. His reckless storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago demonstrates his inability to handle this knowledge responsibly. The resort, which the Justice Department says hosted “more than 150 social events that together drew tens of thousands of guests” during the relevant period, was a potential target for foreign intelligence operations. (In 2019, NBC News reported that a Chinese citizen was arrested at the club with “two passports, four cellphones, a laptop, an external hard drive and a thumb drive containing computer malware.”)
In fact, the indictment alleges that Trump has already shared national defense information with a writer, a publisher, two staffers and a representative of his political action committee — none of whom had the required security clearances. If Trump is convicted, a compelling case could be made for his imprisonment and a sentencing condition that limits his ability to communicate sensitive secrets to the outside world to limit further damage.
Second, Trump poses a threat to our national security as a defendant. In criminal cases involving classified information, a defendant sometimes will engage in a practice known as “graymail,” threatening to reveal sensitive national secrets if the government persists in the prosecution. For this reason, former government employees often get lenient plea deals to avoid the disclosure of government secrets at trial.
The Classified Information Procedures Act creates some mechanisms to safeguard such material, such as protective orders during discovery and at trial. But in light of Trump’s access — not to mention his win-at-all-costs mentality — CIPA’s protections feel too thin. Because Trump has already seen all of the documents noted in the indictment, there is a risk that he will share their contents with people unauthorized to see them or threaten to do so unless the charges are dropped or favorably resolved.”
According to the indictment, in December 2021, the contents of several of Trump’s boxes had spilled on the floor in a storage room. Among the documents on the floor was one marked “FVEY,” indicating that the information was releasable only to the Five Eyes alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the U.S. Most of us would be reluctant to lend a novel to a friend who treated our possessions with such contempt, let alone our most private secrets.
If Trump were to become president again in January 2025, foreign allies might be unwilling to share their sensitive intelligence with us. And if we stop receiving valuable intelligence from allies, we will be in the dark about important information with which to make decisions about our military and security interests.
At his news briefing announcing the indictment, Smith emphasized that members of our intelligence community and armed forces “dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people.” Violations of the laws that protect national defense information “put our nation at risk.” Even a Trump trial and conviction may not prevent him from wreaking further havoc, but they can send a powerful message that he can be held criminally accountable and deter others who might follow his lawless example.”
What happens next? Here I find a hopeful voice in Robert Reich, writing in The Guardian in an article entitled There will be no civil war over Trump. Here’s why: Nations go to war over the ideologies, religions, racism, social classes or economic policies. Trump represents nothing other than his own grievance;
“The former president of the United States, now running for re-election, assails “the ‘thugs’ from the Department of Injustice”, calls Special Counsel Jack Smith a “deranged lunatic” and casts his prosecutions and his bid for the White House as part of a “final battle” for America.
In a Saturday speech to the Georgia Republican party, Trump characterized the entire American justice system as deployed to prevent him from winning the 2024 election.
“These people don’t stop and they’re bad and we have to get rid of them. These criminals cannot be rewarded. They must be defeated.
Once again, Trump is demanding that Americans choose sides. But in his deranged mind, this “final battle” is not just against his normal cast of ill-defined villains. It is between those who glorify him and those who detest him.
It will be a final battle over … himself.
“SEE YOU IN MIAMI ON TUESDAY!!!” he told his followers on Friday night in a Truth Social post, referring to his Tuesday arraignment.
It was chilling reminder of his 19 December 2020, tweet, “Be there, will be wild!” – which inspired extremist groups to disrupt the January 6 certification.
At the Georgia Republican party convention on Friday night, the Arizona Republican Kari Lake – who will go to Miami to “support” Trump – suggested violence.
“If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me,” Lake exclaimed to roaring cheers and a standing ovation. “Most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA,” the National Rifle Association gun lobby. “That’s not a threat, that’s a public service announcement.”
Most Republicans in Congress are once again siding with Trump rather than standing for the rule of law.
A few are openly fomenting violence. The Louisiana representative Clay Higgins suggested guerrilla warfare: “This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS [a reference to the real president of the United States] has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm.”
Most other prominent Republicans – even those seeking the Republican presidential nomination – are criticizing Biden, Merrick Garland and the special counsel Jack Smith for “weaponizing” the justice department.
All this advances Trump’s goal of forcing Americans to choose sides over him.
Violence is possible, but there will be no civil war.
Nations don’t go to war over whether they like or hate specific leaders. They go to war over the ideologies, religions, racism, social classes or economic policies these leaders represent.
But Trump represents nothing other than his own grievance with a system that refused him a second term and is now beginning to hold him accountable for violating the law.
In addition, the guardrails that protected American democracy after the 2020 election – the courts, state election officials, the military, and the justice department – are stronger than before Trump tested them the first time.
Many of those who stormed the Capitol have been tried and convicted. Election-denying candidates were largely defeated in the 2022 midterms. The courts have adamantly backed federal prosecutors.
Third, Trump’s advocates are having difficulty defending the charges in the unsealed indictment – that Trump threatened America’s security by illegally holding (and in some cases sharing) documents concerning “United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack”, and then shared a “plan of attack” against Iran.
Republicans consider national security the highest and most sacred goal of the republic. A large number have served in the armed forces.
Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, said on Fox News Sunday that he was “shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were, frankly … If even half of it is true, then he’s toast. I mean, it’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning. And this idea of presenting Trump as a victim here, a victim of a witch-hunt, is ridiculous.”
None of this is cause for complacency. Trump is as loony and dangerous as ever. He has inspired violence before, and he could do it again.
But I believe that many who supported him in 2020 are catching on to his lunacy.
Trump wants Americans to engage in a “final battle” over his own narcissistic cravings. Instead, he will get a squalid and humiliating last act.”
Trump as the masterspy Milady DeWinter
Cardinal Richelieu & Milady DeWinter montage set to Hozier’s Take Me To Church
Maimie McCoy discusses the merciless Milady – The Musketeers – BBC One
America dances with our addiction to power;
Liberty and Fascist Tyranny, Hope and Fear
The terror of freedom and the ecstasy of submission
Hozier – Take Me to Church, Art-project Inspiration. Choreography and directed by Helga Geller
Sergei Polunin, ‘Take Me to Church’ by Hozier, Directed by David LaChapelle
On this anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub Massacre which left 49 dead, one of the most terrible hate crimes in American history and which bears the marks of an intersectional multilayered dimensionality in its apparent motives and etiology; the internalized oppression of a conflicted and self-hating homosexual as shaped by religious intolerance and the escalating spiral of derangement and violence of fundamentalist submission to authority, the latter cause belonging to the same category of terrorist hate crime as abortion clinic bombings.
Had there been no religious ideology telling the perpetrator he is not merely abnormal but also evil and damned because of the nature of his desires, those forty nine people would be alive today.
Such tragedies illuminate the fault lines of our society; the perpetrator is responsible for his crimes, but we are also responsible for the divisions of exclusionary otherness and the maladaptive social medium in which hate crimes occur.
We have allowed atavisms of barbarism to survive into the twenty-first century, like an invisible reptilian tail we drag behind ourselves.
There is a cure for the injustice of our normality and the violence of our authorized identities; wage love and not hate, diversity and inclusion and not demonization and criminalization, in the performance of our identities as autonomous individuals and transform society by our example and the resilience of our community.
This is what I mean by inclusion of the phrase “the frightening of the horses” in my profile, in which I paraphrase the famous quote by the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, muse of George Bernard Shaw; “I really don’t mind what people do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.” There are times wherein the boundaries of the Forbidden must be transgressed in order to seize the power which it holds over us. When this occurs in public spaces it becomes revolutionary and transformational, a form of guerrilla theatre.
Go ahead; frighten the horses.
For we must not only expose and challenge forces of patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror which multiply intersectionally in this horrific incident to illuminate the pervasive fascism which threatens us all; we must also celebrate the fearless defiance and glorious transgression of the drag clubs as stages of guerilla theatre of disruption of heteronormative narratives, as intentional communities beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, and of authorized identities of sex and gender.
The Pulse Massacre was a hate crime precisely because it attacked an entire community and class of marginalized persons, one which illustrates a great truth; to make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
And this we must resist, by any means necessary. No matter where you begin with the use of social force in the manufacture of otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Among the most insightful and relevant writing on the subject of homophobic hate crimes as symptoms of systemic inequality and internalized oppression is that of Professor Rowan Wolf, whose article for Uncommon Thought I amplify herein; “Sadness marks this day after the horrific massacre in Orlando, Florida. at the PULSE nightclub (Sunday, June 11,2016). As a lesbian and a sociologist, my thoughts grapple with “Why?” Omar Mateen and James Howell are both Americans born and raised in the United States. While there are protestations that these two men have nothing connecting their activities, that is flatly wrong for they share not only deep seated homophobia, but the belief that they have the right to act on it, and likely that they would be “heroes” for doing so. Homophobia runs though the veins of U.S. culture, and it is woven into the fabric of our society by misogyny, and socialization into sex roles as they are constructed in mainstream culture. These biases are legitimated in the arguments about “political correctness” and the persistent and deliberate misunderstanding about “protected classes” and “hate crimes.” This article attempts to draw these arguments and issues together in a critique that illuminates the reality of inequality and bias in U.S. society, and how it gets legitimated and even fanned, into the rhetoric that is commonly used.
Omar Mateen, the homophobic beserker who went on a killing spree in Orlando, Florida, was a “security guard” for G4S (a global security firm formerly known as Wachenhut, and the 3rd largest publicly traded company in the world).1 It took awhile for the media to acknowledge that Omar Mateen was a homophobe, but that was hardly out of their mouths before they were off speculating that he was an Islamic terrorist under orders from ISIS. This shift in the story line is important from the perspective of not addressing homophobia, and trying to link it to a presumed “larger threat” to the country. This morphing of the story is consistent across various disasters and incidents. The media creates a world of hypotheticals pointing every direction except for those that would allow some progress on addressing very serious issues.
Donald Trump, in his usual uninformed spouting, blasts that the massacre is because of “ lax” immigration laws and accused President Obama of “political correctness” in not targeting “radical Islam.” (The Wrap) Never mind that Mateen was NOT an immigrant. Further, neither was James Howell (arrested yesterday), the other homophobe arrested in LA with guns and bomb making materials in his van heading for the LA Gay Pride march.
Of course, you have to feel a little bit of sympathetic (not) for the sticky position that the Trumpster is in. After all, most of his “fifth column” are homophobes too. They are just way right, and Christian evangelical right, homophobes. So poor Donald can’t say anything too sympathetic for the victims of Mr. Mateen or he risks offending his base.
However, the corporate media is not doing much better than Trump, and with relief they are jumping from the uncomfortable issue of homosexuals as victims of this atrocity, to Islamic “terrorism” or even “home grown, Islamic terrorism.”
For nobody wants to confront two very nasty facts. First, that Mateen and Howell and all the other U.S. homophobes are products of U.S. culture, and their homophobia is the homophobia embedded deeply in this culture. And second, that hate crimes ARE terrorism; that is what makes them hate crimes. The constant media and governmental protestations that Mateen and Howell have no connection to each other is a lie on the face of such a statement. Mateen and Howell share two very important things. 1) their homophobia ran deep enough, and 2) they felt that they had some right or permission to violently attack the targets of their hatred. I am sure that no one wants to go there, but Trump bears some responsibility for creating an atmosphere that fans this hatred at the same time that he encourages people to act out that hatred violently.
Rationalizing Hatred and Hiding It In Plain Sight: People do not want to address the unfortunate reality that there really are deep veins of misogyny, homophobia, racism, and classism that run through US society. They always have, and looking the other way, or attributing to the biases held by some people (not “us” of course) does not make them any less real nor less devastating. These biases are deeply engrained in the culture and reinforced thousands of times in images and references that most of us hear every day. We hear and see them so often that we rarely even notice as they traipse across our consciousness.
This lack of awareness of the systemic nature of these cultural biases (that become writ large in devastating ways at times, as with the massacre in Orlando), also reinforces the persistent misrepresentation of hate crimes. The distinguishing characteristic of hate crimes is that the message sent by the perpetrators is to the whole target GROUP. Hate crimes are perpetrated upon an individual (or sometimes a small group or property), but the message is to the group. For example, the torching of black churches or mosques or synagogues, are not aimed at that specific place of worship. The message is to all people who worship in that way. Likewise when a person of perceived “hispanic” descent is beaten up at a bus stop. The message is to everyone who “looks like” that person that they should not be there, or sometimes anywhere.
The message sent by hate violence is to the whole group, and it is intended to “terrorize.” So, in effect, hate violence is terrorism even though there is great legal resistance to recognizing it as such. Further, violence against women is also hate violence (and hence a form of terrorism), but legislators really do not want to start down that path. For while (perhaps), acknowledging that hate crime is different from regular crime, to acknowledge that in the case of women would challenge the basic structure and operation of sex roles within the U.S., for they are by their very nature unequal. This fundamental cultural atavism over women, the feminine, and gender roles, lies at the very heart of homophobia.
The Deliberate Obfuscation of “Hate Crime”: Whenever the issue of “hate crime” comes up, or there is pressure to have something prosecuted as a hate crime, there are many folks who get up in arms. They argue that it is discriminatory to have “extra” penalties, and “special” prosecution for some crimes simply because they happened to someone who is a person of color, and most particularly for reasons of gender or sexual orientation. “Why should “they” get “special” treatment under the law?” The answer is two fold. One, because the message sent by the perpetrator is to ALL people with that characteristic. It is not a “personal” crime. Two, anyone can be the victim of a hate crime, but people of higher social status (white, male, heterosexual, or middle class or above, Christian, or any combination of the preceding) rarely are the victim of hate crime. They are protected in many ways, not the least being social constraint based on deep socialization. However, it is the STATUS of race, ethnicity, religion, that is “protected,” and everyone has those statuses – not just people with lower status in each of these social categories. In other words, everyone has a race, everyone has a sex, everyone has a sexual orientation, everyone has a religious designation (even atheists), and everyone has a social class.
This, unfortunately, takes us back around to the ever popular spout of “political correctness.” For at its base, the real anger over political correctness is that people with low (or lower) status should not have the “right” to be treated with equal courtesy and respect. We should not have the “right” (or the social expectation) to name ourselves or expected to be treated as equals. The anger over “political correctness” is that whites, and particularly white males, should not be “burdened” with “having to watch” what they say. They shouldn’t have to be “burdened” with having to worry about how some “over sensitive” woman/queer/Black/Asian/Mexican/Indian/ (and most specifically since 9/11/2001) “Arab” f e e l s about how they have been addressed, acted towards, or talked to or about. Nor should they have the “right” to complain about it if they are offended and pull the “race card” or the “sex card.” This is the coding and legitimation of deeply seated oppression in the 21st century.
So some may wonder how the hell we got from a massacre of folks in a “gay” night club to the issue of “political correctness.” The answer is that the rancor that is evoked about political correctness points directly at the root of the systemic inequality that ends up with folks feeling that they have a moral and social right to harass, beat up, or even kill, people of one of these “lesser” groups. Of course, those with fundamentalist religious association may also feel that they have a religious responsibility and god given authority, to put “those” folks “in their place” (or in the ground). If you do not believe that there is tremendous anger over “political correctness,” then listen to one of Trump’s stump speeches and the response he gets back from the crowd; or bring up the topic in casual conversation at a family dinner or at work.
