Today, December seven, is a day that “will live in infamy”; but what lessons have we learned?
As Elizabeth D. Samet, author of the new book Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness, writes in her article in Time entitled America Learned the Wrong Lessons From Pearl Harbor—And the World Is Still Living With the Consequences; “On Tuesday, December 7, 2021, we will remember Pearl Harbor, the 1941 Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base on Oahu, Hawaii, for the eightieth time. It is a ritual remembrance that has much to reveal about Americans’ present-day understanding of themselves and their country’s role in the world, especially at a moment when we are also trying to understand the exit from Afghanistan. What happens on such anniversaries reveals the double edge of a nation’s memory, which offers a sense of strength and unity even as it tends to foreclose a certain kind of future.
We will remember Pearl Harbor in unsurprising ways: there will be the customary memorial parade in Hawaii (the theme of which is to be Valor, Sacrifice, and Peace); television networks will run World War II programming; newscasters will introduce segments of documentary footage and interviews with some of the dwindling number of World War II veterans. These remembrances will be both solemn and sentimental: they will awaken the nostalgia of a confused country for a period of supposed clarity, when good and evil could be readily discerned and disentangled, when the U.S. wielded its military might in the service of liberating the world from its oppressors, and when the exercise of violent force brought about a definitive resolution.
Americans were being taught how to remember the events of December 7, 1941, almost as soon as they happened. Hours after learning of the attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dictated the first draft of his War Message to Congress. He would revise the initial language, “a date which will live in world history,” into what would ultimately become the speech’s most well-known phrase, “a date which will live in infamy.” Merriam-Webster notes that Roosevelt’s language is frequently misremembered as “day of infamy.” But it also reports a yearly spike in lookups of the word infamy. In other words, the core message of treachery summoning a righteous vengeance has not been lost even if our recollection is imperfect and even if Americans have to be reminded annually of what the word actually means.
Infamy—perfidy and surprise—and the compulsion to exact revenge for it shaped the narrative from the beginning. In Cultures of War, the historian John W. Dower called the word infamy a “code” that would teach Americans how to understand not only Pearl Harbor but also, ultimately, 9/11, after which the word again appeared in newspaper headlines and speeches, thus indelibly linking the two attacks.
In 1941, organizing chaotic violence and suffering into a story with meaning, propaganda posters soon gave graphic representation to these concepts. Sometimes featuring a fist raised in defiance or a tattered flag, they enjoined the American public to “Avenge Pearl Harbor” by making bullets or ships, buying war bonds, or joining the navy or coast guard “NOW.” Americans were exhorted to do all of these things so that those who perished at Pearl Harbor would not have “died in vain.”
Relentless calls to “remember” served as a goad to revenge, and the propagandists’ message gave us a vocabulary still in use today for framing American violence. In a representative example, a postcard features a sailor remarking to two shipmates as they watch a Japanese ship they’ve just shelled sink: “Just a little something ‘to remember Pearl Harbor.’” A poster, which proclaims “Make him pay for that day,” depicts a knife plunged into a calendar open to December 7, while another, portraying a blind serviceman, demands, “He CAN’T forget Pearl Harbor—Can you?”
Just a week after the attack, Don Reid and Sammy Kaye produced the song “Remember Pearl Harbor,” which proclaimed to its listeners that all those who died on December 7 died “for liberty.” When the journalist Eric Sevareid, recently returned from Europe, heard it, he mocked the song for its “saccharine melody” and referred to it as “Remember-r-r Pearl Harbor-r-r.” He was also disgusted by the atmosphere of the New York night clubs in which people danced to it.
The spectacle seemed to Sevareid typical of America’s cynical response to a war they had only just joined. He saw not patriotic fervor but a kind of visceral excitement: there was “money to burn,” fashion had seized on the “military motif,” black marketeers thrived, jingoistic newspaper “headlines blared the good news every time that three Jap planes went down,” and billboards told consumers that Wrigley’s gum and Lucky Strikes “had gone to war.” Americans were persuaded that the country “could produce its way to victory,” but they ignored the political and social realities of a world in flames. “Little men sneered at the Four Freedoms,” Sevareid recalled, “and the great vision of the century of the common man was sneered at as ‘globaloney.’”
That’s not the way we remember it now. We imagine that everything changed overnight. But, as the historian Richard W. Steele carefully documented, by early 1942, only two months after the attack, members of the Roosevelt Administration were already worrying that the public had lost interest. On February 16, Time ran a story with the headline, “THE PEOPLE: Smug, Slothful, Asleep?” It catalogued a list of warnings expressed by everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt to James Landis, the executive head of Civil Defense, to Edward R. Murrow that, as Murrow put it, Americans “do not fully appreciate the need for speed … do not quite understand that if we delay too long in winning the victory we will inherit nothing but a cold, starving embittered world… Already there are signs that we’re coming to accept slavery and suppression as part of the pattern of living in this year of disgrace.” General Johnson was more succinct: “The general public . . . simply does not seem to give a tinker’s dam.”
The further irony is that it is far less convenient to remember the Pacific Theater than it is the European. The brutality of the war against Japan, often racially motivated on both sides, as Dower chronicled in War Without Mercy, and its ready association with the internment camps at home, does not easily fit into the narrative of the Good War we prefer to remember today. While Pearl Harbor was the catalyst for our entrance into the conflict, we have ever since tended to overlook the Pacific in favor of the war against the Nazis.
The real and immediate consequences of the war we have chosen to remember—chiefly the liberation of Europe from fascist tyranny—offered then and still offers us the most attractive version of ourselves. Yet that liberation, together with the establishment of a new world order, gave us a false impression that the violent force we inflict on others would inevitably yield virtuous results. Our memory also omits certain compromising details: our reluctance to enter the war on behalf of liberating anyone, our callousness toward the fate of Europe’s Jews, our short-lived interest in denazification, our exportation of segregation to postwar Europe.
In recent years, we have become increasingly enthralled with the idea that when Americans die, they die for liberty, and thus we are repeatedly committed to sending more righteous liberators to die—in Iraq, in Afghanistan—so that others will not have died “in vain.” We seem also to have grown to love the idea of being hated for our freedom, for “our way of life,” and this leads quite naturally to an obsession with American greatness and goodness. We can find aggrieved, reductive versions of this exceptionalist belief on t-shirts or in the lyrics of a pop song like Darryl Worley’s “Have You Forgotten?”
But we can also discern an influence on national policy. The assumption that when Americans fight they fight for liberty has a long history, but that assumption, together with a confidence in the exceptional nature of American violence as a mode of deliverance, has been used since World War II to frame and to justify a series of dubious military actions. This is especially true of our most recent conflicts. It clearly undergirded President George W. Bush’s victory declaration in the War on Terror on the decks of the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003: “In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty and for the peace of the world,” he told the assembled sailors, “And wherever you go, you carry a message of hope, a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘To the captives, come out; and to those in darkness, be free.’” Such faith—or a cynical appeal to it—likewise inspires us to cling amid the ruins to our unintentional, impermanent liberation of women in Afghanistan.
Commemoration is a natural, normal, even necessary part of any culture. Remembrance can forge a sense of collectiveness otherwise elusive, especially in a fractured democracy like our own. But when memory is so tightly yoked to righteous indignation—as is the case with Pearl Harbor or 9/11—it risks becoming pathological by obstructing the growth essential to a nation’s progress.
World War II was an aberration in so many ways: the existential threat posed by fascism, the unequivocal necessity of our participation, and the decisiveness of Allied victory are only the most obvious. When we remember Pearl Harbor, we find ourselves in the position of Orpheus, suddenly mistrusting Hades’ bargain, compelled to look back, only to discover that Eurydice has vanished. Betrayed by the last twenty years, we grasp in vain to retrieve an elusive glory. Our tragic postwar mistake was in thinking that the consequences of World War II could be endlessly duplicated. Over the years we have somehow developed a capacity to be surprised when American military might doesn’t establish, as it once helped to do, a new world but instead, after twenty wasteful years of occupation, fitful nation-building, and unfounded confidence, are left right back where we started. There is a cruel and particular irony in the paradox that a country the imagination of which has always been knit so tightly to the future—to the seductive dream of beginning anew—now finds itself in the position of hoping that history will miraculously repeat itself.”
Here follows the text of F.D.R.’s immortal Day of Infamy speech, in which the greatest leader America has ever known other than Lincoln set us forever on a course of total resistance to fascist tyranny which would usher in the Imperial American epoch of global history.
I direct your attention to this moment because we stand in its echo today, but with our positions reversed as sponsors of Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza and throughout Palestine, and in the wake of the Fourth Reich’s recapture of the state under Traitor Trump as the Resistance and our partners in the Democratic Party begin the long process of salvaging democracy and rebuilding our institutions and the public trust and faith in the idea of America as a free society of equals, founded on the values of freedom, equality, truth, and justice for all, a guarantor of liberty and universal human rights, a beacon of hope to the world, and a refuge for the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” as the Statue of Liberty proclaims, we must fully inhabit the terror of our victims.
There can be no reclaiming our heart or transformation to a global United Humankind of universal freedom and equality without owning our complicity in evil and the restoration of balance through acts of redemption, reckoning, and restitution. America’s creation of the state of Israel as a colony and proxy of imperial dominion and control of oil as a strategic resource was very useful in establishing the third phase of American Empire in the wake of World War Two, and like the Conquest by which we seized a continent and slavery by which we created our seed capital of empire, for such original sins we must give answer to the court of history.
Our nightmare history as a colonial and imperial power is a legacy from which we must emerge, and still today shapes, motivates, informs, and determines our actions and ideas of belonging and otherness as identity politics, legitimation of power, and manufacture of consent.
In the Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and the far more general ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, one people divided by history and faith as weaponized by those who would enslave us, we have a vivid and immediate example of the psychopathy of power and the state as embodied violence, atrocities in which we Americans are complicit as our taxes paid for the bombs and tanks which now consume, silence, and erase whole cities, families, and peoples in a storm of fire and steel.
This too we must resist, if democracy and our universal human rights are to be meaningful in future, and if we human beings are to be guarantors of each other’s humanity. Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
The tragic events of October 7 have often been compared to those of December 7 as events of disruption and fracture of the world order; so may we compare our own violations of human rights through our client state of Israel with those we suffered at the hands of the enemies of democracy in the Second World War.
In the dark mirror of Gaza we must confront our own darkness, in witness and solidarity of action.
As Elie Weisel teaches us; “Silence is complicity.”
“Yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.
Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.
It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.
The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.
Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island.
And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island.
Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.
As Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.
No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.
I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.
Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.
With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt – Declaration of War Address – “A Day Which Will Live in Infamy”
From Here to Eternity film trailer
Tora! Tora! Tora! Film trailer
The Thin Red Line trailer
Farewell to the King
Hacksaw Ridge trailer
America Learned the Wrong Lessons From Pearl Harbor—And the World Is Still Living With the Consequences/ Time
With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, E.B. Sledge
(Stunning record of a campaign whose atrocities remain under the National Secrets Act. My uncle Sgt. John Weeks United States Army fought in the Okinawa Campaign, after surviving the Bataan Death March, and he said he still wasn’t allowed to talk about it decades later. After this he fought in the Korean War; his MOS was Military Intelligence.)
Under the unseeing eye of dead God who cannot punish or redeem, the fading echoes of whose terrible truths have long been stolen by those who would enslave us as their interpreters in the manufacture of legitimacy, authority, and the centralization of power to carceral states of force and control, the stuff of nightmares woven by fiends into a fictive reality which substitutes itself for that of nature, the Wilderness of Mirrors in which we wander lost; lies, illusions, conspiracy theories, propaganda, alternate realities, and a schizophrenic humankind transformed from citizens into subjects through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Such is the siren song of madness from which we must escape; strategies of alienation and subjugation deployed to create and enforce hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege.
In this Year of the Fall of America which now draws to a close with the Moon of the Abyss in full reign and the earth frozen in entropic darkness like the lowest ring of Dante’s Hell, the Giants of Frost and Old Night like the loathsome criminals of the Trump regime running loose without restraint, lunatics in charge of the asylum who disavow all mercy and abandon the idea of humanity with intent to steal our souls, to all of this I say with Dylan Thomas; let us “not go not gentle into that good night, but rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
For this refusal to submit is a power that cannot be taken from us, and before disbelief and disobedience authority becomes delegitimized and hollow, a mirage empty of the power it has stolen from those who serve it. We can be killed, but we cannot be silenced and erased if we bear witness and remember, nor can we be conquered and subjugated if we yield not and abandon not our fellows, as the Oat of the Resistance goes. In Resistance we become Unconquered and free; this is our victory and our humanity.
When the Enemy comes for us, as they always have and will, whether as police repression of dissent or for purposes darker still like the ICE white supremacist terror force now perpetrating ethnic cleansing throughout America, or the rain of death beyond our shores like the Venezuelan fishermen murdered by our Navy in acts of piracy, and like the genocide of the Palestinians wherein our taxes buy the deaths of children so that Trump and other apex predators of capitalism can build a Riviera of casinos for elites on the bones of a people, let them find not a humankind divided against itself by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil or reduced from citizens to subjects by despair, abjection, and learned helplessness, but united in solidarity of action as guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beings. When they come for one of us, let them be met with all of us.
This, friends, is how we reclaim our liberty and restore our democracy; this, this, this.
As I wrote in my post of December 15 2024, Beneath the Gaze of a Dead God: From Damascus, With Love; Beneath the gaze of a dead God, leprous and cold, which seizes and shakes us with its horror and judgement, the full Moon of the Long Nights devours us with its baleful and malevolent eye, window into endless chasms of darkness, like a rotting thing washed up on the shores of time, carcass of a lost beauty upon whose waning echoes of power our civilization has been built by those who would enslave us as they mine its authority for their own.
Herein I write of the cartography of our monstrosity and the limits of the human, of the tyranny and terror of faith weaponized in service to power, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, from the ruins of a glorious antiquity undermined by a series of hells constructed by the fallen Assad regime and a people sacrificed to the power of a tyrant; a letter to any possible future humanity, from Damascus, with love.
For this is the end result of all such power and the state as embodied violence, and we must look upon it and bear witness, not in despair and learned helplessness as such tyrants intend, but in solidarity, refusal to submit, and certain knowledge that all systems of oppression and carceral states of force and control will in the end fall and become nothing.
Let us say with Ahab; “To the end, I will grapple with thee.”
As written by Shelley in his poem Ozymandias:
“I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
As I wrote in celebration of Herman Melville, on his birthday August 1; To each of us his own White Whale, to lift us beyond our limits in pursuit of the Impossible; this gift has Herman Melville given us in his magnificent novel Moby Dick, written as an answer to the Book of Job.
And yet more; fables which intertwine with our histories to magnify and deepen us through the dreams in which we live, the courage to embrace our passions and our shadows as their master and wield the darkness as a forge of destiny rather than be consumed by it, to live Unconquered and free, and finally the glorious mad quest to strike through the mask of illusion which is the material world and its Wilderness of Mirrors, lies, and falsifications, and with rapture and terror, or fascinans et tremendum as Rudolf Otto phrased it, seize the creative power and vision of the Infinite which lies beyond; Herman Melville charted themes of Romantic Idealism with the subversive intent of Victor Hugo’s social realism and the interrogation of traditional religious values through its symbols of his direct model Nathaniel Hawthorne.
There are other layers to the ideas of Herman Melville, who describes and questions the arbitrary nature of rule bound systems and of reality, and moreover is revolutionary and transgressive.
In his great book Moby Dick, we have a Marxist- environmentalist diatribe against capitalism valorizing workingmen’s labor in the form of a critique of the Romantic project of projecting ourselves into nature for the purpose of dominating and exploiting its resources, harnessed to a narrative which is primarily an exploration of men’s relationships with other men and starring the beautiful and very human marriage of his narrator Ishmael and the tattooed Islander Queequeg. Though mad Ahab is the tragic Romantic hero of the story and referential to Victor Frankenstein, the whale is its main character; it is the epic of a nonhuman personification of unconquerable nature. Moby Dick is also a figure of the ferocious patriarchal god of the Old Testament; the novel is laden with religious symbolism and images, and its humanism prefigures Freud and Nietzsche.
He wrote of gender inequality in The Tartarus of Maids, memorialized the cause of abolition in his civil war poetry which begins with John Brown’s Ferry and ends with the assassination of Lincoln, and his novel of a slave revolt at sea, Benito Cereno, references Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave.
Bartleby the Scrivener, a Story of Wall Street, a short story universally taught in American high schools, was influenced by The Communist Manifesto and by his own experience of the European revolutions of 1848-49. Herein Sartrean
authenticity, Marxist commodification, and Kafkaesque absurdism play together in a sandbox of ideas a hundred years in advance of its time.
Herman Melville still fulfills his mission as a revolutionary writing in the role of the Jester of King Lear to incite, provoke, and disturb; Camille Paglia devoted a whole chapter to him in her course on western civilization published as Sexual Personae, as has Harold Bloom in The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. C.L.R. James wrote a study of capitalism and its consequences for the rise of totalitarian fascism while imprisoned with other communists awaiting deportation from Ellis Island in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.
For each of us can find reflection in the magnificent Ahab and his tragic but glorious quest to reach beyond our limits, to dream an impossible thing and make it real.
“From Hell’s Heart I stab at Thee” Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Patrick Stewart as Ahab in Moby Dick, trailer for BBC series
Michael Sheen performs ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ by Dylan Thomas
(who I am)
“Fire Is Catching”; where we live now
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1; Fire Catches
“If we burn, you burn with us”
References
Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents, David C. Martin
The Giants of Frost and Old Night, meaning of Entropy and Chaos, whom I have named my kin as the Trickster God Loki is among them, and all Chaos is a measure of the adaptive potential of systems from which rebirth arises as well as a symbolization of the horrors of their collapse; a reading list
A Little Book on the Human Shadow: A Poetic Journey into the Dark Side of the Human Personality, Shadow Work, and the Importance of Confronting Our Hidden Self, Robert Bly
“Monster” – Imagine Dragons (cover by Runaground on youtube)
With film montage of Marvel’s Loki
Let us embrace our monstrosity and proclaim with Loki the Trickster; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
Like the ripples from a stone tossed into a pool, this; with second and third order consequences which propagate outward through time and the alternate universes produced by Rashomon Gate events.
In a world which is a museum of holocausts and atrocities, how do we live among the unknowns beyond the limits of the human and claw back something of our humanity from the darkness?
In refusal to submit to Authority we become Unconquered and free, but also marked by Otherness and often savaged by loneliness and the pathology of disconnectedness because we no longer truly belong. This is a problem because belonging is the only thing that balances fear as a means of social exchange. But it can also become a sacred wound which opens us to the pain of others.
How do we seize power from those who would enslave us, without becoming tyrants ourselves? To become the arbiter of virtue in an unjust world is a seductive phantasm of tyranny we must avoid, and revolutions tend to become tyrannies as a predictable phase of struggle due to the imposed conditions of struggle as unequal power and its legacies.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
Tonight our avengers come out to play; for Krampus is a figure of retributive justice, who restores balance to the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity.
With a name derived from the word for claw, krampen, Krampus is clearly a chthonic underworld being, who brings a Reckoning for violations of normality and transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, as an instrument for the restoration of social order, especially in his role as a punisher of naughty children, yet we must recognize what we mean when we say a thing is naughty or evil; it defies authority.
Herein is birthed violence and the use of social force as both systems of oppression enforced by the tyranny and terror of carceral states of force and control, for all states are embodied violence and there is no just authority, and its counterforce in recursion according to Newtons Third Law of Motion, revolutionary struggle and seizures of power. And if we are very lucky, they are not always the same.
We must change the rules of the games others have designed for us to play in order to seize our power and our autonomy; test limits, enact violations of normality, transgress boundaries, challenge authority and seize our power from those who would enslave us and liberate ourselves and each other from authorized identities and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue.
Here our Krampuses can help us too, for Krampus is an ambivalent figure who may equally act as an agent of the repression of dissent and as an ally in solidarity of action and revolutionary struggle, like all of us who place our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all of us who embrace our monstrosity in defense of others from those who wield unequal power as tyrants.
In the figure of Krampus we have the dialectics of fear, power, and force and the dilemma of the liberator and the tyrant in the use of social force and violence. This is due to the imposed conditions of struggle, and a process of the centralization of power to authority which arises from the violence necessary to win freedom; the historical examples of liberators who became tyrants are nearly endless.
