Each year we commemorate the eight Days of Remembrance of the Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust, in Israel with moments of silence as whole cities pause while air raid sirens warn of impending attack, lest we forget and think the danger is long past and we ourselves safe, and throughout the world those engaged in revolutionary struggle against brutal tyrannies and in resistance to the force and control of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil reflect on the example of our sacred dead and their glorious Last Stand in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which affirms our common human being, meaning, and value.
I wonder now, on the eighty third anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, if we have learned its lessons; of vigilance against fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and tyrannies of force and control, especially which may arise within ourselves as atavisms of instinct and fear shaped by submission to authority and systems of unequal power, of divisions of exclusionary otherness and belonging, and the existential threats of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and of solidarity in resistance and our duty of care for others.
We see the lines of fracture in our systems as we struggle to birth a true free society of equals and emerge from the legacies of our history and from elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and nowhere on earth are we free from our addiction to power and its manifold consequences. Yet we resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows, as the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet goes; and this is the hope of humankind.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
All over the world, those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, will remember and rise again to claw their way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand.
Who resists and refuses to submit to force cannot be conquered or subjugated. This is the great lesson of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and why we remember it; because we must if we are to remain human, owners of ourselves if nothing more, and free.
To disambiguate between our two days of remembrance, the United Nation’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27 marks the day in 1945 when the Soviet Red Army liberated the Auschwitz–Birkenau concentration camp; an achievement of liberation struggle and international solidarity, a good and noble cause to celebrate. But Israel and the United States have chosen the Yom HaShoah date of Nisan 27 on the Hebrew calendar for the 8-day DRVH commemoration something else entirely; the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Not the rescue of the Holocaust’s victims, but the resistance unto death and solidarity with each other of a people who refused to submit to unjust authority, tyranny, and state terror.
In Resistance we become Unconquered and free.
It began with a teenage girl who threw a Molotov cocktail at the Nazis as they marched into the Ghetto. One little girl, with no weapons and no training, who said no.
As described by the only surviving commander of the Uprising, Dr. Marek Edelman, author of Resisting the Holocaust: Fighting Back in the Warsaw Ghetto, “who fought on as the city was burned around them, they fought against impossible odds not to escape, for there was nowhere to escape to in occupied Poland, nor to buy time, for no help was coming, but only “to pick the time and place of our deaths”.
This I dispute, for the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising did far more than to claim their own freedom in seizing ownership of their lives in challenge to authority and refusal to obey force and control; they showed the rest of us how to live, and how to become free.
In the words of Max Stirner; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
As written by Ben Cohen in the Jerusalem Press, in an article entitled ‘From Every Floor, From Every Window:’ Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; “Now something unprecedented took place. Three officers with lowered machine pistols appeared. They wore white rosettes in their buttonholes – emissaries. They desired to negotiate with the Area Command. They proposed a 15-minute truce to remove the dead and the wounded. They were also ready to promise all inhabitants an orderly evacuation to working camps in Poniatow and Trawniki, and to let them take along all their belongings. Firing was our answer. Every house remained a hostile fortress. From every floor, from every window, bullets sought hated German helmets, hated German hearts.”
There are many inspiring stories from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, the 80th anniversary of which is being marked this week, but the passage quoted above is probably the one that left the deepest impression upon me.
I first read it many years ago, when I picked up a copy of “The Ghetto Fights,” a memoir by Marek Edelman, who was a leader of the Bund, the pre-war Jewish Socialist party, and who participated in the uprising against the Nazi occupiers. Edelman was describing the aftermath of the epic battle that commenced on April 19, 1943, when the Germans attempted to liquidate the ghetto with columns of troops, armored vehicles and tanks, and with heavy artillery pieces placed outside its walls. But the Jewish resistance fighters inside had anticipated their arrival; in the ensuing combat, the Germans became trapped at the intersection of Mila and Zamenhofa Streets, with their intended path to a safe retreat fatally exposed to the guns wielded by the fighters of the ZOB and the ZZW, the two Jewish military organizations in the ghetto. “Not a single German left this area alive,” wrote Edelman.
At the same time, further German units were pinned down in Nalewki and Gesia streets. “German blood flooded the street,” Edelman recalled. “German ambulances continuously transported their wounded to the small square near the Community buildings. Here the wounded lay in rows on the sidewalk awaiting their tum to be admitted to the hospital.” By 2 p.m. that same day, the Jewish fighters realized that they had won a key battle over their oppressors.
The Germans returned to the ghetto walls 24 hours later and were again met with hails of bullets and deadly attacks using what we now call Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). It was at this point that the three German officers described by Edelman came begging for a ceasefire, in order to collect their dead and wounded. In that precise moment, the role of the Jew and the German, of the “Untermensch” and the “Aryan”—cemented over the previous decade by the growing power of the Third Reich—was utterly inverted. Every bullet fired at the Germans was a riposte to the grotesque slogan carved into the gates of Auschwitz, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Makes You Free”). And every German who fell while attempting to rescue his wounded comrades was a sign that the humanity of the Jews had not been extinguished—that they were real agents making real decisions, including the decision to deny the enemy any form of mercy or regard amid the heat of the fighting.
The energy and the intensity shown by the 700 poorly armed young Jewish fighters reflected the understanding, deep in their hearts, that the battle for the ghetto was not ultimately one in which they would prevail. “We knew we couldn’t win,” wrote Mira Fuchrer, just 21 years old, one of the women fighters who came from the ranks of the Labor Zionist Hashomer Hatzair organization.
“We fought so we could die with dignity.” For Fuchrer’s boyfriend, the 22-year-old commander of the ZOB, Mordechai Anielewicz, the sheer fact of the uprising was a fillip to Europe’s Jews in their darkest hour, and therefore in itself a victory. “The dream of my life has risen to become fact,” he reflected at the height of the fighting. “Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts! I have been a witness to the magnificent, heroic fighting of Jewish men of battle.”
Like other aspects of the Holocaust and World War II more generally, the details of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising have become richer and more complicated with further research over time. Critically, thanks largely to the painstaking work of the late Moshe Arens, a former Israeli cabinet minister, we now know that there was not just one—as was assumed for several decades—but two military groups in the ghetto. As well as the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), which drew supporters of the non-Zionist Bund and left-wing Zionists such as Dror and Hashomer Hatzair, there was the Jewish Military Union (ZZW), commanded by Pawel Frenkel and rooted in the Revisionist Zionist Betar movement of Vladimir Jabotinsky.
The political divide between these two organizations was unmistakable, as was the internal split within the ZOB between those leftists who supported the creation of a Jewish state and those who saw Zionism as a needless deviation from the proletarian class struggle (but not, I should emphasize, as a “racist,” “colonialist” project in the manner of those who define themselves as anti-Zionists today). Yet the imperative of defeating the Germans was overwhelming, and so the ZOB and the ZZW, Betarniks and Bundists alike, forged a strategic alliance. The ZOB distributed its fighters at different points around the ghetto while the ZZW concentrated its forces in Muranowska Square, flying a blue-and-white Zionist flag alongside a Polish one from its headquarters as it pushed back against the German advance.
The vicious urban fighting lasted for nearly a month before the Germans were able to declare victory. “The former Jewish Quarter in Warsaw is no more,” announced the SS Commander Jurgen Stroop in a May 16, 1943 cable to his superiors in Berlin.
In the event, the ghetto was razed, and most of the surviving fighters committed suicide rather than face capture and humiliation at the hands of the Germans. The 42,000 Jews who still remained in the ghetto two years after the Germans began the mass deportation of the community were transported either to the Majdanek concentration camp or the labor camps at Poniatow and Trawnicki. Most of them were murdered at those locations during a two-day mass shooting operation in November 1943.
“Never say that you are walking the final road/Though leaden skies obscure blue days,” the ghetto fighters would sing. “The hour we have been longing for will still come/Our steps will drum—we are here!”
Eighty years later, as their descendants wrestle with a resurgence of antisemitism (albeit in far more favorable circumstances—the existence of a Jewish state, full civil and political rights in most countries where Jews live) we should not only wish that their memory remains a blessing. Let it strengthen us, too.”
Montage From The Pianist film, set to music by Matt Maltese, As the World Caves In
19 באפריל 2026 לעולם לא עוד: ימי הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה
בכל שנה אנו מציינים את שמונת ימי הזיכרון לחללי הקדושים וגיבורי השואה, בישראל ברגעי דממה כאשר ערים שלמות עוצרות בזמן שסירנות תקיפות אוויר מזהירות מפני תקיפה צפויה, שמא נשכח ונחשוב שהסכנה עברה מזמן ואנחנו בעצמנו. בטוחים, וברחבי העולם העוסקים במאבק מהפכני נגד עריצות אכזרית ובהתנגדות לכוח ולשליטה של פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה משקפים את הדוגמה של המתים הקדושים שלנו ועמידתם האחרונה המפוארת במרד גטו ורשה. מאשר את האדם המשותף, המשמעות והערך שלנו.
אני תוהה עכשיו, במלאת 80 שנה למרד גטו ורשה, אם למדנו את לקחיו; של ערנות מפני פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה ועריצות של כוח ושליטה, במיוחד שעלולים להתעורר בתוכנו כאטביזם של אינסטינקט ופחד המעוצבים על ידי כניעה לסמכות ולמערכות של כוח לא שוויוני, של חלוקות של אחרות ושייכות מוציאות, ו האיומים הקיומיים של זיוף ודה-הומניזציה ושל סולידריות בהתנגדות וחובתנו לדאוג לזולת.
אנו רואים את קווי השבר במערכות שלנו כאשר אנו נאבקים להוליד חברה חופשית אמיתית של שווים ולצאת ממורשת ההיסטוריה שלנו ומהגמוניות עילית של עושר, כוח וזכות, ובשום מקום על פני כדור הארץ איננו חופשיים מההתמכרות שלנו. לכוח ולהשלכותיו הרבות. אולם אנו מתנגדים ואינם מפסיקים, ואינו נוטשים את חברינו, כפי שנאמרת שבועת ההתנגדות שניתנה לי על ידי ז’אן ז’נה; וזוהי התקווה של האנושות.
בסופו של דבר, כל מה שחשוב הוא מה אנחנו עושים עם הפחד שלנו, ואיך אנחנו משתמשים בכוח שלנו. תעשה משהו יפה עם שלך.
בכל רחבי העולם, אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי הארץ, חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והמחוקים, יזכרו ויקומו שוב כדי לצאת מהחורבות ולעשות עוד דוכן אחרון.
מי שמתנגד ומסרב להיכנע לכוח אי אפשר לכבוש או להכניע. זהו הלקח הגדול של מרד גטו ורשה, ומדוע אנו זוכרים אותו; כי עלינו להישאר אנושיים, הבעלים של עצמנו אם לא יותר, וחופשיים.
כדי לבלבל בין שני ימי הזיכרון שלנו, יום הזיכרון הבינלאומי לשואה של האו”ם, 27 בינואר, מציין את היום בשנת 1945 שבו שחרר הצבא האדום הסובייטי את מחנה הריכוז אושוויץ-בירקנאו; הישג של מאבק שחרור וסולידריות בינלאומית, מטרה טובה ואצילית לחגוג. אבל ישראל וארה”ב בחרו את תאריך יום השואה כ”ז בניסן בלוח העברי להנצחת DRVH בת 8 ימים משהו אחר לגמרי; יום השנה למרד גטו ורשה ב-1943. לא הצלת קורבנות השואה, אלא התנגדות למוות וסולידריות זה עם זה של עם שסירב להיכנע לסמכות בלתי צודקת, לעריצות ולטרור המדינה.
בהתנגדות אנו הופכים ללא כבש וחופשי.
זה התחיל בילדה מתבגרת שזרקה בקבוק תבערה לעבר הנאצים כשצעדו לגטו. ילדה אחת קטנה, בלי נשק ובלי הכשרה, שאמרה לא.
כפי שתיאר המפקד היחיד שנותר בחיים של המרד, ד”ר מרק אדלמן, מחבר הספר “התנגדות לשואה: נלחם בחזרה בגטו ורשה”, שנלחם בזמן שהעיר נשרפה סביבם, הם נלחמו כנגד סיכויים בלתי אפשריים לא לברוח, שכן לא היה לאן לברוח בפולין הכבושה, וגם לא לקנות זמן, כי שום עזרה לא הגיעה, אלא רק “לבחור את הזמן והמקום של מותנו”.
על זה אני חולק, שכן גיבורי מרד גטו ורשה עשו הרבה יותר מאשר לתבוע את חירותם בעצמם בכיבוש הבעלות על חייהם תוך אתגר לסמכות וסירוב לציית לכוח ולשליטה; הם הראו לכולנו איך לחיות, ואיך להיות חופשיים.
במילותיו של מקס סטירנר; “לא ניתן להעניק חופש; יש לתפוס אותו.”
Polish
19 kwietnia 2026 Nigdy więcej: Dni Pamięci o Męczennikach i Bohaterach Holokaustu
Każdego roku upamiętniamy osiem Dni Pamięci Męczenników i Bohaterów Holokaustu w Izraelu chwilami ciszy, gdy całe miasta zatrzymują się, podczas gdy syreny alarmowe ostrzegają przed zbliżającym się atakiem, abyśmy nie zapomnieli i nie pomyśleli, że niebezpieczeństwo już dawno minęło, a my sami bezpieczni, a na całym świecie ci, którzy angażują się w rewolucyjną walkę przeciwko brutalnej tyranii oraz w opór wobec siły i kontroli faszyzmu krwi, wiary i ziemi, zastanawiają się nad przykładem naszych świętych zmarłych i ich chwalebną ostatnią walką w powstaniu w getcie warszawskim, które potwierdza naszą wspólną istotę ludzką, znaczenie i wartość.
Zastanawiam się teraz, w 80. rocznicę powstania w getcie warszawskim, czy wyciągnęliśmy z niego wnioski; czujności wobec faszyzmu krwi, wiary i ziemi oraz tyranii siły i kontroli, zwłaszcza tych, które mogą powstać w nas jako atawizmy instynktu i strachu ukształtowane przez poddanie się władzy i systemom nierównej władzy, podziałom wykluczającej inności i przynależności oraz egzystencjalne zagrożenia fałszerstwem i dehumanizacją, solidarnością w oporze i naszym obowiązkiem troski o innych.
Widzimy linie pęknięcia w naszych systemach, gdy walczymy o narodziny prawdziwie wolnego społeczeństwa równych i wyłaniamy się z dziedzictwa naszej historii oraz z elitarnych hegemonii bogactwa, władzy i przywilejów, i nigdzie na ziemi nie jesteśmy wolni od naszego uzależnienia władzy i jej wielorakich konsekwencji. Jednak opieramy się i nie przestajemy, i nie opuszczamy naszych towarzyszy, jak mówi Przysięga Oporu dana mi przez Jeana Geneta; i to jest nadzieja ludzkości.
Ostatecznie liczy się tylko to, co zrobimy z naszym strachem i jak wykorzystamy naszą moc. Zrób coś pięknego ze swoim.
Na całym świecie ci, których Frantz Fanon nazwał Nędznikami Ziemi, bezsilni i wywłaszczeni, wyciszeni i wymazani, będą pamiętali i powstaną ponownie, by wydostać się z ruin i stoczyć kolejną Ostatnią Bastion.
Kto stawia opór i odmawia poddania się sile, nie może zostać pokonany ani ujarzmiony. To jest wielka lekcja powstania w getcie warszawskim i dlaczego ją pamiętamy; ponieważ musimy, jeśli mamy pozostać ludźmi, właścicielami samych siebie i wolnymi.
Aby ujednoznacznić nasze dwa dni pamięci, Międzynarodowy Dzień Pamięci o Holokauście ustanowiony przez ONZ, 27 stycznia to dzień wyzwolenia przez Armię Czerwoną obozu koncentracyjnego Auschwitz-Birkenau w 1945 roku; osiągnięcie walki wyzwoleńczej i międzynarodowej solidarności, dobry i szlachetny powód do świętowania. Ale Izrael i Stany Zjednoczone wybrały datę Yom HaShoah 27 Nisan w kalendarzu hebrajskim na 8-dniowe obchody DRVH na coś zupełnie innego; rocznica powstania w getcie warszawskim 1943 r. Nie ratowanie ofiar Holokaustu, ale opór aż do śmierci i wzajemna solidarność narodu, który nie poddał się niesprawiedliwej władzy, tyranii i państwowemu terrorowi.
W Ruchu Oporu stajemy się Niezwyciężeni i wolni.
Zaczęło się od nastolatki, która rzuciła koktajlem Mołotowa w nazistów maszerujących do getta. Jedna mała dziewczynka, bez broni i bez wyszkolenia, która powiedziała nie.
Jak opisał jedyny żyjący dowódca Powstania, dr Marek Edelman, autor Resisting the Holocaust: Fighting Back in the Warsaw Ghetto, który walczył dalej, gdy wokół nich płonęło miasto, walczyli z niemożliwymi szansami, by nie uciec, bo w okupowanej Polsce nie było dokąd uciec, ani kupić czasu, bo pomoc nie nadchodziła, a jedynie „wybrać czas i miejsce naszej śmierci”.
Kwestionuję to, ponieważ bohaterowie powstania w getcie warszawskim zrobili znacznie więcej niż tylko domaganie się własnej wolności, przejmując odpowiedzialność za swoje życie, rzucając wyzwanie władzy i odmawiając posłuszeństwa wobec siły i kontroli; pokazali reszcie z nas, jak żyć i jak stać się wolnymi.
Słowami Maxa Stirnera; „Wolności nie można przyznać; trzeba go przejąć”.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, a reading list
Resisting the Holocaust: Fighting Back in the Warsaw Ghetto, Marek Edelman,
Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Hanna Krall, Marek Edelman, Lawrence Weschler (Translator), Joanna Stasinska (Translator)
This is the anniversary of a tragic and glorious Last Stand the world must never forget, and I cannot.
Here follows my journal of the final day as Russian forces sealed off the city from aid or escape, and after making what mischief we could for the enemy my friends and I fled along the underground railroad to Warsaw to organize resistance and revolution within Russia, and bring a Reckoning for war crimes in Mariupol to her destroyers.
For fear of nuclear annihilation and other retaliation by and direct conflict with Russia, America and the world have avoided bringing a Reckoning to Putin’s regime for its crimes against humanity in Ukraine; we have not counter-invaded, liberated the Black Sea, destroyed the airfields, supply lines, and manufacture of war material, nor given Ukraine the means to do so for herself.
As the survival of humankind depends upon our abandonment of weapons of mass destruction and global nuclear disarmament, disengagement works on the existential level, but we know from Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” that appeasement does not. As the famous line from the film Darkest Hour that Churchill never said goes; “You can not reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
Between war with Russia and refusing our duty of care for others regardless of whose citizens they may be which entails the abandonment of our principles of universal human rights and the natural right of sovereignty of all human beings, there is a vast and enormous space of free play in which to act in solidarity and anticolonial struggle with those under threat of imperial conquest and dominion and all of the atrocities and horrors of war.
This is true of Palestine and the democracy movement against the theocratic regime in Iran in contrast to Trump and Netanyahu’s criminal acts of imperial conquest and dominion to create a Greater Israel as a kleptocracy of limitless greed as well as Ukraine, and far too many other failures of our humanity.
Let us bring regime change to Russia, for this is the only way Putin’s mad quest to re-found the Russian Empire, which now unfolds in ten theatres of war including Ukraine and Vichy America in the puppet regime of Traitor Trump, will truly end; when the people of Russia liberate themselves. I can say the same for America and Israel in the Gaza War and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; it ends when the people of America restore our democracy and when the people of Israel liberate themselves from the Netanyahu settler regime and bring true democracy to Israel in abandoning the re-enactment of Auschwitz which is the Occupation, and unite with the people of Palestine as fully equal citizens in one nation wherein fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are renounced for ideals of equality, diversity, inclusion, and a secular state.
When I originally wrote this commemoration of the anniversary of the Last Stand of Mariupol, legislation awaited a vote in our Congress which Janus-like offered us a chiaroscuro of good and evil; funds to combat tyranny and terror for Ukraine, and funds to enforce tyranny and terror for Israel. We can see how well that worked out, as our abandonment of the principle of universal human rights sabotaged the Restoration of America through division of the Democratic Party and produced the second Trump regime.
Let us stand in solidarity as each other’s guarantors of our humanity, friends, beyond the authorized identities of borders and nations.
What would a foreign policy based on universal human rights applied equally to all human beings and the nations which represent them look like?
Our policy in Israel must be to silence the bombs of genocide, break the blockade of humanitarian aid toPalestine, and bring regime change.
For Ukraine we must do far more than fund resistance; we must bring the fight to the enemy on his own ground, in solidarity with the people of Russia versus the regime and in alliance with the democracy movement now pervasive throughout civil society and the antiwar movement within the Russian military. This is how we brought a Reckoning to Prigozhin as a war criminal, in partnership with the slave soldiers he sent to conquer a free people, and it is how we will bring a Reckoning to Putin and his regime, and to Trump and all who are complicit in his subversion of democracy, theft of our citizenship and our rights and freedoms, and the white supremacist state terror of ICE and its campaign of random abductions and imprisonment without cause or trial in foreign gulags.
Yes, it is all one revolutionary struggle for our humanity versus tyranny and state terror and one war with many theatres as World War Three.
But while the forces arrayed against us may seem unstoppable as the tides both in America under a captured state and in Ukraine before the savage and ferocious assaults of the Putin regime whose war crimes and atrocities define the limits of the human, in Syria we proved that the enemy can be defeated. If we all unite in solidarity of action as guarantors of each other’s liberty and universal human rights.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
April 18 2022 Last Stand at Mariupol: Fight at the Steel Works
Fighting at the Azovstal and Ilyin Iron and Steel Works remains ongoing; among the vast warrens and maze of tunnels here, with its arsenals, hospitals, communications centers, and routes of resupply as in other underground fortresses in Mariupol and elsewhere, Resistance to the Russian Occupation may be waged for years if necessary. A machinist and leader of the steelworkers who armed themselves in defense, called Big Yuri, has even jury rigged an arms factory which can manufacture rifles and ammunition indefinitely. This, unfortunately, is not the same as holding the ground.
We are the Spartans; our lives buy time for our civilization to awaken to its peril and the threat of fascist tyranny and imperial conquest by Russia in this the Third World War.
For Mariupol and far too many of the people of Ukraine, this will come too late; no one is coming to help, and many of her defenders have nothing left to fight with on this forty seventh day of the Siege of Mariupol which began on the second of March, and of the Battle which began February 24th.
But it is not too late for you and yours, whomever you may be or wherever you may live. This truth must suffice, as the hope for our future.