This same outrage carries over to deciding to call (and particularly prosecute) something as a “hate crime.” Remember the outrage over George Zimmerman’s murder of Trayvon Martin (also in Florida) being prosecuted as a hate crime? The same is happening with the flight to “terrorism” in the case of Mateen, and the deep relief on the part of corporate commentators to not have to deal with the combination of homosexuality and hate crimes. Instead, they deflect the issue to ISIS and Islamic terrorism where the real issue becomes not these 103 people whose lives have been violently shoved onto a different course because of one person’s deep hatred for who they were assumed to be (homosexual). Nor for the millions of homosexuals who are getting not only the message of how very dangerous it is to be an “out” LGBT in this society, but how much the society still does not want to deal with homophobia or structured inequality.”
Where are we now, in this Wilderness of Mirrors in which we are lost? As written by Brandon J. Wolf in Time, in an article entitled 7 Years After the Pulse Nightclub Shooting, Florida Must Reject Hate; “Growing up in rural Oregon, I often dreamt of a world where I could be all of myself. A world where I didn’t feel the nagging societal pressure to be “Black enough” for some spaces and “white enough” for others. A world that saw my queerness not as a dealbreaker, but as a superpower.
Pulse Nightclub embodied that for me. After packing two suitcases and running away to the refuge of Orlando, I uncovered what I had been looking for. The spinning disco balls and strobe beams ricocheting across the bar dared all of us to dance like no one was watching. The beats radiating from the floorboards unearthed our authenticity, nudging us into rhythmic protest against a world that had always told us to uncross our legs, stiffen our wrists, and deepen the gravel in our voices. There was safety there. Inside those walls, we were normal.
When I close my eyes at night, I can remember the moments when that normal shattered into a million shards on June 12, 2016. I can feel it, hear it, see it. The vibrant poster above the urinal. The cup teetering on the edge of the sink, perched precariously as if it might tumble to the tiles below. The first cracks of gunfire from an assault rifle. The stench of blood and smoke wafting into the room.
Hours later, the world woke to our horror: 49 dead; 53 injured. LGBTQ communities across the globe reeled with the jarring reminder that no space is a safe space when your very humanity is perpetually up for debate. The celebrations over marriage equality and surging social acceptance were suddenly cleaved by violence. Overnight, ours was a community under siege, picking up the broken pieces of the nation’s deadliest attack on LGBTQ people in history.
This community remains under siege today.
Florida, just years removed from that horrifying tragedy, has become synonymous with the breathtaking assaults on LGBTQ civil rights sweeping the nation. From book censorship to health care prohibitions on trans youth to bathroom bans, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his right wing allies have ushered in a raft of dehumanizing policies designed to build political careers at the expense of our civil liberties. These laws are all animated by the same dangerous ideology that has long been used to rationalize discrimination and violence against LGBTQ people: That we are a “contagion” whose “spread” can only be stopped by wielding the power of government to censor us out of society. This utterly absurd argument is peddled alongside promises to “protect the children” from us in an effort to force us back into that makeshift closet.
The demonization of LGBTQ people isn’t new. Whether it was the police raids that led to the Stonewall Riots or the HIV/AIDS crisis that fueled the ACT UP movement, this community has had its back against the wall countless times before. And at each pivotal point in history, we blazed a new path forward. We willed a better, more inclusive future into existence by sharing our stories unapologetically and choosing radical love over the ferocious hate threatening to consume us.
In the wake of the tragedy at Pulse seven years ago, Orlando faced a similar critical choice. We could succumb to the TV pundits. We could beat the drums of war. Or we could choose love. We could embody the spirit of Pulse itself, unapologetically becoming a city that dares everyone to dance as if no one is watching. We chose the latter. We chose love over hate.
When I left home in search of a place to belong, I didn’t expect to fall in love with a new community. I never thought I’d watch that community traverse the flames of militarized hatred. And I couldn’t have imagined that our struggle to put the pieces back together might demonstrate to a weary nation that when hate tries to demonize our neighbors, terrorize them into submission, and tear us apart at the seams, there is another path. We simply must choose to walk it together.”
Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film Paris Is Burning- Deleted Scenes & Outtakes
Paris is Burning & The Tragic Story of Venus Xtravaganza
The House of Impossible Beauties, by Joseph Cassara
This was my choice for Best Novel of 2018, of which I wrote in review; A marvelous and beautiful debut novel, which poses fundamental questions regarding identity and the struggle for its ownership, and of the shaping forces of the families we have chosen and the ones imposed on us. To whom are we responsible for who we are, if not ourselves?
Strange and unknown remains the Undiscovered Country, as Shakespeare called the future, for it is a thing of relative and ambiguous truths, ephemeral and in constant motion and processes of change, and limitless possibilities of becoming. “An undiscovered country whose bourne no travelers return—puzzles the will”, as the line in Hamlet goes, in reference to death and what may lie beyond the limits of human being and knowing.
But it applies equally to the myriads of futures from which we must choose, shaped by our histories and systems of being human together as imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle and by our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value.
The emergence of the Autonomous Zones as a spontaneous adaptation to universal conditions of unequal power and brutal repression by carceral states of force and control was in part an echo and reflection of the Occupy Movement which began in New York’s Zuccotti Park on September 17 2011; by October nearly a thousand cities in 82 nations and in 600 American communities had ongoing and sustained sister protests and Occupy movements. The Black Lives Matter movement began in July of 2013 in protest against the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, and in 2020 with the death of George Floyd ignited the Summer of Fire; some 26 million Americans joined protests in 200 cities, joined by sister protests in two thousand cities in sixty nations. The Autonomous Zones were a prodigy of the harmonic convergence of these two global movements of social justice, as shaped by influences of the #metoo antipatriarchal movement and Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strike and other global ecological movements.
In the Autonomous Zones global protest movements against white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, tyranny and state terror both as democracy movements and as the police abolition movement, recombined and integrated as an agenda of revolutionary struggle against systems of unequal power.
And as we brought a Reckoning for systemic evils, epigenetic trauma, and the legacies of our histories, we also sought to launch humankind on a total revisioning of our being, meaning, and value, and the reimagination and transformation of the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Here is a journal entry of mine speaking as a witness of history to that time of revolutionary struggle and liberation; as I wrote in my post of June 11 2020, Utopia Now: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone; Marvels and jubilation in the streets, a carnival of transgressions of the Forbidden and masquerades of possible identities and futures of becoming human, anarchy and chaos and joy, running amok and being ungovernable, and the frightening of the horses; come and dance with us, America. Come find your heart and be free.
Whosoever remains unconquered is free. For each of us who defies injustice and tyranny, who resists subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement, who questions, mocks, and challenges authority, becomes an agent of Liberty who cannot be silenced, and who passes the torch of freedom as an uncontrollable catalyst of change to everyone with whom we interact, and thereby can never be truly defeated.
Each of us who in resistance becomes Unconquered and a bearer of Liberty are also become a Living Autonomous Zone, and this is the key to our inevitable victory. We ourselves are the power which state terror and tyranny cannot conquer.
The people of Seattle have answered brutal repression and police violence, an attempt to break the rebellion against racial injustice and hate crime enacted by the police throughout America and the world led by Trump and his white supremacist terrorists both within the police as a fifth column and operating in coordination with deniable forces like the gun-toting militias now visible everywhere, by storming the citadel of city government with waves of thousands of citizens demanding the right to life regardless of the color of our skin.
The people have seized control of six city blocks, including the police precinct and City Hall, and established the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, a name which rings with history and reflects the Paris Commune and the Italian Anarcho-Syndicalists of the 1920s, Rojava in Syria and Exarcheia in Athens, but was directly modeled on the ideals, methods, and instruments of the Occupy Movement founded in New York’s Wall Street.
Such beautiful resistance by those who will not go quietly to their deaths. To all those who tilt at windmills; I salute you.
Let us take back our government from our betrayers, and our democracy from the fascist tyranny of blood, faith, and soil which has attempted to steal our liberty and enslave us with divisions of exclusionary otherness.
When the people have reclaimed the government of which they are co-owners and this new phase of protest, a movement to occupy City Hall in defiance of tyranny, has seized every seat of power in the nation and restored democracy to America, we can begin the reforging of our society on the foundation of equality and racial justice, and of our universal human rights.
Let us join together in solidarity and restore America as a free society of equals, and liberate all the nations of the world now held captive by the Fourth Reich.
There can be but one reply to fascism and state terror; Never Again.
As written by Kate Yoder in Salon; “The year 2020 seems to be drawn straight from the plot of some discarded dystopian novel — a book that never got published because it sounded too far-fetched. Not only is there a pandemic to contend with, unemployment nearing levels last seen in the Great Depression, and nationwide protests against police brutality, but it’s all happening in the same year Americans are supposed to elect a president.
Amid the chaos and tear gas, some people see a chance to scrap everything and start over, a first step toward turning their visions for a better world into reality. In Seattle, protesters in one six-block stretch of Capitol Hill, a neighborhood near downtown, have created a community-run, police-free zone, recently renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, CHOP. It’s a scene of masked crowds, vibrant signs and street art, a “no cop co-op” giving away food and supplies, and newly planted community gardens. In Minneapolis, volunteers turned a former Sheraton hotel into a “sanctuary” offering free food and hotel rooms — until they got evicted.
“We’re seeing a new resurgence of utopianism,” said Heather Alberro, an associate lecturer of politics at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom who studies radical environmentalists and utopian thought.
Problems like climate change, the widening gap between the rich and everybody else, and racial inequality gives many the sense that they’re living through one giant unprecedented crisis. And these combined disasters create “the exact conditions that give rise to all sorts of expressions” of utopian thinking, Alberro said. From broad ideas like the Green New Deal — the climate-jobs-justice package popularized by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — to Seattle’s “autonomous zone,” people are offering up new plans for how the world could operate. Whether they came from literature or real-life experiments, these idealistic efforts can spur wider cultural and political change, even if they falter.
Based on President Donald Trump’s tweets about Seattle’s CHOP (or Fox News websites’ photoshopped coverage of the protest) you’d picture pure chaos, with buildings afire and protesters running amok. The reality was more like people sitting around in a park, screening movies like “13th,” and making art. It’s a serious protest too, with crowds gathered for talks about racism and police brutality in front of an abandoned police precinct. The protesters’ demands include abolishing the Seattle Police Department, removing cops from schools, abolishing juvenile detention, and giving reparations to victims of police violence.
“The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone #CHAZ is not a lawless wasteland of anarchist insurrection — it is a peaceful expression of our community’s collective grief and their desire to build a better world,” Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan tweeted last week.
The protest zone goes by many names: Originally called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, it was later rebranded as CHOP. The barricaded area, which spans from Cal Anderson Park into nearby streets, is part campground, part block party. Tourists wander through, snapping photos of the street art.
A week earlier, protests in Cal Anderson Park, sparked by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, were met by police officers spraying rubber bullets, mace, and tear gas. Then, last week, the police abandoned the area, and the protesters declared it their own, turning the “Seattle Police Department” into the “Seattle People Department” with a bit of spraypaint.
The CHAZ follows a long history of anti-capitalist experiments that reimagined the way the world was run. In 1871, the people of Paris, sick of oppression, rose up to take control of their city for a two-month stint. The Paris Commune canceled debt, suspended rent, and abolished the police, filling the streets with festivals. The French government soon quashed their experiment, massacring tens of thousands of Parisians in “The Bloody Week.” Even though it was short-lived, the Paris Commune inspired revolutionary movements for the next 150 years.
In 2011, Occupy Wall Street protestors took over New York City’s Zuccotti Park for two months to highlight the problems of income inequality. Their encampment offered free food, lectures, books, and wide-ranging discussions. The radical movement ended up changing the way Americans talked, giving them a new vocabulary — the “99 percent” and “1 percent” — and its concerns about income inequality went on to mold the priorities of the Democratic Party.
Alberro compared Seattle’s CHOP to a community of 300 environmental activists in western France who set up camp at a site earmarked for a controversial new airport starting in 2008. One of many ZADs (zones à défendre) that have sprung up in France, the community ended up being not just a place to protest the airport, but to take a stand against what protesters saw as the underlying problems — capitalism, inequality, and environmental destruction. (The government ended up shelving plans for the airport in 2018). “The point of these autonomous zones is not only to create these micro exemplars of better worlds,” Alberro said, “but also to physically halt present forces of destruction” — whether that’s an airport or, in the case of Capitol Hill, how police treat black people.
Seattle has a lengthy history of occupations and political demonstrations tracing back to the Seattle General Strike in the early 1900s. The Civil Rights era brought sit-ins and marches. Indigenous protesters occupied an old military fort in 1970 and negotiated with the city to get 20 acres of Discovery Park. Two years later, activists occupied an abandoned elementary school in Beacon Hill, demanding that it be turned into a community center (now El Centro de la Raza).
And it might not be a coincidence that the new protest zone appeared on the West Coast, often portrayed in literature as an “ideal place” to set up utopian communities, Alberro said. For instance, the book “Ecotopia,” published in 1975 by Ernest Callenbach, depicted a green society — complete with high-speed magnetic-levitation trains! — formed when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the United States. The book went on to become a cult novel, influencing the environmental movement’s focus on local food, public transportation, and renewable energy.
Ecotopia isn’t exactly an ideal parallel for the current wave of protests, as its utopia was white. Callenbach envisioned a segregated society where black people opted to live in the less affluent “Soul City.” Still, it’s apparent that some of its other messages live on. Alberro has talked to many “radical” environmental protesters for her research, and most of them haven’t read any of the green utopian books she asks about. But they repeat some of the ideas and phrases from that literature nearly “word for word” when describing the changes they want to see in the world.
Though Seattle’s protest zone is focused on racial oppression, not environmental destruction, Alberro sees a similar impulse behind all these projects. “Many activists would argue that it’s all part of the same struggle,” she said, arguing that people can’t successfully take on environmental issues without addressing racism and other socioeconomic problems. “There seems to be a cultural atmosphere that molds these different movements, even though they often don’t come into contact with one another.”
And in the words of those who lived it as interviewed and written by Shane Burley in ROAR and republished by Black Rose Anarchist Federation; “Over the past few weeks we have witnessed one of the largest uprisings in recent US history. The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, brought millions of people in the US and around the world out into the streets in aggressive demonstrations. In cities across the country, police precincts were set on fire, corporate stores looted, and as the police turned their sights on the protests, the numbers only grew.
In Seattle, Washington, confrontations with protesters in a gentrified part of the city known as Capitol Hill led to law enforcement’s retreat from their office. Organizers and community members advanced on the area and transformed this eight-block segment of the neighborhood into a collective space, which they soon called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).
The CHAZ has become the focus of right-wing rage, from the media to the president, as they intimate that this is a terrorist operation controlled by brutal anarchist cells. Photos, videos, testimonies from the inside the CHAZ paint a very different picture, communicating something closer to other occupations (Occupy movement?) where people moved from simple protests to experimenting in living differently.
Hundreds of people are putting in the labor to keep things like a medical clinic, a café, concerts and speakers, a community garden, and other resources into a stable infrastructure of mutual aid. They have done so with the support of local organizations and even businesses. Now the CHAZ is hitting a point where they are building for the future, discussing differences in direction and priorities, and how they are going to navigate the negotiation between immediate reforms and more revolutionary aims.
I spoke with two organizers of the CHAZ about what drew them there, how it has been working, and where they hope to go with the project. Both are using pseudonyms, one going by Officer CHAZ (OCHAZ) and the other going by Frank Ascaso (FA), who also organizes with the Black Rose / Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation. These organizers were interviewed separately from one another and were combined here into one conversation.
We’re in one of the largest rebellions in the last fifty years. How did you get involved in the demonstrations and the autonomous project that became the CHAZ?