As my rescuers in Sao Paulo Brazil 1974 said to me when they ambushed the police bounty hunters who were about to kill me for helping the street children escape execution, and welcomed me into their ferocious brotherhood; “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
In the fifty one years since that day, I have learned that to live as an Avenger requires two things; to embrace our monstrosity in the performance of solidarity, and to remain ever vigilant lest it consume us.
How may a child seize his power and autonomy from a parent in becoming human, a slave from his master, a colonized people from an empire and its vast armies of occupation, a rebel angel from a tyrant god?
As we launch our actions to bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us wherever men hunger to be free, in America and possibly soon in Venezuela against the Trump regime, in Ukraine and Palestine and where ever men hunger to be free, there are things I would whisper in your ear as you drive your chariot through the streets in triumph like Caesar; one is the test of when force may be used, to free others and never to control, to enforce virtue, or to shape others to our own wishes and ideas, but only to help them seize these things for themselves, however they may imagine their best selves, how to be human together, and the possibilities of becoming human.
My test for disambiguation of who to fight for is simply this; Who is suffering? And for who to fight against; Who holds power?
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue. That path leads to the gates of Auschwitz and to its reflection in the Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians.
Herein there is but one exception in which the use of social force is just; to prevent any of us or our freedoms from infringing on those of another.
The only justifiable role of force among human beings is to bring balance to systems of unequal power, to liberate and to avenge and bring a Reckoning, and as a guarantor of our universal human rights.
To discover and enact our uniqueness among the limitless possibilities of becoming human, while holding space for others to do the same in all ways imaginable so long as no ones joy harms that of another; this is the point of balance we struggle to achieve.
In this sacred calling to pursue the truth, both that of others and of ourselves, of those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh and of those we ourselves create, in all liberation and revolutionary struggle against imposed orders of human being, meaning, and value, how can we claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory of even survival?
First before all else, victory is refusal to submit; we can be killed but we cannot be conquered so long as we resist, and this is a power no one can take from us.
All resistance and revolutionary struggle is war to the knife. By this I mean total war, without boundaries or limits and with nothing held back, for if we let authority set the rules of the game they will falsify, commodify, dehumanize, and subjugate us.
Who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
As my father once taught me, never play someone else’s game, and when you cannot walk away, you must change the rules. Among the best examples of this which I can offer is when a monster trapped me into playing a game of chess for the life of a prisoner in Sarajevo over several days; where I learned to play the man and not the board, surely among the most bizarre of jailbreaks, but a lesson I have used in conflicts ever since.
As Jean Genet said when he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut 1982; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. My test for the use of force is simple; who holds power? For I am on the side of all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth.
From where does this idea arise?
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
As written by Jean-Paul Sartre in his play of 1948 Dirty Hands: act 5, scene 3; “I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary. “
As Frantz Fanon said in his 1960 Address to the Accra Positive Action Conference, “Why we use violence”, and published in his book Alienation and Freedom: part 3, chapter 22; “Violence in everyday behaviour, violence against the past that is emptied of all substance, violence against the future, for the colonial regime presents itself as necessarily eternal. We see, therefore, that the colonized people, caught in a web of a three-dimensional violence, a meeting point of multiple, diverse, repeated, cumulative violences, are soon logically confronted by the problem of ending the colonial regime by any means necessary.”
As Malcolm X said in the speech of 1965; “We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”
While all of this remains true, and especially for those who pass through the Arch d’ Triumph and find themselves masters of the systems they wagered their lives to overthrow; we must remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
In Gaza the Nothing devours whole families, cities, and the slave caste of one people divided by history and authorized identities of blood, faith, and soil weaponized in service to power, unleashed like a wrathful god of cannibal terror by survivors of horrors beyond imagining in the Holocaust who have duplicated the conditions of their trauma in the concentration camps in Palestine, internalized oppression, substitution, and displacement reflected in changing places with their former guards and driven by the amoral nihilism of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force.
Like all victims who become abusers, the Israelis have learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis; the apologetics of power, that only power is real and has meaning, and that only fear is the basis of human exchange. This is the Original Lie of the tyrant, and this we must resist if we are to become human.
Security is an illusion, one born of overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized through falsification and lies in service to power and the manufacture of authority, and from this Wilderness of Mirrors we must Awaken.
As Sinead O’Connor taught us, we must “fight the real enemy”; systems of unequal power and oppression and the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege who must subjugate and dehumanize us to maintain unequal power, as apex predators, and not each other.
This war, like so many others, ends only when the people of Israel and Palestine unite to free themselves from those who would enslave them and who pit them against each other as a primary strategy of power.
There are no Israelis, no Palestinians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
Today is the Anniversary of the assassination of Fred Hampton, founder of the Rainbow Coalition, by the FBI and Chicago Police, for teaching the principle of solidarity in revolutionary struggle across divisions of class, race, gender, and political ideology, a primary insight rekindled and popularized by Jesse Jackson as an extension of Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign for social justice.
Fred Hampton’s story is told in the film Judas and the Black Messiah; one of heroism and martyrdom at the hands of a carceral state of white supremacist terror and fearmongering in service to elite wealth, power, and privilege and the weaponization of divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of membership and belonging.
The story of the Rainbow Coalition which he founded on April 4 1969 in Oakland California in a meeting which he attended as Chairman of the Illinois Black Panthers is greater still, a history which remains to be told in full.
This Conference for a United Front was a national meeting of diverse groups involved in social and political activism, which brought together the Black Panthers and the white Young Patriots from Chicago, as well as Cesar Chavez’s Farm Workers Union, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Communist Party USA, and the Peace and Freedom Party of which my mother was a lifelong member and among their delegation, among many others.
I have vague memories of hearing Fred Hampton and others speak, some of my first memories of hearing political rhetoric as a nine year old; my mother forevermore proudly proclaimed herself among the first members of the Rainbow Tribe, as do I.
A month later, on Bloody Thursday May 15 at People’s Park in Berkeley, I witnessed and survived the most terrible atrocity of state terror in the history of our nation excluding the Civil War, when the police opened fire on peaceful student protest and then hunted us through the streets in a two week campaign of brutal repression with 2,400 National Guard soldiers and a mercenary force of the Alameda County Sheriffs, who had discarded their badges and donned Halloween masks while the city was tear gassed from helicopters. I would need the Rainbow Coalition’s vision of unity and hope to balance the fear and despair used by our government as a weapon of mass terror, repression of dissent, and subjugation at the orders of Governor Ronald Reagan, who in Bloody Thursday joined the many tyrants of history who have waged war against their own citizens in crimes against humanity.
But I had such words of unity, hope, and the redemptive power of love to heal the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, thanks to my mother, Gary Snyder’s Smokey the Bear Sutra which was in the hands of the six thousand students and chanted as a magic spell versus tyranny and police terror and visionaries like Fred Hampton, and I refused to give them up or allow myself to be subjugated by learned helplessness, abjection, and despair which is the true objective of the use of force and control by authority and those who would enslave us.
To her and heroic figures which include Fred Hampton I owe growing up with ideals of solidarity, equality, diversity, and inclusion as part of my identity, shaping forces and informing and motivating sources of my self-creation as seizures of power and autonomy, of the witness of history and what Foucault called truthtelling as a sacred path in pursuit of truth, and of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority which includes disbelief and disobedience as well as direct action.
This above all we can learn from the example of the witness and martyrdom of Fred Hampton; force and power become meaningless and empty when met with refusal to believe, obey, or submit. We can be killed and imprisoned, but we cannot be defeated, for who refuses to submit becomes free and Unconquered.
This is how one voice bearing the truth becomes an unstoppable tide of mass action and of history, and how we can find the will to claw our way out the ruins of our dreams to make yet another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival. In the wake of the last year’s second election of Our Clown of Cruelty, Traitor Trump, the Fall of America and the coming Age of Tyrants which it heralds, we will need such examples of solidarity of action and the victory of hope over fear, and if we follow ever thus we shall remain unbroken and Unconquered.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As written by Alicia Harmon in IDS News in her article, Want to learn about productive allyship? Look to the Rainbow Coalition; “To learn how to best be an ally, look to the Rainbow Coalition, a radical, multiracial coalition based in Chicago. From them, we can learn what it means to work with vision, bridge divides and get work done that tangibly helps communities.”
The Rainbow Coalition still lives on in large, city chapters and on campuses — including ours.
Jakobi Williams, an IU professor of African American and African Diaspora studies and history and the author of “From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago,” said the Rainbow Coalition was the brainchild of the Black Panther Party.
The Rainbow Coalition was a progressive, socialist movement that included the Black Panthers and a Puerto Rican gang-turned-human-rights organization called the Young Lords. Joining them was a white Appalachian migrant, leftist organization called the Young Patriots.
The coalition included Black Panther members Bobby Lee and Fred Hampton along with Young Lords founder José “Cha Cha” Jiménez and Young Patriots leader William “Preacherman” Fesperman. It eventually grew to include other Latino, Asian American, Native American and student organizations among others.
The Rainbow Coalition did not organize around colorblindness and non-confrontational political ideals.
“Chicago then, and still is today, the most racially, residentially segregated city in America,” Williams said.
According to South Side Weekly journalist Jacqueline Serrato, redlining, the systemic manner in which housing and services were segregated and denied to racial undesirables, was violently enforced by white street gangs. This was just one of many racial issues in Chicago.
“Fred Hampton and Bob Lee were able to transcend those so-called differences to bring these people together under the rubric of class solidarity,” Williams said.
They united to deal with poverty, gentrification, police brutality and political disempowerment.
Williams said the coalition saw itself as a continuation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr ‘s Poor People’s Campaign, a democratic socialist effort that sought economic justice for poor people across backgrounds.
Survival programs, which the Panthers established to help meet the needs defined in their Ten Point Platform, were instrumental in the Coalition’s work.
According to Serrato, these programs included the free breakfast program, free health clinics, day care centers and other social service programs. The Panthers helped other organizations establish programs in their communities, and these efforts were primarily spearheaded by women.
Some continue to be implemented by our government today, most notably the School Breakfast Program.
Along with embracing radical politics and emphasizing community programming, The Rainbow Coalition rejected paternalistic forms of allyship that meant others would come into communities as apparent saviors, impose solutions, and dominate leadership.
Williams said Hampton and Lee asserted “that we’re working together in solidarity, but we’re not trying to run your communities. So you guys advocate for whatever you think is important for your communities, and then when you’re ready to move forward, you contact us and we show up in support.”
As we look at allyship today, it’s important to note the Rainbow Coalition did not come together for diluted ideas of diversity and representation.
They came together because of explicit and joint political goals. They did not dominate conversations of change, nor the communities being changed. They worked with each other, government organizations, and lawyers to bring change as quickly as possible.
Superficial reforms and demonstrations were not — and are not — enough. We need to have specific political vision, engage in community organizing, address policy directly, and work to break down oppressive systems systematically.
As we get ready to watch “Judas and the Black Messiah,” we should read and learn this history for ourselves. And when it’s time, get down and do the work.”
What can we learn about the art of revolutionary struggle from this film, and from the life of Fred Hampton?
As written by Joseph G. Ramsey in Black Agenda Report, How Should Revolutionaries Relate to this Film? 15 Lessons from Judas and the Black Messiah;
1) The FBI is not our friend. As American corporate media cozy up with the repressive state apparatus beneath the barbed umbrella of contra-Trump “resistance,” bringing many liberals with them, this film reminds us that, at root, the abiding purpose of the FBI is not to uphold justice for all, but to protect a social order that benefits only a few. While CNN and MSNBC now feature permanent pundit seats for former top officials from the CIA, NSA, or FBI, Judas reminds us of how such groups’ raison d’être has been to infiltrate, undermine, and destroy threats to the ruling class (capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist)—by any means necessary.
2) The Panthers were not “terrorists” but the target of state terror. Nothing justifies state power more than a terrorist; it’s popular revolutionaries and radical social movements that call that state power into question. Indeed, as Judas shows, much of the “worst” that was attributed to the BPP in terms of violence was in fact instigated or even deliberately perpetrated by state infiltrators themselves. And even where the Panther’s use of violence in the film is not strictly speaking a matter of immediate self-defense (and there is some of that sort), the film makes clear that such violence is still an indirect result of oppressive conditions and police state terror.
3) Cultural nationalism is not the same as revolutionary culture. The opening Hampton speech of the film—addressed to a student group at a predominantly black college—seems aimed at elements of our current moment and movements. As Hampton underscores in his critical comments, donning dashikis, renaming colleges, and blackening the public face of elite leadership, is of limited value as far as the masses are concerned. Such symbolic top-down reforms, though by no means a bad thing in themselves, won’t protect the people, and yet may play a co-opting role for more privileged strata (like college students), substituting for more revolutionary change. (As Hampton puts it later, addressing the “Southern heritage” of the white Young Patriots, when trapped in a house that’s on fire, the only “culture” that really matters is “water and escape.”)
4) Capitalist exploiters and ‘pig’ oppressors come in every shade. Just as the film makes clear that not all whites are capitalist exploiters or supporters of the police, not all capitalists or “pigs” are white. And, as the premise of the film makes clear, skin color is no guarantee of solidarity—and thinking it is can leave an organization open to destructive backstabbing. “We’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism,” as Hampton famously puts it—and as this film quotes him: “We’re going to fight it with socialism.” “We’re not going to fight racism with more racism…We’re going to fight it with solidarity.”
5) While Black radicals were the main target of police repression, what made the Panthers particularly “dangerous” in the view of J. Edgar Hoover and company was that the BPP grasped that poor people across race and social movement lines share common interests in challenging and changing this oppressive system. (As Hampton points out: “rats” and “pigs” alike were running rampant in poor white Chicago neighborhoods in 1969, too. Certainly, as Hampton recognizes, the conditions faced by black slaves, white tenant farmers, and overseers ought not to be equated. But all those groups could have still had an interest in “cutting the master’s throat,” as Hampton put it—and on this point of unity genuine solidarity could be built (and people transformed in the process).
6) It takes bold leadership to cross the prevailing social lines but doing so can yield major breakthroughs. The film shows Hampton bravely crossing onto the turf of supposed antagonists, from shotgun-armed street gangs, to hillbilly nationalists flying the confederate “Stars and Bars,” and winning friends where even his own Panther comrades expect enemies. Such underlying commonalities of interest, however, may not manifest unless one first breaches the existing social silos. Indeed, the underlying commonality may appear first as opposition, since oppressed people, hardened to survive an unjust system, may look upon strangers first as possible threats. But with the proper approach—with optimism, clarity, and humor—and with a strategic focus on common concerns and shared enemies, it is possible to find allies and new comrades in unexpected places. (Even among those who may seem to uphold symbols, styles, or rhetoric anathema to radical change.)
7) Beware the lure of the gun (and of revenge). The open defiance of the police on the street surely inspired and galvanized many—and was crucial to the Panthers’ sudden rise. But the brandishing of the gun can be effectively suicidal in a situation where the distribution of arms is so lopsided. There is therefore a danger in romanticizing revolutionary violence (and martyrdom) and, furthermore, with thinking of revolutionary-socialist politics primarily through the metaphor of a “war”—a point made powerfully in the film by Hampton’s partner, Deborah Johnson, whose lyric talents allow her to recognize in her beloved comrade not only a warrior, but also a poet.
8 ) The system fears the radical unity of the broad masses, and targets those who make such unity possible. What makes a leader or organization truly “dangerous” to the establishment is not merely its racial character or its militancy—though both certainly factor—but its ability to connect with other groups around shared interests, recruit allies, and galvanize broader support for a radical (socialist and anti-imperialist) program, beyond the ranks of the most oppressed. (This can also be applied to the state targeting of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X during, especially during the final years of their lives.)
9) Revolutionaries romanticize the oppressed at our peril. Yes, as Mao put it, “where there is oppression there is resistance,” but also, where there is oppression there is: isolation, vulnerability, fear and desperation. Each of which can make oppressed people not less but more prone to manipulation by agents of the state into counter-revolutionary activity—this is where the focus on the Bill O’Neal’s “Judas” character is crucial.
10) Study is essential to the struggle. Hampton’s Panthers took ideology and education seriously. The BPP were not merely a stylish armed breakfast organization, serving the people scrambled eggs on Tuesday and shotguns on Sunday. They were also teaching people—and themselves—core ideas of Marx, Lenin, Fanon, and Mao in Liberation Schools. They were working consciously at becoming socialists, internationalists, communists, and anti-imperialists, linking the US war in Vietnam to its abuse of oppressed people at home, and expressing solidarity and developing ties to regimes abroad, from Cuba to China to Algeria. (It is clear that Shaka King elected to foreground Hampton as educator—we see him more often with chalk in hand than gun. And just as Fred and Deborah study Malcolm X’s speeches with care, so a new generation should now study Hampton’s words, maybe even working from this film.)
11) State repression threatens not just to destroy revolutionary movement from without, but to distort it from within. Police violence can do double-damage, not only laying waste to the lives of revolutionaries, organizers, and people from oppressed communities, but also instilling in some of its victims a rage, desperation, and desire for revenge that can in turn play right into the enemies’ hands, undermining organizational discipline and collective strategy, substituting individual martyrdom for collective transformation. (The subsequent fear of state repression can in turn lead to a third form of damage, as organizational “security culture” cuts groups off from not just the state, but the people, too.)
12) Mass incarceration and repression create both political opportunities and dangers for revolutionary movement. The film foregrounds the contradictory implications: on the one hand, prisons have the potential to be a kind of “ground zero” for revolutionary activity, creating new forms of solidarity and collaboration among some of society’s most oppressed. On the other, the vulnerability to state coercion created by widespread criminalization creates the deadly potential for turning oppressed people against the very revolutionary organizations that aim to serve and to liberate them. (At the same time, some of the most powerful displays of community support for the BPP came in the wake of the police fire-bombing of their headquarters.)
13) Revolutionary leadership like Hampton’s is precious and has a crucial role to play, but over-reliance on it can become a movement weakness. There is no way you can watch this film and still feel unequivocally that we are somehow better off in horizontal “leaderless” organizations without the guidance of such charismatic voices. Yet the film shows Hampton’s own struggle in his last days against the tendency to elevate him at the expense of the group and its mission. As Hampton puts it, “You can kill a revolutionary…But you can’t kill Revolution.” How then can we cultivate and support revolutionary leadership without creating mass dependency upon it? (It’s crucial to recall here that the label “Black messiah” was a targeting invention of the state; we ought not to take up such a notion in our own movements.)
14) A line struggle runs through this entire society—between serving the people, even when it means breaking with the system(proletarian ideology), and defending the system or profiting oneself, even when it means hurting the people (the “pig” outlook). No one is excluded, no one immune.
15) It is the role of revolutionaries not to act in place of the people but to “sharpen the contradictions” and clarify the stakes, so that the people themselves can decide. As Hampton puts it: “Where there are people, there is power.” Yes! But how will the people grasp their power and come to wield it? What line will prevail? We need revolutionary educators of all types to help people “make the distinction,” as Chairman Fred put it, “between the proletariat and the pig.” To do so is not so simple a task as it might seem: for to separate the two is not just a matter of saying “these people are the heroes” and “those people the villains,” but of recognizing the ways in which the “proletarian v. pig” struggle is at work broadly across society, not just between but also within people’s lives and many of our institutions. “Making the distinction,” then entails working through the particularity of the contradiction, the class and ideological struggle cutting across all things in society, from the prison cell to the schoolhouse, from the workplace, to the street….to, yes, even the movie theater.
So then: Rather than asking whether or not Judas & the Black Messiah fulfilled our own personal desires for what a revolutionary film about Fred Hampton or the Black Panthers ought to look like, perhaps we should begin with another sort of question: What can we do to make the most of this opportunity? How can this film be used as a tool for advancing the struggle? How can we use this powerful (if imperfect) film as a chance to “heighten the contradictions” so that more and more people can learn the enduring lessons of this history?”
There is another aspect of the execution of John Brown which has consequences for us today, in the shadows of the January 6 Insurrection and the capture of the state by the Fourth Reich through the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024 and the Presidency of the most successful foreign agent ever sent against our nation, the fascist, rapist, and treasonous Russian agent Traitor Trump.
A full recital of perversions and crimes against humanity, subversions of democracy in the sabotage of our institutions of government and violations of our national ideals, most especially in the twin campaigns of white supremacist terror at home in the ICE ethnic cleansing atrocities and abroad in the random murders of Venezuelan fishermen and acts of piracy on the high seas, would roll on endlessly like a litany of woes and songs of cruelty and the abandonment of our humanity.