I speak herein as a witness of history who has been in Mariupol from March 22, and offer this testimony on behalf of our universal human rights in any Reckoning brought to the perpetrators of this vast and horrific war crime.
This has been from its beginning a battle of aerial and artillery bombardment against the city itself and the civilian population, of tanks against riflemen, of flesh against unanswerable force and horror, of division against solidarity, of hate against love, and of fear against hope.
Here the human will to freedom is tested by an enemy who exults in the embrace of the monstrous, whose policies and designs of war as terror gladly and with the open arrogance of power instrumentalize utter destruction and genocide, a war wherein atrocities and depravities are unleashed as tactics of shock and awe with intent of subjugation through learned helplessness and overwhelming and generalized fear.
Here as in Nanking and countless other places, this produces not submission but resistance. Politics is about fear as a basis of exchange, and in the Calculus of Fear, where limited state terror against its own citizens in concert with total control of information may be useful internally in the manufacture of consent to be governed, provided the legitimacy of authority remains unquestioned by those in whose name it claims to act, in war what is uncontrollable and unimaginable creates conditions in which there is nothing more to lose.
Such are my people, all those with nothing left to lose, here and in all times and places throughout history and among all humankind, and when we stand in solidarity with each other we are Unconquerable and beyond any force of subjugation or control.
Too much or too little fear, and where and how it is used, can destabilize totalitarian regimes. When law becomes meaningless and is replaced by power and force, authority is delegitimized, the consent to be governed is lost, and order becomes chaos.
Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, episode seven The World to Come, has a scene in which two young successors to leadership of traditionally rival factions find themselves in love and in need of allies in a subplot which reimagines Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; the rebellious hellion Jonah Breakspear asks his Machiavellian lover Sophie Longerbane, “Who is chaos good for?” To which she replies, “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
As Jean Genet said to me in Beirut nearly forty years ago as we were surrounded by soldiers in a house they had set on fire and about to be burned alive; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
Resistance has always been a war to the knife. Curious phrase, that; among the few words and whole phrases which come into modern English unchanged from the original Norse; krig på kniven. Its meaning for us is simple; those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none.
By any means necessary, as this principle is expressed in the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X.
Why is this terrible war happening, in Mariupol a campaign of terror which includes executions, torture, organized mass rape and the trafficking of abducted civilians, the capture of civilian hostages and use of forced labor, cannibalism using mobile factories, genocidal attacks, erasure of evidence of war crimes using mobile crematoriums which indicates official planning as part of the campaign of terror and proof that the countless crimes against humanity of this war are not aberrations but by design, threats of nuclear annihilation against European nations sending humanitarian aid, and the mass destruction of cities?
The Russian strategy of conquest as Total War, designed by Franco and Hitler and tested at Guernica, opens with sustained and relentless bombardment and destruction of hospitals, bomb shelters, stores of food, power systems, water supply, corridors of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of refugees; anything which could help citizens survive a siege. Once nothing is left standing, a campaign of terror as organized mass rape, torture, cannibalism, and looting begins, and any survivors enslaved or executed. This is a war of genocide and erasure, which has no parallel in modern Europe other than the Siege of Sarajevo; and here I speak as a witness of history to both.
Why? What could possibly be worth purchasing with your humanity and that of your nation and people?
Russia wants to conquer Ukraine for the same reason Japan invaded Manchuria; because it is an industrial heartland from which the conquest of the world may be launched, and the warm water ports of Mariupol and Odesa are key to this imperial plan of dominion, as well as to control of a land corridor to Crimea.
The sixty-five ports of the Black Sea connect Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine, and all of these with the Mediterranean, dominion of which Russia has long disputed with Turkey in Libya and Syria. If Russia intends to follow the conquest of Ukraine with that of Eastern Europe, the capture of Romania’s Port of Constanta would open the whole of the Danube region to invasion. The Black Sea remains as crucial to the dominion of the Mediterranean, and of Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, as it was when Mithridates VI of Pontus contested for it in his wars with the Roman Empire, or at the Battle of Gallipoli which we seem doomed to refight in Crimea.
At stake in the fight at the steelworks in Mariupol is the major regional industrial plant and the strategic resource of keeping a fleet alive, decisive in diverting Russian troops and resources from the Donbas campaign and in preventing Russia from fully colonizing Crimea and coastal Ukraine. Denying Russia the ability to refit and repair its ships from local resources may be key to defeating the invasion of the Ukrainian seaboard and the Mediterranean.
The Azovstal and Ilyin Iron and Steel Works are also a vast and labyrinthine fortress from which the defense of Mariupol may be waged, like Fort St Elmo from which the Knights of Malta made their heroic Last Stand.
What is happening in Mariupol now, among the confusion and devastation of a city of ghosts wherein the Russian army has given free rein to the depravity of war?
As Ukraine seizes the initiative in the north and drives Russia back across the border, and begins to contest and retake the Black Sea with the stunning victory of crippling the Moskva, flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet to which the defenders of Snake Island gave famous reply, savage fighting for the port and the steelworks continues though Russia has claimed a thousand Ukrainian Marines surrendered, with the implication that Mariupol itself has also surrendered.
To this disinformation aimed at the will of the Ukrainian people to refuse to submit and remain Unconquered I say; First, that Mariupol is without question under Occupation and in enemy hands, but the city has not surrendered nor ever will. Suicide teams who have volunteered to remain and harry the enemy as opportunities arise will see to that, and networks of Resistance among her citizens await the hour of Liberation.
The Russians have published their estimate of the forces gathered here at the steel works as twenty five hundred Ukrainians and four hundred foreign volunteers of the International Legion, including the independent Abraham Lincoln Brigade which I founded here, we Americans who named ourselves after the legendary unit of the Spanish Civil War. Others still hold the port itself under Ukrainian control, a fact to the advantage of any such force of Liberation who may bring a fleet to this fight.
Second, there is nothing dishonorable in surrender if it means you live to fight another day, and the 36th Marines Brigade who have on the forty sixth day of their heroic defense of Mariupol declared in their last message to the world, days ago now, that they have nothing left to fight with, no ammunition, water, anything, and that they are either captive or dead, bear only honor with them into a future which must now be chosen by others.
I have never seen a Ukrainian surrender. Casually stroll into an enemy checkpoint and pull the pin on a grenade, laughing, to open the way for a hospital truck to rescue others, yes. Share a bottle of poisoned vodka with an enemy sentry and die together while refugees are escorted through the lines, yes.
Such people cannot be conquered. The use of force and violence is fragile and power is hollow when it has no legitimacy but only brutal repression to sustain it; for all such things fail at the point of disobedience and disbelief.
Whosoever refuses to submit becomes Unconquered, and is free. This is a kind of victory against which no tyranny or terror can win.
I have seen a fierce bearded fellow attack a pair of Russian tanks with an ax, running from cover to leap onto the turret and behead the commander, and vanish into the ruins like a shadow of wrath summoned by the city’s pain, grief, and fear. Called The Headsman, in him Ukraine has found an avenger. The remaining tank crewmen bailed out and ran in panic, the commanding officer in the second tank opened fire on the deserters and actually shot one of them, and he was shot in turn by a fellow Russian soldier who emerged behind him from the tank, put a gun to his head, and then simply walked across the street with hands raised and changed sides. The soldier who chose our common humanity over nationalism and solidarity over division is now the commander of that tank, but with the Ukrainian flag painted on it. Saint Andrei, they are calling him.
Putin has sent slaves to conquer a free people. He forgot to wonder, what happens when the slaves join together with their fellow victims of tyranny whom they were sent to conquer, in solidarity of action to liberate themselves?
While the Russian army has an active peace movement and networks of solidarity working with their Ukrainian counterparts, and many incidents of desertion and mutiny including fragging officers, the Ukrainians, often frozen, starving, and out of ammunition like the founders of America who crossed the Delaware with Washington on that fateful Christmas Day in 1776, remain defiant and Unconquered.
There is also the legend of the Wolf of Mariupol, a girl who tore out her attacker’s throat like a wolf. A myth of war, possibly; but I saw what was left of the Russian soldier in question. It is said she now leads a team of women who rescue others from the Butterfly Collectors, the soldiers capturing women for abduction to Russia and trafficking as a criminal syndicate within the Russian military. In her Ukraine has found a Harriet Tubman.
A group of Ukrainian Marines has last week broken through to link up with elements of the Azov National Guard, very stubborn fellows who have held the steel works in grim conditions; but several zones of conflict are unfolding and rapidly changing. Russian officers have tried to compel surrender using civilian hostages in a different incident, but not to my knowledge with success.
The war crimes of the Russians have awakened a resistance of victory or death; like the defenders at the Siege of Malta in 1565 or George Washington who coined that phrase as a password at the Battle of Trenton, the Ukrainian soldiers, civilian partisans including steelworkers and others who armed themselves when Russia attacked, and international volunteers I have witnessed swearing an oath to die in place rather than surrender anything to a conqueror will not go quietly.
What happens next? As Lenin asked in his essay that founded a political party and a Revolution which was destined to transform the world, What is to be done?
Today the Russian Occupation forces impose passports of travel required of all persons on the streets, begin capturing civilians and sending them to processing centers to choose some for forced labor camps and others for summary execution, and all access to the world beyond Mariupol and from the world to here cordoned off entirely. Mariupol is to be emptied, the population totalized as dead or enslaved, and remaining persons systematically hunted to extinction.
Putin intends to leave us nothing to defend and nowhere from which to fight. And in so doing he has freed us to begin the next phase of struggle, and take the fight to the enemy.
Sometimes I think he doesn’t know how to play this game at all.
Fortunately for us, being a KGB Colonel is not precisely the same as being a professional revolutionary, and seems to have made of Putin a truncated and misshapen thing, of limited intellect and no morals whatever, no visionary evil genius nor embodiment of Hegelian world-historical forces but merely an overseer of the carceral state. Vladimir Putin is much like Adolf Eichmann, as described by Hannah Arendt in her historic work on the Nuremberg Trials.
As I consider my goals and objectives regarding the war to be obvious to anyone, I don’t mind outlining them for you here.
First and beyond all other priorities, for only this will truly end the threat of war, we must act in solidarity with the Russian peoples to help bring regime change and the Liberation of Russia from the tyranny of Vladimir Putin and his oligarchy.
Second, we must bring a direct and personal Reckoning to Putin, his oligarchs, high command, political allies and minions, and all those complicit in war crimes in Ukraine.
Third, we must bring destruction to Russia’s ability to wage this war, especially the artillery and airfields which reduce whole cities to ruin in the opening phase of any such enemy assault.
Fourth, we must seize control of the Black Sea or prevent Russia from doing so, to deny its use as a launching pad for the imperial Russian conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
We’re going to need a pirate fleet for that last bit, and I know just where I can find one.
Herein the overarching strategic reality which must drive our decisions is the fact that World War Three has now been ongoing for some time, whose theatres of war include Russia, America, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and now Ukraine inclusive of her province Crimea.
Should we fail to stop this war of imperial conquest and dominion here in Ukraine where all our humanitarian values and international laws are violated with brutal savagery, and allow it to become a general global war between liberty and tyranny, my fear is that the world may enter an age of tyranny and centuries of war which humankind will not survive.
For Putin’s hand rests on the button of our nuclear annihilation and extinction, and it calls to him, whispering; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
”圮地則行；圍地則謀；死地則戰“; as written by Sun Tzu in Chapter Eleven of The Art of War, “In death ground, fight.”
This principle of action was once demonstrated for me in Angola, during the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988, in a tactical situation similar to ours here in Mariupol. While the spectacle of this grand final battle in a decades long liberation struggle against colonialism and Apartheid was unfolding, I was making mischief behind enemy lines in the bush. Here I discovered a lost unit, mainly Zulu though with Soviet and Cuban volunteers, which was encircled by Apartheid forces.
After reporting what I knew of the area to the command group and a brief conference in several languages, an old fellow who had heretofore been silent stood up from the shadows of the tent, whose shirtless form displayed a fearsome and magnificent scar from a lion’s claws, and said; “We are surrounded and outnumbered with no ammunition and worse, no water, and no one is coming to help us. We must attack.”
The sergeant smiled at this as if he had been given a marvelous gift, strode outside, and gave the order which if you are lucky you will never hear; “Fix bayonets!”
And the men about to die erupted in song. “Usuthu! Umkhonto wami womile!” “My spear is thirsty”, that last.
We too can emerge victorious from our war of survival against even an immensely more vast and powerful foe, as did the heroes of Cuito Cuanavale, if we unleash the full will and force of our nations against an emergent Russian Empire, as a United Humankind; especially if we do so against its weak spots and lines of fracture.
Ukraine is such a weak spot of imperial ambition, while she yet resists and remains Unconquered. And the Russian invasion of Europe can be derailed by political action in Russia through the democracy and peace movements which have challenged Putin’s tyranny.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity goes the motto of the Revolution which birthed democracies in America and France; the first two parts of which proclaim universal principles of human being, and the third part, which refers to what we call solidarity, interdependence, and our duty of care for others, is instrumental to the realization of our liberty and equality as a free society of equals.
We can be victorious in the triumph of democracy over tyranny, of solidarity over division, and of love over hate. But there is only one way this works; we must act as one United Humankind.
As written by Tom Bateman of the BBC; “Russian troops started their encirclement of Mariupol in early March, gradually tightening the noose.
There are growing signs Russia could be on the brink of fully capturing Mariupol, the besieged southern port city which has suffered a devastating, six-week assault.
Officially, Ukraine’s armed forces say they are sustaining its defence and are in “continuous contact” with their troops on the ground. But they concede it is likely Moscow will try to take full control of the city, while a regional Russian-backed separatist leader claims Mariupol is close to falling.
Ukrainian troops have said they are running out of ammunition, and are believed to have been pushed back into two isolated pockets adjoining the coastline.
The city’s fate is likely to be critical for the next phase of the war. In Russian hands it would provide control of a clear swathe of territory connecting Moscow’s two fronts in the south and east. It would release large numbers of forces to redeploy, and provide President Vladimir Putin with a moment of strategic “victory” after a lethally shambolic first stage to his invasion.
It would mark a huge loss, if by now an expected one, for Ukraine’s leadership which has described Mariupol as “the heart of this war today”.
It is believed Ukraine’s forces have been forced back to the port area and the Azovstal iron and steel plant.
Russian troops started their encirclement of Mariupol in early March. The siege has killed thousands of civilians and unleashed an appalling struggle for survival for trapped residents who remain.
Thousands of people have escaped further north, risking a deadly journey through the front line. Here, in Zaporizhzhia, I have watched civilians arrive day after day, describing how they have witnessed the obliteration of their city.
In recent days Russian forces are thought to have pushed in further by dividing the remaining holdout of Mariupol’s defenders, according to think tank the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
It’s believed Ukraine’s forces have been forced back to the port area and the Azovstal plant, a massive iron and steel works from where they had launched counter-attacks for weeks.
Videos have emerged of fighters apparently from the 36th marine brigade vowing not to surrender their positions.
“We are holding on to every bit of the city wherever possible,” says one in a video posted to social media channels on Tuesday.
“But the reality is the city is encircled and blocked and there was no re-supply of ammunition or food,” he adds. Part of the footage shows him alongside several other marines in a room that looks like a basement shelter. One of the men has crutches leaning against his chair.
A post on Monday on the brigade’s Facebook page described the situation as “the last battle… It is death for some of us, and captivity for the rest,” it said, adding they had been “pushed back” and “surrounded” by Russian troops.
Ukrainian analysts differed over whether the post could be relied on as genuine, with some claiming the page had been hacked. But more than 36 hours later the post remained on the site.
The siege and a resulting collapse in communications in Mariupol mean it is difficult to independently verify reports about changes on the ground.
There is little doubt Ukrainian forces have been desperate for new supplies of weapons, ammunition, food and water.
Mariupol – home to more than 400,000 people before the war – has been virtually wiped out by weeks of heavy Russian shelling.
Ukraine’s military reportedly managed over the weeks to resupply troops with kit including night and thermal vision goggles, portable battery charging packs and even anti-tank munitions; but it became increasingly hard.
“Ultimately, the city was surrounded so soon into the invasion that there was never a chance to build up supplies,” says Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at defence think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
“They’ve already held out far, far longer than any external analysis would have predicted possible. So it’s difficult to say how much longer they can go on,” he says, adding that they have “achieved extraordinary results with very little”.
Ukrainian attempts to rotate forces or evacuate the wounded also became much more high risk as Russia tightened its siege.
In his video address to the nation late on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said: “The future of Ukraine directly depends on the strength of our resistance in all its forms. The future of us all, each of our cities, each of our villages.
“And I am grateful to everyone who understands this. Who does not stop resisting even when it seems that the result is very far. Because the darkest time is always before dawn.
“I want to separately address those heroes who are having a very hard time. Those who defend Mariupol. A marine battalion of the 36th marine brigade, Azov special operations detachment, 12th operational brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine. Subdivisions of the State Border Guard Service. Volunteers of the “Right Sector”. The 555th military hospital and National Police employees.”
The full capture of the city could see significant numbers of Russian troops, so far used to contain and prevent resupply in Mariupol, reconstituted and moved elsewhere, particularly in other parts of the eastern Donbas region, where Moscow is gearing up for a major offensive.
It could also see Moscow consolidate its progress north of Mariupol, which is one of the reasons the Ukrainians were finding it so hard to relieve the city, according to Mr Bronk.
The forces could also be used to bolster Russian-occupied Kherson, where Ukrainian troops have been attempting to retake ground with some success.
President Zelensky continued his metaphor that Mariupol is the heart of the war. “If it stops beating then we will be… weaker,” he said.”
20 Days In Mariupol documentary film
Churchill’s speech in Darkest Hour: You cannot Reason With a Tiger When Your Head Is In Its Mouth
Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
This is my theme song for Last Stands, which I posted as I embarked for Mariupol in March 2022 and for Afghanistan in August 2021 after the Fall of Kabul.
18 квітня 2024 р. Друга річниця останнього стоянки на металургійному заводі в Маріуполі
Це річниця трагічної та славетної Останньої битви, яку світ ніколи не повинен забувати, а я не можу.
Ось мій щоденник останнього дня, коли російські війська блокували місто від допомоги чи втечі, і після того, як завдали ворогу скільки могли, ми з друзями втекли підземною залізницею до Варшави, щоб організувати опір і революцію в Росії, і принести відповідальність за військові злочини в Маріуполі її руйнівникам.
Через страх ядерного знищення та іншої помсти з боку Росії та прямого конфлікту з нею Америка та світ уникають розплати режиму Путіна за його злочини проти людства в Україні; ми не проводили контрвторгнення, не звільняли Чорне море, не знищували аеродроми, лінії постачання та виробництво військової техніки, не давали Україні для цього засобів.
Оскільки виживання людства залежить від нашої відмови від зброї масового знищення та глобального ядерного роззброєння, розмежування діє на екзистенціальному рівні, але ми знаємо з «Миру в наш час» Чемберлена, що умиротворення не діє. Як звучить відомий рядок із фільму “Найтемніша година”, про який Черчилль ніколи не говорив; «Не можна міркувати з тигром, коли твоя голова в його пащі».
Між війною з Росією та відмовою від нашого обов’язку піклуватися про інших, незалежно від того, чиїми громадянами вони можуть бути, що тягне за собою відмову від наших принципів універсальних прав людини та природного права на суверенітет усіх людей, існує величезний і величезний простір вільного гра, в якій діяти в солідарності та антиколоніальній боротьбі з тими, хто перебуває під загрозою імперського завоювання та панування, а також усіх звірств і жахів війни. Це стосується і Палестини, і України.
Давайте принесемо зміну режиму в Росії, бо це єдиний спосіб, яким справді закінчиться шалений пошук Путіна відновити Російську імперію, який зараз розгортається на десяти театрах війни, включаючи Україну та Америку на наших виборах; коли народ Росії звільниться. Я можу сказати те саме про війну в Газі та ізраїльсько-палестинський конфлікт; це закінчується, коли народ Ізраїлю звільняється від режиму поселенців Нетаньяху та приносить справжню демократію в Ізраїль, відмовляючись від реконструкції Освенціма, який є окупацією, і об’єднується з народом Палестини як повноправні громадяни в одній нації, в якій фашизм кров, віра та земля відмовляються заради ідеалів рівності, різноманітності, інклюзії та світської держави.
Законодавство тепер чекає на голосування в нашому Конгресі, який, як Янус, пропонує нам світлотінь добра і зла; кошти на боротьбу з тиранією та терором для України та кошти на посилення тиранії та терору для Ізраїлю.
Наша політика в Ізраїлі має полягати в тому, щоб заглушити бомби геноциду, прорвати блокаду гуманітарної допомоги в Газу та змінити режим.
Для України ми повинні зробити набагато більше, ніж фінансувати опір; ми повинні вести боротьбу з ворогом на його власній території, солідарно з народом Росії проти режиму та в союзі з демократичним рухом, який зараз поширений у громадянському суспільстві, та антивоєнним рухом у російській армії. Так ми розплатилися Пригожину як військовому злочинцю, так ми розплатимося Путіну та його режиму.
Бо нас багато, ми спостерігаємо, і ми майбутнє.
Russian
18 апреля 2024 Вторая годовщина последней битвы на металлургическом комбинате в Мариуполе
Это годовщина трагической и славной Последней битвы, которую мир никогда не должен забыть, а я не могу.
Здесь следует мой дневник последнего дня, когда русские войска изолировали город от помощи или побега, и, причинив врагу весь вред, который мы могли, мы с друзьями бежали по подземной железной дороге в Варшаву, чтобы организовать сопротивление и революцию внутри России, и принести расплату за военные преступления в Мариуполе ее эсминцам.
Опасаясь ядерного уничтожения и других возмездий со стороны России и прямого конфликта с ней, Америка и весь мир избегают расплаты режиму Путина за его преступления против человечности на Украине; мы не осуществили ответное вторжение, не освободили Черное море, не разрушили аэродромы, линии снабжения и производство военной техники и не предоставили Украине средств сделать это для себя.
Поскольку выживание человечества зависит от нашего отказа от оружия массового уничтожения и глобального ядерного разоружения, размежевание работает на экзистенциальном уровне, но из книги Чемберлена «Мир в наше время» мы знаем, что умиротворение этого не делает. Как гласит знаменитая фраза из фильма «Темные времена», которую Черчилль никогда не говорил; «Невозможно рассуждать с Тигром, когда твоя голова у него во рту».