OCHAZ: It’s been a long road to the breaking point. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths really pushed us over the edge this time. I knew I could no longer live with myself if I remained silent and complacent. I became infused with a burning desire to take action, so I rushed to the front lines of the protest marches in Seattle at the earliest opportunity. It was the least I could do, but quite literally a step in the right direction. Everybody’s got a unique story to tell about their journey to Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), but for me, it was the ecstasy of finally taking a firm stand against systemic oppression. That feeling became such an intense high, that I never wanted to come down. I am addicted to justice, and it’s one drug that I will never give up.
FA: Networks of activists and organizers here in Seattle had been having discussions as Minneapolis and other cities had ignited in protests and riots. There’s a long history of anti-police organizing here with movements to block the expansion of a youth detention center and a so-called “police bunker,” an expansion to a police facility in the northern part of the city. So in those networks people started talking about what we could do here in solidarity with Minneapolis. So people started planning protests for that weekend. And a whole bunch of various groups, from anarchists to church and pacifist groups to the anti-police coalitions, started planning their own thing. The first weekend of protest there were a half dozen different calls to action, and that’s when the riots started here as well. So that’s when I showed up, in those early days.
How does the CHAZ coordinate with the rest of the city’s protest movement?
FA: I would say they are a piece of it, but I would not call it the center [of the movement]. This moment around Black lives is incredible and every group is taking pretty dramatic action. And I would say that is continuing. There are non-profit groups leading marches, there are church groups leading marches, there’s the anti-prison and abolition groups leading marches, and a lot of those are happening outside the space. They were happening before and they were using their own infrastructure and resources to make them happen, and that is still happening.
For example, there was recently a march of 60,000 people between two of the largest parks in Seattle, which, from what I could tell, had little connection to the CHAZ. There was also a children’s march, which seemed to have little connection to the CHAZ. That said, there are things being planned in the autonomous space. So, for example, last night (June 14) I participated in a protest that marched out of the autonomous zone, a Black Lives Matter march, to challenge the police and occupy streets elsewhere. People are planning things from the autonomous space too, but this moment is so dramatic and diverse that lots of things are happening outside of it too.
What was the process by which the zone was first opened up and established? What were the protests like before its formation?
OCHAZ: As with any social movement, it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact origin. The events leading up to the formation of CHAZ have been so surreal and chaotic at times that I’m not sure whether I’ll ever fully understand what happened to get us here. But I want it to be clear that the “Regime” [CHAZ-lingo for the Seattle Police Department] struck first. They’ve been killing us for decades. For as long as we can remember, the people of Capitol Hill have begged the City Council to clean up their mess, but they never listen. They’re too busy sucking Jeff Bezos’s dick to even glance at us. Our so-called political “leaders” will never miss a wink of sleep over the dead bodies of marginalized folks piling up in the streets, so now we’re going to give them something to really lose sleep over.
But even when we protested “the right way,” by peacefully marching, did they listen then? No. They sent their Seattle Police Department (SPD) goon squad after us, treated us like we were criminals—worse than criminals, because at least criminals get a trial. We were more like animals to them. During the march, I watched as dozens of my comrades were brutalized by riot police, simply for demanding reform and racial equity. We tried safe civil disobedience, but the “good ol’ boys” at the SPD never let us down when it comes to the level of violence we’ve come to expect from them.
FA: There had been a week and a half of steady confrontations in that space. Every day from maybe six or seven o’clock in the evening to midnight or one in the morning, pretty regular confrontations. People were pretty exhausted, actually, by the time the police withdrew from that space. Definitely, lots of people showed up that night, but a lot of folks went home early. So when the declaration of the autonomous zone came out after midnight, a lot of people were not there for the evening — I wasn’t there either.
How did the crowd take the space?
OCHAZ: There wasn’t any particular tactic or method, we just… took it. It was ours anyway, as far as we were concerned. Putting up those barriers just felt like the most natural thing we could ever do to protect ourselves. When shit hit the fan at the protest, we switched to auto-pilot, no thought required, just the pure energy of the crowd directing our concentrated motion. We moved as a unit, as if we all shared the same body and mind in the heat of that moment.
The last thing I remember was facing off against the cops down on Pine Street. Recalling the black bloc tactic, we used our bodies to create a wall, but I never expected one of them to run around and sucker-punch my good pal, Dikembe, who was standing off to the side. “Big D” wasn’t even part of our bloc, just an innocent bystander, and that was the last straw for me. I snapped. I knew the bloc needed me, but D was in trouble. I couldn’t desert him even if it meant putting my own safety at risk. I basically blacked out in rage at that point, and when I came to, I was waking up in CHAZ.
All I know is that our group had rushed the line and eventually took the East Precinct. The cops got pushed back, and our barriers went up. My boy Dikembe was injured pretty bad, but that didn’t stop him from spraying the first of many tags at the border crossing in bright bold letters for the whole world to see: “CHAZ.” To the cops, that tag was a threat to back off. To us, it meant freedom.
FA: That whole day was so weird. There had been clashes with the police every night. The mayor promised not to use tear gas, but the very next night the police used tear gas anyway. The day after that, someone got shot, and the following day the police withdrew. They made this dramatic announcement in the afternoon with the police chief saying they were going to withdraw from the East Precinct.
I think there was a lot of anxiety and confusion about what to do. There was some kind of speculation that the police were withdrawing as a set-up to have people attack the precinct and break windows or burn it down so the police would have an excuse to say how bad the protesters were. This was a rumor. That evening when people got to the space, they got right up to the building and there was hesitation about doing anything. People weren’t sure, “what should we do? Do we attack it? Do we just keep the protest in the space?” And those conversations were going on throughout that day and into the night.
Then there were rumors that Proud Boys were in the area, also totally unconfirmed and probably untrue. So then people were thinking about maybe defending the space. What if other fascists come to attack the space? And my understanding is that out of those conversations came to declare an autonomous zone.
What is the idea behind the CHAZ? What is an “autonomous zone?”
FA: Autonomous zones have a long history, likely going back to the Paris Commune in which the French government refused to defend the city against a Prussian siege, a foreign siege. The people of Paris just kind of took over the mechanisms of the city and thought “we can run this better in our own interests. It turns out we don’t need you protecting us, we can take care of ourselves perfectly fine.” And they sort of restructured the city on a radically new democratic principle, a much more directly democratic form of organization.
And since then there have been a whole series of similar popular democratic actions to reclaim space and infrastructure. To run it in the interests of people instead of the police, business or military. So I see this as part of that tradition and a part of that lineage. And one of the things that is most beautiful about this space is that it is such a clear message in this moment when police can literally not stop killing people in the streets.
This past weekend there was just another Black person killed by the police in Atlanta. The autonomous zone is saying “Hey, it turns out we actually don’t need you. We can run our neighborhoods safely without policing. We can run them in much more humane interests without policing.” That political message is pretty clear and pretty strong out of this particular occupation.
OCHAZ: CHAZ is living proof that a world without police is possible. When we say, “Defund the police,” we mean exactly what that sounds like. Cops only create more problems than they try to solve. Especially for undocumented immigrants, BIPOC, WOC, trans, queer and other marginalized communities who simply do not have the privilege of being protected when they call the police for help (or when the police are called on them by some tone-deaf “Karen,” you know the type).
For us marginalized folks, any minor interaction with the police can be a death sentence. CHAZ is the antidote to all that. Our emphasis on restoration over retribution is a major part of the guiding ethos and driving force behind CHAZ. “Autonomous” to us means autonomy from the SPD’s boot on our collective neck. We don’t need the police, because we look out for each other instead. Call it what you want: a collective, a cooperative, a commune. Above of all, CHAZ is a family.
What is day-to-day life like there right now? Is it just a protest space, or are you rebuilding everyday community structures?
FA: It’s pretty interesting because the first day after the autonomous zone was declared there was almost no infrastructure in place yet. I think the call surprised a lot of people. In the next couple of days, hundreds of people came to start and set those up. Now the space feels like a sort of city within the city. It’s got a medical station. It’s got a pretty sophisticated and abundant food distribution. It has community check-ins around disputes and disturbances. It’s got a discussion space; a café space called “the decolonial café.” A community garden, informational tents, and informational sessions with free literature, nightly film screenings and a band stand with nightly performances from different bands.
So there is a ton of activity going on there, and the space itself feels very vibrant and exciting. It does feel like a festival of resistance. And people can plug into movement spaces and have organizing conversations and plan the next action. Or they can think about how to design the garden and the purpose of a community garden, things like that. To me it’s pretty incredible.
In the first few days there was no structure, by the end of the first week people initiated a general assembly model in the middle of the afternoon. The first one was more like a “speak-out,” people talking about their experiences and processing a lot of stuff. A lot of trauma from the police violence of the previous weeks. Black voices were highlighted in their day-to-day struggles with the police. After that the general assembly turned into a “working group” model with report-backs, breaking away to work on things like logistics and then coming back to the space.
I don’t know if they have been able to make any collective decisions and I don’t know if they really have a process for that, whether it is voting, majority voting, or consensus. But it is definitely a space for the whole zone to talk to each other.
OCHAZ: Well it’s certainly nothing like the way it’s portrayed on right-wing propaganda channels like Fox News. We don’t have guarded “checkpoints,” or any of that rubbish. Our borders are open to anyone who stands in solidarity with Black lives, and anyone who seeks safety and refuge from police harassment. Some people drive into CHAZ from out of state to lend a helping hand, while others live and work completely within the boundary. Everyone who comes here with an open mind sees a flourishing environment filled with boundless love.
It feels like walking through a lucid dream 24 hours a day. We use the park to host recreational activities, such as free movie nights, stand-up comedy shows and dance parties. We have local farmers growing crops, artists painting murals to raise social awareness and wholesome activities for kids and families. There are friendly faces everywhere, like our resident 63-year-old street musician, “Papa Jacoby,” who teaches authentic West African djembe music with a focus on cultural sensitivity.
Everybody is having a lot of fun in CHAZ, but we also can’t forget why we are here and who we are fighting for. That’s why we make sure to hold regular classes on the history of racism, strategies for decolonization and the destructive legacy of whiteness. We’re working hard to unlearn systems of racism, and create a place in CHAZ where for once in the history of America, white folks take a back seat to make room for the unheard voices of Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples.
Everywhere you look in CHAZ, you will find a vibrant, thriving community where every citizen understands that Black Lives Matter, and they mean it with all their hearts. I’ve never seen something so beautiful that it actually makes me cry, but that pretty much sums up CHAZ for you.
How are mutual aid projects supporting the Zone to continue?
OCHAZ: Robust mutual aid programs are key to CHAZ’s success, as well as harm reduction methodologies wherever possible. The people organize themselves around community needs. Our “No-cop co-op” doesn’t accept any cash — anything a citizen of CHAZ needs is provided free of charge from the co-op, because we believe in people over profits. Our kitchen distributes food to the homeless night and day, and we’re not just talking cans of cold beans here. In CHAZ, anyone who is hungry can receive a full, nutritious and locally-sourced hot meal, and we’ll even top it off with a scoop of ice cream and some of those little Keebler mint cookies for dessert.
Around the corner, we have a free childcare center to take some of the stress off working women of color, along with a “no questions asked” medical care facility to anyone in need. Undocumented immigrants in particular, who live outside the CHAZ, are often afraid to see a doctor because revealing their personal information could bring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to their doorstep. CHAZ ensures that our immigrant comrades have nothing to fear when they go in for a check-up, by providing a viable alternative to Big Pharma and other western imperialist medical institutions.
Another pride and joy of the Autonomous Zone is our cooperative agricultural program. All citizens are welcome to grow and share crops in our garden area, but of course we have designated the most fertile plot of land to Indigenous peoples, so they can take ownership over what is rightfully theirs without intrusion. To those who would have never believed the people of America could break away from capitalism and say goodbye to the oligarchy: think again — the CHAZ works, and we’re expanding it with even more socially-minded programs every day.
FA: So the mutual aid group in Seattle that formed just as the pandemic hit has been very involved organizing the autonomous zone space. Setting up the food and some of the other distribution resources they used for Covid they have been able to use in this space. So that’s been really great. Then I just think the idea of mutual aid and supporting each other in the space is also a big part of this. So the “No cop co-op,” where people are just providing whatever they have and distributing it freely to people who need it. And the kind of food donations that are coming in are all part of that notion.
Some people are putting in tremendous amounts of work, way more than I am. The medical team is incredible. They have been battling the police for weeks and treating people who have been injured by the police very, very seriously. Their ability to get medical supplies and distribute them to people in need is really incredible.
What do you think about the portrayal in right-wing media? Is it really different from your own experience?
FA: The CHAZ really does feel like a festive and joyous space. There have been lots of efforts to discredit the space from the Seattle Police Department or right-wing media, even just mainstream media.
Are the police or right-wing vigilantes trying to get into the zone?
FA: The police have re-entered the space. The precinct was left completely upended. It was open, unlocked and completely accessible. In the first couple of days, no one went in. There was still that hesitancy about getting into the East Precinct. People were still unsure of what to do. And after the first couple of days the police came in and locked it and fenced it off.
From what I know, that is the only time the police have come into that space and other than that other city services are responding to the area. The mayor has directed the Fire Department, the Department of Transportation and the Parks Department to be the ones who come to that area. So I haven’t seen any police there since they came in the one time.
OCHAZ: The fascists are always on our ass, predictable as usual. Unfortunately, it’s just something we have to expect and figure out how to deal with the best we can. The cops have left us alone for the most part, running scared ever since we exiled them from the Zone. But there is definitely a looming cloud of right-wing assholes threatening to swoop in and destroy what we’ve created here. What those assholes don’t realize, is that we are watching them like a hawk. We’ll never just lie down and take it, or let them hurt even a single hair on our people’s bodies. Sure, we’ve received threats from cops, “patriots,” biker gangs, you name it. But CHAZ has a message to all you bootlickers out there: we’ve got your number. Fuck around and find out.
How are you thinking about the CHAZ in the long term? Are you thinking of this extending into weeks and months?
OCHAZ: I’m trying my best to not get blinded by optimism. We still have a long way to go to achieve racial equity. There’s a lot of work to do to expand our reach, secure our infrastructure, and build up the kind of community that works for everybody, not just whites and white-passing POC. Those among us who come from a place of privilege are still struggling to avoid centering themselves, because dismantling the effects of racism and colorism isn’t just a one-time gig — it’s a full time job.
That’s why we are putting up daily reminders, so that the very roads we walk on will declare loud and clear what we all stand for. Little by little, we’re covering every building in sight with tributes to George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and others. We are de-gentrifying the city, renaming streets that were previously named after colonizers and diligently taking down any and all lingering remnants of our country’s racist past, so we can move on to a better future. We are setting our sights high, toward full self-sustainability, so that we no longer rely on donations from the outside to keep us going. The next thing on my list is to get a greenhouse going, to cultivate crops that will provide a wider range of vegan options for the kitchen.
FA: That’s a great question. When I was there yesterday, it seemed entrenched to me. People have uprooted part of the park and planted community gardens there. There’s a tent city, protesters kind of reminiscent of Occupy. All the mutual aid projects I was mentioning, the medics and the food distribution and things like that, are really well set up. The infrastructure they have is impressive. So it looks like it has staying power, to me.
What will come of that, I am unsure. There are several groups that have issued demands, some of which are aligned and some of which are a little different. We don’t know yet what they will be able to leverage from the city and what the end goal is, and I think a lot of those conversations are still emerging in the general assembly sessions that are happening and conversations in the space. But at this point it has staying power and I don’t imagine it going away anywhere anytime soon.
How have you worked with Indigenous tribes in the area?