Before the court of history wherein the idea of democracy now stands trial and for the next years of the Fourth Reich’s Trump regime in America will be under constant attack and subversion from the top by a cabal of lunatics and fiends whose mission is not only the destruction of the state and its institutions but the Fall of America as the land of the free, how shall we the people answer treason?
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter; “On the clear, windy morning of December 2, 1859, just before 11:00, the doors of the jail in Charles Town, Virginia, opened, and guards moved John Brown to his funeral procession. Three companies of soldiers escorted the prisoner, who sat on his own coffin in a wagon drawn by two white horses, for the trip to the gallows.
Once there, Brown mounted the steep steps. The sheriff put a white hood on the prisoner’s head and adjusted a noose around his neck. After a delay of about fifteen minutes while officers arranged the troops that had escorted the wagon, the sheriff swung a hatchet at the rope supporting the trap door below Brown’s feet. The door snapped open and the man who had tried to launch a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry two months before dangled, as one observer said, “between heaven and earth.”
That same observer, John T. L. Preston of the Virginia Military Institute, went on to explain that the “grand point” of the spectacle was its moral: that it was fatal to take up arms against the government.
John Brown was the first American to be executed for treason.
Before 1859 the punishment for treason in America had not been clear. In the early years of independence, as colonies tried to stamp out loyalty to the King, some colonies had broadened the definition of treason to include “preaching, teaching, speaking, writing, or printing,” and by the time of the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, twelve of the thirteen states had written their own laws against treason.
The Framers of the Constitution recognized the danger that leaders in the new nation might expand the definition of treason to sweep in political opposition, and after all, they had been “traitors” themselves just eleven years before. So the Framers specified in the Constitution a very limited definition of treason against the United States, saying that only levying war against the United States or “adhering to their enemies” or giving “aid and comfort” to an enemy could be considered treason. But they did not define a penalty for treason, leaving that to be determined by Congress.
They also voted to leave open the possibility for states to define treason as they wished. In the years after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, most state constitutional conventions defined treason as a crime in their fundamental state law.
As men jockeyed for control of the government in the chaotic early years of the Republic, several men ran afoul of the federal and state treason clauses, but they did not pay the ultimate price for their missteps. Two men were convicted of treason against the federal government during the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s; President Washington pardoned them both. In 1838, Joseph Smith and five other Mormon leaders were charged with treason against Missouri for their part in the violent struggle between Mormons and non-Mormons in the state; they escaped before trial. Thomas Wilson Dorr was convicted of treason against Rhode Island for his part in the Dorr Rebellion of the 1840s and was sentenced to hard labor for life, but a popular protest won him amnesty after he had served a year.
Then, on October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led 18 men to attack the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia—it became West Virginia in 1863—in order to seize guns from the armory, distribute them to local enslaved men, and lead them to freedom and self-government. As they cut the telegraph wires in the town in the dead of night, a free Black man, a baggage handler, stumbled upon them and they shot him. The sound attracted the attention of a local physician, who roused his neighbors. As they started to come awake, Brown’s men took the armory, which was defended by a single watchman who turned over the keys to the raiders.
At dawn the next day, a train came through the town, and its operators alerted authorities to the trouble in Harpers Ferry as soon as they got to a working telegraph. Meanwhile, Brown’s people captured Armory employees coming to work, and as news of the hostages spread, local militia converged on the site. As firing from the militia pinned Brown’s men down, they moved to a small brick building near the armory’s door. Intermittent shooting over the course of the day killed a number of Brown’s men as well as local militia before federal troops arrived on the morning of the next day, October 18.
Officers, commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee, promised to spare the lives of Brown and his men if they surrendered, but Brown refused. Within minutes, soldiers had broken down the doors to their shelter and taken prisoner Brown and the seven of his men still alive.
On October 27 the state of Virginia began the trial of the still-wounded Brown for murder, inciting a slave insurrection, and treason against the state of Virginia. His lawyers argued that he could not have committed treason because he was not a resident of the state and so owed it no allegiance.
But the Virginia jury deliberated for only 45 minutes before they convicted John Brown of treason, agreeing with the prosecution that one did not have to reside in a state to be guilty of taking up arms against its government. On November 2 the judge sentenced Brown to death by hanging, a sentence that would be carried out after a legally required one-month delay.
Virginians like Preston applauded the decision. “Law had been violated by actual murder and attempted treason,” Preston wrote to his wife in a letter reprinted in the local newspaper, “and that gibbet was erected by law, and to uphold law was this military force assembled…. So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such foes of the human race!”
The execution of John Brown for treason set a precedent.
And in just over a year, Virginians themselves would take up arms against the federal government. Men like Preston, who became an aide-de-camp to Stonewall Jackson, had to wonder if the precedent of hanging John Brown for treason might come back to haunt them.
Notes: J. Taylor McConkie, “State Treason: The History and Validity of Treason Against Individual States,” Kentucky Law Journal Vol. 101: Iss. 2, Article 3.”
Will this precedent of which Heather Cox Richardson has reminded us come back to haunt Traitor Trump and other conspirators in the January 6 Insurrection, the Doge monkeywrenching and kleptocracy which has stolen from the poor to give to the rich, and the criminals who have killed nameless peasants without trial or cause to legitimate the colonial invasion and capture of Venezuela’s oil under the pretext of stopping drug trafficking as Trump sells a pardon the American kingpin of the Silk Road syndicate who smuggled 400 million dollars of drugs into our nation?
The idea of capital punishment as absolute power of the state over its citizens is anathema to me; I prefer instead the ancient Roman custom of damnatio memorae or public forgetting and erasure from history, and in accord with the principle of minimum use of social force I believe the natural consequence of treason is loss of citizenship and exile.
But with Trump’s promise to pardon the January 6 Insurrectionists when he takes office, and the charges against him for leading it as a coup against the United States and in violation of his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, what options remain open to us?
Let us bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us.
What has happened to bring us to the edge of the Restoration of America and the end of the criminal Trump regime?
As written in The Hartman Report, in an article entitled Breaking News: If Hegseth Gave an Order to “Kill Everybody,” He Must Be Removed and Prosecuted, And if Donald Trump approved or encouraged these actions, then impeachment and criminal referral are not optional: they’re required to defend the rule of law; “Shocking as this moment is, none of us should pretend we weren’t warned. When Donald Trump installed Pete Hegseth — a television provocateur whose public record is soaked in belligerence, booze, and culture-war performance — as America’s Defense Secretary, the world could see exactly where it was headed.
Still, nothing prepared us for today’s Washington Post’s revelation that Hegseth personally ordered U.S. forces to “kill everybody” on a small wooden boat off the coast of Trinidad on September 2.
You’d expect rogue militias or failed–state paramilitaries to speak that way. You don’t expect it from the man running the Pentagon.
What the Post reports is almost too grotesque to absorb.
After the first U.S. missile ripped the boat apart and set it burning, commanders watched on a live drone feed as two survivors clung desperately to the charred wreckage.
They were unarmed. They were wounded. They were no threat to anyone. They were simply alive; inconveniently alive for a man who had allegedly already given the order that there be no survivors.
And so, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the strike, the Special Operations commander overseeing the operation ordered a second missile. It hit the water and blew those two men apart.
History tells us to watch out for nations that lose their moral compass in real time.
It starts when the powerful stop seeing human beings as human. It accelerates when the government itself denies any obligation to justify its killings.
And when leaders begin lying to Congress and the public to cover what they’ve done, you’re no longer looking at isolated abuses. You’re staring straight into the machinery of authoritarianism.
Instead of telling Congress that the second strike was designed to finish off wounded survivors, Pentagon officials claimed it was to “remove a navigation hazard.”
That isn’t just spin: it’s an attempt to rewrite reality.
The Post quotes Todd Huntley, a former Special Operations military lawyer now at Georgetown Law, saying exactly what any first-year law student would immediately recognize: because the United States is not legally “at war” with drug traffickers, killing the people on that boat “amounts to murder.”
Even if a war did exist, Huntley notes, the order to kill wounded, unarmed survivors “would in essence be an order to show no quarter,” which is defined under the Geneva Conventions as a war crime.
This isn’t an obscure legal debate. This is basic civilization. Armed states do not execute helpless people in the water.
And yet this is now U.S. policy. The boat strike on September 2 was not a one–off. It was the beginning of a campaign.
The Post reports that since that first attack, Trump and Hegseth have ordered more than 20 similar missile strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 80 people.
The administration insists the victims were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But in classified briefings to Congress, Pentagon officials have not provided even one single verified name of a trafficker or gang leader they’ve killed. Lawmakers from both parties say they’ve been shown nothing beyond grainy videos of small boats being destroyed from the air.
If these men had truly been high–value cartel operatives, Trump would be parading names and photos across every rally stage in America. The silence tells its own story.
Experts warn that many of the dead may not have been traffickers at all. They may have been border–crossing migrants, subsistence fishermen, or small–scale smugglers whose crimes did not remotely justify summary execution.
International human rights groups are already calling these killings extrajudicial and illegal. Some foreign governments are asking whether the United States has effectively created a free-fire zone over parts of the Caribbean, and several have limited intelligence sharing with us for fear of being complicit in prosecutable war crimes and crimes against humanity.
This, too, has been part of the authoritarian playbook since ancient times.
Pick a foreign or criminal “other,” paint them as subhuman monsters, and then declare that the normal laws of war, morality, and basic decency no longer apply.
For years, right-wing media has been hyping Tren de Aragua as a kind of supercharged successor to MS-13, just as Trump once used MS-13 as a bludgeon to justify abuses at home.
The fact that the administration has produced no evidence for its claims isn’t a bug: it’s the point. When the government fabricates an omnipresent threat, it gives itself permission to kill whoever it wants.
This may also explain the ferocity with which Hegseth and Trump went after Democratic lawmakers last week when they reminded U.S. service members that they are duty-bound to disobey illegal orders.
Those officers weren’t being dramatic: they were issuing a warning grounded in fresh blood. And Hegseth’s and Trump’s panicked rage — calling for the death penalty for six members of Congress, including a decorated war hero and a CIA officer — now makes perfect sense: he knows perfectly well what he’s already ordered.
The strike on September 2 is not just a policy failure; it’s a moral collapse. If the Post’s reporting is accurate — and multiple congressional offices say it is consistent with what whistleblowers have told them — then the United States has engaged in the deliberate killing of wounded, unarmed men floating in the sea.
That is the kind of conduct that topples governments, triggers war-crimes investigations, and leaves scars on nations for generations.
Nobody elected Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth to serve as judge, jury, and executioner for impoverished people in wooden boats. Nobody gave them the authority to murder suspects without trial. And nobody gave them the right to lie to Congress about it.
Congress must not let this pass. These allegations demand immediate public hearings, subpoena power, and full investigative authority.
If Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody,” he must be removed and prosecuted.
If U.S. commanders falsified reports to mislead Congress and the public, they must be held accountable.
And if Donald Trump approved or encouraged these actions, then impeachment and criminal referral are not optional: they’re required to defend the rule of law.
America doesn’t have many chances left to prove to the world, and to ourselves, that we still believe in the value of human life and the restraints of democratic power. This is one of them.
How best may we restore the balance of justice and our democracy?
As I wrote in my post of January 9 2022, How Shall We Answer Treason?; Disloyalty and the betrayal of trust are among the worst and most terrible of true crimes, for they signify and represent the failure and collapse of all other values and meaning. This is why Solidarity as Fraternity is among the three principles on which the Revolution is built, along with Liberty and Equality, for without them there can be no free society of equals.
A brilliant Meidas Touch video which indicts Trump as a domestic terrorist for the January 6 Insurrection provoked me to question, How shall we answer treason? So wrote the following in reply:
Actually, I would like to see Trump achieve his true nature by being fed to dogs and transformed into dog shit. Wouldn’t it be a lovely display in a glass case exhibited in a museum of holocausts, atrocities, and crimes against humanity? Let his monument read thus:
Here lies Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, in his true form, most terrible enemy democracy has faced since Alcibiades betrayed Athens, most dangerous foreign agent to ever attack America and leader of the most destructive and consequential attacks against our nation even including Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, who subverted our ideals and sabotaged our institutions, and nearly enacted the fall of civilization as the figurehead of the Fourth Reich and herald of an age of fascist tyranny and state terror.
Yet here he lies, nothing but a pile of dog shit. Look upon the rewards of treason, tyranny, and terror, you who are mighty, and despair.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
We can but wish. Beyond such fantasies, exclusion is a just balance for crimes of treason, disloyalty, and betrayal, in the forms of loss of citizenship, the most terrible punishment any nation can inflict, and exile and erasure.
To be clear, all participants in the January 6 Insurrection, and all who conspired in this crime, had knowledge aforehand but did not sound an alarm, or acted subsequently to conceal, abet, or deny and excuse its perpetrators and its nature including all legislators who voted not to investigate it, the Justice department which sabotaged its investigation and trial, and all who became conspirators after the fact in voting for Trump in our last election, bear responsibility in its crimes and should be repaid with loss of citizenship, forfeitures of assets, exile, and erasure.
Exile as the natural consequence of treason was explored in the short story “The Man Without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale, first published in The Atlantic in December 1863. It is a story of a traitor who comes to understand the true meaning of his crime; the renunciation of his social contract, connection and interdependence with other human beings, and membership in a national identity.
As described in Wikipedia; “It is the story of American Army lieutenant Philip Nolan, who renounces his country during a trial for treason, and is consequently sentenced to spend the rest of his days at sea without so much as a word of news about the United States.
The protagonist is a young US Army lieutenant, Philip Nolan, who develops a friendship with the visiting Aaron Burr. When Burr is tried for treason (that historically occurred in 1807), Nolan is tried as an accomplice. During his testimony, he bitterly renounces his nation and, with a foul oath, angrily shouts, “I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” The judge is completely shocked at that announcement and, on convicting him, icily grants him his wish. Nolan is to spend the rest of his life aboard US Navy warships in exile with no right ever to set foot on US soil again and with explicit orders that no one shall ever again mention his country to him.
The sentence is carried out to the letter. For the rest of his life, Nolan is transported from ship to ship, lives out his life as a prisoner on the high seas, and is never allowed back in a home port.”
So for Exile; now also for Erasure. As I wrote in my post of January 7 2021, Treason and Terror: Trump’s Brownshirts Attack Congress; This leaves the ringleader and chief conspirator of treason, sedition, insurrection, and terror to be removed from power and denied a platform from which to spread madness and violence like a plague; our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. I believe we must remove, impeach, deplatform, and prosecute him for his many crimes against America; Trump must be exiled from public life and isolated from his power to destroy us.
Roman law called this damnatio memoriae, the erasure of public forgetting, and coupled with the Amish practice of shunning provides a useful model of minimum use of social force in safeguarding ourselves from threats, without the brutality of torture and prison to which we have become addicted. A fascinating article by the classical scholar Alexander Meddings examines its use in the cases of Trump’s nearest Imperial parallels, Caligula and Nero.
Exile and Erasure; neither prison nor violence or the use of force and fear. Let us simply cast out those who would destroy us from among us, and forget them.
I came to my lifelong interest in the origins of evil by three Defining Moments of life disruptive events and trauma, which include a childhood growing up in a savagely repressive community of religious fanatics of the patriarchal and xenophobic Reformed Church, once the state faith of South Africa’s Apartheid regime, a childhood wherein divisions of exclusionary otherness and the three primary terrors, faith weaponized in service to authority and power as violence, subjugation, and identitarian-sectarian division, patriarchal sexual terror, and white supremacist terror and other racially motivated hate crime and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, were symbolized for me by two fires; a witch burning, hopefully the last in the United States when neighbors including other children whom I played with gathered to burn a solitary old woman alive in her home, having no father, husband, brother, or son to speak for her which was already a social crime without the rumor of witchcraft, and the burning of a cross on the lawn of newlyweds who had married outside of their churches, a Dutch Reformed Church man and a Swiss Calvinist woman, both white Protestants, referred to locally as a mixed marriage and officially shunned by the Reformed Church. This was all within an hours drive of San Francisco, not in some remote village lost in medieval Europe; but also under the shadow of a tyrant god. When one begins by forbidding music as sinful and the use of buttons as non-Biblical technology, divisions of exclusionary otherness and membership become easily reinforced by authority as a grim regime of force and control.
Second came a near-death experience of disembodied timeless vision and frontline witness at nine years of age of the most massive incident of state terror in American history, Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969 in People’s Park, Berkeley, when then Governor Reagan ordered the police to open fire on a nonviolent student protest.
Third were my experiences in the summer of 1974 just before high school, when I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children and other outcasts from the police death squads and bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and my near-execution by police which echoes that of Maurice Blanchot in 1944 by the Gestapo and of Fyodur Dostoevsky’s 1849 mock execution by the Czar’s secret police as recounted in The Idiot.
This trauma and historical context I processed by reading and writing, and during my last two years of high school I discovered books which became instrumental to this process and to my understanding; Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, whose protagonist I felt a deep identification and kinship with, and was a dinner table subject of conversation as my mother wrote her study of psychosomatic muteness from his childhood therapy journal and the Soviet mental hospital records Kosinski wrote his magnificent and terrible novel from, the works of Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, and Jean Paul Sartre, and other Holocaust survivors and Resistance fighters who engaged with the problem of evil as tyranny and state terror, and Robert Waite’s magisterial study of Hitler in The Psychopathic God; this last work inspired me to question the origins of evil as fear, power, and force under the quadruple lens of psychology, history, philosophy, and literature as a field of scholarship at university and throughout my life.
How is this relevant to ideas of justice? Because we must not become our enemies in the use of social force, even to guarantee our universal human rights.
Remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
We must escape the maelstrom of dehumanization which is the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force if we are to free ourselves from the disfiguring and crippling legacies of our history. To do this we must abandon power over others and the social use of force; but first we must seize our power over ourselves from those who would enslave us.
Family of victim in alleged Trump ‘drug boat’ killings files first formal complaint
Breaking News: If Hegseth Gave an Order to “Kill Everybody,” He Must Be Removed and Prosecuted
And if Donald Trump approved or encouraged these actions, then impeachment and criminal referral are not optional: they’re required to defend the rule of law…
On this day we meet in solidarity with our comrades and bearers of the Torch of Liberty, to swear our oaths and make our plans for the upcoming year of liberation struggle throughout the world; to make mischief for tyrants and bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us.
Among the legacies of our history we must escape if we are to create a free society of equals and a United Humankind, slavery is a horror of depravity and terror which defines the limits of the human. The Abolition of slavery and its epigenetic consequences must always be a first priority mission for anyone who places their lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, because it is a canary in the coal mine of unequal power, a symptom of the tyranny of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and a clearly evil example of a general condition of dehumanization and commodification as a casus belli for democracy.
In America we fought the Civil War against a Confederacy which was nothing more grand than a human trafficking syndicate which had declared itself a nation to evade morality and the rule of law; here the African slave stood in as a figure for all the exploited labor of the time, which included all women, many children, and whole sectors of our economy; what was a sailor, a miner, or any worker forced to sell his time in brutal and dehumanizing conditions but a slave? With the crusade of liberty which began as Abolition and became a second American revolution in the Civil War, all of the exploited classes united in solidarity to seize power and cast their owners down from their thrones. This is how we freed the slaves in America, and its how we must unite to free the slaves now.
Among its greatest horrors is that slavery today is not a marginal crime but one central to the internal contradictions of our civilization; it is omnipresent and touches our lives everywhere, like the violations of invisible hands which seek to shape us to their own purposes as commodities and labor which creates wealth and power for others who own us. Slavery is a pervasive and endemic harm, and an inherent evil of capitalism; nearly everything we own and use is an artifact of slavery in some form.
The United Nations figures there are fifty million slaves now living; including “28 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. Almost one in eight of all those in forced labour are children. More than half of these children are in commercial sexual exploitation.”
I once pointed out the ubiquity of slavery in our society and the banality of evil hiding in plain sight to my Forensics students using the skeleton in the school biology classroom as an example; “Ever wonder why the skeleton in your biology class is so tiny? It’s a child skeleton, like most, and like most they come from processing factories in places like the one in India which was just shut down, from which some four thousand skeletons were bought by schools all over America and Europe. The supply for this trade originates in India’s inheritable debt law; you can be put to work to pay off your grandfather’s debt, and they don’t have to be nice about how they do it. These skeletons exist because the local value of children as slave labor is less than the foreign value of their bones.”