Между войной с Россией и отказом от нашей обязанности заботиться о других, независимо от того, чьими гражданами они могут быть, что влечет за собой отказ от наших принципов универсальных прав человека и естественного права суверенитета всех людей, существует огромное и огромное пространство свободы. игра, в которой нужно действовать в духе солидарности и антиколониальной борьбы с теми, кто находится под угрозой имперского завоевания и владычества, а также всех зверств и ужасов войны. Это справедливо как для Палестины, так и для Украины.
Давайте осуществим смену режима в России, поскольку это единственный способ действительно положить конец безумному стремлению Путина заново основать Российскую империю, которое сейчас разворачивается на десяти театрах военных действий, включая Украину и Америку на наших выборах; когда народ России освободится. Я могу сказать то же самое о войне в Газе и израильско-палестинском конфликте; он закончится, когда народ Израиля освободится от поселенческого режима Нетаньяху и принесет Израилю истинную демократию, отказавшись от реконструкции Освенцима, который является оккупацией, и объединится с народом Палестины как полностью равные граждане в одной нации, где фашизм кровь, вера и почва отвергаются ради идеалов равенства, разнообразия, инклюзивности и светского государства.
Законодательство теперь ожидает голосования в нашем Конгрессе, которое, подобно Янусу, предлагает нам светотени добра и зла; фонды для борьбы с тиранией и террором в Украине и фонды для насаждения тирании и террора в Израиле.
Наша политика в Израиле должна заключаться в том, чтобы заставить замолчать бомбы геноцида, прорвать блокаду гуманитарной помощи Газе и добиться смены режима.
Для Украины мы должны сделать гораздо больше, чем просто финансировать сопротивление; мы должны начать борьбу с врагом на его собственной земле, в знак солидарности с народом России против режима и в союзе с демократическим движением, которое сейчас широко распространено в гражданском обществе, и с антивоенным движением в российских вооруженных силах. Вот как мы принесли расплату Пригожину как военному преступнику, и так мы принесем расплату Путину и его режиму.
Reading List for a Future History of the Battle and Siege of Mariupol, To Be Written
Such a history begins thus; Herein is my witness of history and truth telling in this, the first general history of World War Three. As with all things human, it is also fiction except when it is not, myth when it can be, poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and of our limitless future possibilities of becoming human.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
There are no Ukrainians, no Russians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
Ukrainian
Список для читання майбутньої історії битви та облоги Маріуполя, який буде написаний
Така історія починається так; Ось моє свідчення історії та правди в цій першій загальній історії Третьої світової війни. Як і все людське, це також вигадка, за винятком тих випадків, коли це не так, міф, коли він може бути, поетичне бачення та переосмислення і трансформація людського буття, сенсу й цінності та наших безмежних майбутніх можливостей стати людьми.
Хіба ми не ті історії, які розповідаємо про себе, собі та іншим?
Завжди залишається боротьба між масками, які ми робимо для себе, і тими, які роблять для нас інші.
Це перша революція, в якій ми всі повинні боротися; боротьба за володіння собою.
Немає ні українців, ні росіян; тільки такі люди, як ми, і вибір, який вони роблять щодо того, як бути людьми разом.
Russian
Список литературы для будущей истории битвы и осады Мариуполя, которую нужно написать
Такая история начинается так; Вот мой свидетель истории и правды в этой, первой общей истории Третьей мировой войны. Как и все человеческое, это также вымысел, за исключением случаев, когда это не так, миф, когда он может быть, поэтическое видение и переосмысление и трансформация человеческого бытия, смысла и ценности, а также наших безграничных будущих возможностей стать людьми.
Разве мы не истории, которые рассказываем о себе, себе и другим?
Всегда остается борьба между масками, которые мы делаем для себя, и масками, которые делают для нас другие.
Это первая революция, в которой мы все должны сражаться; борьба за право собственности на себя.
Нет ни украинцев, ни русских; только такие люди, как мы, и выбор, который они делают о том, как быть людьми вместе.
18 квітня 2022 року Останній бій у Маріуполі: бій на металургійному заводі
Бойові дії на «Азовсталі» та «Ільїнського металургійного комбінату» тривають; серед величезних лабіринтів і лабіринтів тунелів тут, з його арсеналом, госпіталем, центром зв’язку та маршрутами постачання, як і в інших підземних фортецях у Маріуполі та інших місцях, опір російській окупації можна вести роками, якщо буде потрібно. Машиніст і керівник металургійних робітників, які озброїлися для захисту, на ім’я Великий Юрій, навіть присяжні сфальсифікували збройовий завод, який може виробляти гвинтівки та боєприпаси необмежений час. Це, на жаль, не те саме, що тримати землю.
Ми спартанці; наше життя дає час для нашої цивілізації, щоб пробудитися до її небезпеки та загрози фашистської тиранії та імперського завоювання.
Для Маріуполя та дуже багатьох жителів України це станеться надто пізно; ніхто не йде на допомогу, а багатьом її захисникам нема з чим битися в цей сорок сьомий день облоги Маріуполя, що розпочалася 2 березня, і битви, що розпочалася 24 лютого.
Але ще не пізно для вас і ваших, ким би ви не були і де б ви не жили. Цієї правди має бути достатньо, як надії на наше майбутнє.
Я говорю тут як свідок історії, який перебував у Маріуполі з 22 березня, і пропоную це свідчення від імені наших універсальних прав людини в будь-якій розплаті винуватцям цього величезного та жахливого військового злочину.
З самого початку це була битва повітряних та артилерійських бомбардувань самого міста та цивільного населення, танків проти стрільців, плоті проти невідповідної сили та жаху, поділу проти солідарності, ненависті проти любові та страху проти надії. .
Тут людська воля до свободи випробовується ворогом, який радіє в обіймах жахливих, чия політика та задуми війни як терору з радістю та з відкритою зарозумілістю влади інструментують повне знищення та геноцид, війну, в якій розв’язуються звірства та розбещення. як тактика шоку і благоговіння з наміром підкорення через вивчену безпорадність і непереборний і загальний страх.
Тут, як і в Нанкіні та багатьох інших місцях, це викликає не підкорення, а опір. Політика стосується страху як основи обміну, а в Обчисленні страху, де обмежений державний терор проти власних громадян у поєднанні з повним контролем інформації може бути корисним для внутрішнього виробництва згоди на керування, за умови легітимності влади. залишається беззаперечним для тих, чиє ім’я вона претендує на дію, у війні те, що є неконтрольованим і немислимим, створює умови, в яких втрачати більше нічого.
Занадто великий або занадто малий страх, а також те, де і як він використовується, може дестабілізувати тоталітарні режими. Коли закон втрачає сенс і замінюється владою і силою, влада делегітимізується, втрачається згода на керування, а порядок стає хаосом.
Гільєрмо дель Торо у своїй чудовій епосі про міграцію та расову рівність Carnival Row, сьомий епізод «Світ, що прийде», містить сцену, в якій двоє молодих наступників лідерства традиційно ворогуючих фракцій опиняються закоханими та потребуючими союзників у сюжеті, який переосмислює «Ромео і Джульєтту» Шекспіра; бунтівний геліон Джона Брейкспір запитує свою кохану-макіавеллістську Софі Лонгербейн: «Кому хаос корисний?» На що вона відповідає: «Хаос корисний для нас. Хаос — велика надія безсилих».
Як сказав мені Жан Жене в Бейруті майже сорок років тому, коли ми були оточені солдатами в будинку, який вони підпалили і ось-ось спалили заживо; «Коли немає надії, ми вільні робити неможливі речі, славні речі».
Опір завжди був війною на ножа. Цікава фраза, що; серед небагатьох слів і цілих фраз, які приходять до сучасної англійської мови незмінними від оригінальної скандинавської мови; krig på kniven. Його значення для нас просте; ті, хто хоче нас поневолити і хто відмовляється від усіх законів і будь-яких обмежень, не можуть ховатися ні за ким.
У будь-якому разі, оскільки цей принцип виражений у знаменитому сентенції Сартра у його п’єсі «Брудні руки» 1948 року, цитованої Францом Фаноном у його промові 1960 року «Чому ми використовуємо насильство» і зробленій безсмертним Малькольмом Ікс.
Чому відбувається ця страшна війна, у Маріуполі проводиться кампанія терору, яка включає страти, катування, організовані масові зґвалтування та торгівлю викраденими цивільними, захоплення цивільних заручників та використання примусової праці, канібалізм з використанням пересувних заводів, напади геноциду, знищення докази військових злочинів із використанням мобільних крематоріїв, що вказує на офіційне планування як частину кампанії терору та доказ того, що незліченні злочини проти людства у цій війні є не відхиленнями, а задумом, загрозою ядерного знищення європейських країн, які надсилають гуманітарну допомогу, і масою руйнування міст?
Російська завойовницька стратегія починається з постійних і невпинних бомбардувань і руйнувань лікарень, бомбосховищ, складів продовольства, енергосистем, водопостачання, коридорів гуманітарної допомоги та евакуації біженців; все, що могло б допомогти громадянам пережити облогу. Після того, як нічого не залишиться, починається кампанія терору як організовані масові зґвалтування, тортури, канібалізм та мародерство, а будь-які вижили поневолені або страчені. Це війна на геноцид і стирання, яка не має аналогів у сучасній Європі, крім облоги Сараєво; і тут я виступаю як свідок історії для обох.
Чому? Що може бути варте того, щоб придбати з вашою людяністю та людськістю вашої нації та народу?
Росія хоче завоювати Україну з тієї ж причини, чому Японія вторглася в Маньчжурію; тому що це промисловий центр, з якого можна почати завоювання світу, а тепловодні порти Маріуполя та Одеси є ключовими для цього імперського плану панування, а також для контролю над сухопутним коридором до Криму.
Шістдесят п’ять портів Чорного моря з’єднують Румунію, Болгарію, Грузію, Молдову, Туреччину, Росію та Україну, і всі вони із Середземним морем, домінування якого Росія довгий час спорила з Туреччиною в Лівії та Сирії. Якщо Росія має намір продовжити завоювання України разом із завоюванням Східної Європи, захоплення румунського порту Констанца відкриє для вторгнення весь Дунайський регіон. Чорне море залишається таким же важливим для панування в Середземному морі, Східній Європі, Північній Африці та Близькому Сході, як і тоді, коли Мітрідат VI Понтійський змагався за нього у війнах з Римською імперією або в битві при Галіполі, з яким ми, здається, приречені на боротьбу в Криму.
На кону в боротьбі на металургійному заводі в Маріуполі стоїть головний регіональний промисловий завод і стратегічний ресурс підтримки флоту, який вирішальний у відверненні російських військ і ресурсів від кампанії на Донбасі та у запобіганні повної колонізації Росією Криму та прибережної України. Відмова Росії в можливості переобладнати та ремонтувати свої кораблі з місцевих ресурсів може стати ключем до перемоги над вторгненням на українське узбережжя.
«Азовсталь» та «Ільїнський металургійний комбінат» також є величезною фортецею-лабіринтом, з якої можна вести оборону Маріуполя, як форт Святого Ельмо, з якого мальтійські лицарі зробили свій героїчний Останній бій.
Що зараз відбувається в Маріуполі, серед сум’яття і розрухи міста привидів, де російська армія дала волю розбещеності війни?
Коли Україна перехоплює ініціативу на півночі й штовхає Росію назад через кордон, а також починає змагатися та відвоювати Чорне море з приголомшливою перемогою, пошкодивши Москву, флагман російського Чорноморського флоту, якому захисники Зміїного острова дали славу Відповідь, жорстокі бої за порт і металургійний завод тривають, хоча Росія заявляла про капітуляцію тисячі українських морських піхотинців, маючи на увазі, що сам Маріуполь також здався.
На цю дезінформацію, спрямовану на волю українського народу відмовитися підкоритися і залишитися Нескореним, я кажу; По-перше, що Маріуполь безперечно знаходиться під окупацією і в руках ворога, але місто не здалося і ніколи не здалося. Команди самогубців, які добровільно зголосилися залишитися і боротися з ворогом, коли з’являться можливості, подбають про це, а мережі Опору серед її громадян чекають години Визволення.
Росіяни опублікували свою оцінку сил, зібраних тут на металургійному заводі: двадцять п’ятсот українців і чотириста іноземних добровольців Міжнародного легіону, включаючи бригаду Авраама Лінкольна, американців, які назвали себе на честь легендарного підрозділу громадянської війни в Іспанії. Інші досі тримають сам порт під контролем України, що вигідно будь-якій такій силі визволення, яка може привести флот до цієї боротьби.
По-друге, немає нічого безчесного в капітуляції, якщо це означає, що ви живете, щоб воювати ще один день, а 36-та бригада морської піхоти, яка на сорок шостий день героїчної оборони Маріуполя, оголосила в своєму останньому посланні світові, кілька днів тому, що їм нема з чим битися, ні боєприпасів, ні води, ні чого, і те, що вони або полонені, або мертві, несуть із собою лише честь у майбутнє, яке тепер мають вибрати інші.
Я ніколи не бачив капітуляції українців. Невимушено зайдіть на ворожий контрольно-пропускний пункт і, сміючись, потягніть шпильку на гранату, щоб відкрити шлях лікарняній вантажівці, щоб врятувати інших, так. Поділіться пляшкою отруєної горілки з ворожим сторожем і помріте разом, поки біженців супроводжують через ряди, так.
Таких людей неможливо перемогти. Застосування сили та насильства є крихким, а влада порожньою, коли вона не має легітимності, а лише жорстокі репресії для її підтримки; бо всі такі речі зазнають непокори й невіри.
Кожен, хто відмовляється підкоритися, стає Нескореним і вільний. Це свого роду перемога, проти якої не може перемогти жодна тиранія чи терор.
Я бачив, як лютий бородатий хлопець атакував пару російських танків із сокирою, бігаючи з укриття, щоб стрибнути на вежу і відрубати голову командиру, і зникав у руїнах, як тінь гніву, викликана болем, горем і страхом міста. . Називається Головою, в ньому Україна знайшла месника. Решта танкістів вирвалась і в паніці побігла, командир другого танка відкрив вогонь по дезертирам і фактично застрелив одного з них, а його по черзі застрелив російський побратим, який вийшов за ним з танка, поклав пістолет йому в голову, а потім просто пішов через вулицю з піднятими руками й перейшовши на бік. Солдат, який вибрав нашу спільну людяність, а не націоналізм і солідарність, а не розкол, тепер є командиром того танка, але з намальованим українським прапором. Святий Андрій, його кличуть.
Путін послав рабів, щоб підкорити вільний народ. Він забув поцікавитися, що станеться, коли раби об’єднаються зі своїми побратимами-жертвами тиранії, яких їх послали завоювати, на знак солідарності, щоб звільнитися?
У той час як російська армія має активний рух за мир і мережі солідарності, які працюють зі своїми українськими колегами, а також багато випадків дезертирства та заколотів, у тому числі підривних офіцерів, українці, часто заморожені, голодні й позбавлені боєприпасів, як засновники Америки, які перетнули Делавер з Вашингтоном у той фатальний Різдво 1776 року залишаються зухвалими і Нескореними.
Існує також легенда про Маріупольського Вовка, дівчину, яка, як вовк, розірвала своєму нападникові горло. Можливо, міф про війну; але я бачив, що залишилося від російського солдата. Кажуть, що зараз вона очолює команду жінок, які рятують інших від колекціонерів метеликів, солдатів, які захоплюють жінок для викрадення в Росію та торгівлі людьми як злочинний синдикат в російських військових. У ній Україна знайшла Гаррієт Табмен.
Минулого тижня група українських морських піхотинців прорвалася, щоб зв’язатися з елементами Азовської Національної гвардії, дуже впертими хлопцями, які тримали металургійний завод у похмурих умовах; але кілька зон конфлікту розгортаються і швидко змінюються. Російські офіцери намагалися змусити здатися з використанням цивільних заручників у іншому інциденті, але, наскільки мені відомо, не вдалося.
Військові злочини росіян пробудили опір перемоги чи смерті; як захисники під час облоги Мальти в 1565 році або Джордж Вашингтон, який придумав цю фразу як пароль у битві при Трентоні, українські солдати, цивільні партизани, включаючи сталеварів та інших, які озброїлися під час нападу Росії, і міжнародні добровольці, свідками яких я був, як лаялися клятва померти на місці, а не здати щось завойовнику не пройде спокійно.
Що буде далі? Як запитав Ленін у своєму есе про створення політичної партії, якій судилося змінити світ, що робити?
Сьогодні російсько-окупаційні війська встановлюють паспорти проїзду, необхідні для всіх людей на вулицях, починають захоплювати мирних жителів і відправляти їх у центри обробки, щоб вибирати одних у табори примусової праці, а інших для розстрілу, а також доступ у світ за межами Маріуполя та з Світ тут повністю оточений. Маріуполь має бути спустошений, населення узагальнено як мертве чи поневолене, а решта особи систематично вимирають.
Путін має намір не залишити нам нічого, щоб захищати і ні звідки воювати. І тим самим він звільнив нас, щоб ми розпочали наступну фазу боротьби і перенесли боротьбу з ворогом.
Іноді мені здається, що він взагалі не знає, як грати в цю гру.
На наше щастя, бути полковником КДБ – це не те саме, що бути професійним революціонером, і, здається, зробив з Путіна урізану та деформовану річ, обмеженого інтелекту та будь-якої моралі, ні прозорливого злого генія, ні втілення гегелівського світу… історичні сили, а лише наглядач за карцерською державою. Володимир Путін дуже схожий на Адольфа Ейхмана, як описала Ханна Арендт у своїй історичній роботі про Нюрнберзький процес.
Оскільки я вважаю свої цілі та завдання щодо війни очевидними для всіх, я не проти окреслити їх тут.
Перш за все, і крім усіх інших пріоритетів, оскільки тільки це по-справжньому покінчить із загрозою війни, ми повинні діяти солідарно з російськими народами, щоб допомогти змінити режим і звільнити Росію від тиранії Володимира Путіна та його олігархії.
По-друге, ми повинні принести пряму та особисту розплату Путіну, його олігархам, верховному командуванню, політичним союзникам і прихильникам, а також усім, хто причетний до військових злочинів в Україні.
По-третє, ми повинні знищити здатність Росії вести цю війну, особливо артилерію та аеродроми, які руйнують цілі міста на початковій фазі будь-якого такого нападу ворога.
По-четверте, ми повинні взяти контроль над Чорним морем або перешкодити Росії зробити це, заперечити його використання як стартовий майданчик для імперського завоювання і панування в Середземному морі, Європі, Африці та Близькому Сході.
Для цього останнього нам знадобиться піратський флот, і я знаю, де його знайти.
Тут всеохоплюючою стратегічною реальністю, яка повинна керувати нашими рішеннями, є той факт, що вже деякий час триває Третя світова війна, театри якої включають Росію, Америку, Сирію, Лівію, Білорусь, Казахстан, Нагірний Карабах, а тепер і Україну включно. її губернії Крим.
Якщо ми не зможемо зупинити цю війну імперського завоювання і панування тут, в Україні, де всі наші гуманітарні цінності та міжнародні закони порушуються з жорстоким дикістю, і дозволимо їй перетворитися на загальну глобальну війну між свободою та тиранією, я боюся, що світ може вступити в епоху тиранії та століть воєн, яких людство не переживе.
Бо рука Путіна лежить на кнопці нашого ядерного знищення й вимирання і кличе його, шепоче; «Звільни мене, і я зроблю тебе могутнім».
”圮地則行；圍地則謀；死地則戰“; як написав Сунь Цзи в одинадцятому розділі «Мистецтво війни» «На землі смерті боріться».
Цей принцип дій був мені колись продемонстрований в Анголі, під час битви при Куіто-Куанавале в 1988 році, в тактичній ситуації, подібній до нашої тут, у Маріуполі. Поки розгорталося видовище цієї грандіозної останньої битви в десятирічній визвольній боротьбі проти колоніалізму та апартеїду, я робив зло в тилу ворога в кущах. Тут я виявив загублений загін, переважно зулуський, але з радянськими та кубинськими добровольцями, який був оточений силами апартеїду.
Після доповіді про те, що я знав про місцевість, командній групі та короткої конференції кількома мовами, старий хлопець, який досі мовчав, піднявся з тіні намету, на обличчі якого без сорочки був страшний і чудовий шрам від кігтів лева. , і сказав; «Ми оточені та перевершені, без боєприпасів і, що ще гірше, без води, і ніхто не йде нам на допомогу. Ми повинні атакувати».
Сержант посміхнувся на це, ніби отримав чудовий подарунок, вийшов надвір і віддав наказ, якого, якщо пощастить, ви ніколи не почуєте; «Поправити багнети!»
І чоловіки, які ось-ось померли, вибухали піснею. «Усутху! Umkhonto wami womile!» «Мій спис спраглий», останнє.
Ми також можемо вийти переможцями в нашій війні на виживання проти навіть набагато більшого й могутнього ворога, як це зробили герої Куіто Куанавале, якщо ми випустимо повну волю та силу наших націй проти Російської імперії, що виникає, як об’єднане людство; особливо якщо ми робимо це проти його слабких місць і ліній зламу.
Україна є таким слабким місцем імперських амбіцій, а вона все ще чинить опір і залишається Нескореною. А російське вторгнення в Європу може бути зірвано політичними діями в Росії через рухи за демократію та мир, які кинули виклик тиранії Путіна.
Свобода, рівність, братерство – девіз революції, яка породила демократії в Америці та Франції; перші дві частини яких проголошують універсальні принципи людського буття, а третя частина, яка стосується того, що ми називаємо солідарністю, взаємозалежністю та нашим обов’язком піклуватися про інших, є інструментом для реалізації нашої свободи та рівності як вільного суспільства. рівних.
Ми можемо перемогти у тріумфі демократії над тиранією, солідарності над розколом і любові над ненавистю. Але це працює лише одним способом; ми повинні діяти як єдине об’єднане людство.
Russian
18.04.2022 Последняя битва под Мариуполем: бой на металлургическом заводе
Бои на Азовстали и металлургическом комбинате имени Ильина продолжаются; среди обширных лабиринтов и лабиринтов туннелей здесь, с его арсеналом, госпиталем, узлом связи и путями снабжения, как и в других подземных крепостях в Мариуполе и других местах, Сопротивление русской оккупации может вестись годами, если это необходимо. Машинист и лидер сталеваров, вооружившихся для обороны, по имени Большой Юрий даже присяжными устроил оружейный завод, который может бесконечно производить винтовки и боеприпасы. Это, к сожалению, не то же самое, что удерживать землю.
Мы спартанцы; наши жизни выигрывают время, чтобы наша цивилизация проснулась перед опасностью и угрозой фашистской тирании и империалистического завоевания.
Для Мариуполя и слишком многих жителей Украины это произойдет слишком поздно; никто не идет на помощь, и многим ее защитникам нечем сражаться в этот сорок седьмой день осады Мариуполя, начавшейся второго марта, и битвы, начавшейся 24 февраля.