OCHAZ: Every decision made in CHAZ comes to fruition with the full acknowledgement and understanding that this land belongs to Indigenous peoples first, full stop. Tribal needs remain a top priority in CHAZ to ensure that they get the representation they deserve, which had previously been stripped away from them by the old regime. We always take special care and consideration to work beneath local tribal leaders for approval. One of the first things we did when we established CHAZ was consult with a Duwamish Chief and his spiritual advisor. We wouldn’t dream of doing anything without their blessing.
Why are you personally so passionate about it?
FA: One, is just being concerned for Black lives, which is part of where it came from and where it started. I think where it has to end is the recognition of Black humanity, Black integrity and Black dignity. Also, at the moment we can try to rethink and radically reimagine what our cities can look like. This is one of those moments. Our budgets, at a local level, so favor militarism and violence. And that’s true at a national level too. This points to the idea that when we organize ourselves to meet human needs what emerges is beautiful constructions of art, new forms of music, new forms of literature, new political ideas, new infrastructures to provide medical care and food for each other. Those are the priorities that we should be emphasizing, and the autonomous zone states that really clearly.
OCHAZ: Simply put, Capitol Hill is my home. Our people are sick to death of being pushed around by the regime on a daily basis. I can’t sit back and watch my people be tormented by the “thin blue line” anymore. We have our own “line” up on Cap Hill: the rainbow line. And our line isn’t thin — it’s thick as fuck, and you better not cross it.”
“A Day in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”
Meet the Activists Inside Seattle’s Police-Free Zone
Watch “The TRUTH on the ground inside CHAZ CHOP Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone Seattle Washington
Peter Lamborn Wilson – T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (voice podcast)
Terrible and strange is our undiscovered country; both of myriad possible futures and of our imaginal nations, and all a ground of struggle and a Wilderness of Mirrors, lies, illusions, falsification and rewritten histories, silence and erasure, alternate realities and Rashomon Gate Events.
All of our creations of human being, meaning, and value, and we along with them, ephemeral and in constant processes of change. And under existential threats by systems of oppression and unequal power, which include fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness.
To make an idea about kinds of people is an act of violence.
No matter where you begin with ideas of authorized national identity, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
When those who would enslave us come for us, as they always do, let them find not a people subjugated by learned helplessness nor divided by hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, but a United Humankind unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of January 21 2024, In Germany And Throughout Europe, the Return of Fascism Creates Its Own Resistance As Polarization Begins the Fracture of the State; An ancient terror emerges from the shadows to consume us all once again, as Nazi revivalists in Italy, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and elsewhere join their American counterparts in a vast and ambiguous multifront war against democracy, human rights, and western civilization.
But the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance, as we have witnessed this past week in the mass actions against the Alternative für Deutschland fascist party in Germany, and a hero has risen to defend our humanity, the magnificent Carola Rackete.
This we celebrate, but must also give caution of the dangers of ideological fracture and the polarization of the state which makes a wishbone of nations by their most extreme elements. We can study its effects and consequences in real time as they unfold before us in America, and in elections globally.
It is also recapitulating the ideological fracture and division of the Social Democratic Party of Germany which removed the only blocking force for the rise of fascism; this process also destroyed the Students For A Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and other organizations of liberation struggle in America, under constant assault from the F.B.I. and other institutions of state terror and counter-revolution which used assassinations and infiltration and subversion to remove leadership and set group members against each other with false rumors of disloyalty.
Such counter-revolution waged against the liberty of the people as theft of citizenship is a predictable phase of revolutionary struggle, and there is but one reply to this strategy of marginalization, division, silencing and erasure, dehumanization and the repression of dissent; solidarity.
Let us stand with those who stand with us, and with those who share our interests in allyship. Come what may.
Because we are now waging the Last Stand Against Fascism, among all humankind and throughout the world, and the price of our failure is too terrible to contemplate.
Let us give to fascism and tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of September 27 2022, A Rising Tide of Fascism in Europe; With the electoral victory of the alt-right in Italy, a rising tide of fascism now threatens all of Europe; Nazi revivalism has a staging ground and launchpad for the reconquest of Europe in Orban’s Hungary, LePen’s Nationalists in France and Vox in Spain are the unquestionable opposition to their governments, Sweden just elected a similar party of Nazi origins, and the new government of England has at best turned back the clock to the ideology and policies of the Thatcher era and at worst displays alarming cues of fascist dog-whistles which portend far worse horrors and depravities to come.
Such are the times we live in, wherein an enemy we have fought for a century returns to seize its birthplace at the centennial of Mussolini’s March on Rome, as European political and social systems and institutions destabilize and begin transformational change from both the mechanical failures of their internal contradictions as terminal stage capitalism consumes the worlds resources and centralizes wealth and power to hegemonic elites, oligarchs which have become a quasi-aristocracy, and the carceral states of force and control which they create. Civilization itself is falling, but will such change be catastrophic or a rebirth of humankind as a free society of equals wherein democracy and our universal human rights are victorious; comes now an age of tyranny or Liberty?
Where do we go from here?
As I wrote in my post of September 23 2021, When Things Fall Apart and the Center Cannot Hold, Embrace Change; Transformative change and the forces of Chaos lie at the heart of our universe, a reality and medium of being characterized by illusion and impermanence, as its central motive principal.
Chaos is a forge of creation which endlessly generates contradictions and paradoxes as the forking points of universes, of multiplicities and relative truths, a wellspring of life and the realization of unknowns but also of our darkness born of attachment to externalities and that which is by its nature ephemeral and transitory, and moreover a world filled with falsifications of ourselves, echoes and reflections like the distorted images in funhouse mirrors which multiply into infinity as a theft of our uniqueness and our souls.
The trauma of death and of life disruptive change, and our immersion in a sea of grief, despair, and terror; when the anchorages and truths we cling to have shifted and cast us adrift into topologies of the unknown, when we dare to look behind the curtain and the figures of our faith are revealed to be lies and instruments of our subjugation, when these existential threats and crises of hope, trust, and faith combine as they have this past year with the loneliness of our modern pathology of disconnectedness, how shall we answer our nothingness?
To this I say, how can we not embrace Chaos and transformative change, when it is endless and ongoing, and challenges us to live in the eternal now? Why fix and react wholly to its negative aspects as death and destruction, when it offers us equally possibilities of liberation from order and authority, self-creation, autonomy, and unknowns to explore, and a space of free creative play?
Here is Yeats great and visionary poem The Second Coming, written in the wake of three successive mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Here we must ask the great question of Lenin and Tolstoy, which set up the current paradigm of our civilization as dyadic revolutionary and conservative forces; What is to be done?
As I wrote in my post of July 17 2023, The World is Mad. And It is On Fire;
The world is mad. And it is on fire.
These existential threats are interdependent faces of a single problem, albeit a Gordian Knot of complex, nuanced, relative and shifting truths, meanings, and values; unequal power.
And both sets of causes and effects which chase each other round in recursion, like the iconic Gahan Wilson cartoon of gleeful devils in pursuit of each other entitled One Damn Thing After Another, are not symptoms of natural processes of change but consequences of political decisions we have made about how to be human with each other.
Extinction and the destruction of earth’s ecosystems and ability to support life is parallel and interdependent with the global subversion of democracy and the dawn of an age of tyrants and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
We cannot work toward solutions to extinction and fascist tyranny separately; they must be taken together as a whole.
I write now in reference to an article by Robin McKie in The Guardian entitled, “World experiences hottest week ever recorded and more is forecast to come: There is a good chance that the month of July will see the highest global temperatures for (the past) 120,000 years.“
Yes, but not for the millennium to follow; it just becomes unsurvivable from here. What creatures in some distant future will sift the dead sands of our world for clues to what doomed it, and why?
It will never be this good again, and one day humankind will become nothing and unremembered.
Because we have failed to purge our destroyers from among us, to seize power and control of our destiny from those who would enslave us and steal our future; elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege now locked in a death spiral of terminal stage capitalism as war on nature and subjugation and commodification of our labor which creates benefits for the few who can buy our time at the cost of dehumanization of the many and the extinction of us all.
We must abandon our addiction to power and its ephemeral, transitory, ultimately meaningless and destructive material signs and vanities, and our reliance on fossil fuels as a strategic resource of dominion and hegemony which is consuming us like a poison or cancer, and the whole twisted project and inverted values of civilization not as a conversation and questioning of ourselves and our universe but as systems of oppression and control of nature; and instead embrace the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
Max, trailer for the film with John Cusack
The Master of Go, by Yasunari Kawabata, Edward G. Seidensticker (Translator)
July 1 2023 In Marseille and Throughout France, a Test of Competing Futures and Ideas of Human Being, Meaning, and Value; A Free Society of Equals Versus Fascisms of Blood, Faith, and Soil and Liberty Versus a Carceral State of Force and Control
April 20 2024 Anniversary of My Speech to the Volunteers At Warsaw, and of the Reorganization of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of Ukraine For Liberation Struggle in Russia in the Wake of Our Escape From Mariupol
February 24 2024 Anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine; Symptom, Consequence, and Trigger Event of the Fall of Human Civilization In Recursion
April 25 2024 Liberation Day Italy: Lessons from History for Antifascists, Revolutionaries, Truthtellers, and Bearers of the Promethean Fire Which Is Democracy
August 23 2023 Anniversary of the 1922 Founding of Antifa: the Barricades of Parma and the Antifascist Resistance of Guido Picelli and L’Ardito del Popolo
February 4 2024 Sinn Féin Victorious in Seizing the Government of Northern Ireland; Hope For a United Ireland Free from British Colonial Rule is Rekindled
February 6 2023 In Greece, Birthplace of Democracy and Our Global Civilization, An Ancient Terror Re-Emerges From the Shadows of Our History Like a Plague of Fear and Hate: the Return of Fascism and Nazi Revivalism With the Golden Dawn
And last, the monster we have escaped at our origin in founding democracy;
Britain
May 6 2023 Britain’s Rituals of Subjugation to King Charles Visited By the Grim Reaper, Foretelling Doom to the Monarchy At the Heart of a Diseased and Leprous Empire
How do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Take a moment to savour with me the indictment of Trump for the crime of espionage. Ahhh, the bliss.
A commentator on MSN’s Eleventh Hour on this night one year ago pronounced the magic words which I hope will awaken our nation from the long nightmare of capture by the Fourth Reich; “I think Trump is done.”
It has been a fairytale from which we may learn many kinds of morals, a story which begins in the 1980 capture of the Republican Party by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement as a fundamentalist theocracy and the Presidency of its figurehead Ronald Reagan, and found its true form in the Presidency of a pedophile rapist and Russian agent who for years slept with a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible.
Here in the trial of Traitor Trump is a morality play which is also a Rashomon Gate of our possible futures, for it is more than a legal last stand of the rule of law and the idea of democracy in America against a rigged electoral process which offers capture of the state to its enemies, but also a trial of democracy in America and of our infiltrated and subverted justice system whose court of ultimate appeal is a Supreme Court which is become a whorehouse.
What is the meaning of the Trump regime in the story of America and our future possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals?
As I wrote in my post of November 3 2020, One Hundred Years of Racist Vote Suppression and White Supremacist Terror: Anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre; This election has seen attempts at vote suppression unknown in our lifetimes; Trumps mission to subvert democracy includes intimidation by calling for armed white supremacists to deny nonwhite citizens access to the polls, an attack on Biden’s campaign caravan by the Trump Train mobile force, failed assassination attempts against Biden and other political figures, sabotage of the postal system, politization of the Justice department, and his farcical declaration of victory before the vote is counted, among his many treasonous crimes.
Today liberty and tyranny play for the soul of America and the freedom of the world.
I spent some time today at a Trump rally trying to defuse a hate crime in the making. A hey rube went up that a rally staged between our local mosque here in Spokane and a Middle Eastern grocery was becoming a violent mob; while others responded as a protection detail and placed themselves with great courage between potential perpetrators and their victims, I blended into the rally to assess and shape its development as an incubator of violence and work to defuse it through dialog and negotiation.
Today these angry young men chose not to allow fear, rage, and hate to master and dehumanize them, nor provoke them into violence which would be the ruin of their lives; what will all of the other angry young men choose tomorrow?
I’d like to believe this incident is atypical and not being played out a thousand times over across America; but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Tyranny weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear as an instrument of subjugation. This we must resist, but unless we speak directly to those fears we cannot heal the divisions of our society which authority has so skillfully manipulated.
In the words of Sigmund Freud, “Civilization begins when we throw words instead of stones.” Sadly, we humans have often chosen stones when words would serve us better.
In all the madness of this election and of the deranged perversions and assaults upon our liberty, equality, truth, and justice of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump’s kleptocracy of state terror and tyranny, we must not forget that though he exploited the flaws of our society to orchestrate the Fall of America and of democracy throughout the world, he did not originate them.
Trump has revealed, tested, and hammered at our flaws, yet we remain unbroken and unconquered. This we should celebrate; in the main we are voting and not shooting, because our faith in one another and in the ideals on which our society is founded remain intact, though the institutions of our government may need radical and revolutionary change.
Nor is there anything new in the threat to democracy of vote suppression; today is the one hundred year anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre, the most terrible incident of racist vote suppression in the history of our nation since the Civil War. What may give us hope now that failed us then is the emerging consensus of racial equality and the mass coalition for racial justice won for us by the Black Lives Matter movement and the heroic citizens who have seized the streets of our cities in an unparalleled months long mass action.
Regardless of the election results, anyone who wishes to actually govern must do so at the head of these protests and not barricaded against the will of the people. This is the true meaning of this years seizure of power by our citizens, and it is a genie which cannot be returned to the prison of its lamp, for each of us is now a Living Autonomous Zone.
As I wrote in my post of November 5 2020. Trump’s Last Coup Attempt and Subversion of Democracy as His Ship of Fools Sinks in Pathetic Failure; As Trump’s Ship of Fools comes apart at the seams and sinks beneath the waves in pathetic failure, our Clown of Terror collapses in infantile tantrums and tries to take democracy down with him, a final gesture of madness and idiocy in his delusional quest to subvert our values and institutions of liberty and seize tyrannical power.
We must never forget how close we came to a repeat of the 1933 German Federal Election that set Hitler on the path to a tyranny of absolute power; this is clearly the most important electoral event in the history of humankind since then, and the two elections are terrifyingly parallel. Trump tried three times to use the Black Lives Matter protests to create fear and legitimize the federal occupation of America under the pretext of re-establishing law and order in an exact duplication of Hitler’s successful strategy using the Reichstag Fire, and failed.
We have escaped the jaws of the Fourth Reich which have held us fast for four years, since the Stolen Election of 2016, while Trump and his cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and plutocratic robber barons have violated everything about America which is noble and true, plundered the public wealth, dehumanized and divided us, sabotaged and subverted the institutions of our freedom, equality, truth, and justice, betrayed our allies and emboldened our foes, lost the American hegemony of global power and privilege and our position as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us never forget the bottomless depravities, treasons, and amoral predation and greed of Trump’s many enablers and conspirators in the Fall of America as we struggle in the years ahead to reclaim our nation and our souls. We must hold them to account, but we must also reimagine our society and the many systemic and structural flaws by which we came to this broken and lost state.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2022, The Greatest Show on Earth: Presenting the January 6 Committee; Tonight our puppets will dance upon the stage of history and our imaginations, while a chiaroscuro of light as truth and democracy versus darkness as fascist tyranny and falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, conspiracy theories and propaganda play for the kingdom of our souls and the fate of America and the world.
Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a prison planet of masters and slaves?