A student who is now a doctor then asked; “So how do I become a doctor and study medicine in a just way?”
Here is my answer to her and to us all; “Become a doctor in honor of the people who bought that privilege for you with their lives, and change the evil we inherit into something good.”
For the past and the dead we can do nothing but remember and bear witness; it is the future and the living who must be redeemed.
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 is the Secretary-General’s Message on the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery; “As we commemorate the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, we need to recognize that the legacy of the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans reverberates to this day, scarring our societies and impeding equitable development.
We must also identify and eradicate contemporary forms of slavery, such as trafficking in persons, sexual exploitation, child labour, forced marriage and the use of children in armed conflict. The latest Global Estimates of Modern Slavery on forced labour and forced marriage reveal that, in 2021, some 50 million persons were thus enslaved, and this number has been growing.
The most marginalized groups remain particularly vulnerable, including ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities, migrants, children and persons with diverse gender identities and sexual orientations. The majority of these vulnerable persons are women.
On this International Day, I call on Governments and societies to recommit to eradicating slavery. Increased action needs to be taken with full participation of all stakeholders, including the private sector, trade unions, civil society and human rights institutions. I also urge all countries to protect and uphold the rights of victims and survivors of slavery.”
What is to be done?, as Lenin asked in his essay which launched the Russian Revolution. As it happens, history provides us with guidance in this cause of liberation struggle.
This is also the anniversary of the execution of John Brown in 1859 for the Harper’s Ferry raid, in which he forever taught us how to reply to those who would enslave us with his historic attempt to arm the slaves that they might seize for themselves the lands they worked and the wealth they created, much as the people of Haiti had done in the Revolution of 1791-1804.
As Frederick Douglass said of him, “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. . . . Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm, the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone–the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union–and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost cause of the century.”
How very like the moment of decision we face now, in the wake of the January 6 Insurrection and all that has come after in the Trump regime. Our glorious heroes and champions of the past, Frederick Douglass and John Brown among countless others, have given answer to those who would enslave us; now its our turn.
How answer we, for the suffering of the fifty million people who are slaves now? How bring we a Reckoning to the elite hegemons responsible for this vast and timeless crime against humanity, and bring change to the systems of unequal power by which those who would enslave us enforce their tyranny?
Who do we want to become, we humans; a world of masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
As written in Jacobin in an article entitled Eugene Debs’s Stirring, Never-Before-Published Eulogy to John Brown at Harpers Ferry; “In a previously unpublished eulogy to John Brown from 1908, Eugene Debs proclaimed Brown the “greatest liberator this country has known” and declared that ”the Socialist Party is carrying on the work begun by John Brown.” We publish it here in full.
Eugene Debs revered John Brown as “history’s greatest hero,” a man who saw an unspeakable horror and tried to dash it from the world. In October 1908, while campaigning for president, Debs decided to make a brief stop at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the site of Brown’s doomed anti-slavery crusade.
After disembarking from the “Red Special,” his campaign train, Debs delivered a brief eulogy. His remarks, though stirring, were largely lost to history. A labor paper published a transcript in November 1908, but otherwise Debs’s remarks, as far as we know, have never been digitized or reprinted.
Jacobin’s Shawn Gude was able to obtain a copy of Debs’s speech — courtesy of the wonderful librarians at Indiana State University — while conducting research for his forthcoming biography of Eugene Debs. So here it is: Debs’s never-before-published eulogy to John Brown.
“It is fitting that the Red Special should stop here and that we should do honor to John Brown. He was the greatest liberator this country has known. He dared the whole world and gave up his life for freedom. What more can a man do?
A few years I came and followed his steps from this spot all the way to Charles Town, where he was hanged. All the way he was the only calm person. Kindly, sweetly, and not even hating those who hounded him, he went his way.
Even members of the poor despised race for which he had done so much were taught to despise him and look upon him as something vile. On that bright, sunny morning when he was led upon the gallows, he smiled. “This is a beautiful country,” he said. “I had not seen it before.” He went to his death without fear, knowing his work was done.
As I stand here on this spot where he stood, I can see him as he stood here with a rifle in his hand, and his sons on the ground, one dead and the other dying. What a heroic figure he is as I see him.
Even today he is not appreciated. But as time goes on the fog that obscures the acts of great heroic men will be swept away, and he will stand as one of the most heroic figures in the world. Emerson has said: “The time will come when John Brown will have made the gallows as glorious as Jesus Christ made the cross.” The Socialist Party is carrying on the work begun by John Brown.”
There is another aspect of the execution of John Brown which has consequences for us today, in the shadows of the January 6 Insurrection and the capture of the state by the Fourth Reich through the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024 and the bogus and fictive Presidencies of the most successful foreign agent ever sent against our nation, the fascist and Russian agent Traitor Trump.
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter; “On the clear, windy morning of December 2, 1859, just before 11:00, the doors of the jail in Charles Town, Virginia, opened, and guards moved John Brown to his funeral procession. Three companies of soldiers escorted the prisoner, who sat on his own coffin in a wagon drawn by two white horses, for the trip to the gallows.
Once there, Brown mounted the steep steps. The sheriff put a white hood on the prisoner’s head and adjusted a noose around his neck. After a delay of about fifteen minutes while officers arranged the troops that had escorted the wagon, the sheriff swung a hatchet at the rope supporting the trap door below Brown’s feet. The door snapped open and the man who had tried to launch a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry two months before dangled, as one observer said, “between heaven and earth.”
That same observer, John T. L. Preston of the Virginia Military Institute, went on to explain that the “grand point” of the spectacle was its moral: that it was fatal to take up arms against the government.
John Brown was the first American to be executed for treason.
Before 1859 the punishment for treason in America had not been clear. In the early years of independence, as colonies tried to stamp out loyalty to the King, some colonies had broadened the definition of treason to include “preaching, teaching, speaking, writing, or printing,” and by the time of the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, twelve of the thirteen states had written their own laws against treason.
The Framers of the Constitution recognized the danger that leaders in the new nation might expand the definition of treason to sweep in political opposition, and after all, they had been “traitors” themselves just eleven years before. So the Framers specified in the Constitution a very limited definition of treason against the United States, saying that only levying war against the United States or “adhering to their enemies” or giving “aid and comfort” to an enemy could be considered treason. But they did not define a penalty for treason, leaving that to be determined by Congress.
They also voted to leave open the possibility for states to define treason as they wished. In the years after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, most state constitutional conventions defined treason as a crime in their fundamental state law.
As men jockeyed for control of the government in the chaotic early years of the Republic, several men ran afoul of the federal and state treason clauses, but they did not pay the ultimate price for their missteps. Two men were convicted of treason against the federal government during the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s; President Washington pardoned them both. In 1838, Joseph Smith and five other Mormon leaders were charged with treason against Missouri for their part in the violent struggle between Mormons and non-Mormons in the state; they escaped before trial. Thomas Wilson Dorr was convicted of treason against Rhode Island for his part in the Dorr Rebellion of the 1840s and was sentenced to hard labor for life, but a popular protest won him amnesty after he had served a year.
Then, on October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led 18 men to attack the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia—it became West Virginia in 1863—in order to seize guns from the armory, distribute them to local enslaved men, and lead them to freedom and self-government. As they cut the telegraph wires in the town in the dead of night, a free Black man, a baggage handler, stumbled upon them and they shot him. The sound attracted the attention of a local physician, who roused his neighbors. As they started to come awake, Brown’s men took the armory, which was defended by a single watchman who turned over the keys to the raiders.
At dawn the next day, a train came through the town, and its operators alerted authorities to the trouble in Harpers Ferry as soon as they got to a working telegraph. Meanwhile, Brown’s people captured Armory employees coming to work, and as news of the hostages spread, local militia converged on the site. As firing from the militia pinned Brown’s men down, they moved to a small brick building near the armory’s door. Intermittent shooting over the course of the day killed a number of Brown’s men as well as local militia before federal troops arrived on the morning of the next day, October 18.
Officers, commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee, promised to spare the lives of Brown and his men if they surrendered, but Brown refused. Within minutes, soldiers had broken down the doors to their shelter and taken prisoner Brown and the seven of his men still alive.
On October 27 the state of Virginia began the trial of the still-wounded Brown for murder, inciting a slave insurrection, and treason against the state of Virginia. His lawyers argued that he could not have committed treason because he was not a resident of the state and so owed it no allegiance.
But the Virginia jury deliberated for only 45 minutes before they convicted John Brown of treason, agreeing with the prosecution that one did not have to reside in a state to be guilty of taking up arms against its government. On November 2 the judge sentenced Brown to death by hanging, a sentence that would be carried out after a legally required one-month delay.
Virginians like Preston applauded the decision. “Law had been violated by actual murder and attempted treason,” Preston wrote to his wife in a letter reprinted in the local newspaper, “and that gibbet was erected by law, and to uphold law was this military force assembled…. So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such foes of the human race!”
The execution of John Brown for treason set a precedent.
And in just over a year, Virginians themselves would take up arms against the federal government. Men like Preston, who became an aide-de-camp to Stonewall Jackson, had to wonder if the precedent of hanging John Brown for treason might come back to haunt them.
Notes:
J. Taylor McConkie, “State Treason: The History and Validity of Treason Against Individual States,” Kentucky Law Journal Vol. 101: Iss. 2, Article 3.”
Will this precedent of which Heather Cox Richardson has reminded us come back to haunt Traitor Trump and other conspirators in the January 6 Insurrection, the ICE white supremacist terror force and its criminal programme of ethnic cleansing, the racialization of our universities and the institutions of the state, the kleptocracy of a government for sale, the subveersions of our democracy and the violations of our ideals and values?
The idea of capital punishment as absolute power of the state over its citizens is anathema to me; I prefer instead the ancient Roman custom of damnatio memorae or public forgetting and erasure from history, and in accord with the principle of minimum use of social force I believe the natural consequence of treason is loss of citizenship and exile.
But if we are to become fulcrums and change the balance of power in the world, we must also dismantle unequal power and its systems of oppression.
Let us bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us.
Many of the people I write about in my political daily journal Torch of Liberty are Hegelian world-geniuses, polymaths whose transformative vision redefined what it means to be human and changed the possibilities of our becoming. Today we honor Rosa Parks, who did the same not because of unique gifts of intellect or the enormity and refinement of scholarship, but because of her moral genius and courage of action in the defiance of unjust authority and overwhelming force and control in the liberation of humankind and the transformation of our civilization and our being, meaning, and value.
When Rosa Parks refused to obey the laws of racial segregation and inequality, she ignited the Civil Rights Movement and reshaped the systems and structures of racial oppression, our nation, and our world forever. One woman, with no allies around her, no special training in resistance nor ideology with which to plan strategies, neither a professor nor a combat veteran nor bearing the weight of historical narratives of heroic revolutionary struggle; not an avenging angel of righteousness but simply a woman who said no to authority and refused to submit.
A single voice which came to speak for us all, and became a tidal wave of change as a voice of America, bearing with it new possibilities of becoming human.
Today we celebrate the genius of ordinary people and of action, for each of us bears the hope of the world.
On this Black Friday weekend, wherein we mock and satirize Authority as delegitimation and seizure of power to restore balance and level all hierarchies of belonging and otherness weaponized in service to power as national identities, I find instruments and models of poetic vision as the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our ways of being human together in the ars poetica of Surrealism as an ideology of revolutionary struggle.
In this I now find echo and reflection of my own work, as I interrogate the origins of evil as violence in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force weaponized by Authority in service to power as carceral states of force and control and the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege they create and enforce as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil or national identity, and how all of these systems of oppression layered like the rings of an onion manifest in our current events and issues of the day as Defining Moments in which we choose among futures and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
This mad Quixotic quest to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world, the nature of humankind and how we choose to be human together as seizures of power in revolutionary struggle versus tyrannies and authorized identities, to dream a thing and make it real among our myriad futures which in the shadows of the Fourth Reich’s Trump Regime and the abandonment of our idea of universal human rights in the Ukraine and Palestine theatres of World War Three have become more horrific and may as my visions warn usher in an Age of Tyrants and centuries of war among totalitarian states ending with human extinction, futures which I parse as consequences of current events unfolding now through the critical methods of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, and write for you here in my essays like a Tarot reading in the way William S. Burroughs taught me to do, not only to reveal truths and tell futures but to change our futures and ourselves.
Seizures of power are not enough to set us free; we must not only liberate ourselves from systems of oppression, we must dismantle them. This is the only way to avoid the Nietzschean Eternal Return of revolutions that become tyrannies, as is now unfolding in America as it did in the glorious French Revolution that devolved into a Reign of Terror and became the Napoleonic Empire, in Russia and China, in an India where victory over the British Empire was birthed with the terrors of Partition and the assassination of her liberator Gandhi and now with Modi become a fascist tyranny, with most anticolonial revolutions as a predictable phase of struggle, and with an Israel created to guarantee our humanity now become a perpetrator of genocide and a dark mirror of the Nazis who were their abusers.
No matter where you begin with hierarchies of belonging and otherness as authorized identities, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
And as we engage systems of oppression designed to instrumentalize falsification, commodification, and dehumanization to subjugate and enslave us, and field the ICE white supremacist terror force in America as brutal repression and ethnic cleansing in America as well as nightmares of state terror and the abandonment of our humanity in Russia’s war on Ukraine, Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, and the kleptocratic Trump Regime’s looming invasion and conquest of Venezuela to steal her oil, let us revision America and humankind and unite in solidarity of action to resist tyranny and state terror, the hollowing out of what it means to be human and the theft of our souls, and claw back something of our humanity from the fascist darkness.
Let us run amok and be ungovernable, let us violate normalities and transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden, let us embrace the wildness of ourselves and the wildness of nature, let us perform upon the stage of the world those truths written in our flash and immanent in nature as well as those truths we ourselves create, let us steal the fire of the gods and the legitimacy of Authority through disbelief and disobedience, let us be beautiful and free.
Here follows my interrogation of Surrealism as a Gate to the Transhuman in the context of the Ars Poetica of Gini Koch in my review of her Aliens series Book 3, Alien in the Family; Love, Hope, and Faith; the Gifts of Pandora which define what is uniquely human, our instincts to transcend ourselves and the limits of our form, forces of light which balance those of darkness; the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Gini Koch’s Alien in the Family, and the Aliens series as a multivolume story arc, charts the limits of the human as machine, animal, monster, and Nietzschean superman as allegories of degradation and exaltation. This reimagines the Buddhist cycle of rebirth in progress toward Awakened being, with elements and references from Kabbalah and the journey through imaginal realms of the Tree of Life in the unification of opposing forces.
It is also a form of Surrealism.
As such it is useful to illuminate the fiction of Gini Koch by the light of her close parallels; Djuna Barnes in Nightwood, Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue and its film version in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, Daumal’s primary source The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and the works of Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs, those last two at once journals of madness and songs of poetic vision.
Surrealism is defined by twin characteristics; the quest to transcend ourselves, often in terms of religious mysticism, and the use of dreams as a door to the Infinite. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood is a Surrealist classic; Vladimir Nabokov, especially in Ada, with his experiments in dreams as time travel and prophecies is the other best example which immediately comes to mind for me, but many works either advance the Surrealist project of transformation or use dream images and symbols extensively.
Djuna Barnes is Promethean in her rebellion, a thief of the fire of the gods, a figure out of Milton or Blake, wielding her Lacanian vision into character and the human condition like the camera of Annie Leibovitz, ablating illusions and subliming us her readers into purified figures like the images freed by Michelangelo from the stone.
Her Great Book, Nightwood, is a work of oblique intent like the subversive satire of Gini Koch; a magician’s trick which both reveals and misdirects, summoning the Unseen and a welter of forking paths like the garden of Jorge Borges. She has given us an allegory of becoming human, of release and awakening from our animal condition; a nightmare journey through a labyrinth guided by her words like Ariadne’s thread, a Book of the Dead which leads us through the stages of initiation along with her protagonist until we are at last liberated and transformed as a fully aware and free being.
Nightwood is thoroughly saturated with religious symbolism and motif structures, but harnessed to a unique and transgressive artistic vision. Her use of paradox, juxtaposition, sentence structures where endings are beginnings; all reinforced her intent to free us from historical and authoritarian structures and discover new forms and meanings.
At once a gnostic-magical path of transcendence of one’s animal nature and liberation from the prison of the material world, and a glorious reimagination of her sources and references, Djuna Barnes stirs into her cauldron the King James Bible, Blake, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Freud, Nietzsche, an unraveling and reweaving of the fate of ourselves and our civilization.
It remains an inchoate paen of freedom, a summoning, a battle hymn of feminist and other humanistic empowerment, and a novel of colossal imagination, artistry, and poetic force.
Jungian psychology and its form as James Hillman’s archetypal classicism can be described as Surrealism, also as syncretic mysticism, as he modeled it on alchemical philosophy and Coleridge’s Primary Imagination. Tibetan Buddhism has the Bardo, and Islam the alam al mythal, as states of being and interfaces between life and death and the individual and the Infinite; Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue is a stellar example of modern mysticism as Surrealism.
Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, like the great film Alejandro Jodorowsky made of it entitled The Holy Mountain, is an allegorical journey to the Infinite, by a dying man struggling to leave behind a record of all that he has learned, informed by a huge and very odd syncretic scholarship, like the tracks of the mysteries he follows to the other side, as a guide for rest of us.
As a primary Surrealist text Mount Analogue references Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a re-negotiation of the terms of the social contract and an interrogation into the failure of civilization from its internal contradictions in World War One.
The Magic Mountain recasts Plato’s Dialogues as a forum of modern ideologies in a hospital ward for the dying, a kind of Congress of Possible Nations. Herein Thomas Mann diagnoses and explores the malaise and rebirth of civilization. His major influences include Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Tolstoy. In his 1939 Princeton lecture Thomas Mann discussed the idea that his novel belongs to a quest tradition, which makes its hero a type of the Grail Knight, Parsifal; and suggests an awareness of Emma Jung’s work on the subject.
As in the tale of the Fisher King in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Wasteland period of Lancelot’s madness and his recovery and regeneration of the land, and the Grail Quest itself, The Magic Mountain is an allegory of the fall and rebirth of civilization and of humanity.
And like all Surrealism, maps the topologies of madness as transcendence and exaltation, its point of divergence with Absurdism being the fracture and abandonment of meaning which is inherent or implicit in being rather than created by us, aesthetics which parallel the historical shift from an authoritarian-religious to an Existential-Humanist paradigm; the breaking of the medieval Great Chain of Being.
Through the influence of Philip K. Dick, Surrealism has become pervasive in our culture, and both the science fiction and fantasy genres may be considered special forms of Surrealism with their own conventions. It is these conventions, tropes, and iconographies of our normality which Gini Koch satirizes with delightful and wicked Lacanian vision and a ferocious wit which recalls that of Jeanette Winterson, Camille Paglia, and Rebecca Solnit.
Metaphysical fantasies, Surrealism and dreams, a Quixotic tilting at authoritarian power structures, the world as a prison of the flesh and a web of treacherous illusions, varieties of truth and lies, madness and the ecstatic liberation of consciousness as well as the possibilities of re-editing humanity through chemistry and allied to the mission of Timothy Leary, echoes of Kafka, Gogol, and Camus; Philip K. Dick is a seer whose visions of our possible futures illuminate questions of human being, meaning, and value.
Reality and epistemic doubt, madness and vision, identity and its infinite reflections, rebellion against authority as self creation and other existential themes; his stories are treasures which unfold as pathways of becoming human.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and the great film Blade Runner on which it is based, investigates the definition, boundaries, and meanings of being human, and the test of empathy as its qualification. What is human? Is empathy exclusive to humans, something machines and animals are without?
It is a central theme of Gini Koch’s works, which surfaces in the Aliens series as threatening figures of mechanical and biological transhumanism; robots, androids, and cyborgs as well as beasts, monsters, and supermen who like Alberich the dwarf in Wagner’s Ring must sacrifice the ability to love in the quest for tyrannical power.
For a final comparative example with which to illuminate the works of Gini Koch as Surrealism, I turn to those of William S. Burroughs. An encyclopedic and phantasmagorical body of work, full of dark satire, science fiction tropes, chaos, magic, songs of anarchy and freedom, and a beautiful unbounded transgression, William S. Burroughs wove revolutionary socio-political insights together with the glorious madness of Dionysian ecstatic vision.