Но еще не поздно для вас и ваших близких, кем бы вы ни были и где бы вы ни жили. Эта истина должна быть достаточной, как надежда на наше будущее.
Я говорю здесь как свидетель истории, который был в Мариуполе с 22 марта, и предлагаю это свидетельство от имени наших всеобщих прав человека в любой расплате, привлеченной к виновным в этом огромном и ужасном военном преступлении.
С самого начала это была битва воздушных и артиллерийских бомбардировок против самого города и гражданского населения, танков против стрелков, плоти против неопровержимой силы и ужаса, разделения против солидарности, ненависти против любви и страха против надежды. .
Здесь человеческая воля к свободе испытывается врагом, ликующим в объятиях чудовищного, чья политика и замыслы войны как террора с радостью и с открытым высокомерием власти превращают в инструмент полнейшее разрушение и геноцид, войну, в которой развязываются зверства и разврат. как тактика шока и трепета с намерением подчинения посредством выученной беспомощности и подавляющего и всеобщего страха.
Здесь, как и в Нанкине, и во множестве других мест, это вызывает не подчинение, а сопротивление. Политика — это страх как основа обмена, и в Исчислении страха, где ограниченный государственный террор против собственных граждан в сочетании с полным контролем информации может быть полезен внутри страны для производства согласия на управление при условии легитимности власти. не подвергается сомнению со стороны тех, чье имя претендует на то, чтобы действовать, на войне то, что является неконтролируемым и невообразимым, создает условия, в которых больше нечего терять.
Слишком много или слишком мало страха, а также то, где и как он используется, могут дестабилизировать тоталитарные режимы. Когда закон теряет смысл и заменяется властью и силой, власть утрачивает легитимность, теряется согласие на то, чтобы ею управляли, а порядок превращается в хаос.
Гильермо дель Торо в великолепной эпопее о миграции и расовом равенстве «Карнивал Роу», в седьмом эпизоде «Грядущего мира», есть сцена, в которой двое молодых преемников во главе традиционно соперничающих фракций оказываются влюбленными и нуждаются в союзниках в сюжетной линии, которая переосмысливает «Ромео и Джульетту» Шекспира; мятежный геллион Джона Брейкспир спрашивает свою макиавеллиевскую возлюбленную Софи Лонгербейн: «Кому полезен хаос?» На что она отвечает: «Хаос полезен для нас. Хаос — великая надежда бессильных».
Как сказал мне Жан Жене в Бейруте почти сорок лет назад, когда мы были окружены солдатами в доме, который они подожгли и собирались сжечь заживо; «Когда нет надежды, мы свободны делать невозможные вещи, славные вещи».
Сопротивление всегда было войной на нож. Любопытная фраза, что; среди нескольких слов и целых фраз, которые вошли в современный английский язык без изменений из оригинального норвежского языка; криг для ножа. Его смысл для нас прост; те, кто хочет поработить нас и кто отказывается от всех законов и всех ограничений, не могут ни за кем спрятаться.
Любыми необходимыми средствами, как этот принцип выражен в знаменитом изречении Сартра в его пьесе 1948 года «Грязные руки», процитированном Францем Фаноном в его речи 1960 года «Почему мы используем насилие» и увековеченном Малкольмом Икс.
Почему происходит эта страшная война, в Мариуполе кампания террора, которая включает в себя расстрелы, пытки, организованные массовые изнасилования и торговлю похищенными гражданскими лицами, захват гражданских заложников и использование принудительного труда, каннибализм с использованием передвижных заводов, геноцидные нападения, стирание доказательства военных преступлений с использованием мобильных крематориев, что указывает на официальное планирование как часть кампании террора и доказательство того, что бесчисленные преступления против человечности в этой войне являются не отклонением от нормы, а намеренно, угрозы ядерного уничтожения европейским странам, отправляющим гуманитарную помощь, и массовое разрушение городов?
Российская стратегия завоевания начинается с непрерывных и безжалостных бомбардировок и разрушений больниц, бомбоубежищ, складов продовольствия, энергосистем, водоснабжения, коридоров гуманитарной помощи и эвакуации беженцев; все, что может помочь гражданам пережить осаду. Как только ничего не остается, начинается кампания террора с организованными массовыми изнасилованиями, пытками, каннибализмом и грабежами, а все выжившие порабощаются или казнятся. Это война геноцида и стирания, которая не имеет аналогов в современной Европе, кроме осады Сараево; и здесь я говорю как свидетель истории обоим.
Почему? Что может стоить покупки с вашей человечностью и человечностью вашей нации и народа?
Россия хочет завоевать Украину по той же причине, по которой Япония вторглась в Маньчжурию; потому что это промышленный центр, из которого может быть начато завоевание мира, а тепловодные порты Мариуполя и Одессы являются ключом к этому имперскому плану господства, а также к контролю над сухопутным коридором в Крым.
Шестьдесят пять портов Черного моря соединяют Румынию, Болгарию, Грузию, Молдову, Турцию, Россию и Украину, и все они со Средиземным морем, господство над которым Россия давно оспаривает с Турцией в Ливии и Сирии. Если Россия намерена после завоевания Украины завоевать Восточную Европу, захват румынского порта Констанца откроет для вторжения весь Дунайский регион. Черное море остается столь же важным для господства в Средиземноморье, Восточной Европе, Северной Африке и на Ближнем Востоке, как это было, когда Митридат VI Понтийский боролся за него в своих войнах с Римской империей или в битве при Галлиполи, которые мы, похоже, обречены отыграть в Крыму.
На карту в битве на сталелитейном заводе в Мариуполе поставлено крупное региональное промышленное предприятие и стратегический ресурс для поддержания жизни флота, решающего в отвлечении российских войск и ресурсов от кампании на Донбассе и в предотвращении полной колонизации Россией Крыма и прибрежной Украины. Лишение России возможности переоборудовать и ремонтировать свои корабли за счет местных ресурсов может стать ключом к отражению вторжения на украинское побережье.
Металлургический комбинат «Азовсталь» и Ильинский металлургический комбинат — это также обширная и запутанная крепость, из которой можно вести оборону Мариуполя, подобно форту Святого Эльма, из которого мальтийские рыцари сделали свой последний героический бой.
Что происходит сейчас в Мариуполе, среди суматохи и разрухи города-призрака, где русская армия дала волю разврату войны?
Поскольку Украина перехватывает инициативу на севере и оттесняет Россию через границу, она начинает бороться и отвоевывать Черное море с ошеломляющей победой, выводя из строя «Москву», флагман российского Черноморского флота, которому защитники Змеиного острова дали знаменитую Ответ: ожесточенные бои за порт и сталелитейный завод продолжаются, хотя Россия заявила о сдаче в плен тысячи украинских морских пехотинцев, подразумевая, что сдался и сам Мариуполь.
На эту дезинформацию, направленную на волю украинского народа отказаться подчиниться и остаться непокоренным, я говорю; Во-первых, что Мариуполь, несомненно, находится под оккупацией и в руках врага, но город не сдался и никогда не сдастся. Об этом позаботятся отряды самоубийц, которые вызвались остаться и изводить врага, когда представится возможность, а сети Сопротивления среди ее граждан ждут часа Освобождения.
Русские опубликовали свою оценку сил, собранных здесь, на сталелитейном заводе, в двадцать пятьсот украинцев и четыреста иностранных добровольцев Интернационального легиона, включая бригаду Авраама Линкольна, американцев, которые назвали себя в честь легендарного подразделения гражданской войны в Испании. Другие до сих пор держат сам порт под украинским контролем, что выгодно любой силе Освобождения, которая может привлечь флот для этой битвы.
Во-вторых, нет ничего постыдного в капитуляции, если это означает, что вы будете жить, чтобы сражаться в другой день, и 36-я бригада морской пехоты, которая на сорок шестой день своей героической обороны Мариуполя заявила в своем последнем послании миру, несколько дней назад, что им не с чем сражаться, нет боеприпасов, воды, чего угодно, и то, что они либо пленники, либо мертвы, несет с собой только честь в будущее, которое теперь должны выбрать другие.
Я никогда не видел капитуляции Украины. Случайно зайдите на вражеский контрольно-пропускной пункт и, смеясь, вытащите чеку из гранаты, чтобы открыть путь для госпитального грузовика, чтобы спасти других, да. Поделитесь бутылкой отравленной водки с вражеским часовым и умрите вместе, пока беженцев провожают через строй, да.
Таких людей невозможно победить. Применение силы и насилия хрупко, а власть бесполезна, когда у нее нет легитимности, а только жестокие репрессии для ее поддержания; ибо все подобные вещи терпят неудачу в момент непослушания и неверия.
Тот, кто отказывается подчиниться, становится Непокоренным и свободен. Это своего рода победа, против которой не может победить ни тирания, ни террор.
Я видел, как свирепый бородач напал на пару русских танков с топором, выбежал из укрытия, прыгнул на башню, обезглавил командира и исчез в руинах, как тень гнева, вызванная городской болью, горем и страхом. . По прозвищу Палач, в нем Украина нашла мстителя. Остальные танкисты выскочили и в панике побежали, командир второго танка открыл огонь по дезертирам и фактически застрелил одного из них, а его в свою очередь застрелил однополчанин русский солдат, выскочивший за ним из танка, положил пистолет к голове, а затем просто перешел улицу с поднятыми руками и перешел на другую сторону. Солдат, который предпочел нашу общность человечности национализму и солидарность дивизии, теперь командир этого танка, но с нарисованным на нем украинским флагом. Святой Андрей, его зовут.
Путин послал рабов покорять свободный народ. Он забыл спросить, что происходит, когда рабы объединяются со своими собратьями-жертвами тирании, которых они были посланы завоевывать, в знак солидарности действий ради собственного освобождения?
В то время как в российской армии есть активное движение за мир и сети солидарности, работающие со своими украинскими коллегами, и много случаев дезертирства и мятежа, включая фраги офицеров, украинцы, часто замерзшие, голодные и без боеприпасов, как основатели Америки, которые пересекли Делавэр с Вашингтоном в то судьбоносное Рождество 1776 года остаются дерзкими и непокоренными.
Существует также легенда о мариупольской Волчице, девушке, которая, как волк, разорвала нападавшему глотку. Возможно, миф о войне; но я видел, что осталось от рассматриваемого русского солдата. Говорят, что теперь она возглавляет команду женщин, которые спасают других от Коллекционеров бабочек, солдат, захвативших женщин для похищения в Россию и торговли ими в качестве преступного синдиката внутри российской армии. В ней Украина нашла Гарриет Табман.
На прошлой неделе группа украинских морских пехотинцев прорвалась, чтобы соединиться с частями Национальной гвардии «Азов», очень упрямыми ребятами, которые удерживали сталелитейный завод в тяжелых условиях; но несколько зон конфликта разворачиваются и быстро меняются. Российские офицеры пытались заставить сдаться, используя гражданских заложников в другом инциденте, но, насколько мне известно, безуспешно.
Военные преступления русских пробудили сопротивление победы или смерти; как защитники при осаде Мальты в 1565 году или Джордж Вашингтон, придумавший эту фразу в качестве пароля в битве при Трентоне, украинские солдаты, гражданские партизаны, включая сталелитейщиков и других, которые вооружились, когда Россия напала, и международные добровольцы, которых я видел ругающимися клятва скорее умереть на месте, чем отдать что-либо завоевателю, не пройдет спокойно.
Что происходит дальше? Как спрашивал Ленин в своем сочинении об основании политической партии, которой суждено было изменить мир, что делать?
Сегодня российские оккупационные силы вводят проездные документы, необходимые всем лицам на улицах, начинают захватывать мирных жителей и отправлять их в центры обработки для отбора одних в исправительно-трудовые лагеря, других для суммарной казни, а также полный доступ в мир за пределами Мариуполя и из мир здесь оцеплен полностью. Мариуполь должен быть опустошен, население подсчитано как мертвое или порабощенное, а оставшиеся люди систематически истреблены.
Путин намерен оставить нам нечего защищать и не от чего воевать. И тем самым Он освободил нас, чтобы начать следующую фазу борьбы и дать бой врагу.
Иногда мне кажется, что он вообще не умеет играть в эту игру.
К счастью для нас, быть полковником КГБ — это не совсем то же самое, что быть профессиональным революционером, и, кажется, Путин превратился в усеченного и уродливого, с ограниченным интеллектом и без всякой морали, не визионерского злого гения и не воплощения гегелевского миросозерцания. исторические силы, а всего лишь надзиратель за карцеральным государством. Владимир Путин очень похож на Адольфа Эйхмана, как описала Ханна Арендт в своей исторической работе о Нюрнбергском процессе.
Поскольку я считаю свои цели и задачи в отношении войны очевидными для всех, я не возражаю изложить их здесь для вас.
Прежде всего и помимо всех других приоритетов, поскольку только это действительно положит конец угрозе войны, мы должны действовать солидарно с русскими народами, чтобы способствовать смене режима и Освобождению России от тирании Владимира Путина и его олигархии.
Во-вторых, мы должны привлечь к прямой и личной ответственности Путина, его олигархов, высшее командование, политических союзников и приспешников, а также всех причастных к военным преступлениям на Украине.
В-третьих, мы должны разрушить способность России вести эту войну, особенно артиллерию и аэродромы, которые превращают в руины целые города в начальной фазе любого такого нападения противника.
В-четвертых, мы должны захватить контроль над Черным морем или помешать России сделать это, чтобы лишить его возможности использовать его в качестве стартовой площадки для империалистического российского завоевания и господства в Средиземноморье, Европе, Африке и на Ближнем Востоке.
Для этого нам понадобится пиратский флот, и я знаю, где его найти.
Здесь всеобъемлющей стратегической реальностью, которая должна определять наши решения, является тот факт, что уже некоторое время продолжается Третья мировая война, театры военных действий которой включают Россию, Америку, Сирию, Ливию, Беларусь, Казахстан, Нагорный Карабах, а теперь и Украину. ее губернии Крым.
Если мы не сможем остановить эту войну империалистического завоевания и господства здесь, в Украине, где все наши гуманитарные ценности и международные законы нарушаются с жестокой жестокостью, и позволим ей превратиться во всеобщую глобальную войну между свободой и тиранией, я боюсь, что мир может вступить в эпоху тирании и столетий войн, которых человечество не переживет.
Ибо рука Путина держится на кнопке нашего ядерного уничтожения и вымирания, и она зовет его шепотом; «Освободи меня, и я сделаю тебя сильным».
”圮地則行；圍地則謀；死地則戰“; как писал Сунь-Цзы в одиннадцатой главе «Искусства войны»: «На земле смерти сражайся».
Этот принцип действия мне когда-то продемонстрировали в Анголе, во время битвы при Куито-Куанавале в 1988 году, в тактической ситуации, похожей на нашу здесь, в Мариуполе. Пока разворачивалось зрелище этой грандиозной финальной битвы за многолетнюю освободительную борьбу против колониализма и апартеида, я творил зло в тылу врага в кустах. Здесь я обнаружил потерянный отряд, в основном зулусский, хотя и с советскими и кубинскими добровольцами, который был окружен силами апартеида.
После доклада командной группе того, что я знал об этом районе, и краткого совещания на нескольких языках из тени палатки встал старик, который до сих пор хранил молчание, чье тело без рубашки демонстрировало устрашающий и великолепный шрам от когтей льва. , и сказал; «Мы окружены и в меньшинстве, без боеприпасов и, что еще хуже, без воды, и никто не идет нам на помощь. Мы должны атаковать».
Сержант улыбнулся при этом, как будто ему был дан чудесный подарок, вышел наружу и отдал приказ, который, если вам повезет, вы никогда не услышите; «Крепить штыки!»
И люди, собиравшиеся умереть, разразились песней. «Усуту! Умконто вами вомиле!» «Мое копье хочет пить», последнее.
Мы тоже можем выйти победителями из нашей войны за выживание против даже гораздо более обширного и могущественного врага, как это сделали герои Куито-Куанавале, если мы высвободим всю волю и силу наших народов против зарождающейся Российской империи, как Единое Человечество; особенно если мы делаем это против его слабых мест и линий перелома.
Украина – такое слабое место имперских амбиций, а она еще сопротивляется и остается Непокоренной. И российское вторжение в Европу может быть остановлено политическими действиями в России через движения за демократию и мир, которые бросили вызов путинской тирании.
Свобода, Равенство, Братство — вот девиз Революции, породившей демократии в Америке и Франции; первые две части которого провозглашают универсальные принципы человеческого бытия, а третья часть, в которой говорится о том, что мы называем солидарностью, взаимозависимостью и нашим долгом заботиться о других, способствует реализации нашей свободы и равенства как свободного общества. равных.
Мы можем одержать победу в триумфе демократии над тиранией, солидарности над разделением и любви над ненавистью. Но это работает только одним способом; мы должны действовать как единое человечество.
We celebrate National Library Week this year in a context of open hostility to education, a word from the Greek educatus which means to draw forth potential human being, meaning, and value rather than to stuff in facts, and which models and teaches not obedience but questioning, not falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the factory model of education as industrial production, but its opposite; citizenship in a democracy as the art of asking questions and testing answers.
Let us build citizens and not subjects.
There are historical reasons why our democracy was born in the Enlightenment and the scientific model of reason wherein we test claims of truth and take no authority at its word, and why tyranny is often a product of theocratic subjugation to authority.
If we are to be a free society of equals, wherein citizens are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights, universal education in which nothing is Forbidden as an area of experiment, inquiry, and debate is crucial; democracy requires freedom of information and communication including those of free speech and a free press.
In a time of darkness, book bans and burning, politization of school boards as subversion of democracy and repression of dissent, the forbidding of inquiry in areas which may threaten elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, we must write, speak, teach, and organize democracy as Resistance to fascist tyranny and as revolutionary struggle.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks made for us by others and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
And our job as teachers and parents is to help, model, and guide our children in their ongoing self creation and choices about how to be human together and become citizens, not slaves.
We do not need to post and recite the Ten Commandments, pledge allegiance to gods or masters, or trade value with money which proclaims In God We Trust; because none of this is about our relationship with the Infinite, and everything to do with a state which wants to claim our obedience as its interpreter. Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
We do need to learn as a nation and as a species to cherish our uniqueness and that of others, in solidarity and not division. And if we are to be a democracy, we need an education system founded on the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in literature and history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
To this end I offer here updated versions of the reading lists I used throughout my years of teaching AP and other English classes in high school, as supplementary choice reading lists for American Literature and World Literature as our education system has structured classes, to stand alongside and apart from the limits of government and school board approval and control, both of curriculum and of our human possibilities.
This was the key to empowerment and self actualization, happiness, and stellar academic achievement among my students and to success later in life; a free space of play in which to discover and create themselves. If we offer only this to our students, children, and future generations of citizens, a free space of play in the creation of themselves bearing many possible authorized identities without hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, we have done our job as caretakers of the future. Each of us has one problem in common which we must solve in order to grow up and become ourselves; we must reinvent how to become human.
Find your bliss, as Joseph Campbell exhorts us to do; but first something must catch spark and engage our interest, provoke us to question and explore.
This is the role of literature as humankind’s treasure house of memory, and why the canon is central to the project of civilization.
The canon represents nothing less than an authorized set of possible identities; this is why it must adapt and change with time, and why it is absolutely crucial that the canon be diverse and inclusive enough to reflect those who read it. If a student or reader cannot see themselves in the models of being human which are offered to them as possibilities of future selves, that work is worthless to them as a tool of identity construction and a forge of human being, meaning, and value.
I organized Modern American Literature as core lists by fiction, poetry, drama, science and other fictions, and also literature of the American South, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American, and Jewish American, and Hawaiian categories, as well as a nonfiction list I entitled A Useful Past: Contexts and Sources for Constructing an American Identity, part of which is the American Presidents Histories and Biographies list included here as I later abandoned attempts at sciences, art, and music.
The sciences component of the Contexts list is too large and changes too rapidly to do justice to so I long ago stopped updating it, though I taught annual Socratic seminars through the Gifted and Talented Program on Batesonian Holism, Chaos Theory, Godel’s Theorem, Fuller’s Synergetics, and Quantum Theory. Art and music have similar problems of scope, with issues of tribalization.
As Gertrude Stein invented the modern world after our civilization destroyed itself in World War One, my list begins with her. Where possible, superlative critical works accompany the primary sources from authors of world-historical significance.
World Literature is represented by 28 lists, including special universal studies lists for Feminism and Women’s Literature, Fairytales, Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology, Existentialism, and lists of National Literatures including Australia, New Zealand, & Canada, Austria, Germany, & Switzerland, Africa, Britain & Ireland, the Caribbean, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe, France, Greece, India, Iran, Islamic Peoples, Italy, Japan, Jewish People, Latin America, Netherlands, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, Scandinavia, and Spain.
Here I wish to signpost that nothing on my reading lists is chosen by any criterion other than quality as I so judge; in contrast to official reading lists chosen for reading level and objectives by grade and also appropriate age level content, because values are always negotiated truths and a ground of struggle, and in America the Texas Board of Education controls through purchasing power and ideological influence the publication of all textbooks nationally and is highly political and moreover falsified by the network of fundamentalist churches it represents, including the Pentecostal Church which is a propaganda organization of theocratic racist and patriarchal terror. Ever wonder why our high school history text books make no mention of slavery as a cause of the Civil War?
How do we use reading lists as teachers, parents, readers exploring unknowns, ourselves, and the boundaries of our maps of becoming and of human being, meaning, and value?
One ongoing project which I ran for many years using these lists in high school may also be useful for private reading or home study, groups, partners, and getting to know one’s neighbors; I asked students to choose the list of a group with which they identify and then choose partners from a different group, then select two books, one from each other’s list, to read together and give a presentation as partners about each book to the class.
This project, which I called Becoming Human Through Literature, has three goals; to develop a broad personal culture, to discover maps of how to become human, and to operate transcontextually as a global family member.
As an activity for partners in any stage of a relationship, reading books together and discussing them as you progress makes a wonderful way to explore each others values and ideas. You may surprise and delight one another; you may also surprise and reimagine yourself.
For all of these lists I began with immortal classics and added whatever I thought merited inclusion on the basis of quality alone; this is how I found myself teaching a broad and inclusive curriculum. Yes, this means I’ve read all of the books listed, many in their original languages, and with some the major critical works and essays about them; and in some cases wrote lesson plans and materials and taught, guided discussions, supervised research, scored student critical essays and written about them for many years. It also means that if your favorite book is not on a list, I may simply not have read it yet.