Now begins a great Reckoning, and we shall see.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2021, Treason, Tyranny, and Terror on Trial: As the Second Impeachment of Traitor Trump Begins, I Submit Charges Before the People’s Tribunal of Crimes Against Humanity for Which Trump and His Collaborators Should Now Be On Trial; Among the many crimes against humanity for which Traitor Trump and his collaborators should be on trial but are not yet include the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Mexican and other nonwhite migrants, the concentration camps at our border, the orphaning and torture of children, and the state tyranny and terror of fascist and racist violence as national policy perpetrated by the ICE and Border Patrol components of Homeland Security, forces of repression which are antidemocratic by their nature and which should be abolished as a top priority of the Restoration of America.
Just as villainous and reprehensible is the parallel program of racist police violence and the carceral state to re-enslave Black American citizens and enforce systemic forms of inequality and injustice through state terror, repression of dissent, the force of a militarized police and the counterinsurgency model of policing which has transformed our security services into an army of occupation with primarily political objectives, and the control of pervasive and endemic surveillance and propaganda, lies, illusions, and subversions of the truth.
Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his circus of fools, degenerates, and barbarians, his enablers and collaborators both within the government and his shadow forces rallying under the Confederate and Nazi flags to bring violence and insurrection to our nations capital and to the streets of our cities throughout America, are co-conspirators and instigators in the murders of every Black American killed by police shooting or other racist violence since its authorization by Trump in the wake of Charlottesville.
And every missing child kidnapped by the state and disappeared into what abominable slavery or human trafficking designed in the diseased imagination of Trump and his Epstein buddies we know not of, every migrant of the huddled masses yearning to be free who died in the quest to reach the safety of America because the water caches had been intentionally sabotaged by criminals in the uniform of our nation who were “just following orders” like their counterparts in the SS during the Holocaust, every prisoner who died in custody because they were denied water or medical care; the blood of these and countless other victims of Trump’s narcissistic self-aggrandizement and regime of fascist corruption, racism, and patriarchal sexual terror is on the hands of every Republican who voted for him and fails now in this trial to repudiate him publicly and renounce his works as among those of the devils which he serves.
For in his actions Trump has been not only a foreign agent and Putin’s puppet whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America, but also a slave of Moloch the Seducer, Demon of Lies, in that he is not merely a pathological liar but also an idiot madman who cannot distinguish truth from lies, and who has weaponized his delusions and psychopathy as instruments of our falsification and subjugation in his quest for tyrannical power.
The bizarre and lurid dark fairytales of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, like the charges of the Inquisition and the Nazis which othered witches and Jews on which QAnon is constructed, serves as deflection from Trump’s loathsome perversions and sexual terrorism. What terrors did he conceal behind the beauty pageant, modeling, and human trafficking syndicate he once controlled?
His Stop the Steal campaign is a similar deflection which shields him from inquiry into the Stolen Election of 2016 and the fact that his Presidency was entirely illegitimate and due to Russian interference; it was also the rhetorical and organizational basis of his final attempted coup on January 6, for which he is now being impeached for the second time.
We must cast out the monsters from among us, the racists and white supremacist terrorists, the Gideonite fundamentalists and patriarchs of Christian Identity theocratic fascism and sexual terror, and the amoral forces of repression of those who would enslave us and who enforce hegemonies of elite power and privilege and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness armed with guns and badges and the authority of a government which has been infiltrated by the Fourth Reich, an implacable and relentless enemy which has come just short of seizing us in its jaws.
We must give fascism no second chances.
As I wrote in my post of January 11 2021, Allegories and Symbols of the Fall of America: the January 6 Insurrection as Theatre of Cruelty; Here is an expanded version of my post of January 6 on the Surrealist film Gummo as a satire of the Deplorables who committed treason and armed insurrection against our nation at the command of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump; on Insurrection Day, I offer for your consideration the film Gummo, a sensitive and elegant documentary of the Deplorables from whom the Fourth Reich cadre who staged the assault on Congress were recruited, and an allegory of America.
Bacon? Stapled to the wall, a strip of bacon captures ones attention as a symbol of degeneration and barbarian atavisms of instinct. Werner Herzog signposted it for our attention, and it persists as a symbol of degeneration to an animal state, like a trophy of wealth which is also offal above a bathtub filled with filth as our young protagonist eats spaghetti, his mouth smeared with red like a cannibal; an unforgettable image of the fallen American Dream.
It is the little things which disturb, provoke, and incite us to challenge normality, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, the authorized identities of hegemonic elites and divisions of otherness, and to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden with glorious sins of beatification.
Here as always, all true art defiles and exalts.
We dine in filth on the carrion of others lives and by their labor. This is a Surrealist film intended as an allegory of America and a thematic interrogation of our flaws and dark legacies of injustice, and in large part restates Nietzsche’s critique of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and the idea of the innate depravity of man, an extension of the doctrine of original sin, on which all our law is based, as Nikos Kazantzakis argues in his thesis Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.
So also does the film restate William S. Burroughs’ analysis of capitalism and imperialism as the Algebra of Need, in which drug addiction becomes a metaphor of our addiction to wealth, power, and privilege, an engine of self-destruction, commodification, and dehumanization which feeds on and worsens our most atavistic instincts. Here the flaws of our humanity, fear and rage, vanity and jealousy, the need to dominate and control, become the instruments of our subjugation to hegemonic elites through divisions of exclusionary otherness and to tyrants of force and control and the imperial and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
The film itself is brutally shocking, grotesque, and borders on the obscene; which is why I adore it so. I must warn you that while I like it as an allegory of America’s flaws, and to poke fun at Trump’ s followers, this is brutal and depressing; anyone with suicidal ideation should avoid it. This debut of a heralded wonder of the new age as director was not understood as a critique of state power as a force of dehumanization and regression to an animal state, like that of the Deplorables, and unjustly derailed a promising career; a historical injustice I would like to redeem, because Gummo is a film we need now.
We must see the enemies of Liberty as they truly are, if we are to heal our nation from the primary trauma of fracture they enacted in the January 6 Insurrection.
Both the Insurrection and the film Gummo, like the Trump presidency as a whole, must be interpreted as performances of the Theatre of Cruelty as articulated by Antonin Artaud in his manifesto The Theatre And Its Double. Trump is a figure of the mad emperor from his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist; his performances as a clown of terror, disruption, and sadism were also brilliantly prophesized by Robert Coover in The Public Burning, A Political Fable, written as a satire of Nixon.
Let us see beyond the lies and illusions with which Trump and his Deplorables conceal their subversions of democracy, sabotage of our institutions, and violations of our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s never anything but “just an old humbug.”
As I wrote one year ago today in my post of February 11 2021, Profiles in Treason and Terror; The dishonorable and the mad, the delusional and the sadistic epicures of brutality and perversions, the feral predators hooting and champing before the gallows and guillotines they have brought to murder members of congress with and their partners in uniform unleashing racist terror and gun violence in the streets, and the amoral and predatory grifters and puppetmasters of fascism who have subjugated and enslaved them and stolen their honor and their souls; these are among the idolators of Traitor Trump who conspired, enabled, and collaborated in his plot to subvert democracy and overthrow America in the January 6 Insurrection which attempted to seize Congress and execute its members, which like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch on which it was modeled was intended to decapitate the government of the people in a single stroke.
As details emerge of the internal operations and massive scale of the plot against America, in terms of its central coordination and logistics under direct operational command of Trump and his cabal of conspirators, we are offered not only the spectacle of his aberrance and monstrosity as a mad idiot Clown of Terror drooling and gloating in bestial depravity at the destruction of our values and institutions, the violation of our ideals and the endless suffering he has caused, but of those of his freakish and degenerate followers as well.
The role of deniable forces of the Fourth Reich such as the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, and other organizations of white supremacist terror, and of their partners and infiltration agents within our police, military, and security services, in the January 6 Insurrection is by now well documented and will become more so as the greatest manhunt in our history exposes and entraps more of its perpetrators.
The images we have been witnessing of their assault on liberty during the Second Impeachment trial will be remembered in the history of the world as the true legacy of an era of fascist tyranny under the figurehead of Trump which nearly ended America as a guarantor of global democracy and universal human rights, and had we fallen as the primary domino and a beacon of hope to the world both democracy and human rights would be lost to humankind for unknown ages; the last time civilization fell it took a thousand years for the idea that government derives its authority from its citizens and not by divine right, the idea that no one of us is better than any other by right of birth, and that freedom, equality, truth, and justice are the foundational values of our society and truths of human being and meaning, to reawaken.
And it took centuries of wars and revolutions to do so; how if this time civilization falls not to hordes of barbarians seeking nothing but pillage and destruction, but to regimes of totalitarian force and control?
This is the great contradiction of the forces of repression and subjugation to authority which overran our capitol on January 6; they have been betrayed by their masters in believing they were acting to restore our traditional values and civilization, when in fact they had been weaponized in service to its destruction. Here is a clear and present danger, but also an opportunity; shared motives can be redirected to heal divisions, for they too want an American Restoration. As yet we just disagree on our definition of terms.
When fear is overwhelming and generalized, it can be shaped through submission to authority by lies, illusions, alternate realities, especially when pervasive and endemic surveillance, big data, and propaganda are available as instruments of state control. Authority achieves submission through falsification and the theft of the soul, but this is also the weakness of control which cannot stand against truth, just as the weakness of force is that it is powerless against resistance, disobedience, and refusal to submit.
The election of Biden and Harris, the failure of Trump’s sixth coup attempt on January 6, and the public exposure and shaming of his co-conspirators, collaborators, and enablers before the stage of the world of the Second Impeachment trial; in these events we have witnessed a turning of the tide from fascism to a restoration of democracy.
Once the Reckoning has been achieved, the Restoration must heal our divisions; and this means we must embrace and transform the fear that lives at the heart of hate, and drives the rage, violence, and need to conquer and dominate others which shadows our historical inequalities and injustices.
Fear, Power, Force; such is the Ring of Power which enslaves us, and which we must abandon if we are to become whole.
Herein I offer a previous version of the role of Trump as Angelo in the savage morality play Measure For Measure, a work luminous with Kafka-esque Absurdism, Freudian horror, and a brilliant interrogation of the dynamics of patriarchy and power asymmetry in gender relations in the brilliant review of the Simon Godwin production, critiqued with marvelous insight by Geoffrey O’Brien in the New York Review of Books; entitled “Shakespeare’s Pornography of Power by Geoffrey O’Brien.
“This is the disgusting, stinking world of medieval Vienna. The darkness of this world is absolutely necessary to the meaning of the play…When this play is prettily staged, it is meaningless—it demands an absolutely convincing roughness and dirt.” Thus Peter Brook, who directed a legendary production in 1950, on his vision of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Simon Godwin’s pathway into the play at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn is by way of a corridor through Mistress Overdone’s brothel, along a narrow basement path lined with discreetly closed cubicles and arrays of lubes, dildos, anal plugs, shackles and handcuffs, multicolored condoms, an inflatable sex doll. It is a space dimly lit but by no means medieval, an ingratiatingly tacky emporium more likely to amuse than repel the New York theatergoers passing through.
Given the perennial relevance of the various injustices it circles around—the sexual exploitation and pious hypocrisy and persecution of whistleblowers—Measure for Measure invites updating. The virginal Isabella, realizing that no one will believe her story of victimization against that of the all-powerful Angelo—who has been named regent of Vienna by its absent duke—cries out: “To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, / Who would believe me?”—language so direct it could be lifted from the latest celebrity harassment trial, especially when spoken with the angry clarity that Cara Ricketts gives the line.
Angelo—the moral disciplinarian with a spotless reputation who, once given power, swiftly succumbs to his most predatory impulses—can be envisioned almost too neatly as the sort of high-minded conservative who from time to time finds himself indicted for sexual malfeasance. There is no problem with Thomas Jay Ryan’s performance: Ryan’s delineation of Angelo’s ethical collapse and his half-hearted efforts to justify himself to himself have the barely controlled panic of a public figure realizing how little he knows himself. The regent lies, and the most unhampered truth-telling comes from sex workers and criminals who make no pretense to any credo beyond their own self-interest, as in the unarguable defense of the tapster Pompey, arrested for procuring: “Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live.”
But it’s in the nature of Measure for Measure that whatever contemporary analogies are invoked cannot quite make sense of what happens. In its early stages the play is centered on the three characters whose destinies collide so violently: Angelo, Isabella, and her brother Claudio, who has been condemned for fornication. The scenes in which they confront each other have the amplitude of the tragedies that were to follow: Isabella pleading for Claudio’s life, Angelo demanding her virginity as the price of her brother’s pardon, Claudio overwhelmed by the terror of death, Isabella (in a moment that challenges any audience’s sympathy) denouncing her brother for his weakness of character when she realizes he is willing to see her give in to Angelo’s demands.
The grandeur of these scenes becomes most fully alive through Cara Ricketts’s Isabella, intensely focused, supremely pointed in her argumentation, but with a hint of an absolute commitment to the ideal that helps account for her harsh dismissal of her condemned brother’s terror of dying; an altogether serious person, too serious for the world she finds herself inhabiting, perhaps too serious for the madcap Duke when he proposed to her at the very end of the play. Her reaction to Angelo’s harassment goes beyond physical repulsion into profound moral contempt—expressing itself in angry laughter—at the triviality of his character. Her ultimate forgiveness of Angelo—at a moment when she still believes her brother to have been executed—is dramatically the most difficult of all, couched as it is in a nice legal argument, but Ricketts brought a somber conviction to it.
An audience that wants to take the play as readily grasped satire cannot evade the puzzlements and reversals of judgment that come in its later scenes—reversals of judgment that do not end even when the play is done. Measure for Measure is a perpetual questioning machine, exquisitely functional, set to a relentless tempo, yet a machine that bristles and crackles in its joints with contradiction and discomfort. Harold Bloom has described it as “a comedy that destroys comedy.” It is a comedy that threatens to destroy or at least wear down its own characters by subjecting them to the only mechanism—a mechanism demanding elaborate subterfuges and unlikely changes of heart—by which they can avoid a tragic fate. By the end we might imagine them as the exhausted, socially viable remnants of those conflicted, passionate beings we saw tearing apart everything including themselves scene after scene, during the first three acts. They are saved, and some of them have saved others, but for what fate we can only wonder.
In Godwin’s production, to emerge from the brothel’s passageway into the main theater is to find the Polonsky transformed into what looks like an oversize banqueting hall, the playing area laid out as an immense table decked with candles and balloons and trays of drinks, a few audience members seated around the edge. Drunken revelers stagger noisily across the tabletop stage, leaving behind a solitary figure sprawled on its surface, shooting up (presumably) heroin and then wrapping himself up in a tangle of sheets. A woman in business attire approaches him, studying him like a corporate assistant confronted by a messy but familiar management problem. He, it quickly emerges, is Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, and she is Escalus, the “ancient Lord” who serves him, transmuted into Escala, a tightly controlled executive who in January LaVoy’s reading sometimes evokes a less murderous version of Tilda Swinton’s scheming pharmaceuticals exec in Michael Clayton.
As the Duke (Jonathan Cake) rouses himself from his nod he delivers the play’s opening speech, in a broken rhythm suggesting that the passage’s roundabout prolixity reflects his faltering attempt to shake himself out of his opiate daze. It is one way to get the play going: pitched forward headlong, off-balance from the start, the unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions piling up before we even know where we are. What manner of being is the Duke really? Why is he leaving Vienna in such haste and putting in his place a temporary regent, the “precise” Angelo, known for his rigorous strictness? Why does he choose to linger, disguised as a friar, to observe what happens in his absence? Having learned that his moralistic stand-in is attempting to blackmail Isabella—a young woman just about to enter a convent—into sex in order to save her brother Claudio (Leland Fowler) from a death sentence, why does he intervene in such needlessly tortuous fashion, subjecting innocents to agonies of misinformation? When in one of the play’s most eloquent speeches he more or less persuades Claudio that life is not especially worth living—“Be absolute for death”—does he speak his own sincerest thoughts or is this merely part of the role he is playing as prison confessor?