Combining in his person Existentialism and Surrealism, his work is driven by two great themes; rebellion against Authority and the dreamquest of a magician to become a god.
The first of these themes being Sartrean Authenticity and a Promethean rebellion versus Control, a personification of all forms of thought control and normalcy, referential to Camus, Genet, Nietzsche, the English Romantics, de Sade, and most of all Georges Bataille, whose post-Freudian analysis of sociocultural forces and institutions, developed within the theoretical framework of Levi-Strauss and structural anthropology, indict Authority as a means of dehumanizing and shaping us into the tools of our own governmental, religious, and economic enslavement. The influence of Bataille on William S. Burroughs cannot be overstated.
His second major theme is ecstatic vision and transcendence as a path of liberation from the material world, a sublimity achieved through the derangement of the senses; sex, drugs, violence, and the pursuit of the extreme and the bizarre. As in the early novels of his direct model Jean Genet, a major theme in this is the seizure of power and authenticity through transgression of the Forbidden.
This includes the many magical subterfuges and arcane disciplines he practiced, the cut-up method of randomization invented with Brion Gysin and intended as a ritual of prophecy derived from the I Ching, experiments with telepathy, precognition, shapeshifting, out of body travel to other dimensions and times, curses and psychic conflicts with malign and alien forces, and a path of spiritism akin to that of voodoo which as a Jungian I would call shadow work. In this aspect he resembles Philip K Dick, prophet of the transhuman.
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 him, the final part of his Anarchist trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil. The Wild Boys extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as restraint of our nature. David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau here mingle and intertwine.
Like the monstrous and theriomorphic villains of Gini Koch which are figures of the horror of loss of our humanity through degradation to an animal state, Burroughs’ werewolves and his Lovecraftian fascist Venusian insects scheming to conquer the earth by addicting humankind to heroin as a metaphor of capitalism, which he called The Algebra of Need, in the ostensible travel journal Interzone are also symbols of both the hubris of seizing the Promethean fire of the gods and the dangers of the sin of Pride in becoming self created and autonomous beings, themes of Romantic Idealism referential to their sources in Frankenstein and Milton.
Like those of Gini Koch, all of William S. Burroughs’ works may be read as conceptual art representing surrealist films in the tradition of Cocteau, Artaud, Dali, David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Tim Burton, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Guillermo del Toro. This is especially true of his revisioning of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in The Western Lands, final volume of his trilogy of alternate American history which as a prank I once swapped out for the textbook in a high school American History class hoping someone would call me on it (no one ever did and I went right on teaching it the whole year; I think we had more fun than is usual in a history class) and referential to Lovecraft’s version in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath.
Gini Koch, like Burroughs, draws on diverse mythic sources for her works; in Alien in the Family alone, primarily a hierosgamos or sacred marriage, Orpheus and Eurydice, its medieval version Beauty and the Beast, the Abduction of Persephone, the Labyrinth of Ariadne, the love triangle of Adam, Lilith, and Eve with genders reversed, and in the entirety of the Aliens series, a myth of Exile like that of Mircea Cartarescu in Blinding and Guillermo del Toro in Carnival Row, and a vernacular Kabbalah in which her hero Kitty mounts through the planetary spheres robbing them of their powers like the Redeemer of the Basilidians and becomes a Theotikos or God-Bearer.
Here I wish to signpost and offer an apologetics regarding a recurrent question of readers; why does everyone love the protagonist, Kitty? This is simple; like Nietzsche, Kitty says yes to everything. Who could resist?
Kitty is a figure of protean gender, like Virginia Woolf’s shapechanging immortal time traveler in Orlando, both figures of wholeness; and Kitty bears transformative power to see the truth of others and liberate their best selves like Michelangelo freeing the figures trapped within the stone he sculpted. The nuances and ambiguity of love and sex in the whole Aliens series merits full consideration elsewhere, particularly as a sustained interrogation of idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty and authorized identities of sex and gender; here I wish only to observe that the transgression of Gini Koch’s vision of human evolution references and reimagines the Surrealist tradition; Kitty is a Pythian seer with the power to reveal to us our true selves, and reflects Dali’s Surrealist Woman among other figures.
Tracing the influences of film, comics, and visual media in the works of Gini Koch would be a massive undertaking, as she writes parody and tribute fiction densely referential to the rich culture of science fiction and comics; interrogating her work as a literature of cinema and visual media is a subject in itself. Here I wish to recommend as an exemplar the wonderful graphic novel Giraffes of Horseback Salad, starring the Marx Brothers, a screenplay by Salvador Dali, by Josh Frank, adapted with Tim Heidecker, illustrated by Manuela Pertega.
Surrealism in the works of Gini Koch asks two questions; What is human? Who decides?
The first speaks directly to identity as a prochronism or history expressed in our form of the adaptive choices we have made over time, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature, and it becomes ambiguous with protean and fluid boundaries and interfaces which define the limits of the human from the artificial intelligences of machines, the bestial, monstrous, freakish, and subhuman as atavisms of animal instinct, and the Nietzschean superhuman with comic hero powers toward which we may be evolving.
The second question opens up the whole set of interdependent nested themes which her many novels explore, including the authorization of identities of race and gender and the weaponization of divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging by hegemonic elites in service to power, the tyranny of normality and the social use of force, and transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden as seizure of power and autonomy.
But her Surrealism, like that of her sources and references Djuna Barnes, Rene Daumal, Philip K Dick, and William S. Burroughs, reinforced by elements of Absurdism and Romantic Idealism, also offer us the Gifts of Pandora, hope, love, and faith, as redemptive powers of reimagination and transformation, and a fulcrum of change with which to restore our balance and escape the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force through which those who would enslave us try to steal our souls.
Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings and Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States, Ron Sakolsky (Editor), Franklin Rosemont (Foreword)
On this International Day of Solidarity with Palestine, I write to apply the Occam’s Razor of simplification to the complex and emotionally charged issue of Palestinian-Israeli relations and the problem of the double minority by asking a question; what best serves the joy of humankind?
So many other ways to construct such a question, especially as principles of becoming human through revolutionary struggle and seizures of power under imposed conditions of struggle which include falsification, commodification, and dehumanization as systems of oppression; of death, learned helplessness, abjection, horror, and divisions of authorized identities?
How best to create a free society of equals as a United Humankind through secular democracy and universal human rights?
How to balance our uniqueness as individuals within a diverse and inclusive society?
How to level all hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness and annihilate all systems of unequal power?
How to bring the Chaos, disruption, fracture, change, and democratization of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and escape the legacies of our history and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
How to reimagine and transform the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value?
How to free ourselves and each other under imposed conditions of struggle which require violence and the use of social force in seizures of power, without becoming the authority we struggle against and using the state as embodied violence to enforce our own ideas of virtue?
Israeli atrocities and war crimes in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians has confronted us all with our complicity in evil, and the world is whiplashed in horror and abjection as our leaders betray us and abandon the principle of universal human rights by which our civilization is sustained, a civilization now in processes of collapse and subversion by fascism at the dawn of the Age of Tyrants. But this also means everything is in question, power can be seized, and new futures chosen, if we act in solidarity in times of chaos as a space of free creative play.
As Guillermo del Toro teaches us in Carnival Row; “Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
Clearly we must have true equality if our rights and liberties are to remain universal in the shadow of state force and control. So also are freedom and equality possible only when we are free of authorized divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
What prevents us, here in America and throughout the world, from seeing this humanitarian disaster as it is? First are elite interests of wealth and power, which have created an American colony and imperialist military giant for the purposes of dominance of the Middle East and control of the strategic asset of oil, of which Traitor Trump’s diplomatic campaign on behalf of recognition of the state of Israel by her neighbors is among the most recent forms of the historic and perfidious Arab-American Alliance, another is Genocide Joe’s hugging the war criminal Netanyahu and sending a Navy ship to help terrorize civilians rather than break the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid and silence the bombs of ethnic cleansing.
Biden is not the first American President to have tried to kill me personally by direct order, that distinction belongs to then-Governor Reagan when he ordered police to open fire on student protestors against the University’s investment in Israeli military industry in what has been called the most terrible state terror incident in our history since the Civil War, but when Biden sent drone attacks against our positions in Yemen during the Red Sea campaign from which we counter blockaded the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, he became the only American President to attempt to kill me whom I actually voted for. Genocide Joe helped Israel use famine and denial of medical aid as weapons of war, and for this too we must bring a Reckoning. Trump of course has been far worse.
That we Americans have used the threat of Iranian influence and the ancient Sunni-Shia vendetta to divide and conquer the region, legitimize the conflicts in Yemen and Gaza as test cases of our hegemony, and destabilize democracy movements in Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran as well as perpetuate the disenfranchisement and ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine by Israel speaks to America’s true motives; not to champion peace and freedom, but to secure wealth and power through war and tyranny.
I believe the secondary cause of our blindness to the injustices of the Palestinian-Israeli situation is a legacy of the Holocaust and how we process historical narratives of victimization. Once anointed as a victim, and crowned with a white hat of blameless innocence, that figure in our imagination becomes incapable of wrongdoing in any other way. We Americans think in terms of Good and Evil as a cosmic struggle of dichotomous forces, and of showdowns at high noon in the Westerns which are primary narratives of imperial colonialism and the apologetics of power, not in terms of the flaws of our humanity. Absolutes are simpler.
Ambiguity and moral relativization disrupt authorized identities and systems of oppression; this is their great value in revolutionary struggle.
We are all capable of both good and evil actions, of misunderstandings, conflicted and nuanced feelings and responses, and failures of compassion. And we tend to ignore rather than confront things like moral grey areas which make us uncomfortable; this is called cognitive dissonance reduction, and it means we tend to keep doing things we know are wrong if we have a good story to justify our actions and the belief that God is on our side. Gott Mitt Uns; the most terrible atrocities in history have been perpetrated in this way.
Here I must say plainly that I support the creation of a secular democracy in which all human beings, Palestinian and Israeli alike, are exactly equal both in fact and under the law, that I support the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of the state of Israel and the liberation of Palestine from Occupation and Blockade, and that Israel as presently constituted is a fascist tyranny of state terror which is guilty of crimes against humanity in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people, for which we must bring a Reckoning.
A post has typified the bifurcated and dichotomous dialogs which have attached themselves to the war in Gaza; it says “If you have the power to turn off your enemy’s food, water, and energy, and attack them at your leisure, you are the bad guy.”
To this someone relied; “If you have the power to attack, rape and kidnap over 200 hostages, and hide them in a hospital, you are the bad guy.”
Here follows my reply, in one paragraph; Yes, we are all bad guys here. The use of social force has no justifications; but as resistance struggle and revolution against imposed conditions of unequal power, it may be necessary. The violence of the tyrant, the conqueror, the occupier, or the slave master cannot be compared to the violence used by the slave to break his chains. What has happened here is that both Hamas and the Netanyahu regime have delegitimated themselves in war crimes and unforgivable acts of terror which violate our universal rights. Both seek to subjugate the people in whose name they claim to act to make them complicit, a primary strategy of fascism and other totalitarian state terror. And only love and solidarity of action against Hamas and the state of Israel by the people of Israel and Palestine together can overcome state tyranny and terror.
This leaves us with the question asked by Tolstoy and Lenin in very different works, one which founded the principles of nonviolent resistance used by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the other which began the Russian Revolution; What is to be done?
For myself and my comrades, we have a clear and simple mandate of action in three parts; Unite the Israeli and Palestinian peoples as equal citizens in a democratic secular state wherein faith and ethnicity have no legal standing, defend all civilian noncombatants, their universal human rights, and their access to humanitarian aid, and bring a direct and personal Reckoning to all war criminals on both sides.
As a child in 1969 at an event with my mother that began as a protest against the Occupation of Palestine and American responsibility for its injustices by investment of the University of California and other state institutions, in People’s Park Berkeley, Bloody Thursday May 15, I was in the front line when the police opened fire on the crowd; this was my first death and rebirth, by which I mean Most Sincerely Dead and without life signs for some while, when for a moment I stood outside of time and beheld the possible futures, timelines, and alternate realities which propagated from that moment, the limitless possibilities of becoming human and the terrible chance of a coming age of fascist tyranny, war, the fall of civilization, and the extinction of humankind which may yet come to pass if we cannot reimagine and transform ourselves and our society, and find healing for the flaws of our humanity, the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and the brokenness of the world.
Over fifty years later, I fought in the defense of al Aqsa and in the Third Intifada thereafter; will we still be fighting for our humanity and our liberty fifty years from now, or fifty thousand?
In one night on May 10 2021, fighting not in the defense of al Aqsa, a world-historical stage of grandeur for the deaths of heroes, but for the lives of strangers attacked at prayer by Israeli soldiers among the ruins of a derelict antiquity, I was shot, bayoneted, blown up, and set on fire; yet I awoke the next morning reasonably sound as I so often have from adventures I should not have survived, to fight again in the streets of Sheikh Jarrah with such fedayeen as had gathered, for something I said to my comrades during the night, which was said to me in Brazil 1974 by the Matadors who rescued me from a police death squad, had gone out as a general call; We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.
But at what cost to our humanity, this ceaseless violence? The centralization of power to authority, carceral states of force and control, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and systems of oppression are self-replicating as products of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, yet all obey Newton’s Third Law of Motion and create their own Resistance. And if we are to remain human and resist our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by such recursive forces of unequal power, if we are to become Unconquered in refusal to submit to authority, we must smash the machine which consumes us as the raw material of others who would enslave us.
My hope is that our successors in future generations will have forged a free society of equals and abandoned the use of social force, will have no tyranny or state terror to resist, and can live their lives in joy and love and not in struggle as have I.
We must dream better dreams, and stand together in solidarity of action to make them real.
Who do we want to become, we humans?
Let us choose one another and not the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites, equality, diversity, and inclusion and not the divisions and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, liberty and not the centralization of power and authority to a carceral state owned by the wealthy, democracy and not tyranny, hope and not fear, love and not hate.
As I wrote in my post of May 10 2021, The Defense of al Aqsa: Liberty versus Tyranny in Jerusalem; We may have witnessed the advent of a Third Intifada this night, in the Defense of al Aqsa and the street fighting in Gaza which followed, ignited by the perfidy and imperial conquest of a xenophobic and fascist state of Israel which regards no one but their own tribe and faith as truly human, and which has perpetrated an unprovoked and deadly attack as an act of state terror and a crime against humanity on the peaceful worshippers at one of the most sacred mosques in the Islamic world, a demonstration of power and dominion which follows weeks of provocations, assaults, and acts of propagandistic dehumanization against the people of Palestine.
Like the Second or al Aqsa Intifada which lasted four years from 28 September 2000 to 8 February 2005, unresolved issues of an Occupation now in its fifty fourth year since the June 7 1967 Conquest of Old Jerusalem by Israel, which the State of Israel celebrated according to the Hebrew calendar as Jerusalem Day today by attacking al Aqsa, and a Catastrophe ongoing now for seventy three years since Nakba Day May 15 1948, have coalesced around the symbolic value of al Aqsa, which has a contested dual identity as the Temple Mount in Judaism.
Chances of de-escalation and averting a war depend now not on local factors but on the response of the international community, for history has here become a trap which collapses to ensnare us in its jaws, and outside forces must liberate us from the failures of our system’s internal contradictions.
Will America disavow and renounce its colony of Israel, Queen of her imperial policy in the Middle East and control of the strategic resource of oil? Can international unity and the pressure of Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction free us from the tyranny and terror of an Apartheid regime as it did in South Africa?
Or is war the only reckoning humankind can offer, or will accept?
How can America support the state of Israel in tyranny and terror, conquest and plunder? It’s a question asked in tones of outrage, sorrow, and bafflement since the advent of the Nakba on May 15 1948, the Day of Catastrophe which began the Occupation of Palestine and the systematic enslavement and genocide of its people in the wake of the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem. How is this legitimized?
A friend has recently reframed this question for me; “I loved and embraced the Jewish tradition, joining a synagogue and working alongside its Rabbi. When I witness the treatment of Palestinians by the Jewish government of Israel, I am overwhelmed by feelings of confusion and anger. Unable to reconcile this immorality, I question the very foundation of my faith. Where is the good and moral uprising of international Jewish voices condemning the government’s path? I’ve lost faith in being Jewish.”
What is clear to me is that this crisis of faith is also an existential crisis of identity, a situation of utmost gravity and danger which also holds the potential for reimagination and transformative rebirth, a personal echo of a parallel civilizational crisis from which humankind and the global community of nations must find a way to emerge and free ourselves of the legacies of our history. Here is my reply:
The state of Israel is not identical with the Jewish faith, though the fascist-imperialist faction which Netanyahu represents would like everyone to think so.
A nation based on the assignment of its citizens to a tribal identity, the sectarian weaponization of faith in service to power and an authorized national identity, a military society with universal compulsory service as centralization of power to the state, and a reconstructed Hebrew language of national unity have all used identity politics to subjugate its citizens to the centralized power of tyranny; Israel is a fascist state of blood, faith, and soil no less than that of the Nazis.
Add to this toxic mix a kleptocratic regime which has propagandized narratives of historical victimization to legitimize massive theft and imperial conquest of other people’s nations and one thing is clear; Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis.
You may know from my many references to the incident in my writing that I am an antifascist, sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet in 1982 in Beirut, during our fight against the Israeli invasion and siege. In the forty years after, I have been a hunter of fascists and a revolutionary engaged in struggle for the liberation of humankind against fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and against tyranny and authoritarian regimes of force and control, for democracy and its ideals of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, and for our universal human rights. In this cause I place my life in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
A Palestinian homeland, and justice for its people, has been among my goals since that summer so long ago. Like the goal of liberation of Ireland from British colonial rule, it remains to be achieved. In question is the idea of freedom and citizenship as the sovereignty and independence of peoples from foreign colonialism and authoritarian tyranny, and the primacy of a nonsectarian state free from divisions and hierarchies of faith, for who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
I also support the idea of an Israeli homeland, and see no reason these two states, Palestine and Israeli, should be mutually exclusive or antagonistic. Why must citizenship be bound by the limits of geography, or states by borders? If we cannot win a secular democracy for all as equal citizens and guarantors of each other’s rights and humanity, why not dual states within the same geography, or borderless states wherein people can freely choose to be Palestinian or Israeli citizens regardless of where they live anywhere on earth?
Why must one people’s Return mean another’s Exile?
To be clear, I am on the side of anyone threatened with hate crime regardless of any other factors; in riot and war my test for the use of force is simple; who holds power? And my test for where my solidarity lies is; who is suffering?
I am on the side of all those whom Frantz Fanon named The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. This applies equally to Jews and Muslims, Israel and Palestine, and any other human beings regardless of who they are, and especially without any moral burden of merit as Shaw teaches us with the character of Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue.
Some Israelis who would disagree with me on the question of Palestine and militarism in imperial conquest and regional dominion have been allies in the cause of hunting Nazis, but are blind to their own complicity in this evil due to seeing themselves as victims and defenders of victims rather than perpetrators of crimes against humanity.
This is about fear, and the destructive cycle of abuse and violence. Not membership in any group or authorized identities of belonging, hierarchies of the elite and the elect, and divisions of exclusionary otherness. The origins of violence and the social use of force are universal, historical, and systemic, and absolutely not in any mythical evil impulse, original sin, or inherent depravity of man.
The Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force belongs to no one, but to apersonal systems of unequal power. I understand all too well how power makes us feel safe, the seductive beauty of weapons which make us arbiters of virtue, and how elite membership confers entitlement; this works the same for nations as for individuals, in the playground, prison yard, and contested public spaces like the Temple Mount which is also al Aqsa.
When faith is appropriated by authority for legitimation in identity politics, identity itself becomes confused and ambiguous. To become free, we must seize ownership of ourselves as self-created and autonomous beings.
This is why the primary duties of a citizen are to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
I think of the problem of human evil and its cycle of fear, power, and force in the case of states which become the tyrannies they fought to liberate themselves from, and this is true of anticolonial revolutionary states generally because of the historical legacies of victimization and the imposed conditions of struggle, in this way; victims often become abusers because their identity is organized around power as the only means of escape and survival in a world wherein no one can be trusted.
Security is an illusion, but it is one which is most useful to those who would enslave us.