I am a product of a Great Books of the Western World education, a set of works published by Encyclopædia Britannica based on the great Mortimer J. Adler’s course at the University of Chicago, which I read entirely through during my high school years, a second time while I was at university as an undergraduate, and a third during my graduate studies in literature, Jungian psychology, history, and philosophy. It is a practice which I recommend to everyone as both a starting point and a lifelong journey. This and Harold Bloom’s list in The Western Canon formed my starting point; here I must signpost that I also grew up from the age of nine for ten years of formal study with Chinese and Japanese language and literature, most especially that of Zen Buddhism, and I regard myself not as a champion of the West exclusively but of the whole civilization of humankind. “Nothing human is alien to me”; as goes the iconic line of the Roman playwright Terence in The Self-Tormentor.
As a teenager I began keeping lists of books I liked with notes, and the current version, in constant revision during the last forty years, I call Jay’s Revised Modern Canon. On these lists are the finest books I’ve discovered over a lifetime of reading, and I hope they will bring joy to your life as they have mine.
Why is a diverse and limitless field of reading and study necessary to creating ourselves and our identities as we grow up? How does our education shape our political and social decisions about who we are and how to be human together?
As I wrote in preface to my Becoming Human project, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature for 2022; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As I wrote in my post in celebration of Juneteenth, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, of submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, beauty, and constructions of identity, and from the force and control of the state, especially in this context as falsification, rewritten histories, lies, and illusions which serve the power of those who would enslave us.
What is this freedom? What does it mean for us as we grow up and create ourselves?
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves as interdependent partners who exalt one another as guarantors of each others rights and humanity.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?”
As I wrote in my post of September 21 2020 History, Memory, Identity: Whose Story Is This?; Whose story is this? This question must be the beginning of a new pedagogy of education in history, and remain central to the project of its study. True education asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries and testing our ideas in experiment and debate; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America; this and all else we must always question. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790, Ritchie Robertson
A Useful Past: Contexts and Sources for Constructing an American Identity
Yes, I once attempted to synthesize all knowledge and historical memory of our civilization specific to America under this banner as a resource for my high school students, including arts and sciences. I didn’t get as far as did Diderot with his Encyclopédie, all 23 volumes of it. I may have been influenced in this mad Quixotic quest by reading through our family Encyclopædia Britannica several times in my teens and twenties; ah, the folly of youth. I wasn’t trying to learn everything; I was trying to remember everything, the universe whole and entire, as the emergence of ideal forms and potentialities hidden within us.
The great mystery of Being in Time is not that universals connect us, but that our memory and history allow us to conserve our identity while in constant processes of adaptation and change.
We need both conserving forces which buffer us from the shock of the new and as a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation across vast epochs of time without damage to our morphology of human being, meaning, and value, but also we need revolutionary or innovational forces which allow us to meet new threats and capitalize on chaos.
This is the only list of context readings I have been able to complete; my studies of art and music being arbitrary or determined by the circumstances in which I encountered them, and those of sciences changing too fast since the 1980’s for a definitive sum of knowledge.
Regarding art, I grew up with Chinese inkbrush calligraphy and Japanese Zen sumi-e, from my teenage years an enthusiast of French Surrealist literature and film as my parents let me run amok on my own all over Berkeley and San Francisco and in my twenties once spent a glorious summer attempting to make a film I had written. My working title was Carried Off By Baroness Elsa In Her Zeppelin, referring to the Dada icon Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. During university I painted that I might learn to see better; and studied Monet’s Impressionist techniques because developed it as a method of practice based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and used his idea of juxtaposition of inner and outer realities which in the hands of Tristan Tzara and William S. Burroughs became pathways to the Sublime as the Cut Up Method and forms of glorious chaotization, possibly also a precursor of Andy Warhol’s interrogation of semiotics in his intentionally misaligned images of iconic figures, and later made a study of Egon Schiele’s watercolors because he exalted the beauty of ordinary people in ways which interrogated the boundaries between the beautiful and the grotesque and between erotic nudes and anatomical studies of cadavers, and the Chinese landscapes of C.C. Wang from his magnificent studio book of forms published as Mind Landscapes: The Paintings of C. C. Wang, Jerome Silbergeld, Chi-Ch’ien Wang. And as I have often written, Klimt’s shadow pantheon in the Beethoven Frieze became part of my imaginal world, as did the works of Hieronymus Bosch which as I child I made a collage of across a wall of my bedroom which I called my Dream Gates wall which I would explore in dreams as mandalas are used in Tibetan Buddhism.
As to music, I grew up with the shakuhachi or Zen bamboo flute and enjoyed making strange instruments from things in nature like a Sea Horn from cured and formed seaweed. I wrote mad songs from the ululations of apes and the gruntings and songs of wild things, hymns to abyssal powers in invented languages in my Wittgenstein-Finnegans Wake teenage fanboy years, and made sporadic attempts to learn the piano, violin and guitar.
I’ve spent my whole life enchanted by my partner Dolly’s beautiful piano music; she can play anything she hears, and when twelve returned from seeing Lawrence of Arabia at the theatre and played the entire score from memory. She has been a professional musician for over fifty years from the age of seventeen, playing piano and keyboards and singing; we reconnected and began building Dollhouse Park twenty four years ago now, and all the while I have been part of her musical world. So music has always been part of who I am, through my partner.
One day I may curate lists for film, music, and art; but these fields are too large and my expertise is far too limited to my peculiar tastes to define well, nor am I truly an expert in these fields in the way that I am in literature and history, so for now its just a history of America through the biographies of our Presidents.
Because she is sadly obscure as a cultural icon, this is who I am referring to regarding my traveling circus summer of film making, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven:
Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity-A Cultural Biography,
But with literature I am on my own ground of struggle, publish in over a dozen languages, have taught and can speak with authority on both Modern American and World literatures.
In our current moment of book burnings and bans, rewritten histories and authorized identities, silencing and erasure of the witness of history and the repression of dissent, thought control and the electoral infiltration, subversion, and capture of public institutions crucial to the mission of democracy and the manufacture of an informed electorate able to question authority as co-owners of the state, our interdependent public schools and libraries have become a frontline in the struggle between tyranny and liberty.
Officially Library Week is April 19 to 25 this year, which in terms of my commemorative writing conflicts with my anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, our escape from Mariupol and reorganization of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of Ukraine as an alliance of resistance networks from across Europe to take the fight to Russia, and the three days of the Earth Day festival as I celebrate it, and while all of this must be given its own moment I wish to do nothing to trivialize or diminish the importance of our libraries and the role they play in the creation of an informed electorate in democracies. So, I am honoring our libraries a bit early.
What is a library for?
Libraries share with public schools the purpose of creating citizens, of education in its original Greek meaning to bring out the truth of ourselves, together with two other primary and crucial functions in a democracy; to provide free access to learning as both rights of information and a free press, which also parallel equality as annihilation of class and access to opportunity through upward mobility as a seizure of power, and to provide inclusive and diverse representations of self as revolutionary struggle against authorized identities, divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of race, gender, faith, and nationality.
Libraries are part of the cordon sanitaire against fascism and tyranny, parallel and interdependent with universal free public education.
At the heart of this process of identity construction lies the curation of reading lists and a personal library which represents and defines us in ways we have chosen for ourselves.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
Memory, history, identity; the selves we choose among the limitless possibilities of becoming human. Here is a central problem of both libraries and the construction of ourselves as assemblages of stories; how shall we taxonomize, structure, and assign relative value to the texts we gather, in our personae and in our libraries as memory palaces become material? And in a realm of ideas and their consequences which is chaotic, shifting, ephemeral, impermanent, and full of dyadic opposites, relative truths, mutual interdependence and change?
Before all else, who decides? Public libraries and schools confront us with all of the issues about how to be human together which create, inform, motivate, and shape human societies, and democracies most especially as negotiated truths, meanings and values.
This is why the curation of personal libraries and unauthorized reading lists are revolutionary acts, and a praxis of the values of democracy.
In aid of this process of decolonization and becoming autonomous I share with you now some ideas from writing in Aeon on How to Nurture and Grow a Personal Library, and a link to the wonderful community of librarians at LibraryThing and of readers at Goodreads.
As I wrote in preface to my reading lists, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others. Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom, the glory of our humanity, and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, of submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the Infinite or the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves via boundaries which may also become interfaces.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?
As I wrote in my post of September 25 2024, Banned Book Week: Fighting Theocratic Fascist Terror and Tyranny In America; In a free society of equals, only we ourselves have the right to choose who we will become, and no one may authorize or limit our possible identities, for this is falsification, enslavement, and theft of the soul.
When subversive organizations of white supremacist terror, patriarchal theocratic sexual terror, and tyranny as the centralization of power to a carceral state of force and control with all its attendant evils and paraphernalia of thought control, surveillance, and repression of dissent infiltrate our institutions to enact book bans and other censorship, let us expose and challenge them for what they are; attempts to pervert education from the teaching of questioning to produce citizens who are co owners of the state and guarantors of each others rights into obedience to authority and our degradation from citizens to serfs.
And remember children; they only ban books that can give you the power to see through the lies of those who would enslave us, and to free yourself from systems of oppression, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
For an example of how theocratic and fascist organizations pursue the subversion of democracy through book bans as part of a broad assault on our liberties and freedoms, we may look to the odious Moms For Liberty.
As written by Mark Romano in MSN, in an article entitled 10 Examples of How Moms for Liberty are the Real Threats to our Freedoms; “Moms for Liberty has positioned itself as a champion for parental rights and freedom in education, but their actions often tell a different story. This group, while claiming to advocate for liberty, promotes policies that restrict personal choice and challenge diverse perspectives in schools. Many parents and educators question how a movement that rallies against certain books and ideas can truly call itself a defender of freedom.
With chapters across 45 states, Moms for Liberty has gained visibility in education politics. Their push for influence in school districts raises concerns about the limits they want to place on curriculum and expression. This blog post explores ten notable examples that highlight how their agenda can contradict the very values of liberty and freedom they purport to support.
As this discussion unfolds, it becomes clear that the issues at stake go beyond educational choices. They touch upon broader themes of inclusivity, freedom of speech, and the diverse fabric of American society.
Defining ‘Liberty’ and ‘Freedom’
Liberty and freedom are often used interchangeably, but they have distinct meanings.
Liberty refers to the protection of individual rights and the absence of oppression. It’s about having the legal and social space to make choices.
Freedom, on the other hand, can mean the power to act, speak, or think without hindrance. It’s more about the ability to pursue personal desires.
In a democratic society, both are essential for human dignity.
Moms for Liberty positions itself as a champion of parents’ rights. Yet, their actions often contradict their claims about supporting true liberty and freedom for all.
By limiting access to certain books or topics in schools, they restrict the freedom of students to learn and explore. This creates a tension between their stated goals and the actual impact of their actions.
Understanding these terms helps clarify the debate around organizations like Moms for Liberty. It shows how their belief system can shape policies that may not align with broader definitions of liberty and freedom.
Educational Censorship
Educational censorship is a growing concern as different groups push to control what students learn. This movement often focuses on banning books and shaping classroom discussions, which can limit students’ exposure to diverse ideas.
Banning Books
Banning books has become a notable strategy. Groups like Moms for Liberty often target specific titles that address topics like race, gender, and sexuality. They argue that these subjects are inappropriate for students.
Many schools have faced pressure to remove certain books from libraries and reading lists. This action creates gaps in education. Students miss out on important discussions about society and history. For instance, classics that tackle civil rights issues may get pulled. This not only limits freedom of choice but also diminishes critical thinking skills in young readers.
Controlling Classroom Content
Controlling classroom content is another tactic used by Moms for Liberty. They advocate for removing lessons that introduce concepts related to social justice and identity. Their focus is often on ensuring that political views align with specific ideologies.
Teachers may find themselves restricted in how they address topics in class. This can lead to a watered-down curriculum that avoids important issues. For example, discussions about historical injustices might get minimized or skipped altogether. When educators cannot discuss various perspectives, students lose the chance to develop a well-rounded understanding of the world around them.
Opposition to Inclusive Policies
Moms for Liberty often challenges inclusive policies, focusing on LGBTQ+ rights and racial equity. Their stance leads to heated debates within communities, limiting the support for diversity in schools.
Resistance to LGBTQ+ Rights in Schools
Moms for Liberty has actively opposed policies that support LGBTQ+ students. This includes pushing back against discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation in classrooms.
They argue that these topics should not be part of school curriculums. Their campaigns often focus on banning certain books or materials that include LGBTQ+ narratives.
Many school board meetings see strong vocal opposition from Moms for Liberty members. Their influence raises concerns about students feeling safe and represented, as they push for a more traditional approach to education.
Challenging Racial Equity Initiatives
Moms for Liberty also opposes racial equity initiatives in schools. They argue that these programs create division.
Members often claim that teaching about systemic racism is anti-American or promotes “critical race theory,” even when such teachings are not part of the curriculum.
This opposition can lead to the rejection of programs aimed at promoting diversity and inclusion. They seek to eliminate discussions that highlight historical injustices, which can prevent students from understanding different perspectives.
This resistance can limit resources meant to support marginalized students, impacting overall school culture.
Parental Rights Overreach
Moms for Liberty often advocates for parental rights in ways that some see as overstepping boundaries. This can affect health and safety measures in schools and infringe upon the choices of other families. The implications of these actions are significant and raise questions about individual freedoms.
Health and Safety Measures
In their push for parental control, Moms for Liberty has challenged essential health and safety protocols in schools. One notable example is their opposition to mask mandates during health crises. They argue that parents should decide whether their children wear masks, but this stance can compromise the safety of the entire student body.
Additionally, this group has pushed back against vaccination requirements. By questioning established health guidelines, they risk creating environments where preventable diseases could spread. Their actions often ignore the broader public health implications, focusing solely on individual parental choice.
Infringing on Other Parents’ Choices
Moms for Liberty’s focus on parental rights can inadvertently affect other families’ rights. For instance, when advocating for book bans in schools, they impose their values on all students. This limits access to diverse perspectives and important topics, which can help shape young minds.
Moreover, their initiatives can place undue pressure on educators. Teachers may feel forced to avoid certain subjects to comply with parental demands, impacting the quality of education. In this way, the push for expanded parental rights can lead to a narrowing of educational content, which can harm all students.
Interference with Curriculum Development
Moms for Liberty often challenges curriculum decisions in schools. Their actions raise concerns about how their involvement affects educational choices.
Critique of Curriculum Experts
Moms for Liberty has taken steps to question the expertise of curriculum designers. They believe that parents should have a strong say in what children learn. This point of view often leads to dismissing input from educational professionals.
For example, when schools adopt certain materials, these parents might push back, labeling them as inappropriate. This can create tension between educators and parents.
The result? Educators may feel pressured to alter lesson plans to appease concerned parents. This interferes with the educational process.
Limiting Teacher Autonomy
Teacher autonomy can take a hit when groups like Moms for Liberty get involved. Teachers typically select materials and methods to suit their students’ needs. When parental groups pressure schools, it can limit educators’ choices.
For instance, teachers may shy away from diverse perspectives in literature or science due to fear of backlash. Instead of encouraging open discussions, they might stick to safer, less controversial topics.
This restricts students’ learning experiences. A narrow focus on certain viewpoints can limit critical thinking and understanding. It affects the overall educational environment, making it harder for students to explore complex issues.
Advocacy Against Evidence-Based Education
Moms for Liberty actively challenges the principles of evidence-based education. Their actions raise concerns about the reliance on established research and factual history in schools. Here’s a closer look at two significant aspects of this advocacy.
Rejecting Scientific Consensus
Moms for Liberty has been known to oppose scientific findings, especially those related to health and education. They tend to favor personal beliefs over the conclusions supported by experts.
For example, this group often questions the importance of mental health initiatives that rely on data-driven approaches. They argue against programs that highlight the impact of social and emotional learning, dismissing them as unnecessary. This kind of rejection can limit students’ understanding of crucial topics like mental health and wellness.
Promotion of Historical Misrepresentations
The group also promotes selective versions of history that misrepresent facts. In efforts to influence school curriculums, Moms for Liberty pushes for bans on teaching slavery and civil rights topics. They believe these subjects create discomfort for students and parents alike.
This advocacy can lead to an incomplete education. Omitting such key historical events prevents students from understanding the complexities of race and society. Instead, students may be presented with a sanitized view of history that ignores significant struggles and achievements.
Political Maneuvering
Moms for Liberty actively engages in political strategies to influence local education. They focus on targeting school boards and use emotional tactics to push policy changes.
Electioneering School Board Campaigns
Moms for Liberty aims to place their candidates on school boards across the country. They have launched campaigns to support candidates who align with their conservative values.
Their strategy involves grassroots efforts in communities, mobilizing parents and like-minded individuals. They organize events to drive voter turnout and raise awareness about school issues. This focus on local elections has made them a notable player in education politics.
With over 275 chapters in 45 states, they work to ensure representation that echoes their vision. This approach creates a network that can effectively challenge opposing views.
Policy-Making Through Fear
Another tactic employed by Moms for Liberty is using fear to influence policy decisions. They often highlight issues such as critical race theory and gender identity in schools. These topics can evoke strong emotions among parents.
Moms for Liberty calls for book bans and strict policies regarding curriculum content. By framing these actions as necessary for children’s safety, they gain support from concerned parents. This fear-based strategy is effective in achieving their goals.
Their messaging resonates with many who feel anxious about modern education. By capitalizing on these fears, they seek to reshape public education to fit their ideals.
Undermining Professional Educators
Moms for Liberty has been criticized for actions that challenge the authority and expertise of teachers. This approach can create a hostile environment for educators and diminish the quality of education students receive.
Dismissal of Teacher Expertise
Moms for Liberty often questions the qualifications and methods of professional educators. They argue that teachers are not to be trusted with sensitive topics, claiming these professionals push certain ideologies.
Teachers spend years studying and training to understand how to educate their students effectively. By undermining this expertise, the group can create a divide between parents and educators. This can lead to conflicts at school board meetings and an atmosphere of suspicion.
Such actions might result in teachers feeling unappreciated and undervalued. When teachers worry about their job security or reputation, it can lead to less effective teaching practices.
Encouraging Distrust in Educators
Moms for Liberty advocates for transparency in schools. While this sounds good, it often breeds distrust among parents towards educators.
By promoting ideas that teachers are responsible for indoctrinating students, they create fear and concern among parents. This makes parents more likely to challenge teachers’ decisions or methods without a clear understanding.
Such distrust can harm the classroom environment. Educators might feel the need to look over their shoulders, impacting their teaching style. Instead of focusing on learning, teachers may spend time justifying their choices to parents and school boards.
This breakdown in trust not only affects teachers but can also create a negative atmosphere for students trying to learn.
Stifling Student Expression
Moms for Liberty has faced criticism for actions that seem to limit student expression in schools. This includes restricting student speech and discouraging critical thinking. These actions raise concerns about how students engage with different ideas and perspectives.
Limiting Student’s Speech and Clubs
Moms for Liberty has been linked to efforts that restrict student speech. This includes challenges to student-organized clubs that promote diversity and inclusion.
For example, some schools have seen pushback against clubs that focus on LGBTQ+ issues. Members of these clubs often face strong opposition, limiting their ability to create a supportive environment.
Parents have voiced concerns about these clubs, saying they conflict with their values. Consequently, school administrators sometimes feel pressured to remove or limit these clubs.
This creates an environment where students may feel unsafe expressing their identities and beliefs. Many students cherish these clubs as their safe spaces to discuss important topics.
Discouraging Critical Thinking
Another concern is the trend of discouraging critical thinking in classrooms. Moms for Liberty promotes a certain viewpoint on various issues, often pushing back against curricula that include diverse perspectives.
For instance, they have challenged books and educational materials that present different historical viewpoints or explore complex social issues.
This can lead to a narrow understanding of important topics for students. It limits their ability to engage in discussions and form their own opinions.
When students are not exposed to a wide range of ideas, they miss out on essential skills needed for critical thinking. Encouraging curiosity and questioning is crucial for their development.
Promotion of Homogeneous Ideology
Moms for Liberty’s actions often reflect a consistent pattern of promoting a narrow set of beliefs. This approach can lead to a lack of diverse educational experiences for students. Here are two key areas where this ideology is evident.
Advocating for ‘One-Sided’ Learning
Moms for Liberty pushes for educational policies that favor specific viewpoints. This often means supporting curricula that highlight conservative perspectives while sidelining alternative ideas. For example, they have opposed lessons that include topics like critical race theory and sexual orientation.
This focus can create a limited view of history and social issues. When students only learn about one perspective, they might struggle to understand broader societal dynamics. Effective education thrives on presenting a variety of viewpoints.
Opposing Diverse Perspectives
The organization frequently challenges programs that aim to include diverse voices. They argue that introducing concepts related to race, gender, and LGBTQ+ identities threatens traditional values. For instance, Moms for Liberty has taken steps to block LGBTQ+ protections in schools, claiming these measures infringe on free speech.
Such actions can lead to an environment where students feel excluded or marginalized. By opposing a rich tapestry of perspectives, they limit students’ ability to engage with the world around them. This stance raises concerns about inclusivity and understanding in educational settings.”
As I wrote in my post of May 28 2022, On Libraries and Identity as a Ground of Struggle; “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” So Heinrich Heine has taught us, in his lyric drama of 1823, Almansor: A Tragedy. As described by Professor Shlomo Avineri in a lecture at CEU; “Almansor” is a tragic love story between an Arab man and Donna Clara, a Moroccan woman who’s forced to convert from Islam to Christianity. Taking place in Granada in 1492, the tragedy depicts the burning of the Qu’ran, the act that prompts the sentence now engraved in the ground of Berlin’s Opernplatz commemorating the horrifying book burning of 1933.
Heine’s lyrical poetry was well-loved in Germany, his most famous poem “Lorelei” even appeared in a collection of German folk songs, although the poet’s name was given as Anonymous. His books, together with the works of Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kastner, Karl Marx, Heinrich Mann and many other “un-German” authors, were also burned on May 10, 1933.”
Why was this early work of German Romanticism silenced and erased from the canon of literature for over a century? As a wiki article describes; “The performance turned into a fiasco and had to be canceled after tumultuous scenes in the auditorium. Since there are no immediate newspaper reports of the event, the trigger is not entirely clear and leaves room for speculation ranging from personal intrigue to anti-Semitism. According to Manfred Windfuhr, editor of the Düsseldorf Heine edition, the most likely explanation is the anecdote that the actor of Almansor Eduard Schütz later reported. According to this, a viewer asked about the author of the play during the last transformation towards the end of the performance and was whispered “Der Jude Heine” in response. In the erroneous assumption that an Israelite money changer of the same name from Braunschweig wrote the tragedy, he then exclaimed: “What? shall we listen to the silly Jew’s nonsense? We don’t want to tolerate that any longer! Let’s knock out the piece! ”And thus triggered the protests. simple confusion of names.”