To cast the Duke as a junkie is one way of providing him with a motive. His addiction perhaps discourages him from exercising moral authority; perhaps he sees it as a weakness rendering him unfit to enforce Vienna’s laws with the necessary severity; perhaps he even harbors the thought that those laws are unnecessarily severe; perhaps he simply needs to take some time out. In any event his drug habit, as far as I could observe, comes up only once more (a quick glance at the track marks on his arm, lest he forget), and from the moment he dons his disguise he grows steadily more assured, though it is an assurance boosted by waves of antic humor to which Cake at times gives an almost Monty Pythonish edge. A certain hilarity gives him courage to dream up and carry out his preposterous scheme, which more and more comes to resemble a baroque sting operation.
We can hardly expect to find out who the Duke really is in the course of the evening, since Shakespeare’s text leaves that question so hauntingly open. Even if he assures a confederate early on that he has “a purpose / More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends / Of burning youth,” he never articulates what that purpose is. He is more than central to the play—as the narrative advances he becomes its directing force, moving plot elements around like game pieces—while remaining to the end a fascinating cipher. He is memorably termed “the Duke of dark corners”—a secret devotee of hidden vices—by the witty reprobate Lucio, but Lucio is by no means averse to making things up. If nothing else the Duke can be said to behave very much like a playwright working with improvisatory energy on his play’s last act, an act that will feature a succession of agonizingly drawn-out revelations, a string of pardons, and an unlooked-for proposal of marriage.
The lust of the hypocritical Angelo is not triggered by the attractive power of beauty but perversely by the notion of violating purity: the pornography of power, relished by a man for whom execution and torture are primary tools of policy. There is a terror at the heart of everything. The Duke’s exhortation to Claudio to resign himself to death cannot match in dramatic effect Claudio’s subsequent speech—roughly the play’s midpoint—on the horror of dying: “The weariest and most loathed worldly life / That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment / Can lay on nature, is a paradise / To what we fear of death.”
Sometimes the play feels like a series of decentered snapshots of city dwellers shuffling between sex and death. It is the only Shakespeare play concerned with how a city is run, and what that is like for the people who live there. (Romeo and Juliet is also a city play of sorts, but it centers on the operation of clans, not the municipal government that so ineffectively intervenes in their never-ending feud; and that play’s poetry—so unlike the gnarled, combative, often tensely legalistic exchanges of Measure for Measure—constantly evokes spaces beyond the immediate setting.) In Measure for Measure everything is local, in the most oppressive way. We look at things from the top down and from the bottom up, and the judgment is ambivalent, or rather multivalent. Godwin’s staging conveys very well the sense of airless interconnecting interiors, all linked as part of the same system: claustrophobic offices, claustrophobic cells of both prisons and convents, but mostly of prisons. It could almost be called a prison play, a point underlined here by the cell walls constantly rolling in and out of the foreground.
The motives of the three main characters are seen from many angles, by each other and by bystanders and street-corner commentators of all sorts, from the generously inclined Provost of the prison, realized with great feeling by Oberon K.A. Adjepong, to the unavoidable Lucio, amusingly played by Haynes Thigpen as a self-satisfied comedian a little too hip for the room, always there to speak up for ordinary human vice (“a little more lenity to lechery would do no harm”) although contemptuous of the whores he sleeps with, constantly hovering at the edge of what goes on so he can get his digs in and almost managing to avoid getting called on it. The comedy provides not so much relief as an obverse view, consistently deflating and needling, and it is rarely clear where exactly the boundaries are, or who can truly be called central in this world fallen askew.
Consider the late emergence of Barnardine, a murderer who for nine years has been awaiting execution. The Duke determines to substitute his head for that of Claudio, demanded by Angelo in proof that he has been put to death, but when Barnardine—already described as “a man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come”—emerges from his cell, he simply refuses to die—“I have been drinking hard all night, and I will have more time to prepare me… I swear I will not die today for any man’s persuasion”—and staggers back to his cell. It was a disappointment to see this episode treated as a comic interlude, with too much hokum and unneeded verbal additions. (Zachary Fine did much in his other role as the simple-minded constable Elbow.)
It’s the most surprising scene in Measure for Measure and ought to stop the proceedings in their tracks, with its after beat the Duke’s astonishing pardon of the murderer in the last act. I can still recall being taken to see John Houseman’s production of the play at age eight—a memorable outing to the Shakespeare theater in Stratford, Connecticut in 1956—and however dimly I apprehended its stew of bawdry and sexual extortion, there was no mistaking the uproarious force of Barnardine’s unconditional refusal. The actor was Pernell Roberts, of later Bonanza fame, and he must have delivered Barnardine’s few lines with great vigor, since the scene has lingered in memory ever since. In a play of punitive laws, complex masquerades, and tortuous mutually annihilating arguments, it briefly upholds the intoxicating possibility of simply walking away.”
As I wrote in my post of June 15 2022, Act Three of the Greatest Show on Earth: Where Do We Go From Here?; Where do we go from here?
Democracy in America survived its most terrible moment of peril from internal threat in the January 6 Insurrection, yet here we are, witness to the public exposure of the plot and its treasonous conspirators on television as Congress brings a Reckoning to the Fourth Reich.
Like the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 on which it was modeled, it failed; but in doing so also achieved all of its strategic goals, moving our great enemy nearer to victory by staging a Lost Cause which established the fascist counternarrative as iconography that Trump remains our legitimate President. Next time, and there will always be a next time, we may not be so lucky.
Not only do the forces of fascism remain an active threat, through open allegiance to the Lost Cause which echoes horrifically with that of the Confederacy and the KKK whose adherents are among the networks of deniable assets now among us as they were at the Capitol on that fateful day, but the vast resources of wealth and power at their command after seventy years of infiltration of global elites and governments remain undiminished.
But none of this is relevant to the true threat which fascism poses to us all today; for America has been divided against itself, and as we are warned by Abraham Lincoln in 1858 in his House Divided speech in reference to the synoptic Gospels of Luke 11:17, Mark 3:25, and Matthew 12:25; “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.
We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed –
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
As we are taught with the lyrics of the song Where Do We Go From Here?, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7 of season 6, Once More With Feeling, possibly the greatest musical episode of any telenovela yet created;
“Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
The battle’s done,
And we kinda won.
So we sound our victory cheer.
Where do we go from here.
Why is the path unclear,
When we know home is near.
Understand we’ll go hand in hand,
But we’ll walk alone in fear. (Tell me)
Tell me where do we go from here.
When does the end appear,
When do the trumpets cheer.
The curtains close, on a kiss god knows,
We can tell the end is near…
Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
Where do we go
from here?”
Here is an elegy for the Fall of America, a hymn to a dying hope and the lost grandeur of a fallen nation. When in a distant future the artifacts of our civilization begin to puzzle whatever beings arise from our carrion, and they ask who were the Americans, I hope such music as this lamentation remains to guide their questions.
Yet hope remains when all is lost, and whether it becomes a gift or a curse is in our hands. These lyrics speak of the modern pathology of disconnectedness, of the division and fracture of our Solidarity, of subjugation through learned helplessness and the dominion of fear. But this is not the end of the story, nor of ours.
Once More With Feeling ends not with abjection, but with The Kiss, between the Slayer and Spike, one of the monsters she hunts. A very particular kind of monster, who is also the hero of the story in its entire seven year arc; one who is made monstrous by his condition of being and forces beyond his control, against which he struggles for liberation and to recreate and define himself as he chooses, a monster who reclaims his humanity and his soul. This is why we continue to watch the show twenty years after its debut; we are all Spike, locked in titanic struggle for the ownership of ourselves with authorized identities and systemic evils, a revolution of truths written in our flesh against imposed conditions of struggle and orders of human being, meaning, and value.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an allegory of Sartrean freedom in a world without inherent value or meaning, of the joy of total freedom versus the terror of our nothingness, and above all a song of the redemptive power of love to return to us our true selves.
This is how we defeat fascist tyranny in the long game, after we bring a Reckoning for its crimes against humanity and its subversion of democracy; let us answer hate with love, division with solidarity, fear with hope, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 6 episode 7- Once More, with Feeling – Where Do We Go From Here?
Donald Trump charged with illegal retention of classified documents:
Ex-president is being prosecuted for violating Espionage Act and obstruction over documents held at Mar-a-Lago and has been summoned to court next week
Trump’s GOP critics take aim after indictment is unsealed.
Trump was indicted on 37 counts and has denied wrongdoing. Special counsel Jack Smith urged the public to read the indictment to “understand … the gravity of the crimes charged.”
An emerging defense of former President Donald Trump is that he should not be criminally charged. The federal indictment released on Friday describes him sloppily hoarding classified documents at his private clubs, after all, not selling secrets to a foreign country.
Here are some examples of that talking point:
►”You may hate his guts, but he is not a spy; he did not commit espionage,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. He said the charges are “ridiculous” and “paint an impression that doesn’t exist.”
“Look at who’s been charged under the Espionage Act: Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning – people who turned over classified information to news organizations to hurt the country or provide it to a foreign power. That did not happen here,” Graham said.
►Trump also made the same argument during an appearance in North Carolina. “They’re going after me under the Espionage Act. That’s like the creation of missiles in your basement,” he said.
►”Joe Biden’s Justice Department is trying to argue that Trump is a spy, which is really absurd,” said the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade Monday night.
COLUMBUS, GEORGIA – JUNE 10: Former U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks during the Georgia state GOP convention at the Columbus Convention and Trade Center on June 10, 2023 in Columbus, Georgia. On Friday, former President Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury on 37 felony counts in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents probe. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Fact check: Debunking Trump’s blizzard of dishonesty about his federal indictment
It is true that most of the crimes – 31 of the 37 counts – that Trump has been accused of committing stem from the Espionage Act. But it is a complete mischaracterization to say that Trump has been accused of espionage in the common definition.
It is also true that plenty of people, including in recent years, have been charged not just for willfully leaking information, as with the cases cited by Graham, but also for retaining it, like Trump.
For example, a retired Air Force officer, Robert Birchum, was sentenced earlier this month to three years in federal prison for keeping classified material at his Florida home. Birchum was charged under the same portion of federal law that prosecutors have accused Trump of violating – the Espionage Act.
The Espionage Act is bigger than espionage
The CNN legal analyst and the former counsel to the assistant attorney general for national security Carrie Cordero explained the legal system to CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead” on Monday. A typical spy would be charged under the Espionage Act, she said. But so would someone who improperly retained national defense information.
“In this case, former President Trump hasn’t been charged with spying for a foreign government, or espionage as we normally think about it, but he has been charged with willfully withholding national defense information – which is the way that a case like this is normally charged,” Cordero said.
She also noted that in the national security legal community, there is some discussion of separating laws related to national security information out from the Espionage Act.
Complex system of laws
An outline of laws related to classified and sensitive information by the Congressional Research Service describes a system “based on a complex and often overlapping set of statutes or individual provisions within statutes.”
There is no single law meant to cover all of these cases. While mishandling or inappropriately storing national security material is clearly a risk, one obstacle in convicting Trump could be that he did not appear to be using it against the United States – selling it or giving it to a foreign country – but rather just bragging about having it.
The Espionage Act was first passed in 1917, as the US entered World War I, although it has been updated in the century since.
Here’s what the law says
The specific language in 18 US Code 793 (e), which is cited in the indictment against Trump, goes like this, and I’ve put the key portion in bold:
(e)Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it; or …
That’s the whole point here. The National Archives and the FBI tried repeatedly over time to get the material back. But the government has accused Trump of hiding from the government and his own lawyers.
What about the idea that Trump had the power to declassify?
A separate argument being put forward on Trump’s behalf is that presidents have the authority to declassify information, and so Trump cannot have improperly held classified information.
Here’s Rep. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, talking to CNN’s Dana Bash: “The standard is clear. The standard is Navy v. Egan, a 1988 case,” Jordan said.
“And it said the president’s ability to classify and control access to national security information flows from the Constitution. He decides. He alone decides. He said he declassified this material. He can put it wherever he wants. He can handle it however he wants; that’s the law,” Jordan added.
The complication for Jordan’s argument
Trump, according to the indictment, is on tape referring to material as still classified and admitting that, since he is no longer president, he lacked the ability to declassify it.
Nick Akerman, the former special Watergate prosecutor, told Tapper the Egan case has nothing to do with the Trump case, but is rather concerned with a Navy contractor who was denied the ability to work on a submarine program.
“In fact, what it does say – it warns about giving untrustworthy people access to classified information, which applies in spades to Donald Trump,” said Akerman. “If you look at what he did with this material after he was president, that he held on to it when he had no right to do it.”
There’s also more to the indictment than simply the portions dealing with the Espionage Act. Trump is also accused of withholding, corruptly concealing and scheming to conceal documents in a federal investigation, along with making false statements.
Four years ago today we launched the Seattle Autonomous Zone, among the greatest experiments in liberty the world has seen since the glorious utopias of our forbearers in history; the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party and American labor movements founded in the communes of the Seattle Red Coast over a century ago, the Paris Commune, the First International of Bakunin, Proudhon, and Marx, and the French and American Revolutions which radically transformed the possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals. We seized and held from those who would enslave us and their police forces of tyranny and state terror six blocks of Capitol Hill.
This epochal moment of liberation and triumph over systems of control and dehumanization is for myself shadowed today by the joy of the Indictment of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, for theft of state secrets exactly like Snowden and many others, not to expose its evils but for profit, secrets he intended to use as blackmail leverage against our nation and as self-aggrandizement props in his pathetic attempt to retain power as a king in exile, a Defining Moment of Reckoning which only just begins now, and the public celebrations of the death of Pat Robertson, fascist apologist who captured the Republican Party in 1980 and opened the door to the crimes against humanity of the Reagan era, the advent of the American Fourth Reich, and the Mayan Genocide perpetrated by his protégé Rios Montt in Guatemala as the most horrific and evil of the consequences of the capture of the state by Gideonite fundamentalist theocracy.
Today my joy is made ambiguous by the anniversary of the death of George Winston, greatest pianist since Rachmaninoff and most innovative musician of the late twentieth century after Kitaro, whose songs speak to me of great sadness, loss, and loneliness, the terror of our nothingness and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
But here I wish to honor and balance the darkness with the beauty and transcendent joy of the birth of the Autonomous Zones in Seattle.
These were days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.
Within a fleeting moment of joy Autonomous Zones sprang up in Washington DC encircling the White House, Portland, Minneapolis, Atlanta, New York, Austin, and throughout the fifty cities across America where the Black Lives Matter protests had taken control from the government through mass action, and then throughout the world as the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Franz Fanon named the Wretched of the Earth arose in solidarity and for a glorious moment spoke to Authority with one voice, a voice that said; We refuse to submit, and because no one has power over us we are free.
As I had printed at the time on the paper currency I distributed bearing the legend “Good for Nothing” on one side and “Good for Everything” on the reverse, with the following lines:
On the one side; “Good for Nothing; Tyranny.
Let us question, expose, mock, and challenge authority; let us incite, provoke, and disturb; let us run amok and be ungovernable.”
On the other side; “Good for Everything; Liberty.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.”
So I wrote at the dawn of our Brave New World, which sought to liberate humankind from our addiction to power and our subjugation to authority and carceral states. Here I do not refer to the great novel by Aldous Huxley, dark mirror of this source, but to Miranda’s line in The Tempest; “O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!”