When trust has been abrogated and proven empty and without meaning, when the capacity to bond with and feel the pain of others in empathy has been broken and one is without pity or remorse, when fear is overwhelming and generalized and has been shaped by authority to the service of power, victims learn that only power has meaning and is real. We must not allow our abusers to become our teachers.
While every such issue has its own unique origins and history, the problem itself is universal, and relates to what one fears, and how that fear is shaped by authority as identity. From our perspective as Americans interpreting events in the classic problem of the double minority typified by Israel and Palestine, how we perceive issues has much to do with how they are framed by our informing and motivating sources.
In the end we are defined by what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
The first question to ask of any story, and the most important, is simple; whose story is this?
We are lost in a wilderness of mirrors, of lies and illusions, falsifications of ourselves, distorted images and reflections, echoes and authorized identities which disfigure, disempower, and steal our souls.
How shall we answer those who would enslave us? Our authenticity and autonomy is realized through seizure of power, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and humankind as a free society of equals.
We Americans tend to see things in terms of white hats and black hats, as in the Western films which serve as origin myths and archetypes of our national character. Once victim status has been conferred, such groups and persons become white hats and good guys, incapable of evil and diametrically opposed to whomever must then be black hats. It’s a terrible way of choosing national policy.
Sadly, we humans can be good and evil at once, for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world echo and reflect each other in infinite regress. It is a truth proven once again tonight in al Quds or Jerusalem depending on to whom one is speaking and in what language, as Gaza burns from the onslaught of an Israeli Defense Forces run amok much the same as the night almost four decades ago in Beirut when they tried to burn Genet and I alive in our café, as a dozen human beings from whom everything but hope has been stolen swear vows to each other to hold a position covering the escape of the women and children trapped by the Israeli attack until all are safe, in a final defense not of al Aqsa Mosque, magnificent and beautiful and filled with significance, monument to the human impulse to reach beyond ourselves and to the limitless possibilities of becoming human, a stage fit for the glorious deaths of heroes, but of the disembodied screams of strangers among the nameless warrens of a derelict antiquity.
Against the chasms of emptiness and nihilistic barbarism of a world of darkness and fire, of fear and force, I have only words to offer, and I write to you what I have said to my comrades who have chosen to stand with me; I’ve lost count of Last Stands, but I’ve risked everything against impossible odds and survived more times than I can remember, and all that matters is that we abandon neither ourselves nor one another, that we refuse to submit, for this is the moment of our freedom and of our seizure of power, and it can never be taken from us.
From this night, Palestine is free, for we can be killed, but we cannot be conquered.
Gaza death toll surpasses 70,000, says health ministry
(My estimate is one third the total prewar population, around 800,000 dead, less than three thousand of those combatants. Civilian deaths include 200,000 to 400,000 children.)
October 17 2025 Peace and Joy In Palestine and Israel, Tyranny and Terror In America: the Legacies and Crimes of Traitor Trump: A Retrospective in Honor of Tomorrow’s No Kings Day
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May 29 2025 Anniversary of the Final Day of the Third Intifada of 2021: On The Origins of Evil in Fear, Power, and Force; Existential Questions In the Shadow of the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians As the World Does Nothing to Silence the Rain of Death
May 23 2025 Anniversary of the International Criminal Court Issue of Arrest Warrant For Netanyahu and Charge of Leaders of Israel and Hamas Equally With Crimes Against Humanity In the Gaza War
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The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine, Ben Ehrenreich
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Rashid Khalidi
Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman
Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, Where the Line Is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine, When the Birds Stopped Singing: Life in Ramallah Under Siege, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine, Occupation Diaries, A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle, Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation, Raja Shehadeh
Gate of the Sun, Elias Khoury
The Question of Palestine, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said David Barsamian (Editor), Orientalism, Edward W. Said
On Palestine, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land Two Peoples, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel, Across the Wall: Narratives of Israeli-Palestinian History, The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge, The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis 1700-1948, Ilan Pappe
Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays, Amos Oz
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter
Robert Fisk on Israel: The Obama Years: A unique anthology of reporting and analysis of a crucial period of history, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk
The Unmaking of Israel, Occupied Territories: The Untold Story Of Israel’s Settlements, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount Gershom Gorenberg
Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, Ian Black
An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification, Jeff Halper
Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, Joel Kovel
Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco
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Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean, Basem L. Ra’ad
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The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story, The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story, Ramzy Baroud
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A Country of Words: A Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page, Abdel Bari Atwan
Behind the Myth: Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Revolution, Arafat: The Biography, Andrew Gowers, Tony Walker
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Arabic
29 تشرين الثاني (نوفمبر) 2024التضامن مع الجنس البشري ضد الفاشية والاستبداد وإرهاب الدولة يعني التضامن مع فلسطين
ي هذا اليوم العالمي للتضامن مع فلسطين، أكتب لأطبق شفرة أوكام في التبسيط على القضية المعقدة والمشحونة عاطفيا المتعلقة بالعلاقات الفلسطينية الإسرائيلية ومشكلة الأقلية المزدوجة من خلال طرح سؤال؛ ما هو أفضل ما يخدم فرحة البشرية؟
هناك العديد من الطرق الأخرى لبناء مثل هذا السؤال، خاصة كمبادئ التحول إلى إنسان من خلال النضال الثوري والاستيلاء على السلطة في ظل ظروف النضال المفروضة والتي تشمل التزييف والتسليع والتجريد من الإنسانية كأنظمة قمع؛ الموت، والعجز المكتسب، والذل، والرعب، وانقسام الهويات المسموح بها؟
ما هي أفضل السبل لإنشاء مجتمع حر متساوٍ كبشرية موحدة من خلال الديمقراطية العلمانية وحقوق الإنسان العالمية؟
كيف نوازن بين تفردنا كأفراد داخل مجتمع متنوع وشامل؟
كيف يمكن تسوية جميع التسلسلات الهرمية للانتماء والاختلاف الإقصائي وإبادة جميع أنظمة القوة غير المتكافئة؟
كيف يمكن تحقيق الفوضى والتمزق والكسر والتغيير وإضفاء الطابع الديمقراطي على هيمنة النخبة من الثروة والسلطة والامتيازات، والهروب من تراث تاريخنا وفاشية الدم والإيمان والتربة؟
كيف يمكن إعادة تصور وتحويل الإمكانيات اللامحدودة للإنسان والمعنى والقيمة؟
كيف نحرر أنفسنا وبعضنا البعض في ظل ظروف النضال المفروضة التي تتطلب العنف واستخدام القوة الاجتماعية في الاستيلاء على السلطة، دون أن نصبح السلطة التي نناضل ضدها ونستخدم القوة والعنف لفرض أفكارنا الخاصة بالفضيلة؟
إن الفظائع الإسرائيلية وجرائم الحرب في التطهير العرقي للفلسطينيين قد جعلتنا جميعا نواجه تواطؤنا في الشر، ويصاب العالم بالرعب والذل بينما يخوننا قادتنا ويتخلون عن مبدأ حقوق الإنسان العالمية التي تقوم عليها حضارتنا. وهي حضارة تمر الآن بعمليات الانهيار والتخريب على يد الفاشية في فجر عصر الطغاة. لكن هذا يعني أيضًا أن كل شيء أصبح موضع تساؤل، ويمكن الاستيلاء على السلطة، واختيار مستقبل جديد، إذا عملنا بشكل تضامني في أوقات الفوضى كمساحة للعب الإبداعي الحر.
وكما يعلمنا غييرمو ديل تورو في كرنفال رو؛ “الفوضى هي الأمل العظيم للضعفاء.”
من الواضح أنه يجب أن نحصل على مساواة حقيقية إذا أردنا أن تظل حقوقنا وحرياتنا عالمية في ظل قوة وسيطرة الدولة. كذلك تكون الحرية والمساواة ممكنتين فقط عندما نتحرر من التقسيمات المرخص بها للآخرين الإقصائيين وفاشيات الدم والإيمان والتربة.
ما الذي يمنعنا ، هنا في أمريكا وفي جميع أنحاء العالم ، من رؤية هذه الكارثة الإنسانية كما هي؟ أولاً ، مصالح النخبة في الثروة والسلطة ، التي أنشأت مستعمرة أمريكية وعملاقًا عسكريًا إمبرياليًا لأغراض الهيمنة على الشرق الأوسط والسيطرة على الأصول الاستراتيجية للنفط ، والتي كانت حملة ترامب الدبلوماسية من أجل الاعتراف بها. إسرائيل من قبل جيرانها هي أحدث شكل من أشكال التحالف العربي الأمريكي الغادر التاريخي.
أننا استخدمنا تهديد النفوذ الإيراني والثأر السني الشيعي القديم لتقسيم المنطقة واحتلالها ، وإضفاء الشرعية على الصراع في اليمن كحالة اختبار لهيمنتنا ، وزعزعة استقرار الحركات الديمقراطية في لبنان والعراق وإيران وكذلك إن إدامة الحرمان والتطهير العرقي لشعب فلسطين يتحدث عن الدوافع الحقيقية لأمريكا ؛ ليس لمناصرة السلام والحرية ، ولكن لتأمين الثروة والسلطة من خلال الحرب والاستبداد.
أعتقد أن السبب الثانوي لعمىنا عن مظالم الوضع الفلسطيني الإسرائيلي هو إرث الهولوكوست وكيف نعالج السرديات التاريخية للإيذاء. بمجرد أن ندهن كضحية ، وتتوج بقبعة بيضاء من البراءة الكاملة ، يصبح هذا الرقم في خيالنا غير قادر على ارتكاب أي خطأ بأي طريقة أخرى. نحن نفكر من منظور الخير والشر على أنه صراع كوني بين قوى ثنائية التفرع ، وليس من منظور عيوب إنسانيتنا. المطلق أبسط.
نحن جميعًا قادرون على فعل الخير والشر ، وسوء الفهم ، ومشاعر وردود متضاربة ومتضاربة ، وفشل التعاطف. ونحن نميل إلى تجاهل أشياء مثل المناطق الرمادية الأخلاقية التي تجعلنا غير مرتاحين بدلاً من مواجهتها ؛ هذا يسمى الحد من التنافر المعرفي ، وهذا يعني أننا نميل إلى الاستمرار في فعل الأشياء التي نعلم أنها خاطئة إذا كانت لدينا قصة جيدة لتبرير أفعالنا والاعتقاد بأن الله في صفنا. لقد تم ارتكاب أفظع الأعمال الوحشية في التاريخ بهذه الطريقة.
هنا يجب أن أقول بوضوح إنني أؤيد إنشاء ديمقراطية علمانية يتساوى فيها جميع البشر ، الفلسطينيين والإسرائيليين على حد سواء ، في الواقع وفي ظل القانون ، وأنني أؤيد المقاطعة وسحب الاستثمارات وفرض عقوبات على دولة إسرائيل وتحرير فلسطين ، وأن إسرائيل بتكوينها الحالي هي استبداد فاشي لإرهاب الدولة المذنب بارتكاب جرائم ضد الإنسانية في التطهير العرقي للشعب الفلسطيني.
عندما كنت طفلة في عام 1969 في حدث مع والدتي بدأ احتجاجًا على احتلال فلسطين في بيبولز بارك بيركلي ، الخميس الدامي ، 15 مايو ، كنت في الخط الأمامي عندما فتحت الشرطة النار على الحشد ؛ كان هذا أول موت لي وولادة جديدة ، عندما وقفت للحظة خارج الزمن ورأيت المستقبل المحتمل ، والجداول الزمنية ، والحقائق البديلة التي انتشرت منذ تلك اللحظة ، والإمكانيات اللامحدودة لأصبح إنسانًا والفرصة الرهيبة لعصر قادم للفاشية الاستبداد والحرب وسقوط الحضارة وانقراض الجنس البشري الذي قد يتحقق إذا لم نتمكن من إعادة تصور وتحويل أنفسنا ومجتمعنا ، والعثور على شفاء لعيوب إنسانيتنا ، وأصول الشر في حلقة فاغنريان. الخوف والقوة والقوة وانكسار العالم.
في الربيع الماضي ، بعد أكثر من خمسين عامًا ، قاتلت في الانتفاضة الثالثة. هل سنواصل القتال من أجل إنسانيتنا وحريتنا بعد خمسين عامًا من الآن ، أم خمسة آلاف؟
آمل أن يكون خلفاؤنا في الأجيال القادمة قد شكلوا مجتمعًا حرًا من أنداد وتخلوا عن استخدام القوة الاجتماعية ، ولن يكون لديهم استبداد أو إرهاب دولة لمقاومته ، ويمكنهم أن يعيشوا حياتهم بفرح ومحبة وليس في صراع كما أنا. لديك.
يجب أن نحلم أحلامًا أفضل ، وأن نتضامن في العمل لجعلها حقيقة.
من نريد أن نصبح نحن البشر؟
دعونا نختار بعضنا البعض وليس الثروة والسلطة وامتياز النخب المهيمنة ، والمساواة ، والتنوع ، والاندماج ، وليس الانقسامات والتسلسلات الهرمية للآخرين الإقصائيين ، والحرية ، وليس مركزية السلطة والسلطة لدولة جزئية يملكها الغنى والديمقراطية لا الاستبداد والامل ولا الخوف والحب ولا الكراهية.
كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 10 مايو 2021 ، الدفاع عن الأقصى: الحرية في مواجهة الاستبداد في القدس. ربما شهدنا اندلاع الانتفاضة الثالثة هذه الليلة ، في الدفاع عن الأقصى والاقتتال في الشوارع في غزة الذي أعقب ذلك ، والذي أشعله الغزو الإمبراطوري والغزو الإمبراطوري لدولة إسرائيل الفاشية والكراهية للأجانب والتي لا تهتم بأحد إلا دولتهم. القبيلة والإيمان كإنسان حقًا ، والتي ارتكبت هجومًا مميتًا دون استفزاز كعمل من أعمال إرهاب الدولة وجريمة ضد الإنسانية على المصلين المسالمين في أحد أقدس المساجد في العالم الإسلامي ، دليل على القوة والسيطرة التي بعد أسابيع من الاستفزازات والاعتداءات وأعمال الدعاية لنزع الصفة الإنسانية عن شعب فلسطين.
مثل انتفاضة الأقصى الثانية أو انتفاضة الأقصى التي استمرت أربع سنوات من 28 سبتمبر 2000 إلى 8 فبراير 2005 ، فإن القضايا العالقة للاحتلال الآن في عامه الرابع والخمسين منذ احتلال إسرائيل للقدس القديمة في 7 يونيو 1967 ، والذي احتفلت به دولة إسرائيل وفقًا إلى التقويم العبري كيوم القدس اليوم من خلال مهاجمة الأقصى ، وكارثة مستمرة الآن منذ ثلاثة وسبعين عامًا منذ يوم النكبة 15 مايو 1948 ، قد تضافرت حول القيمة الرمزية للأقصى ، التي لها هوية مزدوجة متنازع عليها مثل جبل الهيكل في اليهودية.
إن فرص وقف التصعيد وتجنب الحرب تعتمد الآن ليس على العوامل المحلية بل على استجابة المجتمع الدولي ، فالتاريخ هنا أصبح فخًا ينهار ليوقعنا في شرك ، وعلى القوى الخارجية أن تحررنا من إخفاقاتنا. التناقضات الداخلية لنظامنا.
هل تتبرأ أمريكا وتتخلى عن مستعمرتها إسرائيل ، ملكة سياستها الإمبريالية في الشرق الأوسط والسيطرة على المورد الاستراتيجي للنفط؟ هل يمكن للوحدة الدولية وضغط المقاطعة وسحب الاستثمارات وفرض العقوبات أن تحررنا من طغيان وإرهاب نظام الفصل العنصري كما حدث في جنوب إفريقيا؟
أم أن الحرب هي الحساب الوحيد الذي يمكن للبشرية أن تقدمه أم ستقبله؟
كما كتبه إيشان ثارور في الواشنطن بوست. ومساء الاثنين ، تبادل مسلحون في قطاع غزة والجيش الإسرائيلي إطلاق صواريخ وضربات جوية وسط تصعيد مميت للعنف. أطلقت حماس والجهاد الإسلامي ، الجماعات المسلحة المتمركزة في غزة المحاصرة ، وابلًا من الصواريخ التي سقطت بالقرب من القدس وفي أجزاء من جنوب إسرائيل ، مما أدى إلى إصابة شخص واحد على الأقل. قتلت الغارات الجوية الإسرائيلية ردا على ذلك ما لا يقل عن 20 شخصا في غزة ، وفقا لوزارة الصحة في غزة ، من بينهم تسعة أطفال.
قال رئيس الوزراء الإسرائيلي بنيامين نتنياهو إن “الجماعات الإرهابية” في غزة “تجاوزت الخط الأحمر” بهجماتها الصاروخية. لكن الانفجار الأخير في الأعمال العدائية له ذيل طويل ، بعد العديد من الأعمال العدوانية من قبل كل من قوات الأمن الإسرائيلية والجماعات اليهودية اليمينية المتطرفة في القدس. قبل أسبوعين ، قامت مجموعات من المتطرفين اليهود ، بما في ذلك بعض المستوطنين من الضفة الغربية ، بمسيرة عبر المناطق المأهولة بالفلسطينيين في المدينة المقدسة ، مرددين “الموت للعرب” ، وهاجموا المارة وألحقوا أضرارًا بممتلكات الفلسطينيين ومنازلهم. أثارت المحاولات الإسرائيلية لإجلاء عدد من العائلات الفلسطينية في حي الشيخ جراح بالقدس الشرقية – نموذج مصغر لما يعتبره الفلسطينيون جزءًا من تاريخ طويل من النهب والمحو على يد الدولة الإسرائيلية – احتجاجات التضامن الفلسطيني في أجزاء مختلفة من الأراضي المحتلة وإسرائيل.
كما زاد التوتر قبل إحياء ذكرى يوم القدس يوم الاثنين ، وهو يوم عطلة رسمية إسرائيلية للاحتفال بالاستيلاء على المدينة خلال الحرب العربية الإسرائيلية عام 1967. تم إلغاء مسيرة سنوية مخطط لها من قبل المتطرفين الإسرائيليين اليمينيين المتطرفين بعد أن غيرت السلطات مسارها في اللحظة الأخيرة. لا تزال أعداد كبيرة تشق طريقها إلى حائط المبكى وتردد أغنية انتقامية متطرفة ضد الفلسطينيين.
أفاد زملائي أن “هجمات حماس الصاروخية ، والتي تضمنت الضربات الأولى على القدس منذ عدة سنوات ، جاءت بعد اشتباكات دارت بين الشرطة الإسرائيلية والمتظاهرين الفلسطينيين والإسرائيليين اليهود من اليمين المتطرف حول البلدة القديمة”. وذكر الهلال الأحمر الفلسطيني أن “من بين مئات الجرحى سبعة نقلوا إلى المستشفى في حالة خطيرة. تم تداول لقطات فيديو على وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي لضباط شرطة إسرائيليين يضربون بوحشية رجلاً فلسطينياً محتجزاً “.
كيف يمكن لأمريكا أن تدعم دولة إسرائيل في الاستبداد والارهاب والغزو والنهب؟ إنه سؤال يطرح بنبرات من الغضب والأسى والحيرة منذ مجيء النكبة في 15 مايو 1948 ، يوم النكبة الذي بدأ باحتلال فلسطين والاستعباد والإبادة الجماعية الممنهجة لشعبها في أعقاب الفتح الإسرائيلي. القدس. كيف يتم إضفاء الشرعية على هذا؟
أعاد صديق لي مؤخرًا صياغة هذا السؤال ؛ لقد أحببت التقليد اليهودي واحتضنته ، وانضممت إلى كنيس وأعمل جنبًا إلى جنب مع حاخامه. عندما أشهد معاملة الحكومة اليهودية الإسرائيلية للفلسطينيين ، تغمرني مشاعر الارتباك والغضب. غير قادر على التوفيق بين هذا الفسق ، أشكك في أساس إيماني. أين الانتفاضة الحسنة والأخلاقية للأصوات اليهودية الدولية التي تدين مسار الحكومة؟ لقد فقدت الثقة في كوني يهودية “.