Heine’s personal friends and influences included Goethe, Schlegel, Dumas, Hegel, and Marx, and his direct models were the world’s first historical novel Las Guerras de Granada by Ginés Pérez de Hita, which awaits translation into English, The Magic Ring by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, and the beautiful Arabic and Persian romance Layla and Majnoun which has been reimagined in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by the Afghan author Khaled Hosseini.
In Almansor, Heine writes in reference to the book burning of 1499 by the future Grand Inquisitor in the wake of the fall of Al-Andalus and the betrayal by the Catholic monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragón of the treaty which guaranteed freedom of religion for all, during which thousands of books were destroyed, including the Qu’ran and other works of Islamic, Jewish, and classical Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, history, and science, excepting only medical works from the flames. It seems they weren’t quite as crazy as our own science deniers and anti-vaccine Luddites, but nearly so, and the parallels do not end there.
And so, we come to this; the Republican Party, in public declaration of their origins and traditions in the Inquisition and the Nazis, have chosen to launch a national campaign of book burnings and bans and are waging a combined electoral and media campaign to monopolize public school and library boards to authorize identities and repress dissent. And only our public solidarity and will to resist subjugation stands between us and the year 2022 being remembered in history with those of 1499 and 1933.
As I wrote in my post of December 14 2021, Subversion of Democracy: Case of the Texas Book Ban;
Remaining on the Texas Public School Required Reading List:
Lynchings and Other Family Gatherings: the Joy of Community
Keep Your Pimp Hand Strong: Negotiating Gender Roles
Only Our Kind Are Truly Human: Why Values and Morals Only Apply To Us
Texas bans books from public schools and libraries in subversion of democracy and our values of freedom and equality of all humankind in an attempt to enforce imperiled hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege historically and systemically constructed along divisions of race and gender and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
The multifront assault on freedom of information and expression is about patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror under the fig leaves of Gideonite fundamentalist Christian Identity sectarianism and jingoistic nationalism, as it has always been.
The last time the state had the right to control its slave populations through access to learning civilization collapsed and was lost for a thousand years while the Church burned books which threated elite power, and we must be vigilant lest we give those who would enslave us the right and power to do so yet again, and cast the world into a Dark Age from which we may never recover.
As written by Ryan Cooper in The Week, in an article entitled The forgotten history of Republican book banning; “A conservative stock character is making a comeback: the book banner. For the past few years, Republicans have pretended they’re defending free speech and free inquiry in schools against censorious liberals with their safe spaces and trigger warnings. In reality, conservatives have a mile-long history of trying to suppress the teaching of books they find uncomfortable.
That record has resurfaced in the Virginia gubernatorial race, where Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin recently ran an ad in which a woman named Laura Murphy complained about not being able to dictate what was taught at her local high school. Murphy describes the issue as explicit material being shown to children without parental sign-off, but there’s much more to the story than the ad let on: Back in 2013, Murphy told The Washington Post that her son Blake (now an associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee) had night terrors after being required to read Toni Morrison’s book Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Beloved.
Murphy isn’t the only Republican with this censorious impulse. The American Library Association maintains an incomplete list of attempted book-banning events in recent history, and in the large majority of cases for which a motivation is explained, it is conservative: Right-wing parents in Columbus, Ohio, tried to ban Catcher in the Rye in schools in 1963 because it was “anti-white.” Other parents challenged The Grapes of Wrath in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1991 because it invoked God and Jesus in a “vain and profane manner.” Slaughterhouse-Five was suppressed in Oakland County, Michigan, in 1972, in a case in which a circuit judge called the book “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” Those are just three of dozens of examples.
Now, liberals have done the same thing on occasion, typically targeting books which contain racial slurs, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But the bulk of book banning incidents — parents complaining about sexual content, violence, skepticism of Christianity, cursing, or the history of racism and slavery — are straight out of the Moral Majority politics of the 1980s and 1990s. That habit seemed to vanish for awhile when Republicans nominated a thrice-divorced, credibly accused rapist for president. Now it’s coming back.
In recent months, Republican legislatures have passed de facto prohibitions of teaching the history of racism across the country. As a result, a Tennessee teacher was fired for assigning Ta-Nehisi Coates, while a Texas school board recently apologized for instructing teachers to present “opposing” views on the Holocaust while trying to obey a Republican law on curriculum content. Don’t let the brief reprieve fool you: They were always like this.”
As written by Amy Brady in Lithub, The History (and Present) of Banning Books in America: On the Ongoing Fight Against the Censorship of Ideas; “Like small pox and vinyl records, book banning is something many Americans like to think of as history. But according to the American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE), the practice persists. ABFE, which from its headquarters in White Plains fights book banning across the country, keeps a list of books challenged each year by American public libraries and schools. In 2016, that list includes Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Emily M. Danworth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Most of the titles are by LGBTQ authors and authors of color who write about life beyond white, straight, middle-class America.
One way ABFE fights book banning is to partner with other organizations in the publishing industry (including their parent organization, the American Booksellers Association) to host Banned Books Week, a seven-day celebration that takes place in bookstores and libraries all over the United States. This year, the event runs from September 25th to October 1st with a focus on “diversity,” a factor behind many book challenges. “There were over 300 book challenges in 2015,” said Chris Finan, Director of ABFE, in an interview. “And themes of race, ethnicity, and sexual preference have been a large part of why those books got challenged.”
On its website, ABFE acknowledges that diversity is difficult to define. One definition that has informed their thinking comes from the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom: Diversity includes “non-white main and/or secondary characters; LGBT main and/or secondary characters; disabled main and/or secondary characters; issues about race or racism; LGBT issues; issues about religion, which encompass in this situation the Holocaust and terrorism; issues about disability and/or mental illness; non-Western settings, in which the West is North America and Europe.”
Historically, other reasons for banning books include: sexual imagery, violence, and any content considered obscene. Indeed, arguments over obscenity—how its defined and how that definition relates to the First Amendment—have been at the heart of banned-book controversies throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Many historians point to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the first book in the United States to experience a ban on a national scale. The Confederacy barred the book from stores not only for its pro-abolitionist agenda, but because it aroused heated debates about slavery (some historians argue that the book catalyzed the Civil War).
A decade after the war, a carping moralist government official named Anthony Comstock convinced the United States Congress to pass a law prohibiting the mailing of “pornographic” materials. His definition of the term was murky at best. Anatomy textbooks, doctors’ pamphlets about reproduction, anything by Oscar Wilde, and even The Canterbury Tales were deemed too sexy to send through the mail.
These bans, or “comstockery,” as the practice became known, continued into the new century. But by the 1920s, shifts in politics and social mores led booksellers to see themselves as advocates for people’s right to read whatever they wanted. Then, in 1933, an influential court case—The United States v. One Book Called Ulysses—helped usher in a new era of legal interpretation of the First Amendment.
In that court case, Judge John M. Woolsey overturned a federal ban of James Joyce’s Ulysses—the ban had been in effect since 1922, and court transcripts reveal that the judge who banned the book also remarked that it was “the work of a disordered mind.” Woolsey, who admitted to not liking the novel, found legal cause to challenge the previous judge’s definition of pornography—and by extension, his definition of art. He ultimately ruled that the depiction of sex, even if unpleasant, should be allowed in serious literature. His final edict is at once hilarious and evident of a mind capable of separating legal philosophy from personal preference: “[W]hilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”
The case set an important precedent. However, Comstock Law remained on the books until 1957, when the Supreme Court tried Roth vs. The United States. The plaintiff was Samuel Roth, a writer and bookseller convicted for mailing pornographic magazines to subscribers. His trial forced the American legal system to once again reconsider its definition of obscenity. The Court’s final decision was bad for Roth: his conviction was upheld, and he remained in prison until 1961. But it was great for lovers of books: the definition was narrowed to apply to only that which is “utterly without redeeming social importance.” That narrowing made room for books depicting sex and violence. Even Judge Woolsey had found Ulysses to have social importance.
In the decades that followed, public officials would continue to challenge the Court’s 1957 definition of obscenity, including Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, whose personal definition famously began and ended with the declaration “I know it when I see it.” But in general, the 1960s and 70s witnessed a simultaneous drop in instances of book bans and rise in more explicit art. Artists and authors felt freer than ever to experiment. Consumers were more willing than ever to un-clutch their pearls and engage with racy material. Sex was mainstream in the novels of John Updike and Erica Jong. Then America elected Ronald Reagan.
“Reagan didn’t run on a campaign of anti-pornography,” Finan clarifies. “But he nevertheless ran an election that depowered those who fought for First Amendment freedoms. [His] election encouraged challenges by people who were unhappy with books in schools and libraries that were increasingly realistic in their depiction of life.” The number of challenges to books made by school boards and libraries rose dramatically: “Suddenly we were facing 700-800 challenges a year,” says Finan. In 1982, the ALA responded to this renewed culture of censorship with Banned Books Week. “The point of the event was to get people to understand that these books weren’t pornographic or excessively violent, but simply depicting the real world…and that many were classics of American literature,” Finan says. “Banned Books Week was the first real [American] celebration of the freedom to read.”
In those early days, Banned Books Week consisted almost entirely of libraries and bookstores hanging posters and displaying banned books. “Those displays were enormously effective communication tools,” says Finan, “because people would wander over and find out that the books they love had been challenged. Suddenly they understood that censorship isn’t just about fringe literature.” Today, those displays remain a centerpiece of Banned Books Week, but partnering sponsors are also seeking to involve readers in other ways. The Washington, DC Public Library, for example, hosts a city-wide scavenger hunt of banned books that began on September 1st and will continue until the end of the month. The books, which have been wrapped in black paper printed with words like “SMUT” or “FILTHY,” have been hidden on shelves in libraries and bookstores all over DC.
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), another sponsor of Banned Books Week, has published a handbook that lists which comic books have been censored and outlines what readers can do to fight censorship. “Since 2011, at least one graphic novel has been included on ALA’s annual list of the ten most frequently challenged books,” said Betsy Gomez, Editorial Director of CBLDF, in an interview. “In 2015, CBLDF fought more than 24 attempts to ban books, including the comics Drama, This One Summer, The Sandman, Fun Home, Persepolis, Palomar. So far, in 2016, CBLDF has defended a dozen books.” The handbook includes programming ideas for educators and libraries to engage their communities in discussions about banned books throughout the year.
Organizations with no official connection to Banned Books Week are also getting involved. Wordier Than Thou, an open mic storytelling group in Pinellas Park, Florida, began presenting last year an annual burlesque show inspired by selected banned books. “[The show] definitely gets people talking about literature,” wrote Tiffany Razzano, founder of Wordier Than Thou, in an email. “[Last year], throughout the night people would come up to me and tell me about their favorite banned book.” The show, which features area burlesque favorite Mayven Missbehavin’, makes thematic sense: “It’s supposedly offensive material [interpreted by] scantily clad women performing classic burlesque stripteases,” she writes. For the sake of surprise, Razzano wouldn’t disclose which books would be featured this year. But last year’s performance included Gone with the Wind, 1984, and The Scarlet Letter.
It’s rare today for a book banning case to make it to the federal courts, but many challenges to books are still taking place on the state and local levels. At the time of this writing, ABFE has joined a protest against the Chesterfield County Public Schools in Virginia, which seeks to remove Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park and other titles from students’ voluntary summer reading lists. The proposed removal is “particularly outrageous,” says Finan, because the books aren’t a part of the school’s required curriculum.
If school administrators are attempting to limit even elective reading, what does the future hold for students who want access to all books, classic and contemporary—books that might broaden their understanding of the world? “The problem of book banning hasn’t gone away, and it probably won’t,” Finan laments. “There are always going to be struggles over the proper limits to free speech.”
Fahrenheit 451 1966 Trailer | Oskar Werner
Sarah Jessica Parker and “The Librarians” discuss the fight against book banning
Being a librarian was already hard. Then came the Trump administration
Already facing burnout and book bans, librarians face a ‘catastrophe’ for institutions deemed central to democracy
On this Tax Day in America we are once again made complicit in crimes against humanity and imperial wars of conquest and dominion by the kleptocracy of hegemonic elites who rule us, and I find it interesting that each of us can quantify our moral harm and complicity in a dollar amount.
Ours here at Dollhouse Park, being my partner Theresa and myself, amounts to more than I ever made as a high school teacher annually, actually close to double a teacher’s salary, a fact I find curious and do not wholly understand though I have worked as a financial consultant. The figure does not disturb me; what it buys does.
Because we all of us are made complicit in the deaths of children, and many others whom we have killed without trial or cause, either simply for being different or because they were in the way of our profits.
This is a ledger I cannot reconcile, nor should anyone. Not and remain human.
It is precisely our humanity they wish to steal from us, in making us accomplices and beneficiaries of atrocities beyond comprehension.
This I cannot abide; can you abide it? So goes the iconic line in the film Inglorious Basterds, and with Ahad I say to all fascists and all tyrants; “To the end, I shall grapple with thee.”
Sic Semper Tyrannis, as Nelson Mandela underlined in the play Julius Caesar as he authorized direct action against the Apartheid regime from his abysmal cell in Robben Island. A friend of mine, vanished and presumed dead, tried to liberate the prisoners of Robben Island long ago, as captain of a rebuilt U-32 Nazi submarine which he operated like Nemo against empires of dehumanization; he failed to do so, but this is not the only measure of victory.
Who will liberate us? There is no one but ourselves.
Liberation struggle can consume our lives, but what is the cost if we do nothing?
How we reckon costs of a war is a ground of struggle, but one which we must come to terms with. In dollars alone, the Iran War has already amounted to $52, 332, 150, 926 as I write this; and it will cost us near a trillion dollars as we go on, even if we stop the war now.
But direct costs are hardly all of it. As Elizabeth Warren said on April 13; “Since Trump started his illegal war with Iran, Americans have paid $8.4 billion more at the gas pump. Each American family has also shelled out an additional $1,700 to pay for Trump’s chaotic, illegal tariffs.” And with fuel prices, all goods bought at the grocery store have also risen in price.
In terms of human lives, 13 of ours, twelve Israelis, and over 1,332 Iranians including children and other civilians. These figures will also grow with time.
But there is more, for the Iran War occurs within the context of a war which is far more broad, encompassing the Palestinian Genocide and Israel’s re-Occupation of Lebanon, a war to conquer a Greater Israel paid for with American taxes and American lives.
For which we get nothing. Nothing at all.
As loath as I may be to phrase things in an inelegant manner, such atrocities and crimes against humanity are too monstrous to call out in polite language, and I must say with Ken Kesey as in his iconic speech to end the Vietnam war recounted in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test; “The way to end war is just walk away and say fuck it. Just walk away and say fuck it.”
As written by Joseph Stiglitz, Gabriel Zucman and Zohran Mamdani in The Guardian, in an article entitled Tax day is a reminder of America’s unequal tax system. But we can fix it: There is no justification for a regressive system in which the super-rich contribute less than the rest of us; “Today, we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. New York City’s average household income is $131,000. Without extreme inequality, residents could live reasonably well. Instead, a few people at the top of the income ladder capture enormous wealth, while millions of others struggle just to get by. Some simply can’t make it. For them, New York has become fundamentally unaffordable.
This outsized level of inequality has enormous economic, political and social consequences. It undermines social and political cohesion, erodes trust in institutions and leads people to conclude, correctly, that the system is rigged.
Nearly one-fifth of America’s super-rich live in New York, the highest concentration of wealth in any state. But inequality is not just a New York problem or even an American problem – though the United States is more unequal than almost every other advanced economy. It is a global crisis.
The global inequality report, commissioned during South Africa’s G20 presidency, found that between 2000 and 2024, the richest 1% captured 41% of all new wealth, while the bottom half of humanity got just 1%. This trajectory is unsustainable.
The rise of extreme wealth is one of the clearest signs of this imbalance. In 1987, billionaires held wealth equal to 3% of global GDP. Today this tiny elite, just 0.0001% of the world population, owns the equivalent of 16% of world GDP in wealth.
As wealth concentrates, so does power – the power to influence elections, shape policy, tilt markets and define the terms of public debate.
One of the main drivers of this trend is our collective failure to effectively tax the super-rich. Until recently, the scale of the problem was difficult to measure. Public data does not track tax contributions of the ultra-wealthy. But recently, there has been a flurry of research looking at just that, and the findings are clear.
In the 1960s, the 400 richest Americans paid about 50% of their income in taxes across all levels of government. Today, they pay about 24%.
This is not unique to the US. Across Europe – including France, Italy and the Netherlands – and in countries such as Brazil, researchers find the same pattern: the super-rich pay lower effective tax rates than almost everyone else. They excel not only at making money, but at avoiding and evading taxes.
Even when they do pay, it falls far short of their fair share – despite the fact that their wealth depends heavily on public investment: government contracts, a highly educated workforce, a rule of law that facilitates business or good infrastructure, or even the basic technology that underlies their “innovation”. Instead, the burden is shifted on to working people whose taxes sustain the very systems that enable extreme wealth.
It is high time we confront this problem collectively.
We can disagree about how progressive tax systems should be – the extent to which the rich should pay more tax, relative to their income, than the rest of us. But there is no justification for a regressive system in which the super-rich contribute less than the rest of us. This is how inequality is deepened and sustained.
For too long, reform has been dismissed as too complex or politically infeasible, even as voters across the political spectrum enthusiastically support the rich paying what they owe.
That is beginning to change.
In 2024, under Brazil’s leadership, the G20 put this issue on its agenda and committed to more effective taxation of ultra-high-net-worth individuals. It commissioned a report that proposed a minimum tax of 2% on the wealth of the super-rich – a straightforward way to ensure they meet their obligations to society.
That powerful idea has had ripple effects. In 2025, Spain and Brazil committed to leading a coalition of countries to implement it. This weekend, the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula Silva, will meet in Barcelona with the heads of states of South Africa, Mexico, Colombia and many more countries to press ahead.
In France, a version of this minimum tax passed the National Assembly, though it was blocked by the conservative Senate. Still, it remains central to the national debate – much like the income tax itself, which once faced similar resistance from conservative forces before becoming law. In the US, a paradigm shift is under way. California voters will consider a tax on billionaire wealth this November. Washington state has approved a 9.9% income tax on million-dollar incomes, set to take effect in 2028. In New York, we are calling on the state to increase taxes on the rich and large corporations to close New York City’s budget deficit and fund essential public services like affordable housing and childcare. And we are already making progress with a new pied-a-terre tax in New York City, which will tax the ultra-wealthy and global elites.
These are just the first steps toward restoring a basic social principle: that those with the most should contribute their fair share so that everyone can live with dignity.
The idea that billionaires should pay higher tax rates than working people is not radical. What is radical is allowing a system where extreme wealth exists alongside widespread hardship – and where those billionaires can in effect opt out of contributing to the society that made their success possible.
The longer we wait to fix that, the more entrenched wealth and economic and political power become, further cementing the privileges of our modern aristocracy.”
As written by Bernie Sanders in The Guardian, in an article entitled Yes, the rich must start paying their fair share of taxes; “Never before in American history have so few had so much wealth and power. Today, the top one per cent owns more wealth than the bottom 93%. One man, Elon Musk, worth $805bn, owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households.
And that inequality is getting worse. Last year alone, after receiving the largest tax break in history from Donald Trump, 938 billionaires in America became $1.5tn richer. Since he was elected, President Trump and his family have become $4bn richer.
Never before in American history have we had such concentration of ownership. While profits soar, a handful of giant corporations dominate virtually every sector of our economy, charging higher and higher prices for the products they sell. Four Wall Street firms combined – BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity and State Street – are the major stockholders of more than 95% of American corporations.
Never before in American history have so few billionaires controlled what we see, hear, and read in the media – both legacy media and social media. Never before in American history have we seen a ruling class, within a corrupt campaign finance system, wield the kind of political power it has today. In the 2026 midterm elections, just 50 billionaires have already spent over $433m to influence political campaigns and buy candidates who represent their interests.
Bottom line: the richest people in America have never ever had it so good.
That is one reality. Here’s the other reality.
The American working class has been under savage attack for years. Over the last many decades there has been an explosion in technology and a huge increase in worker productivity. Despite that, the average American worker is making almost $20 a week less today than he or she did 53 years ago, after adjusting for inflation.
According to the Rand Corporation, over the last 50 years, $79tn in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. Almost all of the gains in worker productivity have gone to the top 1%.
Meanwhile, 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck and are struggling to pay the outrageously high cost of rent, healthcare, prescription drugs, groceries, childcare and the basic necessities of life. Nearly half of older workers have nothing saved for retirement, and over 20% of our seniors are trying to make it on less than $15,000 a year. Tragically, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured and over half a million go bankrupt each year because of medically related debt.
Why, in a nation of such extraordinary wealth, exploding technology and greatly increased worker productivity, are so many people struggling just to stay alive?
One of the major reasons is that we have a tax code that is totally rigged – written by representatives of the wealthy to benefit the wealthy. Instead of raising enough revenue to meet the needs of working families, corporate lobbyists have riddled the tax code with loopholes, allowing the wealthiest people and largest corporations in our country to avoid paying their fair share.
In 2006, Warren Buffett memorably said: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Mr Buffett went on to say that he, a multibillionaire, pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. What Buffett said was true 20 years ago. It is even more accurate today.
In America today, billionaires now pay a lower effective tax rate than the average worker. Elon Musk paid an effective tax rate of less than 3.3%, while the average truck driver paid 8.4%. Jeff Bezos, now worth $223bn, paid an effective tax rate of less than 1%, while the average firefighter paid 8.7%.
Michael Bloomberg, worth $109bn, paid an effective tax rate of just 1.3%, while the average registered nurse paid 13.3%.
And Warren Buffett? His tax rate was just 0.1%, while the average schoolteacher paid 9.8%.
But it’s not just billionaires who are not paying their fair share. Last year, after Trump gave corporate America a tax break of more than $900bn, Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir, Ticketmaster and the company that owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken paid zero in federal income taxes. These companies combined are worth $3.5tn. Their owners are worth over $853bn. They made over $17bn in profits last year. And they paid nothing in federal income taxes.
The American people are catching on.
In California, by a 2-to-1 margin, voters support a tax on billionaires to prevent over 3 million people from losing healthcare.
In New York City, over 62% of residents support Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for a 2% surtax on millionaires and billionaires.
Nationally, more than six out of every 10 Americans believe the amount of taxes paid by the wealthy and large corporations is too low.
That is why I recently introduced a bill that would establish a 5% wealth tax on the 938 billionaires in America who collectively are worth more than $8.2tn. These 938 billionaires constitute 0.000003% of the population.