For it was a thing of beauty, for a time, until it was consumed by its reflected image, fear and force as is common to both criminals and carceral states as embodied violence, the great lie that in the absence of law and restraining force the most brutal and opportunistic becomes king. In Seattle the Autonomous Zone collapsed because it refused to seize power and misread the use of social force in revolutionary struggle as morally equivalent to the use of force in repression of dissent by those who would enslave us.
It’s a mistake Lenin could’ve warned us about, had anyone been listening, and it’s a mistake we won’t be making again. None of the other Autonomous Zones have ever been retaken by the state; the abolition of the use of social force and of formal authority as states remains our common goal, but this does not mean we surrender our universal human rights nor our solidarity and duty of care for others.
The first thing a successful revolution needs, once it has seized power and the tyrants have been cast down from their thrones, is a Committee of Public Safety like that of France in 1793 to defend the people and meet their material needs for food, medical care, and such. Second comes institutions and systems for preventing the centralization of authority as tyranny, for the leveling of unequal power as elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, for ongoing struggle against social hierarchies and divisions and against fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. We can only abandon the social use of force to the degree we are free from its threat ourselves; this is an imposed condition of revolutionary struggle and not a moral dilemma.
Why did the Seattle Autonomous Zone, the first of many throughout the world, fall when others have not?
First because it was a seizure of territory and the police station and government buildings as symbols, which means ground that must be defended, rather than mobile and temporary zones which can be abandoned and reestablished anywhere at any time, by networks of people who are Living Autonomous Zones. As soon as you need a barricade, a checkpoint, a border of any kind, you are fighting the wrong kind of war.
And we had enemies who were immensely powerful and utterly ruthless, willing to commit any depravity to subjugate and re-enslave us through learned helplessness and terror.
Deniable assets of the Fourth Reich under the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf were sent against us both as infiltration agents, spies and provocateurs, and as elite counterinsurgency forces in raids and acts of random wickedness to sow confusion, mistrust, and terror, and to provoke the police, seize the narrative, and manufacture a casus belli for Occupation.
Looking back from the distance of four years, in which I and others have traveled the world establishing networks of Autonomous Zones, and being case zero of a global alliance of Autonomous Zones as a United Humankind which abandons the use of social force and a stateless successor to the United Nations and which offers a way of living together without nations or borders, without war or laws, without police or prisons, without unequal power as patriarchy or racism, without masters or slaves; as I contemplate all of this unfolding of world-historical forces and dialectical processes it occurs to me that the history of the Seattle Autonomous Zone and of the global Autonomous Zones merits being written, especially by those who lived it.
To such ends I will be sharing my journals of the time, and questioning its meaning, and I ask anyone who was there to do the same, to write of your lived experiences and share them with us all here in this public forum as a witness of history.
Memory, history, identity; are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
At the time of their origins on this day four years ago I was thinking of our Autonomous Zones as a globalized quest of the Merry Pranksters and others who formed the tribal elders of my childhood, especially as written in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s novelization of the great trek on the bus Furthur in 1964 to enlighten humankind with Dionysian rituals of music and ecstasy through free love and LSD.
A dialectics of parallel and interdependent forces and themes is revealed in Ken Kesey’s documentary film of the iconic journey of 1964 which launched the psychedelic movement and catalyzed the whole counterculture that was to come, Magic Trip, and of the Autonomous Zones as well; the political and social mission to bring the Chaos, disrupt and destabilize order, perform change and mock authority for the purpose of delegitimation as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth, what Foucault called parrhesia in the lectures I attended in 1983 at the University of Berkeley, and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value through poetic vision and ecstatic trance, an extension of Surrealism which appropriated its methods and iconography in the quest for transcendence through dreams and exaltation through transgression.
Here as Living Autonomous Zones and bearers of visions of liberty as seeds of change we tilt at the windmills which might be giants to break the mould of man and become free and self created beings.
Magic Trip film: Ken Kesey’s documentary of the trip
Our celebrations of D Day and the historic victory over fascism has witnessed signs and wonders; Zelensky has embraced the few survivors of that tragic and glorious day when we stood against the darkness in solidarity as a Band of Brothers, and Biden and Macron have pledged America and France to the defense of Ukraine.
It is a day I have awaited since an incident of the Last Stand at Mariupol, when I spent several hours crawling through the bloody remains of the dead in collapsed tunnels under bombardment, lightless warrens filled with the sounds of the dying whom I could not help. This disturbed me not at all; but I spent days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when I discovered what the Russian Army was doing with the children they stole. Some things are beyond the limits of the human, and for this there are no words.
What is absolutely new in this war, ongoing since the Russian capture of Crimea in 2014, is Allied willingness to directly strike Russia and support direct action by others within Russia. This changes everything.
Of the countless resistance groups in Russia today fighting to liberate the nation from the regime of Putin and bring an end to his mad quest of imperial conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa now ongoing in ten theatres of World War Three, I know nothing whatever other than guesses and very indirect communications with one network, the one that I founded as the Abraham Lincoln Brigades of Ukraine and Russia from the few hundred survivors of the Last Stand at the Steelworks in Mariupol who managed to escape with me as the city was being cordoned off for annihilation and the murder or enslavement of its people. We were joined at Warsaw by several hundred volunteers from the intelligence and special operations community throughout Europe and beyond, often legacy allies from the great struggle against the Nazis, and linked hands with two crucial movements of the Russian people; the democracy movement which has permeated civilian society and the peace moment within the Russian military, both of which have long been operating with the Ukrainians.
This is why I know that any nation who wishes to send advisors, troops, arms, or any imaginable aid whatever to bring the fight home to Russia in liberation struggle will find partners on the ground to fight with, exactly as the O.S.S. which became the C.I.A. and the Jedburgh teams which became the Green Berets found and became interdependent with the Resistance throughout occupied Europe. Now as then, we can set each other free if we stand together.
Let us not mistake the gravity and peril of this moment, for the fate of humankind now hangs in the balance. Russia may fold when confronted, as they did during the Cuban Missile Crisis; or this may open the door to the most terrible war the world has yet known, and even if we are victorious we will be driven to extremes of brute survival which sees the fall of civilization into centuries of barbarism. At best, something like ourselves, stumbling over forgotten ruins, will one day discover that we were once more than masters and slaves, more than beasts ruled by atavisms of instinct, and begin to rise toward humanity.
This is still better than the alternative; appeasement and failure to unite in our defense will begin the Age of Tyrants, six to eight centuries of totalitarian states savaging one another in wars of imperial conquest and dominion with weapons of unimaginable horror and destruction and ending in the extinction of our species.
I believe we may have one to two chances out of every hundred possible futures of surviving the next millennium, and I am being optimistic.
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 Putin and 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.”
Join us.
As written by Patrick Wintour in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘We’re in 1938 now’: Putin’s war in Ukraine and lessons from history; “When big history is self-evidently being written, and leaders face momentous choices, the urge to find inspiration in instructive historical parallels is overwhelming and natural. “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done,” the Oxford historian RG Collingwood once wrote.
One of the contemporary politicians most influenced by the past is the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, and not just because of her country’s occupation by Russia or her personal family history of exile.
She lugs books on Nato-Russian relations, such as Not One Inch, with her on beach holidays. And in her hi-tech office at the top of the old town in Tallinn, she argued this was a 1938 moment – a moment when a wider war was imminent but the west had not yet joined the dots.
She said the same mistake was made in 1938 when tensions in Abyssinia, Japan and Germany were treated as isolated events. The proximate causes of the current conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, the South China Sea and even Armenia might be different, but the bigger picture showed an interconnected battlefield in which post-cold war certainties had given way to “great-power competition” in which authoritarian leaders were testing the boundaries of their empires. The lesson – and necessity – was to resist and rearm. “The lesson from 1938 and 1939 is that if aggression pays off somewhere, it serves as an invitation to use it elsewhere,” Kallas said.
Her favourite historian, Prof Tim Snyder, adds a twist by reimagining 1938 as a year in which Czechoslovakia, like Ukraine in 2022, had chosen to fight: “So you had in Czechoslovakia, like Ukraine, an imperfect democracy. It’s the farthest democracy in eastern Europe. It has various problems, but when threatened by a larger neighbour, it chooses to resist. In that world, where Czechoslovakia resists, there’s no second world war.”
Snyder said such an outcome had been possible. “They could have held the Germans back. It was largely a bluff on the German side. If the Czechs resisted, and the French and the British and maybe the Americans eventually started to help, there would have been a conflict, but there wouldn’t have been a second world war.
“Instead, when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it was invading Poland with the Czech armaments industry, which was the best in the world. It was invading with Slovak soldiers. It was invading from a geographical position that it only gained because it had destroyed Czechoslovakia.”
Snyder drove home his lesson from history: “If Ukrainians give up, or if we give up on Ukraine, then it’s different. It’s Russia making war in the future. It’s Russia making war with Ukrainian technology, Ukrainian soldiers from a different geographical position. At that point, we’re in 1939. We’re in 1938 now. In effect, what Ukrainians are letting us do is extend 1938.”
A return to Churchill’s ‘locust years’?
As Christopher Hitchens once wrote, much American foolishness abroad, from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, has been launched on the back of Munich syndrome, the belief that those who appease bullies, as the then British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, sought to do with Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938, are either dupes or cowards. Such leaders are eventually forced to put their soldiers into battle, often unprepared and ill-equipped – men against machines, as vividly described in Guilty Men, written by Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard after the Dunkirk fiasco. In France, the insult Munichois – synonymous with cowardice – sums it up.
But Snyder made his remarks in Tallinn last month at the Lennart Meri conference, which was largely dedicated to Ukraine and held under the slogan “Let us not despair, but act”. It was held against the backdrop of Russia and China hailing a new authoritarian world order in a joint 6,000-word statement that intended to create an axis to undo the settlement of the past two world wars.
Many at the conference wrestled with how much had gone wrong in Ukraine, and why, and whether the west would shed its self-imposed constraints on helping Kyiv. In a sense, everyone wanted an answer to the question posed by the Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski: “Ukraine has bought us time. Will we put it to good use?”
In 1934-35, what Winston Churchill termed the “locust years”, and again after the Munich agreement, Britain did not put the time to good use, instead allowing Germany to race ahead in rearmament.
Johann Wadephul, the deputy chair of the German Christian Democratic Union’s defence policy committee, fears the answer to Sikorski’s question is in the negative. “If the war goes on like it is, it’s clear Ukraine will lose. It cannot withstand Russian power with its well-organised support from Iran, China and North Korea and countries like India looking only at its self-interest.”
Europe had simply not reorganised itself for war, he said. Listing the consequences for the continent in terms of lost human rights, access to resources and confidence in the west, he said simply: “If Ukraine loses it will be a catastrophe.”
Samir Saran, the head of the Indian thinktank the Observer Research Foundation, who described himself as an atheist in a room full of believers, nevertheless agreed that something bigger than Europe was at stake as he almost mocked the inability of the west’s $40tn economy to organise a battlefield defeat of Russia’s $2tn economy.
He argued: “There is one actor that has reorganised its strategic engagement to fight a war and the other has not. One side is not participating in the battle. You have hosted conferences supporting Ukraine and then do nothing more. But when it comes to action, Russia 2.0 is grinding forward.
“It tells countries like us that if something like this were to happen in the Indo-Pacific, you have no chance against China. If you cannot defeat a $2tn nation, don’t think you are deterring China. China is taking hope from your abysmal and dismal performance against a much smaller adversary.”
Yet it is paradoxical. Nato is bigger and stronger than ever. The transatlantic alliance is functioning far better than the US, France and Britain did in the 1930s – and, after five months of hesitation, some of the extra $60bn in US arms may reach the frontline within weeks.
But from Kyiv’s perspective, everything remains too slow and circumscribed, except for the apportionment of blame across Europe. Germany’s Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, the Free Democratic party’s top candidate for the European elections, takes one side, urging France to hasten weapons deliveries to Ukraine. She said: “We have the problem that, while Poland is doing a lot as a neighbouring country, while Germany is doing a lot, France is doing relatively little.”
Others say the culprit remains Berlin, and that, despite recognising what a threat Vladimir Putin represents, it cannot accept the consequences in terms of the nuclear risks of going all in for a Russian defeat. Benjamin Tallis, a senior research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, said: “For all of this talk of political will, what we actually face is political won’t. We won’t define victory as a goal.”
Without naming Germany, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, reinvented over the past year as a scourge of Russian imperialism, said: “Europe clearly faces a moment when it will be necessary not to be cowards.”
Ben Wallace, the former UK defence secretary, had less compunction about naming names. “[Olaf] Scholz’s behaviour has shown that, as far as the security of Europe goes, he is the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time,” he said of the German chancellor.
Eliot Cohen, a neocon never-Trumper, finds a wider institutional and moral malaise that needs addressing through a theory of victory and a specific practical plan to secure that victory, something akin to Churchill’s call for a ministry of supply that turned the UK into a giant armaments factory.
Cohen said: “It’s not about what people say, it’s about numbers. Are you willing to lift the restrictions on arms factories to run them 24 hours a day? Are you willing to give them Atacms [missiles] and hit targets in Russia, and get Germany to give them Taurus missiles?
“My chief concern is that war is so remote from our societies that we have trouble grappling with what success requires.”
Would Putin turn off his war machine?
Sabine Fischer, a political scientist at the German Council on Foreign Relations, says behind these disputes is the pivot around which every judgment turns: whether Europe believes a Ukrainian defeat can be contained. In other words, what are the consequences for Europe, if any, if Ukraine collapses or a Russian-dictated peace leads to its retention of land gained by military conquest?
Would a victorious Putin husband his resources, turn off the war machine and say the recapture of Kievan Rus had been a self-standing Moscow objective and Russia’s imperial ambitions were now sated? After all, not every state that makes demands has unlimited ambitions.
The Hungarian president, Viktor Orbán, for instance, said: “I do not consider it logical that Russia, which cannot even defeat Ukraine, would all of a sudden come and swallow the western world whole. The chances of this are extremely slim.” An attack on an existing Nato state would be “crazy” since the Nato alliance would have to respond.
But Russia’s foreign policy concept issued in 2023 focuses on a global confrontation with the US and building the alliances to defeat the west. Given Putin’s unrivalled record of broken promises, a Russian peace guarantee might end up as reassuring as Chamberlain’s advice to the British people to have a quiet night’s sleep after he returned from Munich. The US president, Joe Biden, interviewed in Time magazine this week, appeared to regard the consequences as vast. “If we ever let Ukraine go down, mark my words: you’ll see Poland go, and you’ll see all those nations along the actual border of Russia, from the Balkans and Belarus, all those, they’re going to make their own accommodations.”
Others say the Polish response will be less conciliatory. One former Nato commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said eastern states would not wait to find out Putin’s next move. “If Ukraine fails, I am certain that our Polish allies are not going to sit behind the Vistula [River] and wait for them to keep coming. I think the Romanian allies are not going to sit behind the Prut River and wait for Russia to go into Moldova. So the best way to prevent Nato from being involved directly in a conflict is to help Ukraine defeat Russia in Ukraine.”
Fischer believes the consequences of a Russian-dictated peace will not be containable. “Ukraine will experience a new wave of refugees fleeing to the west. The terror regime of the Russian occupation will expand and hundreds of thousands will suffer as a result. The economic, political and security situation will change drastically throughout Ukraine. Partisan warfare could erupt, fuelled by the militarisation of Ukrainian society,” she said.
“The threat situation for the states bordering Ukraine would worsen massively. This is true for Moldova, which would again be in the spotlight, as it was in 2022, especially if Moscow were to take over the Ukrainian Black Sea coast. The cohesive power of the western alliance would be shaken to its core. Russia would continue to weaken Europe from within by building alliances with rightwing, chauvinist populist parties.”