ما هو واضح بالنسبة لي هو أن أزمة الإيمان هذه هي أيضًا أزمة وجودية في الهوية ، وهي حالة بالغة الخطورة والخطر والتي تنطوي أيضًا على إمكانية إعادة التخيل والولادة التحويلية ، وهي صدى شخصي لأزمة حضارية موازية ينطلق منها الجنس البشري والجنس البشري. يجب على مجتمع الدول العالمي أن يجد طريقة للظهور وتحرير أنفسنا من إرث تاريخنا. هنا ردي:
دولة إسرائيل ليست متطابقة مع العقيدة اليهودية ، على الرغم من أن الفصيل الإمبريالي الفاشي الذي يمثله نتنياهو يود من الجميع أن يعتقد ذلك.
أمة تقوم على تخصيص مواطنيها للهوية القبلية ، والتسليح الطائفي للإيمان في خدمة السلطة والهوية الوطنية المصرح بها ، والمجتمع العسكري مع الخدمة الإلزامية الشاملة ، واللغة العبرية المعاد بناؤها للوحدة الوطنية ، استخدمت سياسات الهوية من أجل إخضاع مواطنيها لسلطة الاستبداد المركزية ؛ إسرائيل هي دولة فاشية من الدم والإيمان والتربة لا تقل عن تلك الخاصة بالنازيين.
أضف إلى هذا المزيج السام نظام كليبتوقراطي نشر روايات عن الإيذاء التاريخي لإضفاء الشرعية على السرقة الهائلة والغزو الإمبراطوري لأمم الشعوب الأخرى ، وهناك شيء واحد واضح ؛ لقد تعلمت إسرائيل الدروس الخاطئة من النازيين.
لعلكم تعلمون من إشاراتي العديدة إلى الحادثة في كتاباتي أنني مناهض للفاشية ، أقسمت على اليمين للمقاومة من قبل جان جينيه في عام 1982 في بيروت ، أثناء قتالنا ضد الغزو والحصار الإسرائيلي. في الأربعين عامًا التالية ، كنت صيادًا للفاشيين وثوريًا منخرطًا في النضال من أجل تحرير البشرية ضد فاشية الدم والإيمان والتراب وضد الاستبداد وأنظمة القوة والسيطرة الاستبدادية ، من أجل الديمقراطية ومثلها العليا الحرية والمساواة والحقيقة والعدالة وحقوق الإنسان العالمية. من أجل هذا أضع حياتي في الميزان مع كل أولئك الذين سماهم فرانتس فانون معذبو الأرض ؛ الضعيف والمحروم ، الصامت والمحو.
الوطن الفلسطيني والعدالة لشعبه كانا من أهدافي منذ ذلك الصيف منذ زمن بعيد. مثل هدف تحرير أيرلندا من الحكم الاستعماري البريطاني ، لا يزال يتعين تحقيقه. إن فكرة الحرية والمواطنة هي السيادة والاستقلال للشعوب من الاستعمار الأجنبي والاستبداد الاستبدادي ، وأولوية دولة غير طائفية خالية من الانقسامات والتسلسل الهرمي الإيماني ، لأن من يقف بيننا وبين اللامتناهي لا يخدم أيًا من هؤلاء. .
كما أنني أؤيد فكرة إقامة وطن إسرائيلي ، ولا أرى أي سبب يجب أن تكون هاتان الدولتان ، فلسطين وإسرائيل ، متعارضة أو متعارضة. لماذا المواطنة ملزمة بحدود الجغرافيا ، أو الدول بحدود؟
لأكون واضحا ، أنا إلى جانب أي شخص مهدد بجرائم الكراهية بغض النظر عن أي عوامل أخرى ؛ في أعمال الشغب والحرب ، كان اختباري لاستخدام القوة بسيطًا ؛ من يملك السلطة؟
أنا إلى جانب كل أولئك الذين سماهم فرانتس فانون “معذبو الأرض”. الضعيف والمحروم ، الصامت والمحو. ينطبق هذا بالتساوي على اليهود والمسلمين ، وإسرائيل وفلسطين ، وأي كائن بشري آخر بغض النظر عن هويتهم ، ولا سيما بدون أي عبء أخلاقي من الاستحقاق كما يعلمنا شو بشخصية ألفريد بي دوليتل في فيلم My Fair Lady.
دعونا لا نرسل أي جيوش لفرض الفضيلة.
بعض الإسرائيليين الذين يختلفون معي بشأن قضية فلسطين والنزعة العسكرية في الغزو الإمبراطوري والهيمنة الإقليمية كانوا حلفاء في قضية مطاردة النازيين ، لكنهم لا يعرفون تواطؤهم في هذا الشر لأنهم يرون أنفسهم ضحايا ومدافعين عن الضحايا. بدلا من مرتكبي الجرائم ضد الإنسانية.
هذا عن الخوف والدورة المدمرة للإساءة والعنف. عدم العضوية في أي مجموعة أو هويات مرخصة من الانتماء ، والتسلسلات الهرمية للنخبة والمنتخبين ، وتقسيمات الآخرين الإقصائيين. إن أصول العنف والاستخدام الاجتماعي للقوة عالمية وتاريخية ومنهجية ، وليست على الإطلاق في أي دافع شرير أسطوري أو خطيئة أصلية أو فساد متأصل للإنسان.
لا تنتمي حلقة واغنريان من الخوف والقوة والقوة لأحد ، بل تنتمي إلى أنظمة غير شخصية ذات قوة غير متكافئة. أنا أفهم جيدًا كيف تجعلنا القوة نشعر بالأمان ، والجمال المغري للأسلحة الذي يجعلنا محكمين على الفضيلة ، وكيف تمنح عضوية النخبة الاستحقاق ؛ هذا ينطبق على الدول كما هو الحال بالنسبة للأفراد ، في ساحة اللعب وساحة السجن والأماكن العامة المتنازع عليها مثل جبل الهيكل وهو الأقصى أيضًا.
عندما يتم تخصيص الإيمان من قبل السلطة لإضفاء الشرعية في سياسات الهوية ، تصبح الهوية نفسها مشوشة وغامضة. لكي نصبح أحرارًا ، يجب أن نمتلك ملكية أنفسنا ككائنات مخلوقة ذاتيًا ومستقلة.
هذا هو السبب في أن الواجبات الأساسية للمواطن هي التشكيك في السلطة ، وفضح السلطة ، والتحايل على السلطة ، وتحدي السلطة.
لا يزال هناك دائمًا صراع بين الأقنعة التي يصنعها الآخرون لنا وتلك التي نصنعها لأنفسنا ؛ هذه هي الثورة الأولى التي يجب أن نحارب فيها جميعًا.
أفكر في مشكلة الشر البشري ودورته من الخوف والسلطة والقوة في حالة الدول التي أصبحت طغيانًا قاتلوا لتحرير أنفسهم منها ، وهذا ينطبق على الدول الثورية المعادية للاستعمار عمومًا بسبب الموروثات التاريخية للإيذاء. وشروط النضال المفروضة بهذه الطريقة. غالبًا ما يصبح الضحايا منتهكين لأن هويتهم منظمة حول السلطة باعتبارها الوسيلة الوحيدة للهروب والبقاء في عالم لا يمكن الوثوق فيه بأحد.
عندما يتم إلغاء الثقة وإثبات أنها فارغة وبدون معنى ، عندما تنكسر القدرة على الارتباط مع الآخرين والشعور بألمهم في التعاطف ويكون المرء بلا شفقة أو ندم ، عندما يكون الخوف طاغياً ومعمماً وتشكله السلطة من أجل خدمة السلطة ، يتعلم الضحايا أن القوة وحدها لها معنى وأنها حقيقية. يجب ألا نسمح لمن يسيء إلينا أن يصبح معلمينا.
في حين أن كل قضية من هذا القبيل لها أصولها الفريدة وتاريخها ، فإن المشكلة نفسها عالمية وتتعلق بما يخشاه المرء وكيف يتشكل هذا الخوف من خلال السلطة باعتبارها هوية. من وجهة نظرنا كأمريكيين يفسرون الأحداث في CLA
مشكلة الأقلية المزدوجة التي تمثلها إسرائيل وفلسطين ، كيف ندرك القضايا لها علاقة كبيرة بكيفية تأطيرها من خلال مصادرنا الإعلامية والمحفزة.
في النهاية يتم تعريفنا بما نفعله بخوفنا ، وكيف نستخدم قوتنا.
السؤال الأول الذي يجب طرحه في أي قصة والأهم هو بسيط ؛ لمن هذه قصته
نحن ضائعون في برية المرايا والأكاذيب والأوهام وتزييف أنفسنا والصور المشوهة والانعكاسات والأصداء والهويات المرخصة التي تشوه أرواحنا وتجردها من القوة وتسرقها.
كيف نجيب على من يستعبدنا؟ تتحقق أصالتنا واستقلاليتنا من خلال الاستيلاء على السلطة ، وإعادة تصور وتغيير أنفسنا والبشرية كمجتمع حر من أنداد.
نميل نحن الأمريكيين إلى رؤية الأشياء من منظور القبعات البيضاء والقبعات السوداء ، كما هو الحال في الأفلام الغربية التي تعتبر بمثابة أساطير أصل ونماذج أولية لشخصيتنا الوطنية. بمجرد منح وضع الضحية ، تصبح هذه الجماعات والأشخاص قبعات بيضاء ورجال صالحين ، غير قادرين على الشر ومعارضين تمامًا لمن يجب أن يكون عندئذٍ من القبعات السوداء. إنها طريقة مروعة لاختيار السياسة الوطنية.
للأسف ، يمكننا نحن البشر أن نكون صالحين وأشرار في آنٍ واحد ، عيوب إنسانيتنا تعكس صدى وانكسار العالم. إنها حقيقة تم إثباتها مرة أخرى الليلة في القدس أو القدس اعتمادًا على من يتحدث الشخص وبأي لغة ، حيث أن غزة تحترق من هجوم لقوات الدفاع الإسرائيلية كما كانت الليلة الماضية تقريبًا في بيروت. عندما حاولوا حرق جينيه وأنا على قيد الحياة في المقهى الخاص بنا ، حيث أن عشرات البشر الذين سرق منهم كل شيء ما عدا الأمل ، أقسموا على بعضهم البعض أن يشغلوا منصبًا يغطي هروب النساء والأطفال المحاصرين بسبب الهجوم الإسرائيلي حتى كل شيء. آمنون ، في دفاع نهائي ليس عن المسجد الأقصى ، رائعًا وجميلًا ومليئًا بالمعنى ، نصبًا للدفعة البشرية لتجاوز أنفسنا والإمكانيات اللامحدودة للتحول إلى إنسان ، وهي مرحلة مناسبة لموت الأبطال المجيد ، ولكن صرخات الغرباء بلا جسد بين المحاربين المجهولين لعصور قديم مهجور.
أمام فجوات الفراغ والهمجية العدمية في عالم الظلام والنار والخوف والقوة ، ليس لدي سوى الكلمات لأقدمها ، وأكتب لكم ما قلته لرفاقي الذين اختاروا الوقوف معي ؛ لقد فقدت العدد الأخير من المدرجات ، لكنني جازفت بكل شيء ضد احتمالات مستحيلة ونجوت مرات أكثر مما أتذكره ، وكل ما يهم هو أننا لا نتخلى عن أنفسنا ولا عن بعضنا البعض ، وأننا نرفض الخضوع ، لأن هذا هو لحظة حريتنا ، ولا يمكن أن تؤخذ منا أبدًا.
من هذه الليلة فلسطين حرة ، لأننا يمكن أن نقتل ، لكن لا يمكن غزونا.
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29 בנובמבר 2022 סולידריות עם המין האנושי נגד פשיזם, עריצות וטרור מדינה פירושה סולידריות עם פלסטין
ביום הסולידריות הבינלאומי הזה עם פלסטין
אני כותב כדי ליישם את התער של אוקאם של הפשטות על הנושא המורכב והטעון רגשית של יחסי פלסטין-ישראל ובעיית המיעוט הכפול על ידי שאילת שאלה; מה משרת בצורה הטובה ביותר את שמחת המין האנושי?
ש כל כך הרבה דרכים אחרות לבנות שאלה כזו, במיוחד כעקרונות של הפיכת אנוש באמצעות מאבק מהפכני ותפיסת כוח בתנאי מאבק כפויים הכוללים זיוף, סחורה ודה-הומניזציה כמערכות של דיכוי; של מוות, חוסר אונים נלמד, סלידה, אימה וחלוקות של זהויות מורשות?
כיצד ליצור חברה חופשית של שווים כמין אנושי מאוחד באמצעות דמוקרטיה חילונית וזכויות אדם אוניברסליות?
כיצד לאזן את הייחודיות שלנו כיחידים בתוך חברה מגוונת ומכילה?
כיצד ליישר את כל ההיררכיות של השתייכות ואחרות מדריגה ולחסל את כל המערכות של כוח לא שוויוני?
כיצד להביא את הכאוס, השיבוש, השבר, השינוי והדמוקרטיזציה של הגמוניות עילית של עושר, כוח ופריבילגיה, ולהימלט ממורשת ההיסטוריה שלנו ומהפשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה?
כיצד לדמיין מחדש ולשנות את האפשרויות הבלתי מוגבלות של האדם, המשמעות והערך?
כיצד לשחרר את עצמנו ואחד את השני בתנאי מאבק כפויים הדורשים אלימות ושימוש בכוח חברתי בתפיסות כוח, מבלי להפוך לסמכות שאנו נאבקים בה ולהשתמש בכוח ובאלימות כדי לאכוף את רעיונות המידות הטובות שלנו?
זוועות ופשעי מלחמה ישראלים בטיהור האתני של הפלסטינים עימתו את כולנו עם שותפותנו לרוע, והעולם מוצף באימה ובתסבון כאשר מנהיגינו בוגדים בנו וזונחים את עקרון זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שעל פיו מתקיימת הציוויליזציה שלנו. , ציוויליזציה שנמצאת כעת בתהליכי קריסה וחתרנות על ידי הפשיזם בשחר עידן הרודנים. אבל זה גם אומר שהכל בסימן שאלה, ניתן לתפוס כוח ולבחור עתיד חדש, אם נפעל בסולידריות בזמנים של כאוס כמרחב של משחק יצירתי חופשי.
כפי שמלמד אותנו גיירמו דל טורו ב-Carnival Row; “כאוס הוא התקווה הגדולה של חסרי הכוח.”
ברור שחייבים להיות לנו שוויון אמיתי אם זכויותינו וחירויותינו יישארו אוניברסליות בצל הכוח והשליטה של המדינה. כך גם חופש ושוויון אפשריים רק כאשר אנו נקיים מחלוקות מוסמכות של אחרות מוציאה מהכלל ופשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה.
מה מונע מאיתנו, כאן באמריקה ובכל העולם, לראות את האסון ההומניטרי הזה כפי שהוא? ראשית הם אינטרסים עילית של עושר וכוח, שיצרו מושבה אמריקאית וענק צבאי אימפריאליסטי למטרות דומיננטיות של המזרח התיכון ושליטה בנכס האסטרטגי של הנפט, אשר הקמפיין הדיפלומטי של טראמפ למען הכרה במדינת ישראל על ידי שכנותיה היא הצורה העדכנית ביותר של הברית הערבית-אמריקאית ההיסטורית והבוגדנית.
שהשתמשנו באיום ההשפעה האיראנית ובנקמה הסונית-שיעית העתיקה כדי לפלג ולכבוש את האזור, לתת לגיטימציה לסכסוך בתימן כמקרה מבחן להגמוניה שלנו ולערער את תנועות הדמוקרטיה בלבנון, עיראק ואיראן וכן הנצחת שלילת הזכויות והטיהור האתני של תושבי פלסטין מדברת על המניעים האמיתיים של אמריקה; לא כדי לקדם שלום וחופש, אלא כדי להבטיח עושר וכוח באמצעות מלחמה ועריצות.
אני מאמין שהגורם המשני לעיוורון שלנו לעוולות המצב הפלסטיני-ישראלי הוא מורשת של השואה והאופן שבו אנו מעבדים נרטיבים היסטוריים של קורבנות. ברגע שנמשח כקורבן, והוכתר בכובע לבן של תמימות ללא תמים, הדמות הזו בדמיוננו הופכת ללא מסוגלת לעשות פסול בשום דרך אחרת. אנו חושבים במונחים של טוב ורע כמאבק קוסמי של כוחות דיכוטומיים, לא במונחים של הפגמים של האנושיות שלנו. מוחלטים הם פשוטים יותר.
כולנו מסוגלים לפעולות טובות ורעות כאחד, לאי הבנות, לרגשות ותגובות מסוכסכים ובעלי ניואנסים וכישלונות של חמלה. ואנחנו נוטים להתעלם ולא להתעמת עם דברים כמו אזורים אפורים מוסריים שגורמים לנו לאי נוחות; זה נקרא הפחתת דיסוננס קוגניטיבי, וזה אומר שאנחנו נוטים להמשיך לעשות דברים שאנחנו יודעים שהם לא נכונים אם יש לנו סיפור טוב להצדיק את מעשינו ואת האמונה שאלוהים בצד שלנו. הזוועות הנוראות ביותר בהיסטוריה בוצעו בדרך זו.
כאן אני חייב לומר בבירור שאני תומך ביצירת דמוקרטיה חילונית שבה כל בני האדם, הפלסטינים והישראלים כאחד, שווים בדיוק הן למעשה והן על פי החוק, שאני תומך בחרם, ביטול וסנקציה של מדינת ישראל.
שראל כפי שהיא מכוננת כיום היא עריצות פשיסטית של טרור מדינתי אשר אשמה בפשעים נגד האנושות בטיהור האתני של העם הפלסטיני.
כילדה בשנת 1969 באירוע עם אמי שהחל כמחאה נגד כיבוש פלסטין בפארק העממי בברקלי, יום חמישי הדמים 15 במאי, הייתי בקו החזית כשהמשטרה פתחה באש על ההמון; זה היה המוות והלידה מחדש הראשון שלי, כשלרגע עמדתי מחוץ לזמן וצפיתי בעתידים האפשריים, קווי הזמן והמציאות החלופית שהתפשטו מאותו רגע, האפשרויות הבלתי מוגבלות להיות אנושיות והסיכוי הנורא לעידן פשיסט מתקרב. עריצות, מלחמה, נפילת הציוויליזציה והכחדת המין האנושי שעוד עלולות להתרחש אם לא נוכל לדמיין מחדש ולשנות את עצמנו ואת החברה שלנו, ולמצוא מרפא לפגמי האנושות שלנו, מקורות הרוע בטבעת הווגנרית של פחד, כוח וכוח, ושברו של העולם.
באביב האחרון, למעלה מחמישים שנה לאחר מכן, לחמתי באינתיפאדה השלישית; האם עדיין נלחם על אנושיותנו וחירותנו בעוד חמישים שנה, או חמשת אלפים?
תקוותי היא שממשיכי דרכו בדורות הבאים יצרו חברה חופשית של שווים וינטשו את השימוש בכוח חברתי, לא יהיו להם עריצות או טרור ממלכתי להתנגד להם, ויוכלו לחיות את חייהם בשמחה ובאהבה ולא במאבק כמוני. יש.
עלינו לחלום חלומות טובים יותר, ולעמוד יחד בסולידריות של פעולה כדי להפוך אותם למציאותיים.
מי אנחנו רוצים להיות, אנו בני האדם?
הבה נבחר זה בזה ולא את העושר, הכוח והפריבילגיה של האליטות ההגמוניות, השוויון, הגיוון וההכלה ולא את החלוקה וההיררכיות של אחרות מדריגה, חירות ולא ריכוזיות של כוח וסמכות למדינה קרסראלית בבעלות עשירים, דמוקרטיה ולא עריצות, תקווה ולא פחד, אהבה ולא שנאה.
כפי שכתבתי בפוסט שלי מ-10 במאי 2021, ההגנה על אל אקצא: חירות מול עריצות בירושלים; ייתכן שהיינו עדים להופעת האינתיפאדה השלישית הלילה, בהגנת אל-אקצא ובקרבות הרחוב בעזה שבאו בעקבותיה, שהוצתו בעקבות הבגידה והכיבוש האימפריאלי של מדינת ישראל שנאת זרים ופשיסטית שאינה מתייחסת לאיש מלבד מדינת ישראל. שבט ואמונה כאנושיים באמת, ואשר ביצעו מתקפה בלתי מעוררת וקטלנית כמעשה טרור ממלכתי ופשע נגד האנושות על המתפללים השלווים באחד המסגדים הקדושים ביותר בעולם האסלאם, הפגנת כוח ושליטה אשר עוקב אחרי שבועות של פרובוקציות, תקיפות ופעולות של דה-הומניזציה תעמולה נגד העם הפלסטיני.