Over a 10-year period, this bill would raise $4.4tn.
What would this legislation accomplish?
In the first year, we would provide every man, woman, and child in a household making $150,000 or less with a $3,000 direct payment. That is $12,000 for most families of four.
We would end homelessness and the housing crisis in America by building 7m units of low-income and affordable homes and apartments.
We would expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing.
We would provide universal childcare throughout America.
We would strengthen public education by ensuring that no teacher in America makes less than $60,000 a year.
In the midst of a major crisis in home healthcare, we would guarantee that seniors and people with disabilities receive the home healthcare they need through Medicaid.
And let’s not forget: Donald Trump and his Republican friends in Congress threw 15 million Americans off their healthcare in order to provide a trillion-dollar tax break for the top 1%. Through this bill, we would repeal those healthcare cuts and ensure that none of those 15 million people lose their healthcare.
In other words, we would provide all of this help and support to working families, the elderly, the children and the sick through a 5% tax on the wealth of 938 billionaires. Nobody with a net worth of less than a billion dollars would pay a penny more in taxes.
And let me tell you how insane the level of wealth inequality is in America today. If this legislation had been enacted last year, Elon Musk would have owed $42bn more in taxes, leaving him with just $792bn to survive.
Mark Zuckerberg would have owed $11bn more, leaving him with a meager $209bn to feed his family. Jeff Bezos would also have owed about $11bn more, leaving him with just $207bn to put a roof over his head.
In other words, despite raising an enormous amount of money that could improve life for hundreds of millions of Americans, the wealthiest people in this country have so much wealth that they would barely notice the difference.
As Justice Louis Brandeis profoundly said back in 1933: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
Let’s choose democracy over oligarchy.
The wealthiest people in America must start paying their fair share of taxes.
Let’s create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%.”
Tax day is a reminder of America’s unequal tax system. But we can fix it
In the shadow of the Fall of America and years of the ICE White Terror, of the systematic destruction of our democracy, our freedoms, and our humanity by the criminal Trump regime’s Fourth Reich, we are confronted with a horrific example of the future to which we may be headed in the legacies of history and systems of unequal power from which we struggle to emerge in the anniversary of the 1873 Colfax Massacre.
Theft of citizenship as vote suppression and as genocidal murder, white supremacist state terror, and police gun violence are among the hungry ghosts who bedevil us still, and should there remain any question of the existential active threat of racist terror and the necessity of resistance by any means necessary, we may look to such examples.
No matter where you begin with divisions of identitarian politics in service to elite wealth, power, and privilege, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
To this let us give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As written by Gwendolyn Midlo-Hall and Keri Leigh Merritt in Jacobin, in an article entitled The 1873 Colfax Massacre Was a Racist Attack on Black People’s Democratic Rights: The worst episode of Reconstruction Era violence occurred 150 years ago today in northern Louisiana. The 1873 Colfax Massacre saw white supremacists slaughter 150 African Americans, brutally thwarting their hopes for autonomy and self-governance.; “The Civil War did not end in the Deep South in 1865. The proslavery, pro-Confederate legacies powerfully persisted, shaping the telling of our history and knowledge about people, places, and events: our perception of reality.
This is precisely why many Americans have never heard of one of the most important episodes of mass murder in US history: the racist, bloody Colfax Massacre of April 13, 1873 — exactly one hundred fifty years ago today — when white supremacists slaughtered over one hundred fifty black men in the northwest corner of Louisiana.
Colfax
Located in the heart of the Red River Valley, Colfax was a highly prosperous area in the global cotton economy prior to the Civil War. But flush times for planters ended abruptly after secession. New Orleans fell to the US Army early, in April 1862. After Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed those enslaved in Confederate-occupied territory in 1863, the US Army conducted a ten-day raid up the Red River to Alexandria, where the Confederate governor of Louisiana, Thomas Moore, owned a large plantation.
During the Civil War, the US Army enlisted nearly two hundred thousand armed black men — an astonishing 10 percent of all troops who served. Composed of formerly enslaved men, refugees, and free blacks, these soldiers were tasked with maintaining order, ensuring peace, and protecting polling places.
But when former enslavers began complaining about the black occupation troops, President Andrew Johnson quickly removed them. By the fall of 1867, the number of soldiers in Louisiana had dwindled to only twenty thousand men. The US government decided to redirect its military might toward western colonization, resulting in the murderous removal of indigenous people.
The US government had abandoned the region, as well the people in it, leaving political, judicial, and police power up for grabs.
In the Red River Valley, too few troops meant chaos and contention, as there was no longer a functioning home guard, military patrol, or military commission. The US government had abandoned the region, as well the people in it, leaving political, judicial, and police power up for grabs.
The character of wealth changed, as access to goods and supplies became paramount. Within this shifting landscape, a new group of merchants emerged, competing through violent, insurrectionary means. The Red River Valley transformed into a highway of militarized desperados and warring factions, with no clearly established governmental authority. Murder, gun violence, and terror became the order of the day.
Louisiana’s new constitution, enacted in 1868, created an enclave of Republican power along the Red River, an area that was majority-black and deeply divided. Grant Parish was carved out of Rapides and Winn Parishes and named triumphantly for President Ulysses S. Grant. The parish seat, Colfax, took the surname of his vice president, Schuyler Colfax, Jr.
Yet with so few troops to counterbalance the power of former enslavers and their kin, laws enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments — providing citizenship and the right to vote to all men — were applied timidly and to little effect. Federal election supervisors in rural areas had no police power and were reduced to poll watchers.
That same year, to help keep peace, the Louisiana state legislature established a five-thousand-man militia, half white and half black. The white troops were mainly Confederate veterans; the black troops, Union veterans. During bitter struggles over control of the state government, the militia fragmented along racial lines, with one sector becoming the military arm of a terrorist organization called the White League after 1873. The boundary line between these white supremacists and black Republicans was Bayou Darrow, located seven miles north of Colfax.
Freedmen voting in New Orleans, Louisiana, 1867. (Wikimedia Commons)
Violence quickly enveloped the region. The brutality was primarily carried out by the Knights of the White Camelia, a white supremacist organization akin to the better-known Ku Klux Klan.
During the wave of terror unleashed before the 1868 election, the political assassination rates among both black and white Louisianans had been staggering. As an 1875 congressional report later revealed, there were 1,081 politically motivated murders, 137 shootings, and 507 other verified outrages in the state alone.
Still, as brutal as the 1868 election had been in Louisiana, the 1872 election and its aftermath were even deadlier. Not only was the gubernatorial election disputed, but several of the local elections were, too. Like four years earlier, the real political strife seemed to center in the Red River Valley, with Grant Parish the eye of the storm. In tiny Colfax, the county seat, the local elections were hotly contested. A group of armed black Republicans began occupying the county courthouse, claiming political victory.
Then everything exploded on Easter Sunday, 1873.
Massacre
The power struggle in Colfax had first turned deadly earlier in April, when a band of white supremacists murdered a black man in his front yard. Union veteran William Ward, who served as a black state representative, local Radical leader, and militia captain, ordered his company to muster immediately.
Historian LeeAnna Keith estimates that about three hundred black militiamen, along with their families, flocked to Colfax’s town center, occupying the courthouse (which, in the war-torn rural South, was a “repurposed” plantation stable). Ward, who had grown up enslaved as a carpenter in Virginia, began drilling the men openly in the town’s streets, organizing watches to keep families safe. Armed with guns, they quickly dug entrenchments, erected breastworks, and “posted sentries” around their commandeered area.
Judge William Phillips, a white “scalawag” from Alabama who earned a reputation by openly fathering a child with a black woman and by rallying black voters through promises of land, horses, and tools as part of reparations for slavery, joined forces with the black guards. Under the joint leadership of the white Phillips and the black Ward, local African Americans coalesced around what historian Joel Sipress has deemed “a new type of militant Black politics.”
White supremacists in the Red River Valley used these events to incite as much racial fear as possible. Over the next few days, three hundred white men poured into Colfax from Grant and surrounding parishes, forming an all-white paramilitary counterforce. Under the leadership of C. C. Nash, a former captain of the Confederate Army, they ordered the black militia and their families to leave Colfax under threat of violence. With more manpower and weaponry than the Republicans (they even had a small cannon, a relic from the war), white Democrats began the battle just after noon on Easter.
After hours of skirmishing, the former Confederates found a gap in the levee on the riverbank and positioned their single cannon there. While the weapon fired continuously upon the black freedom fighters, a former plantation overseer led a group of thirty whites in a direct attack against the black militia. One group of black Republicans instantly surrendered and was taken prisoner. Although Nash promised to free the men in the morning, a younger band of white terrorists executed them in cold blood, under the cowardly cover of the night.
Roughly sixty Republicans flooded the courthouse, exchanging fire with the white militia, who finally compelled a black captive to set fire to the courthouse roof. Some of the black Radicals perished in the fire. The men who tried to surrender, numbering between fifty and seventy, were ultimately shot to death. As a steamer pulled into Colfax the night of the massacre, one of the terrorists climbed on board, “armed to the teeth,” offering to give the passengers a tour of “dead n—–s . . . for there were a hundred or so scattered over the village and the adjacent fields.”
Nearly all the dead were brutally slain after they had surrendered.
Only three white Democrats perished during the attack, but the number of African Americans murdered is much more difficult to ascertain. Most of the witnesses were slaughtered. Evidence was lost because bodies were buried in the trenches in front of the courthouse in mass graves or dumped into the Red River.
What we do know is that nearly all the dead were brutally slain after they had surrendered and that almost fifty human beings were callously murdered after being held as political prisoners for hours. We know that not one scintilla of evidence was presented that any of the black men who defended the Colfax courthouse ever committed a single crime. They were simply freedom fighters, assassinated during their quest for independence and political power.
Colfax remains the single largest massacre in Louisiana history. It also spurred one of the worst legal decisions in Supreme Court history, United States v. Cruikshank (1875), which gave control of constitutional amendments and civil rights laws back to the white Confederates that had seceded from the Union. The ruling effectively ended Radical Reconstruction by prohibiting the use of the Enforcement Act of 1870 to prosecute white supremacist terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan. Cruikshank nearly erased the myriad black political gains won after emancipation, re-empowering local white oligarchs — former enslavers.
Legacy
White supremacy has long been an effective tool for US elites to maintain their place at the top of society. Stoking racism and hatred, they have prevented lasting interracial working-class coalitions and managed to keep most black Americans at the bottom of society.
Reactionary forces have likewise been successful at whitewashing history, including that of the Colfax Massacre. Contrary to the historical marker that served as the only headstone for the murdered — erected over half a century later — Colfax was never a riot. As the worst instance of white supremacist violence during Reconstruction, Colfax brutally thwarted black citizens’ hopes for autonomy and self-governance.
One hundred fifty years later, we recognize Colfax for what it really was: a racist massacre and a violent political message to potential black voters throughout the South. And we honor the heroic dead, vowing to continue their fight for democracy.”
I too once bore the icon of Saint Beatrice of the Absurd as did he, following the tracks of Dante through a blighted and ravaged series of otherworlds, bereft of dictums, of referents, a journey in which all the signs had been switched so that self-referential language led outward to realms unknown and the places marked Here Be Dragons had settled into my skin like living tattoos and could only be found by surrendering to the currents of time and dancing untethered like a leaf on the wind, or glimpsed in a mirror of endless reflections.
But unlike Samuel Beckett, grim prophet that he was, I danced in rapture and in joy. Because he who has no hope nor fear, no boundaries to one’s self, is totally free. And in freedom there is as Rudolf Otto teaches us “Mysterium tremendum et fascinans”, both terror and rapture as before the monstrosity of the Biblical God or before the Infinite and the Unknown in which we are shattered, destroyed and re-created, all that which is utterly alien and defines the limits of the human.
That his birthday falls shortly after April’s full Flower Moon, with my gardens full of daffodils and hope, now seems a sign of the renewal of the world and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, when long ago it filled me with dread as I did not yet understand the relationship between the terror of our nothingness and the joy of total freedom.
Who cannot be compelled is free, and becomes Unconquered. For Samuel Beckett, this embrace of Sartre’s total freedom lies at the heart of his luminous questioning of human being, meaning, and value. Take away everything a man has or is, possession and mastery of his own body, his memories, histories, identity, and what remains is his Voice, protean and relative though it may be.
Here begins Beckett’s use of language as an instrument of revolutionary struggle interdependent with many of his great themes, which he deployed as Resistance to fascist tyranny during the Occupation, against a brutal conqueror who used terror to subjugate victims through learned helplessness by means of shock and awe; yet in the face of unanswerable force and overwhelming horror Samuel Beckett discovered a way to claw back some of our humanity from the darkness.
Sometimes it’s the best we can do. Yet it remains a power which cannot be taken from us, our refusal to submit, and that is the only power a human being needs.
I think of this tonight as I contemplate the abandonment of our humanity and our principles of universal human rights in the genocidal Gaza War which Biden and now Trump has made America complicit in, as Israel since Black Saturday has attempted to engineer a global war with her criminal violations of international law and provoked Iran into direct regional conflict, and America has granted authorization for this by shielding Israel from the consequences of her actions.
This follows the casus belli of Black Saturday October 7 2023 which the Netanyahu regime orchestrated using infiltration agents within Hamas and a black ops unit of IDF reconnaissance specializing in masquerading as Muslims while committing atrocities against actual Muslim groups to divide them and prevent the emergence of a natural United Front. Que bono? Only Netanyahu and his settler regime of theocratic imperialists benefits from staging an event which abducts Israeli peaceniks; it marginalizes the Israeli Left and secures the power of the regime while manufacturing a just cause of war for the Final Solution of the Palestinians and the imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors as Greater Israel.
Trump has recently coordinated his bombing of Iran as he had previously of Yemen in a failed attempt to destroy our glorious counterblockade of the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid with the Israeli bombing of Lebanon and of Gaza before, designed to divide Palestine into Bantustans modeled on those of the South African Apartheid era state.
We are now directly involved in the broad regional war against the Dominion of Iran, which controls Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq, and is Russia’s key ally in Putin’s mad quest to re-found the Russian Empire. Last year began with our stunning victory in the Liberation of Syria, where we proved the enemy, by which in this case I mean the Putin regime of Russia for while an ally and instrument of Russian global power the Dominion of Iran is also our ally versus Israel, is not invincible and can be defeated.
World War Three has now been ongoing for several years in ten theatres of war, including Vichy America as Putin captured the state through propaganda warfare and vast dark money in the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024 with his agent Traitor Trump for the purpose of a free hand in the invasion of Ukraine without American intervention, which he got and still gets from his subverted Republican congressmen pawns who rubberstamp everything that has a chance of dismantling our democracy.
Israel and Palestine, one people divided by history, and now Iran and the whole of the Middle East as the Israeli-American Iran War which involves the Iranian Dominion and Axis of Resistance against the Arab-American Alliance as part of the Israeli war to conquer a Greater Israel and also a part of the Russian Third World War, which Israel is doing everything in their power to generalize as imperial conquest and dominion of the whole Middle East. And Netanyahu’s regime has implicated America in unforgiveable crimes against humanity as a strategy of our subjugation and now maneuvers to bring us fully into conflict with Iran, which will bring us into a direct and total war of survival with Russia.
As one may surmise from my frequent use of the phrase Never Again!, I will gladly guarantee the lives of Jewish peoples, be they Israeli citizens or that of any other nation, with my own, and this is unconditional; but applies equally to all human beings. Protecting Israel from the random civilian slaughter of aerial bombardment, yes; but also protecting everyone else from Israeli bombs. Most especially when our tax dollars here in America buy the deaths of children and make monsters of us all.
On this day two years ago I wrote that if America bombs Iran or enables Israel to do so instead of sanctioning Israel for the genocide of the Palestinians and the bombing of the Iranian consulate that provoked this escalation and cycle of retaliation and mutual destruction, everything changes, and the Age of Tyrants begins.
Sadly, I believe I was not wrong in that prediction.
Humankind now faces six to eight centuries of global wars of dominion fought with unimaginable weapons against whole populations by tyrannies of brutal force and control, and in less than two possible futures out of every hundred something like ourselves will one day discover the ruins of our civilization, and wonder how and why we destroyed ourselves.
To be clear; nothing human survives the next millennium; the only question now is whether or not we take all life on earth with us. Unless we choose a United Humankind over an Age of Tyrants.
Will posthuman species emerge from our ruins to question and learn from our mistakes? Will we be remembered, all that we have been and all that we have dreamed, or become nothing? This is truly the only fate in question now; will humankind have been for nothing?
If Biden had used Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction to stop the Israeli genocide as it began in October, we would not now be on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Instead he, like Netanyahu, and now like Trump, chose to answer death and terror with greater death and terror, and failed to silence the bombs.
Force cannot answer force, but only gathers more as it dehumanizes us. If we can reclaim America and use BDS of Israel to stop the genocide, bring the war criminals to trial, begin reparations and the rebuilding of a sovereign and independent Palestine, and restore the idea of universal human rights, we can still stop a war of survival between Russia and America, and between our respective allies Iran and Israel. I fear instead we will choose the path of evil as we so often have when the lives of others can become fuel for the power of elites and of imperial conquest and dominion. If we cannot find mercy within us, we will exterminate humankind. Today I fear the Age of Tyrants has begun.
Our world has far too many rulers whose fingers rest on the button of nuclear Armageddon, and like an evil jinn in its bottle it whispers to them with its siren call; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
We are all become Death, destroyer of worlds, and we must resist the seduction of power.
Four years ago on this day I wrote to you from a place similar to Palestine today, a field hospital in the tunnels of Mariupol where the wounded were triaged and those who may live chosen from those who will die, surrounded by men burned beyond recognition by the mobile crematoriums called thermobaric weapons, identities stolen by brain damage from shrapnel and concussive force and disconnected from themselves with memories possibly forever lost, missing limbs from the violence of others and parts of their humanity from the violence they themselves have committed for war generalizes moral harm and degradation, many with families annihilated in the cauldron of war, who sing a litany of pain and fear and loss; and I believe I understand the place from which Samuel Beckett speaks to us.
All the works of Samuel Becket are masterpieces, are unparalleled, revelatory and stunning. I would first read Waiting for Godot, as everyone else has, and after that my favorite, The Unnamable.
The Unnamable, final and most ferocious novel of his magnificent and terrifying trilogy, is a monologue summarizing the great themes of his works without characters, plot, or setting in the usual sense of literary devices.
There are many things it is not, as Samuel Beckett’s critique of language as a mechanism of social control and theft of identity recalls that of Gertrude Stein and travels in the direction opposite the joyful myriad experiments of his long collaborator James Joyce; yet it remains a brilliant and stunning set of arguments for the meaninglessness and emptiness of values and of being in a universe empty of imposed meaning in which we are free to create ourselves by our own poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of humankind.
What else may one expect of an author whose references include Lautréamont’s Maldoror, de Sade, Bataille?
An extension of Sartre’s Existentialism which develops Absurdist Nihilism as a radical notation of its parent philosophy, and reflective aesthetically of the theatre of Eugene Ionesco and Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett’s idea of Negation rests on premises of authenticity and alienation, and is intended as an act of liberation and an answer to human suffering as a condition of being.
For myself, it is also a sustained critique of Hope, that last gift or curse of Pandora’s Box, and whether Hope is a gift or a curse has been a defining question for me across the last forty years of revolutionary struggle and the quest to discover and find solutions for the origins of evil and the social use of force as violence and tyranny.
Beckett’s Principle of Negation finds its form in the art of silences and blank spaces; here we become the disembodied voices of Molloy or the trapped and dehumanized figures of David Rabe’s Recital of the Dog or Kobo Abe’s The Box Man.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Let us pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Our performance of identities is a theatre of possibilities, of negotiations and dances with normativity and the transgression of boundaries, of the questioning and reimagination of idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of self-creation as liberation and autonomous total freedom, a quest for our uniqueness and for the human transcendent, and of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
I have often wondered if Samuel Beckett was influenced by Nagarjuna, who denies both the existence of the soul and possibly of existence itself, or other Buddhist philosophers, with which he aligns. Certainly the influence of Nietzsche was formative to his ideas, though the Grief of Influence extends both inwards and outwards..
Samuel Beckett influenced Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze; among the essays of The Infinite Conversation there are dialogues between himself and his friends Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille. Blanchot wrote of him in the essay Where now? Who now?; Alain Badiou’s essay on Worstward Ho, Being, Existence, Thought: Prose and Concept, among the collected essays published as On Beckett, remains unexcelled.
His influence on modern theatre begins with his protege and collaborator Harold Pinter, and includes Sam Shepard and Edward Albee.
Both a direct refutation of the Biblical concepts of sin, soul, cosmological design, historical purpose and teleology, and divine authority, and an original and visionary reimagination of the human condition, the works of Samuel Beckett are integral to our civilization and among its finest achievements.
As I wrote in my post of December 21 2023, This Midwinter Solstice, Confront the Meaninglessness of Life Not With Abjection, Despair, and Helplessness But With the Joy of Total Freedom; As we enter the Christmas season on this Midwinter Solstice, the day of most profound and deepest darkness, a time much of America will be consumed by orgiastic buying as displays of elite class membership and obligatory feasts often with people we don’t actually like or deeply know, adrift in a universe without imposed values living lives of random chaotic episodes of being which form no grand design, ephemeral and illusory, subjected to totalizing passions and caught in vast invisible systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization enslaved to authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege like Charlie Chaplin eaten by the gears of the machine he serves in The Factory, let us confront the meaninglessness of life and the terror of our nothingness not with abjection, despair, and helplessness but with the joy of total freedom.
When there are no rules, there are no impossibilities.
Merry Christmas, and don’t forget to run amok and be ungovernable.
At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom.
The citizens of Hungary have for days now been celebrating the fall of Victor Orban in this weekend’s elections, long before he conceded defeat, so massive was the movement to restore democracy and liberate Hungary from Russian influence, a tidal change event which will deny the Nazi revivalists a safe haven for the reconquest of Europe and redirect the flow of history to the values of the Enlightenment encoded in democratic societies; liberty, equality, the universal Rights of Man, testable truth, and justice for all.
The Bearded Lady J.D. Vance had been campaigning for Orban and his fascist kleptocracy of white supremacist nationalism and theocratic terror which has been a model for the Trump regime and for all those who would enslave us. And the American Fourth Reich has failed to win allegiance and keep its ally in power, as has Putin’s regime in Russia which also interfered with the Hungarian elections as it did our own in Trump’s Stolen Election of 2016.