Ukrainians, from President Volodymyr Zelenskiy down, have for more than a year tried to frame the consequences of defeat in lurid terms, in an attempt to shake European torpor and galvanise the west.
Olena Halushenka, the co-founder of the International Center for Ukrainian Victory, urged Europe to think about the bombardment of Kharkiv. “Imagine a city the size of Munich is likely to be without electricity this winter. The cost in terms of millions of migrants will overwhelm Europe.”
Wadephul fears even such framing has not worked. “If you ask the average German on the street: ‘Do you really recognise what is at stake? That we have to spend money not for health but for defence?’ the answers show there is still a lot of persuasion to do. Europeans think they can have this war without thinking they are themselves at war.”
He thinks the guilty men are the leaders who pander to voters who dismiss the Russian threat. That takes the debate back to Germany’s, and specifically the Social Democratic party’s, ambivalence about a Russian defeat. It is not a coincidence that the election slogan of Scholz’s SPD was “a secure peace”.
Scholz himself, for instance, refuses to set Russia’s defeat as an objective, and, after Ukraine’s failed offensive, peace advocates within his party have had a resurgence. The party believes its vote is being squeezed by two parties, one left and the other right, both saying the war is unwinnable. In a sign of the times, Michael Roth, the SPD chair of the Bundestag foreign affairs committee and a supporter of arming Ukraine, is quitting politics, saying he found it was like stepping into a refrigerator to hold the views he did inside his own party.
Dangers of chasing ‘illusions’
Five 20th-century historians, including the Weimar Republic expert Heinrich August Winkler, complained in an open letter that Scholz was not willing to learn the lessons of history or recognise that Russia was bent on the destruction of Ukraine. “The chancellor and the SPD leadership, by drawing red lines, not for Russia but for German politics, weaken Germany’s security policy and benefit Russia.” The government had to come up with a strategy for victory, they argued.
There is even a suspicion that anti-war politicians with access to intelligence reports are leaking pessimistic accounts of German intelligence assessments, reinforcing the impression that Ukraine’s position is hopeless. Ralf Stenger, an SPD member of the Bundestag’s intelligence committee, said Ukraine’s failed offensive last year showed “we can and must prevent Ukraine from losing, but we cannot ensure that it wins”. Anyone who “keeps demanding that weapon A must be delivered more quickly and weapon B in even greater quantities” was chasing illusions, he added. Always increasing the dose when the medicine was not working was “not convincing”.
Critics say this fatalistic narrative – dovetailing with Russia’s main objective, which is to convince the US that further aid is futile – also makes little attempt to identify the lessons of the past two years about the failure to organise a war economy in Europe. Macron coined the phrase “war economy” at the Eurosatory military technology conference outside Paris in June 2022, but there is little sign the promise of such a fundamental reorganisation of Europe’s armaments industry has taken place, or even that anyone was appointed to bring it about.
Liberal market economies are inherently likely to be slower to adapt to war than their authoritarian counterparts, but one of the lessons of the 1930s, and those locust years, is that organising for rearmament entails planning and not just false reassurances, which were the stock in trade of Chamberlain and his predecessor Stanley Baldwin.
The popular lure of an easy peace
The reality was that Britain, overstretched and in debt, fell behind, and calls for a ministry of supply to coordinate the flow of arms were spurned. Nevertheless, Chamberlain complacently predicted that “the terrifying power Britain was building” by boosting its defences “would have a sobering effect on Hitler”.
Something similar happened with regard to ammunition supplies for Ukraine in Europe. In 2023, leaders said they would have 1m shells ready for Ukraine by March 2024, only to admit they could reach only half that number. They promised to reach 2m a year in 2025.
One prominent Ukrainian military adviser said the reality was that the Russian arms industry could now churn out 4.5m shells a year, each costing about only $1,000 to manufacture. Meanwhile, in Europe and the US, a total of 1.3m shells were being produced at an average cost of approximately $4,000. That means Nato is 10 times less efficient, and struggling to locate explosives.
He said: “We need a central plan like in the first or second world war. If governments have an existential demand, a company should not have the ability to make as much profit as they want. It should be regulated. Industrial warfare requires national institutions and a Nato-level industrial warfare committee, which would regulate prices.
“Right now, we have dozens of really high-level, super-important targets each day. And we have only one missile we can use a week, and this is actually insane.”
Some say the picture is improving, but the stark fact, according to Sikorski, is that 40% of the Russian government’s budget is devoted to defence. It is Russia, not Europe, that has built a war economy.
The Ukrainian adviser predicts the west may have caught up in two to three years in drones and munitions, but that means the next few years are the most dangerous the region would face.
In the short term, it is the absence of Patriot batteries, a surface-to-air guided missile, and US-supplied F-16s, agreed in August 2023, that leaves Ukraine so exposed. Only six EU member states – Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Spain – operate Patriot systems. Germany has offered a third battery, and the Dutch part of theirs, but Greece and Spain say they have nothing spare. The date for F-16 deliveries depends on the speed at which pilots can be trained.
But Michael Bohnert, an engineer at the Rand Corporation, sees no sign of a public coordinated military plan to raise the firepower needed, let alone new munitions factories. Incredibly, the adviser to the Polish chief of staff, Krzysztof Król, admitted to a conference last month that after two years “we have not yet created proper conditions for a Ukrainian victory with our plans because political leaders had not yet told them the objective”. If that objective was conveyed, he added, “the military leaders could easily decide what is required. As it is, we give enough only for Ukraine to survive.”
To the extent any European leader has grasped this lacuna, it is Macron, with his emergency meeting in Paris on 26 February to look at ammunition shortfalls and repeated speeches on the existential threat to Europe from the alliance between the far right and Putin.
It will take two meetings, one involving the G7 leaders in Italy next week and then the 75th anniversary Nato summit in Washington in July, to reveal whether the west wishes not to contain Putin, but to defeat him – with all the risk that carries, including for China.
Macron will know many in Europe see the external threat as coming from migration, not Putin, and above all as a French politician, he knows the popular lure of an easy peace. Flowers, not tomatoes, greeted the French prime minister Édouard Daladier, to his surprise, when he returned from Munich in 1938. Knowing full well the threat posed by Hitler, and that he and Chamberlain had betrayed Czechoslovakia, the only democratic country in central eastern Europe, he turned to his counsellor and said of the cheering crowds: “Bunch of fools.”
This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate
‘We’re in 1938 now’: Putin’s war in Ukraine and lessons from history
7 червня 2024 р. Надія для України та людства, якщо це забута надія
Наші святкування Дня D та історичної перемоги над фашизмом стали свідками знамень і чудес; Зеленський прийняв небагатьох, хто вижив у той трагічний і славетний день, коли ми виступили проти темряви в солідарності як Братська група, а Байден і Макрон пообіцяли Америці та Франції захистити Україну.
Це день, якого я чекав після інциденту «Останньої битви» в Маріуполі, коли я провів кілька годин, повзаючи крізь закривавлені останки мертвих у зруйнованих тунелях під бомбардуванням, безсвітні лазні, наповнені звуками вмираючих, яким я не міг допомогти. . Це мене зовсім не турбувало; але я цілими днями кидався і переживав етапи шоку, коли дізнався, що російська армія робила з дітьми, яких вони вкрали. Деякі речі виходять за межі людського, і для цього немає слів.
Абсолютно новим у цій війні, яка триває з моменту захоплення Росією Криму в 2014 році, є готовність Альянсу завдати прямих ударів по Росії та підтримати прямі дії інших усередині Росії. Це все змінює.
З незліченних груп опору в сьогоднішній Росії, які борються за звільнення нації від режиму Путіна та покласти край його божевільним пошукам імперського завоювання та панування в Середземномор’ї, на Близькому Сході, у Східній Європі та Африці, які зараз тривають на десяти театрах Третя світова війна, я нічого не знаю, окрім здогадок і дуже непрямих зв’язків з однією мережею, тією, яку я заснував як Бригади Авраама Лінкольна України та Росії з кількох сотень тих, хто вижив під час Останньої битви на металургійному заводі в Маріуполі, яким вдалося втечі зі мною, оскільки місто було оточене для знищення та вбивства чи поневолення його людей. У Варшаві до нас приєдналися кілька сотень волонтерів з розвідки та спецопераційної спільноти з усієї Європи та за її межами, часто спадщини союзників у великій боротьбі з нацистами, і зв’язані руками з двома вирішальними рухами російського народу; рух за демократію, який пронизав цивільне суспільство, і момент миру в російській армії, обидва з яких давно діють з українцями.
Ось чому я знаю, що будь-яка нація, яка бажає надіслати радників, війська, зброю чи будь-яку можливу допомогу, щоб повернути боротьбу додому в Росію у визвольній боротьбі, знайде на землі партнерів для боротьби, як і O.S.S. яка стала ЦРУ. і Джедбурзькі команди, які стали Зеленими беретами, знайшли та стали взаємозалежними з Опором по всій окупованій Європі. Зараз, як і тоді, ми можемо звільнити один одного, якщо будемо разом.
Давайте не помилятися щодо серйозності та небезпеки цього моменту, бо доля людства зараз висить на волосині. Росія може поступитися, коли зіткнеться, як це було під час Кубинської ракетної кризи; або це може відкрити двері до найжахливішої війни, яку тільки знав світ, і навіть якщо ми переможемо, ми будемо доведені до крайнощів жорстокого виживання, яке веде до падіння цивілізації до століть варварства. У найкращому випадку щось схоже на нас, спотикаючись об забуті руїни, одного дня виявить, що колись ми були більше, ніж панами та рабами, більш ніж звірами, якими керують атавізми інстинктів, і почне підніматися до людства.
Це все одно краще, ніж альтернатива; умиротворення та неспроможність об’єднатися для нашого захисту почне Епоху тиранів, шість-вісім століть тоталітарних держав, які знищують одна одну у війнах за імперське завоювання та панування за допомогою зброї неймовірного жаху та знищення та закінчуються вимиранням нашого виду.
Я вірю, що у нас може бути один-два шанси зі ста можливих майбутніх пережити наступне тисячоліття, і я налаштований оптимістично.
Коли ті, хто хотів би нас поневолити, прийдуть за нами та за іншими, як вони завжди робили і будуть, нехай вони знайдуть не людство, підкорене набутою безпорадністю та розколом, а об’єднане в солідарності як гаранти універсальних прав людини один одного. Якщо ми це зробимо, ми можемо сподіватися залишитися людьми.
Давайте відповімо Путіну і всім тиранам словами, написаними Дж.Р.Р. Толкін між 1937 і 1955 роками у своєму яскравому переосмисленні Другої світової війни в знаковій промові Арагорна біля Чорних воріт у «Поверненні Короля», яка об’єднує етос, логос, пафос і кайрос; «Може настати день, коли мужність людей занепаде, коли ми покинемо своїх друзів і розірвемо всі узи товариства, але це не цей день. Година вовків і розбитих щитів, коли вік людей рухається, але це не цей день. Цього дня ми боремося».
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7 июня 2024 Надежда для Украины и человечества, если надежда безнадежна
Наше празднование Дня Д и исторической победы над фашизмом стало свидетелем знамений и чудес; Зеленский обнял немногих, кто выжил в тот трагический и славный день, когда мы солидарно выступили против тьмы как Братья, а Байден и Макрон пообещали Америке и Франции защищать Украину.
Этого дня я ждал со времени инцидента «Последней битвы» в Мариуполе, когда я провел несколько часов, ползая по окровавленным останкам мертвецов в разрушенных туннелях под бомбардировками, в темных лабиринтах, наполненных звуками умирающих, которым я не мог помочь. . Это меня нисколько не беспокоило; но меня несколько дней рвало, и я преодолевал стадии шока, когда узнал, что российская армия делала с украденными детьми. Некоторые вещи находятся за пределами человеческого, и для этого нет слов.
Что абсолютно нового в этой войне, продолжающейся после захвата Россией Крыма в 2014 году, так это готовность союзников нанести прямой удар по России и поддержать прямые действия других стран внутри России. Это меняет все.
Из бесчисленных групп сопротивления в России, борющихся сегодня за освобождение нации от режима Путина и прекращение его безумных поисков имперского завоевания и господства над Средиземноморьем, Ближним Востоком, Восточной Европой и Африкой, которые сейчас ведутся на десяти театрах военных действий. Третья мировая война, я не знаю ничего, кроме догадок и весьма косвенных связей с одной сетью, той, которую я основал как «Бригады Авраама Линкольна Украины и России», из нескольких сотен выживших в «Последней битве» на сталелитейном заводе в Мариуполе, которым удалось сбежать со мной, поскольку город был оцеплен для уничтожения и убийства или порабощения его жителей. В Варшаве к нам присоединились несколько сотен добровольцев из разведки и спецслужб со всей Европы и за ее пределами, часто бывшие союзниками в великой борьбе с нацистами, и мы связали руки с двумя важнейшими движениями русского народа; демократическое движение, охватившее гражданское общество, и момент мира в российских вооруженных силах, которые уже давно работают с украинцами.
Вот почему я знаю, что любая страна, желающая послать советников, войска, оружие или любую мыслимую помощь, чтобы вернуть борьбу домой в Россию в освободительной борьбе, найдет партнеров на местах для борьбы, точно так же, как и УСС. которое стало ЦРУ. и команды Джедбурга, которые стали «Зелеными беретами», нашли Сопротивление и стали взаимозависимыми с ним по всей оккупированной Европе. Сейчас, как и тогда, мы можем освободить друг друга, если будем держаться вместе.
Давайте не будем недооценивать серьезность и опасность этого момента, поскольку судьба человечества сейчас висит на волоске. Россия может сдаться, столкнувшись с ней, как это произошло во время кубинского ракетного кризиса; или это может открыть дверь самой ужасной войне, которую когда-либо знал мир, и даже если мы победим, мы будем вынуждены пойти на крайности жестокого выживания, что приведет к падению цивилизации в столетия варварства. В лучшем случае что-то вроде нас, спотыкаясь о забытые руины, однажды обнаружит, что когда-то мы были больше, чем хозяевами и рабами, больше, чем зверями, управляемыми атавизмами инстинктов, и начнет подниматься к человечности.
Это все же лучше альтернативы; умиротворение и неспособность объединиться для нашей защиты начнут Эпоху Тиранов, шесть-восемь столетий тоталитарных государств, терзающих друг друга в войнах имперского завоевания и господства с применением оружия невообразимого ужаса и разрушения и заканчивающегося вымиранием нашего вида.
Я считаю, что из каждых ста возможных вариантов будущего у нас есть один-два шанса выжить в следующем тысячелетии, и я настроен оптимистично.
Когда те, кто хочет поработить нас, приходят за нами и за другими, как они всегда делали и будут делать, пусть они найдут не человечество, порабощенное выученной беспомощностью и разделением, а объединенное солидарностью в качестве гарантов универсальных прав человека друг друга. Если мы сделаем это, мы сможем надеяться остаться людьми.
Ответим Путину и всем тиранам словами, написанными Дж.Р.Р. Толкин между 1937 и 1955 годами в своем ярком переосмыслении Второй мировой войны в культовой речи Арагорна у Черных ворот в «Возвращении короля», объединяющей этос, логос, пафос и кайрос; «Может наступить день, когда мужество людей иссякнет, когда мы оставим наших друзей и разорвем все узы товарищества, но это не этот день. Час волков и разбитых щитов, когда эпоха людей рухнет, но это не этот день. Сегодня мы сражаемся».
Torch of Liberty 