כמו אינתיפאדת אל-אקצא השנייה או אל-אקצא שנמשכה ארבע שנים מה-28 בספטמבר 2000 עד ה-8 בפברואר 2005, נושאים לא פתורים של כיבוש שנמצא כעת בחמישים וארבעה שנים מאז כיבוש ירושלים העתיקה ב-7 ביוני 1967 על ידי ישראל, שמדינת ישראל חגגה על פי ללוח העברי כיום ירושלים היום על ידי תקיפת אל אקצא, ואסון הנמשך כבר שבעים ושלוש שנים מאז יום הנכבה ה-15 במאי 1948, התלכדו סביב הערך הסמלי של אל אקצא, בעל זהות כפולה שנויה במחלוקת כהר הבית ב. יַהֲדוּת.
סיכויי הסלמה ומניעת מלחמה תלויים כעת לא בגורמים מקומיים אלא בתגובת הקהילה הבינלאומית, שכן ההיסטוריה הפכה כאן למלכודת שמתמוטטת כדי ללכוד אותנו במלתעותיה, וכוחות חיצוניים חייבים לשחרר אותנו מהכישלונות של הסתירות הפנימיות של המערכת שלנו.
האם אמריקה תתנער ותתנער ממושבה ישראל, מלכת המדיניות האימפריאלית שלה במזרח התיכון והשליטה במשאב האסטרטגי של הנפט? האם האחדות הבינלאומית והלחץ של חרם, ביטול וסנקציה יכולים לשחרר אותנו מהעריצות והטרור של משטר אפרטהייד כפי שעשה בדרום אפריקה?
או שמא מלחמה היא ההתחשבנות היחידה שהמין האנושי יכול להציע או לקבל?
כפי שנכתב על ידי ישאן ת’ארור בוושינגטון פוסט; “ביום שני בלילה, חמושים ברצועת עזה והצבא הישראלי החליפו ירי רקטות ותקיפות אוויריות על רקע הסלמה קטלנית של האלימות. חמאס והג’יהאד האיסלאמי, ארגונים חמושים שבסיסם בעזה המצוררת, שיגרו מטח רקטות שנחתו ליד ירושלים ובחלקים מדרום ישראל, ופצעו לפחות אדם אחד. תקיפות אוויריות ישראליות בתגמול הרגו לפחות 20 בני אדם בעזה, לפי משרד הבריאות של עזה, כולל תשעה ילדים.
ראש ממשלת ישראל בנימין נתניהו אמר כי “קבוצות הטרור” בעזה “חצו קו אדום” עם התקפות הרקטות שלהם. אבל לפיצוץ הלחימה האחרון יש זנב ארוך, בעקבות פעולות תוקפניות רבות הן של כוחות הביטחון הישראליים והן של ארגוני עליונות יהודים מהימין הקיצוני בירושלים. לפני שבועיים צעדו להקות של קיצונים יהודים, כולל כמה מתנחלים מהגדה המערבית, דרך אזורים מאוכלסים בפלסטינים בעיר הקדושה, קראו “מוות לערבים”, תקפו עוברי אורח ופגעו ברכוש ובבתים פלסטינים. ניסיונות ישראלים לפנות מספר משפחות פלסטיניות בשכונת שייח ג’ראח במזרח ירושלים – מיקרוקוסמוס של מה שהפלסטינים רואים כחלק מהיסטוריה ארוכה של נישול ומחיקה בידי מדינת ישראל – עוררו מחאות סולידריות פלסטיניות בחלקים שונים. של השטחים הכבושים וישראל עצמה.
זה גם העלה את המתיחות לקראת ציון יום ירושלים ביום שני, חג ישראלי רשמי שחוגג את כיבוש העיר במהלך מלחמת ערב-ישראל ב-1967. צעדה שנתית מתוכננת של ישראלים אולטרה-לאומיים מהימין הקיצוני בוטלה לאחר שהרשויות ניתבו את דרכה ברגע האחרון. מספרים גדולים עדיין עשו את דרכם לכותל ושרו שיר נקמה קיצוני נגד הפלסטינים.
“התקפות הרקטות של חמאס, שכללו את התקיפות הראשונות נגד ירושלים מזה מספר שנים, הגיעו לאחר עימותים בין משטרת ישראל, מפגינים פלסטינים וישראלים יהודים ימין קיצוני ברחבי העיר העתיקה”, דיווחו עמיתיי. “בין מאות הפצועים היו שבעה שאושפזו במצב קשה, כך לפי הסהר האדום הפלסטיני. קטעי וידאו שהופצו ברשתות החברתיות של שוטרים ישראלים מכים באכזריות גבר פלסטיני עצור”.
איך אמריקה יכולה לתמוך במדינת ישראל בעריצות ובטרור, בכיבוש ובגזל? זו שאלה שנשאלת בטונים של זעם, צער ותמיהה מאז ה-15 במאי 1948, יום הקטסטרופה שהחל את השעבוד השיטתי ורצח העם של אנשיו בעקבות הכיבוש הישראלי.של ירושלים. איך זה מקבל לגיטימציה?
חבר ניסח לי לאחרונה מחדש את השאלה הזו; “אהבתי ואימצתי את המסורת היהודית, הצטרפתי לבית כנסת ועבדתי לצד הרב שלו. כשאני עד ליחס של ממשלת ישראל היהודית לפלסטינים, אני מוצף ברגשות של בלבול וכעס. אני לא מצליח ליישב את חוסר המוסריות הזה, אני מטיל ספק בעצם היסוד של האמונה שלי. היכן ההתקוממות הטובה והמוסרית של הקולות היהודיים הבינלאומיים המגנה את דרכה של הממשלה? איבדתי את האמון בלהיות יהודי”.
מה שברור לי הוא שמשבר האמונה הזה הוא גם משבר זהות קיומי, מצב של כובד וסכנה עצום שיש בו גם פוטנציאל לדמיון מחדש ולידה מחדש טרנספורמטיבית, הד אישי למשבר ציוויליזציוני מקביל שממנו האנושות קהילה גלובלית של אומות חייבת למצוא דרך להגיח ולשחרר את עצמנו מהמורשת של ההיסטוריה שלנו. הנה תשובתי:
מדינת ישראל אינה זהה לאמונה היהודית, אם כי הפלג הפשיסטי-אימפריאליסטי שנתניהו מייצג היה רוצה שכולם יחשבו כך.
אומה המבוססת על שיוך אזרחיה לזהות שבטית, נשק עדתי של אמונה בשירות לשלטון וזהות לאומית מורשית, חברה צבאית עם שירות חובה אוניברסלי ושפה עברית משוחזרת של אחדות לאומית השתמשה בפוליטיקת זהויות כדי להכפיף את אזרחיה לכוח הריכוזי של העריצות; ישראל היא מדינה פשיסטית של דם, אמונה ואדמה לא פחות מזו של הנאצים.
הוסיפו לתמהיל הרעיל הזה משטר קלפטוקרטי שהפיץ נרטיבים של קורבנות היסטורית כדי לתת לגיטימציה לגניבה מסיבית וכיבוש אימפריאלי של מדינות אחרות ודבר אחד ברור; ישראל למדה את הלקחים הלא נכונים מהנאצים.
אתה אולי יודע מההתייחסויות הרבות שלי לתקרית בכתיבתי שאני אנטי-פשיסט, שנשבע לשבועת ההתנגדות על ידי ז’אן ז’נה ב-1982 בביירות, במהלך מאבקנו נגד הפלישה והמצור הישראלים. בארבעים השנים שאחרי, הייתי צייד פשיסטים ומהפכן העוסק במאבק לשחרור המין האנושי נגד פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה ונגד עריצות ומשטרים אוטוריטריים של כוח ושליטה, למען הדמוקרטיה והאידיאלים שלה. חופש, שוויון, אמת וצדק, ולמען זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו. בעניין זה אני מעמיד את חיי באיזון עם כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי הארץ; חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והמחוקים.
מולדת פלסטינית, וצדק לאנשיה, היו בין המטרות שלי מאז אותו קיץ לפני כל כך הרבה זמן. כמו המטרה של שחרור אירלנד מהשלטון הקולוניאלי הבריטי, עוד נותרה להשיגה. מדובר ברעיון החירות והאזרחות כריבונות ועצמאות של עמים מקולוניאליזם זר ועריצות אוטוריטרית, והקדימות של מדינה לא-כתתית נקייה מפילוגים והיררכיות של אמונה, שכן מי שעומד בין כל אחד מאיתנו לבין האינסופי אינו משרת אף אחד מהם. .
אני לא רואה סיבה ששתי המדינות הללו יהיו סותרות זו את זו או אנטגוניסטיות. מדוע אזרחות חייבת להיות קשורה לגבולות הגיאוגרפיה, או למדינות לפי גבולות?
שיהיה ברור, אני בצד של כל מי שמאוים בפשע שנאה ללא קשר לכל גורם אחר; בהתפרעות ובמלחמה המבחן שלי לשימוש בכוח הוא פשוט; מי מחזיק בכוח
אני בצד של כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה את עלובי כדור הארץ; חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והמחוקים. זה חל באותה מידה על כל בני אדם אחרים, ללא קשר למי שהם, ובמיוחד ללא כל נטל מוסרי של הכשרון כפי שמלמד אותנו שואו עם דמותו של אלפרד פ. דוליטל ב”גברתי הנאווה”.
אל לנו לשלוח צבאות לאכוף מידות טובות.
במקום מבצעי פשעים נגד האנושות.
מדובר בפחד, ובמעגל ההרסני של התעללות ואלימות. לא חברות באף קבוצה או זהויות מורשות של השתייכות, היררכיות של האליטה והנבחרים, וחלוקות של אחרות מוציאה מהכלל. מקורות האלימות והשימוש החברתי בכוח הם אוניברסליים, היסטוריים ומערכתיים, ולחלוטין לא בשום דחף רשע מיתי, חטא קדמון או קלקול מובנה של האדם.
הטבעת הווגנרית של פחד, כוח וכוח אינה שייכת לאיש, אלא למערכות אישיות של כוח לא שוויוני. אני מבין היטב כיצד כוח גורם לנו להרגיש בטוחים, את היופי המפתה של כלי הנשק שהופך אותנו לפוסקי מידות טובות, וכיצד חברות עילית מעניקה זכאות; זה עובד אותו הדבר עבור עמים כמו עבור יחידים, במגרש המשחקים, בחצר הכלא ובמרחבים ציבוריים מתמודדים כמו הר הבית שהוא גם אל אקצא.
כאשר אמונה מוחזקת על ידי סמכות ללגיטימציה בפוליטיקת זהויות, הזהות עצמה הופכת מבולבלת ומעורפלת. כדי להיות חופשיים, עלינו לתפוס בעלות על עצמנו כיצורים שנוצרו בעצמנו ואוטונומיים.
זו הסיבה שהתפקידים העיקריים של אזרח הם להטיל ספק בסמכות, לחשוף סמכות, ללעוג לסמכות ולערער על סמכות.
תמיד נשאר המאבק בין המסכות שאחרים עושים לנו לבין אלה שאנחנו עושים לעצמנו; זו המהפכה הראשונה שבה כולנו צריכים להילחם.
אני חושב על בעיית הרוע האנושי ומעגל הפחד, הכוח והכוח שלו במקרה של מדינות שהופכות לעריצות מהן נלחמו כדי להשתחרר מהן, וזה נכון לגבי מדינות מהפכניות אנטי-קולוניאליות בדרך כלל בגלל המורשת ההיסטורית של הקורבנות ותנאי המאבק המוטלים, בדרך זו; קורבנות הופכים לעתים קרובות למתעללים מכיוון שזהותם מאורגנת סביב כוח כאמצעי המילוט וההישרדות היחיד בעולם שבו לא ניתן לסמוך על איש.
כאשר האמון בוטל והוכח כריק וללא משמעות, כאשר היכולת להתחבר ולהרגיש את כאבם של אחרים באמפתיה נשברה ואדם ללא רחמים או חרטה, כאשר הפחד הוא מכריע ומוכלל ועוצב על ידי סמכות בשירות הכוח, הקורבנות לומדים שרק לכוח יש משמעות והוא אמיתי. אסור לנו לאפשר למתעללים שלנו להפוך למורים שלנו.
בעוד שלכל נושא כזה יש מקורות והיסטוריה ייחודיים משלו, הבעיה עצמה היא אוניברסלית, וקשורה למה שחוששים, ואיך הפחד הזה מעוצב על ידי סמכות זהות. מנקודת המבט שלנו כאמריקאים המפרשים אירועים בקלא
הבעיה של המיעוט הכפול, האופן שבו אנו תופסים נושאים קשורים רבות לאופן שבו הם ממוסגרים על ידי מקורות המידע והמניעים שלנו. בסופו של דבר אנחנו מוגדרים לפי מה אנחנו עושים עם הפחד שלנו, ואיך אנחנו משתמשים בכוח שלנו.
השאלה הראשונה שיש לשאול על כל סיפור, והחשובה ביותר, היא פשוטה; של מי הסיפור הזה
אנחנו אבודים בשממה של מראות, של שקרים ואשליות, זיופים של עצמנו, דימויים והשתקפויות מעוותים, הדים וזהויות מורשות שמעוותות, מעצימות וגונבות את נשמתנו.
איך נענה למי שישעבד אותנו? האותנטיות והאוטונומיה שלנו מתממשות באמצעות תפיסת כוח, ודמיון מחדש והפיכתנו של עצמנו ושל המין האנושי כחברה חופשית של שווים.
אנו האמריקאים נוטים לראות דברים במונחים של כובעים לבנים וכובעים שחורים, כמו בסרטי המערבון המשמשים כמיתוסים וארכיטיפים של המקור הלאומי שלנו. ברגע שהוענק מעמד של קורבן, קבוצות ואנשים כאלה הופכים לכובעים לבנים ולחבר’ה טובים, חסרי יכולת לרוע ומנוגדים בתכלית למי שחייבים להיות כובעים שחורים. זו דרך איומה לבחור במדיניות לאומית.
למרבה הצער, אנו בני האדם יכולים להיות טובים ורעים בבת אחת, פגמי האנושות שלנו מהדהדים ומשקפים את השבר של העולם. זו אמת שהוכחה שוב הלילה באל קודס או בירושלים תלוי למי מדברים ובאיזה שפה, בעוד עזה בוערת מהסתערות של צבא הגנה ישראלי משתוללת בדומה ללילה לפני כמעט ארבעה עשורים בביירות. כשניסו לשרוף את ג’נט ואני בחיים בבית הקפה שלנו, כתריסר בני אדם שנגנב מהם הכל מלבד התקווה נשבעים נדרים זה לזה להחזיק בתפקיד שיכסה את בריחת הנשים והילדים שנלכדו בתקיפה הישראלית עד שכל בטוחים, בהגנה סופית לא על מסגד אל אקצא, מפואר ויפה ומלא במשמעות, אנדרטה לדחף האנושי להגיע אל מעבר לעצמנו ולאפשרויות הבלתי מוגבלות להפוך לאנושיות, במה המתאימה למותם המפואר של גיבורים, אבל של צרחות חסרות גוף של זרים בין המלחמות חסרות השם של עתיקות נטושה.
אל מול תהום הריקנות והברבריות הניהיליסטית של עולם של חושך ואש, של פחד וכוח, יש לי רק מילים להציע, ואני כותב לך את מה שאמרתי לחבריי שבחרו לעמוד איתי; איבדתי את ספירת היציעים האחרונים, אבל סיכנתי הכל כנגד סיכויים בלתי אפשריים ושרדתי יותר פעמים ממה שאני יכול לזכור, וכל מה שחשוב הוא שאנחנו לא נוטשים לא את עצמנו ולא אחד את השני, שאנחנו מסרבים להיכנע, כי זה רגע החופש שלנו, ולעולם לא ניתן לקחת אותו מאיתנו.
מהלילה הזה, פלסטין חופשית, כי אנחנו יכולים להיהרג, אבל אי אפשר לכבוש אותנו.
This weekend while much of America indulges in an orgy of buying and the adulation of material goods, itself a repudiation of the sacral functions of Thanksgiving as an authorized narrative of national identity which echoes the historical origins of Black Friday as a public ritual Black Mass in which peasants throughout Europe mocked, parodied, and satirized authorities of Church and State, I will be honoring the subversive tradition of Black Friday in its most ancient form.
This month of Saturnalia which began with our annual ritual hunt and harvest feast, now equally Thanksgiving, originally an Abolitionist holiday enacted by Abraham Lincoln, and the National Day of Mourning on which we perform sacred acts of witness and truth telling to bring a Reckoning for our historical injustices and the Conquest, and a time of celebration of community and family as acts of healing from the pathologies of our disconnectedness and reaffirmation of our mutual interdependence and solidarity, and of the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, America, and our civilization, this liminal time of reversals of order, violations of normality, and transgressions of the Forbidden, and the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen in the questioning, exposure, mocking, and defiance of authority, a season of celebration of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves which encompasses the whole span of midwinter through the reign of the Lord of Misrule we now call Christmas; on this day becomes an amok time of commodification, the orgiastic purchasing of symbols of status and class membership, and the display of finery to proclaim and secure our position as apex predators and hegemons of elite wealth, power, and privilege, beneficiaries of theocratic sexual terror and white supremacist terror, as masters and patriarchs.
As our culture has abandoned the sacred for commercial materialism and expanded Black Friday through the weekend into Cyber Monday and now beyond, a festival of status through displays of wealth like a reverse Potlach or Bonfire of the Vanities which also enables commodification and the theft of the soul, I will be celebrating an inversion of our social order and values by using the sacred to mock the profane.
Let us begin with the basis of our society; what are you worth?
Value is a function of time, scarcity, and desire as instrumentalized by elites in service to power and hierarchy and negotiated by authorized identities and narratives of belonging and otherness; a quality like the molecules of perfume which become electrochemical energy in the chambers of our noses as interfaces between the real and the ideational realms of being, whereupon it is carried to our brains and organized there by the schema of our history and memories into the aroma of our experience; transforms of energy caught in the mirror of our consciousness.
The senses are transducers, changing one form of energy into another which propagate along neural pathways as chemical exchange and becomes abstract information about a world which is nothing more than an illusion created in our minds. It is a fiction, transitory and impermanent, a thing of surfaces, echoes, and reflections; why should we allow ourselves to be falsified and defined by such a thing?
Behind this world lies another, a world which contains thousands of worlds, filled with beauty, and terror, you cannot imagine from here.
I have spent my life exploring them, the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and in liberation struggle against systems of oppression, and in this context of Black Friday I refer to Marx’s theory of alienation, and the hour approaches wherein I must go through the final Forbidden Door of this world and vanish utterly into the Unknown beyond. So I wish now to wedge open that door for you and all who would explore beyond the boundaries of the flags of our skins.
Our forms are an imposed condition of struggle, but they are not our limit.
This I say simply as a man who has been dead, in the few moments when as a nine year old holding my mother’s hand at a protest for divestiture from the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, Bloody Thursday March 15 1969 People’s Park Berkeley, a grenade thrown by a policeman threw me out of my body and I beheld myriads of possible human futures which might unfold from that moment when Governor Reagan ordered the police to open fire on six thousand students trapped into the killing box of the Park. Upon return to my body in mother distraught mother’s arms from being Most Sincerely Dead, I said to her; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but Awakening from iluusions.”
Our enslavement, commodification, falsification, and dehumanization by the hegemons of elite power, white male privilege, and plutocratic capitalism begins with this; our seduction and captivity in the realm of the senses and the theft of our souls.
Let us choose substance over surfaces, and embrace rebellion.
Kobo Abe takes tea at the Mad Hatter’s of an afternoon; Gogol has set his words on fire and is made of a holy light which is used in place of a chandelier, Kafka elicits squeals of delight from Alice with his hideous Gregor Samsa form, Klimt’s giant apelike Typhoeus and his gorgon daughters desire, madness, and death run amok in ecstatic Bacchic dance while Lovecraft tries to put something with tentacles back in its box.
There is always an empty chair for you.
Jefferson Airplane – Go ask Alice
The hatter recites the jabberwocky poem
The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley
Imagination and the Playfulness of God: The Theological Implications of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Definition of the Human Imagination, by Robin Stockitt, Christoph Schwobel
Torch of Liberty 