Orban has fallen today, will Trump follow? Will the other tyrants of the Fourth Reich, Italy’s Meloni, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and others also be cast down from their thrones of hate, lies, and greed? Will the political parties which threaten imperiled democracies in Europe, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in Britain, Santiago Abascal’s Vox in Spain, and far too many others be prevented from capture of the state such as America has endured?
A post Orban Hungary will face many of the challenges of a post Trump America, and the Restoration of democracy in Europe will be neither quick nor easy, as the failure of the Democrats to hold the Presidency against recapture of the state by Trump in our last election proves.
Can the cordon sanitaire against fascism be restored?
As written by Sreve Benen in The Rachel Maddow Blog, in an article entitled Orbán’s defeat in Hungary is also a major loss for Trump and the right in the U.S.: The ripple effects of Hungary’s lopsided elections will be felt far and wide — including in the White House, where the prime minister had a powerful fan; “Donald Trump has thrown his public support behind plenty of foreign allies ahead of their various elections, but the American president’s support for Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was qualitatively different from anything he’s done before. This was an instance in which the Republican saw a kindred spirit in need of a rescue, which Trump appeared desperate to provide.
To that end, Trump not only deployed his vice president to Hungary to campaign for Orbán, he also publicly pledged, just two days before Election Day, to “use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian People ever need it.”
The message was not subtle. It also didn’t work. The Associated Press reported:
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán conceded defeat on Sunday after what he called a ‘painful’ election result, ending 16 years in power for a powerful figure in the far-right movement allied with U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Partial official results show opposition leader Peter Magyar’s party dominating the vote, in a bombshell election result with repercussions around Europe and beyond.
Orbán, who has long positioned himself as Europe’s most regressive and undemocratic leader, was trailing badly in public opinion polls in the run-up to balloting, but given the degree to which he and his party had manipulated the country’s electoral system, there were still some doubts as to whether the results would reflect the people’s will.
The vote tallies were so lopsided, however, that the center-right opposition party, Tisza, dominated anyway.
The obvious beneficiaries of the election will, of course, be the citizens of Hungary, who should expect to see their country move away from far-right authoritarianism, distance itself from Russia and embrace long-overdue economic reforms, all while strengthening the country’s ties to the European Union.
What’s more, as political scientist Jacob Levy explained, “It’s not just that Orbán losing inspires hope in other competitive-autocratic countries ruled by right-wing nationalist authoritarians. It’s that his loss materially changes things in those other countries, because he’s been operating as a headquarters and funding source for the international ideological movement.”
It’s a key detail. Under Orbán, Hungary had become an incubator for transforming democratic systems into authoritarian models. His sweeping defeat is a brutal setback for the broader movement. This includes his many admirers in the Republican Party and throughout much of the American right — including Trump, who enthusiastically embraced Orbán and welcomed him repeatedly to the White House and Mar-a-Lago.
The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg noted in a column, published the day before the election, “Orbán has long held out the system he created in Hungary, which he calls ‘illiberal democracy,’ as a workable Christian nationalist alternative to Western liberalism, and its example has proved enormously influential. In 2022, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said, ‘Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.’ More than any other politician, Orbán showed conservatives worldwide how to use government power to wage the culture wars. He crushed a prominent liberal university, banned ‘homosexual propaganda’ in schools — a forerunner of Florida’s infamous ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law — and engineered the takeover of major media outlets by his allies. Steve Bannon once described Orbán as ‘Trump before Trump.’”
By Trump’s own admission, when he publicly touted “a strongman” system and endorsed the idea that democratic traditions needed to be overhauled, he made no effort to hide his belief that Orbán offered a model worthy of emulation.
It was a model, however, that ultimately failed, rejected by its victims.
No wonder the president didn’t want to talk about it on Sunday night.”
As written by Ashifa Kassam and Flora Garamvolgyi in The Guardian, in an article entitled Hungarian opposition ousts Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power
Péter Magyar’s Tisza party wins election as prime minister concedes defeat, in result likely to reshape ties with EU; “Hungary’s opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, has won the election, bringing an end to Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power, in a result that is likely to rattle the White House and reshape the country’s relationship with the EU.
Less than three hours after polls closed on Sunday, Orbán conceded defeat after what he described as a “painful but unambiguous” election result.
“I congratulated the victorious party,” the rightwing populist told supporters in Budapest. “We are going to serve the Hungarian nation and our homeland from opposition as well.”
With 98.74% of the vote counted, Magyar’s Tisza party was projected to have won 138 of the 199 seats in the country’s parliament, giving them a super-majority capable of amending the constitution and key laws, suggesting they would be able to reverse some of the changes made by Orbán and Fidesz, and potentially unlock EU funds.
Fidesz won 55 seats, while the extreme-right Mi Hazánk party won six.
Magyar, who pledged to repair Hungary’s strained relationship with the EU, crack down on corruption and funnel funds towards long-neglected public services, said Tisza voters had rewritten Hungarian history.
“My fellow Hungarians, we have done it!,” he told the tens of thousands of jubilant supporters who had gathered along the banks of the Danube river to celebrate.
“Tonight, truth prevailed over lies,” said Magyar, 45. “Today, we won because Hungarians didn’t ask what their homeland could do for them – they asked what they could do for their homeland. You found the answer. And you followed through.”
The election was being closely watched around the world as a test of the resilience of the Maga movement and the global far right, many of whom have long looked to Orbán as an inspiration and sought to follow his playbook.
Days before the election, JD Vance had travelled to Budapest, with the US vice-president saying that he had come to “help” Orbán. Donald Trump had also repeatedly endorsed Orbán, most recently on Friday when he vowed to bring US “economic might” to the country if Orbán was re-elected.
US Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, the US House of Representatives minority leader, said the results of the Hungarian election did not bode well for the Trump administration. “Far-right authoritarian Viktor Orbán has lost the election,” he wrote on social media. “Trump sycophants and Maga extremists in Congress are up next in November. Winter is coming.”
In recent months, Orbán, 62, had also been endorsed by rightwing and far-right leaders ranging from France’s Marine Le Pen to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
Meloni was among those who congratulated Magyar on Sunday night, promising her country’s continued cooperation and wishing him success. She added: “I thank my friend Viktor Orbán for the intense collaboration over the years, and I know that he will continue to serve his nation, also from the opposition.”
Leaders from across Europe hailed the result, with Keir Starmer describing it as a “historic moment, not only for Hungary, but for European democracy” on social media.
In recent weeks, the antagonistic relationship between Orbán’s government and the EU had plunged to new lows, after Orbán vetoed further EU sanctions on Russia, as well as an additional €90bn (£78bn) loan for Ukraine. Tensions between Budapest and Brussels had since boiled over, following allegations that Orbán’s government had shared confidential EU information with Moscow.
News of the change in government prompted an outpouring of response from across the EU. “Europe’s heart is beating stronger in Hungary tonight,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. “A country reclaims its European path. The Union grows stronger.”
Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, welcomed Magyar with a jibe at Orbán. “Back together! Glorious victory, dear friends!” he posted on social media, adding in Hungarian: “Russians, go home!”
Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, said he had spoken with Magyar to congratulate him, while the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said he was “looking forward” to working with Magyar.
From Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the country was ready to advance our cooperation with Hungary, even as Magyar has said he would continue Orbán’s opposition to sending arms to the country and fast-tracking EU entry for Kyiv. “We are ready for meetings and joint constructive work for the benefit of both nations, as well as peace, security, and stability in Europe.”
One poll suggested that as many as 65% of voters under the age of 30 were planning to cast their vote against Orbán. Photograph: Dénes Erdős/AP
As Magyar crisscrossed Hungary during the campaign, holding as many as six rallies a day, Orbán had consistently trailed in the polls, suggesting the election was poised to end his efforts to transform Hungary into a “petri dish for illiberalism”.
His rightwing populist government used its time in office to steadily whittle away at the checks and balances that constrained its power: rewriting election laws to its own benefit, manoeuvring to put loyalists in control of an estimated 80% of the country’s media, and retooling the country’s judiciary.
Ahead of the election, as the government stepped up its efforts to clamp down on dissent, local resistance swelled, bursting into public view as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Budapest in June in defiance of the government’s efforts to ban Pride.
Sunday’s election saw a record turnout of nearly 80%, according to the National Election Office. The result was likely due, in part, to the massive number of youths who mobilised against Orbán. One poll suggested that as many as 65% of voters under the age of 30 – many of whom had come of age as the country plunged in press freedom rankings, was accused of being an “electoral autocracy”, and became the most corrupt country in the EU – were planning to cast their vote against Orbán.
On Sunday evening, many of them thronged the banks of the Danube, chanting “We did it!” while others chanted “It’s over!” as they made their way through the city’s metro stations.
“The dictatorship, rightwing ideology and all of that will disappear now, and we have a chance for a better country,” said Nóri, 24, as tears welled in her eyes. “I’m feeling hopeful and happy.”
The view was echoed by Anna, 24. “I really hope these next four years will be better than the past 16.”
The result was also welcomed by Ervin Nagy, one of Hungary’s most well-known film actors. “For the next four years Hungarians can expect safety, peace, freedom, and that no one will interfere in their lives,” said Nagy, who actively participated in Tisza’s campaign from early on.
Analysts were swift to warn that change would probably come slowly. During Fidesz’s 16 years in power, the party stacked the Hungarian state, media and judiciary with loyalists; how they would respond to a change in government was now up in the air.
“The path ahead for Hungary is a complicated one – Fidesz’s control of the business sector, media, public administration, and the judiciary reaches far and deep,” said Dalibor Rohac, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“The message of this election, however, is a clear one: Orbán’s (and Trump’s) ideological project has had a test run of 16 years, and it has been a spectacular political, economic and social failure,” he said. “The defeat of ‘Orbánism’ is an opportunity to repudiate its iterations existing in other western democracies and to charter a more constructive, less polarised trajectory for pluralistic societies.”
Others pointed to all that Magyar and Tisza had been up against. In the lead up to the election, billboards generated with AI and paid for by the government became a mainstay across the country, depicting Magyar as a danger to the country and a stooge of the EU and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Tisza could win against all odds: help from the United States and from Russia, a massive state disinformation machinery, and all state institutions helping Fidesz,” said Péter Krekó, the director of the Budapest-based Political Capital thinktank.
While the super-majority would help the party, the expectations would be “huge and it will be difficult to deliver on some campaign promises due to fiscal constraints. But given that it was dominantly an anti-Fidesz vote, the new government can manage expectations.”
Botond Feledy, a Brussels-based Hungarian geopolitical analyst, said the result was likely to reset the relationship between Hungary and the EU.
“We can count on a Hungarian government that is constructive yet critical, but fundamentally pro-EU and acting as a full-fledged member of the European Union. And this also applies to Nato relations,” he said.
He described the result as a lesson to other populist leaders in the EU. “Patriots for Europe certainly need to study a lesson that adds to the list of challenges in the populist playbook,” he said. “It’s not so easy to make promises to people when the system delivers nothing, and it’s impossible to build a virtual reality that is so far removed from reality.”
As written by Ashifa Kassam and Flora Garamvolgyi in The Guardian, in an article entitled Zebras, wealth and power: Hungary’s election tests Orbán’s grip on power; “The drone footage showed a sprawling residence in northern Hungary, complete with manicured gardens, a swimming pool and an underground garage. But it was what came next that captured much of the country’s imagination: zebras darting across the countryside.
The property caught on camera belongs to the father of the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, offering a glimpse of the staggering wealth amassed by his inner circle, even as most in Hungary have become poorer. References to the zebras – which came from a neighbouring property belonging to Orbán’s best friend and Hungary’s richest man, Lőrinc Mészáros – soon began turning up across the country; plush toys were sold at protests, people posted videos of their own treks to spot the animals, and photos of zebras were plastered over government billboards.
“They became a symbol of the limitless corruption of the whole system,” said Ákos Hadházy, a Hungarian independent MP who last autumn organised a series of “safari tours” to the area in protest.
Those protests were just one part of a swelling opposition movement that has left Orbán facing the prospect of being ousted after 16 years in power.
The scope of this movement is set to be laid bare on Sunday, as Hungarians cast their votes in an election widely seen as the most consequential since the country’s transition to democracy in 1990.
Most polls suggest Orbán and his Fidesz party – who have transformed Hungary into a “petri dish for illiberalism” – could lose power, in a result that could rattle global far-right movements and reshape Hungary’s antagonistic relationship with the EU. But opposition supporters fear the polls are underestimating support for Fidesz, or that Orbán will find a way to retain power even if he loses the election.
“Hungary stands at a historic crossroads once again,” said Anita Orbán of the opposition Tisza party, the political force that has shaken up the race and now leads in most polls. “This moment carries powerful echoes of the past.”
The election comes 23 years to the day after Hungarians voted overwhelmingly to join the European Union. “Now, on 12 April, once again, voters are not simply choosing between parties, but deciding the direction, identity, and future of Hungary,” Anita Orbán, no relation to the prime minister, said on social media. “In many ways, this election is a referendum on whether Hungary returns to European values.”
It was a hint of how much has changed in Hungary since Orbán took power in 2010. What followed was, in the words of Zoltán Kész, a former member of the Fidesz party, nothing less than a “coup in slow motion,” albeit one that eschewed tanks for lawyers and clientelism.
The rightwing populist government had used its time in office to steadily whittle away at the checks and balances that constrained its power: rewriting election laws to its own benefit, manoeuvring to put loyalists in control of an estimated 80% of the country’s media, and retooling the country’s judiciary.
“We’ve come to the point in Hungary when we obviously can no longer talk about a real democracy,” said Kész. “It’s really a state capture that has been going on in Hungary with all the institutions that are supposedly independent. Whether it’s the courts or public services, they’ve been captured by one party, basically.”
On the streets and across dining room tables, Hungarians readily shared how this has played out in practice, from the university professor who has lost his job after speaking out against the government, to the music venues shut down after hosting artists who backed the opposition, and journalists whose newsrooms became government mouthpieces overnight after changes in ownership.
When Hungary’s economy was growing, many paid little attention to what was happening, said Kész. But as inflation soared after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and economic stagnation set in, rumblings began over the growing disconnect between ordinary Hungarians and its ruling class.
It was against this backdrop that Péter Magyar, a former member of Fidesz’s inner circle, began speaking out. As he accused Orbán’s party of branding itself as a defender of Hungarians while siphoning off state funds, corruption rocketed to the top of voters’ concerns and Magyar’s hastily formed party climbed to the top of the polls.
Magyar’s lead has held as the government attempted to ban Pride events and mulled hardening its longstanding clampdown on independent media and NGOs.
What Magyar is up against is visible across Hungary: the omnipresent billboards, generated with AI and paid for by the government, depicting him as a danger to the country and a stooge of both the EU and the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The result is a campaign that has pitted fear against hope, as one Hungarian news outlet noted this week. Orbán – whose government did not respond to a request for an interview – has sought to convince voters that Hungary’s biggest risk lies in the war in Ukraine, casting himself as the only leader capable of keeping peace. Magyar, in contrast, has focused on domestic issues, promising to crack down on corruption, funnel funds towards long-neglected public services and repair the country’s strained relationship with the EU.
A two-minute video released in January made clear the outsized role that the election in a country of less than 10m people, which produces 1.1% of the EU’s GDP, would play on the world stage.
Nearly a dozen rightwing leaders, from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini to France’s Marine Le Pen, endorsed Orbán, praising the path he had blazed in Hungary. “Europe needs Viktor Orbán,” Germany’s Alice Weidel, a co-leader of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), tells viewers in the video.
The extent of Orbán’s reach was laid bare this week as JD Vance landed in Budapest with his wife, Usha. As he campaigned with Orbán, the US vice-president parroted much of Fidesz’s campaign strategy, railing against the EU and taking shots at Ukraine. On Friday, Donald Trump posted : “I AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY!”.
“I think the symbol of Orbán losing should not be underestimated,” said Daniel Freund, a German Green MEP who has long sounded the alarm on democratic backsliding in Hungary. “He is the absolute poster boy of this whole movement of the illiberal, anti-European, extreme right. He is the icon and the example that others follow.”
Vance’s visit was the culmination of years of precise targeting by Orbán, said Dalibor Roháč, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. After Orbán’s allies cast him as a model for Trump and others, the Hungarian government is alleged to have spent millions of euros on US lobbyists, tasking them with peddling this narrative in Washington.
Their efforts soon paid off, with people such as Kevin Roberts, the head of the US Heritage Foundation thinktank that produced Project 2025, describing Hungary as the model for conservative statecraft, “Orbán kept investing in these relationships and bringing people over,” said Roháč.
Budapest has swiftly become a hub of thinktanks and conferences aimed at amplifying the idea of Hungary, in the words of one local journalist, as a “Christian conservative Disneyland” where the global far right feels at home.
The global veneration has continued even as the country plunged in press freedom rankings, faced accusations of no longer being a full democracy, and became the most corrupt country in the EU.
As Orbán’s government cozied up to Vladimir Putin, growing more dependent on its crude oil, Budapest acted as a node between Washington and Moscow and offered Maga a jumping-off point to export Christian nationalist and far-right ideology to the rest of Europe.
Vance’s visit was a demonstration of this. While it made headlines around the world, there’s been no indication that it boosted Orbán’s position.
Instead, momentum seemed to be growing for Magyar. On Thursday evening, his supporters packed the central streets of Györ in north-west Hungary. Images of Hungarian flags prompted comparisons to a March rally in the same town, at which Orbán lashed out at demonstrators who booed him, accusing them of being pro-Ukrainian.
The confidence belies a note of uncertainty that has run through the campaign, as it is anyone’s guess as to whether the opposition surge would be enough to dislodge Fidesz. While the polls suggest a Tisza win, undecided voters and Hungarians abroad could still sway the result, as could the already-swirling claims of vote-buying and gerrymandering.
In the small city of Kecskemét, about 50 miles south of Budapest, many said the campaign had done little to endear them to Magyar. “There’s a level of palpable anxiety among people,” said Katalin, 81, citing fears that Hungary would be drawn into the war in Ukraine. “I don’t think that the Ukrainian people want a war, but their leader might.”
It was a thought that made Zsuzci, 83, shake with fear. “At this point, we can only pray,” she said. “I’m praying to preserve a Christian Hungary. We’ll get dragged into the war in Ukraine if Péter Magyar wins and he’ll also let in the migrants – he does exactly what the European Union tells him to do.”
Regardless of the outcome, it’s clear that Sunday’s vote marks the beginning of a wider reckoning with Hungary’s foray into illiberalism, said Kész. “Under normal circumstances, you lose an election, so what? You go in opposition, you come back in four years. That is a normal democracy, but this is not normal.”
During Fidesz’s 16 years in power, the party stacked the state, media and judiciary with loyalists, suggesting that Orbán’s system could survive him even if he loses.
“Even under the ideal circumstances, change will not happen overnight,” he said. “If you look at the state of the education system, if you look at the state of healthcare, courts, public services, and you name it – these need to be built up again from scratch. There’s a lot of work to be done by a new government.”
As written by Imre Szijarto in Jacobin, in an article entitled Hungary’s Narrow Path Out of Orbánism: Elections on Sunday could finally remove Viktor Orbán from power. Opposition forces have rallied behind rival candidate Péter Magyar, less out of belief in his program than from desperation at the country’s authoritarian turn; “ver since Viktor Orbán’s far-right Fidesz party came to power with a sweeping supermajority in 2010, Hungary’s democratic institutions have faced constant pressure. Orbán called his victory a “revolution in the ballot box” and proceeded to systematically dismantle most institutional checks on his personal power. He adopted a new constitution, brought the Constitutional Court under party control, changed the electoral system, and redrew electoral districts to give his party a significant advantage.
There was more. Orbán used his political power to enrich friends and family members, consolidated most of the media market in the hands of loyalists, turned the public broadcaster into a propaganda outlet, and weaponized the state to bully NGOs, academics, labor unions, and the remnants of the independent press into silence.
While elections remained technically free, they were anything but fair. The systematic distortion of the playing field in favor of Fidesz produced three subsequent supermajorities in the 2014, 2018, and 2022 parliamentary elections.
The outlook for this Sunday’s vote, however, looks very different.
In previous “free but not fair” elections, the only realistic question was whether the incumbent ruling party would maintain its two-thirds supermajority. Today all independent polling institutes report a comfortable lead for the opposition, in percentage terms at least. A recent poll by independent pollster Medián showed a 20 percent lead for the center-right Tisza (Respect and Freedom) Party, though government-aligned counterparts continue to report that Orbán’s party remains ahead.
The main opposition runner, the center-right Péter Magyar, also appears to be the bookmakers’ favorite. It is likely no coincidence that Hungarian authorities banned Polymarket for “facilitating illegal gambling” just as the campaign began. Another clue to the genuine unpredictability of this election is that publicly traded shares of Orbán-affiliated companies consistently trended downward in the last weeks of the campaign.
While the outcome remains highly uncertain, that uncertainty itself makes this contest unprecedented in recent Hungarian history.
To make matters worse for Orbán, a sequence of scandals shook Hungary ahead of the vote. In December, leaked video footage revealed severe cases of child abuse in state-run children’s homes. In February, the public learned how the government enabled Samsung to expose workers to toxic chemicals in a battery plant. Some workers were allegedly asked to take rotating shifts within the most contaminated zones, a practice reminiscent of repair works in the Chornobyl exclusion zone. In March, a detective from the National Bureau of Investigation revealed a plot by the country’s secret service to infiltrate and cripple Magyar’s Tisza Party using intimidation, blackmail, and bribes.
Despite his scandals and their own favorable polling, opponents of Orbán still face a challenging period ahead. Due to systematic gerrymandering, Fidesz could secure a parliamentary majority, even if most voters cast their ballots for the opposition. The incumbents can also rely on a neo-feudal network of local elites used to bribe or coerce some rural low-income communities to vote for Fidesz. While the outcome remains highly uncertain, that uncertainty itself makes this contest unprecedented in recent Hungarian history.
(Counter)-Populism
The meteoric rise of Magyar and his Tisza Party has transformed the Hungarian political landscape. In 2024, the public learned that President Katalin Novák had pardoned a man serving a prison sentence for covering up child sexual abuse. Magyar rose to prominence after releasing a taped recording of his wife, the justice minister, implicating other leading politicians in the scandal.
A few months later, the brand-new party of this previously little-known Fidesz member secured nearly 30 percent of the vote in the 2024 European elections and contributed to the near-total collapse of the fractured left-liberal opposition. Magyar positioned himself on the center right, adopted a more pro-EU and pro-NATO stance in foreign policy, and joined the European People’s Party, made up of parties like the German Christian Democrats, in the European Parliament.
Magyar’s Tisza Party is promising something to every electoral bloc, including tax cuts for low-income taxpayers, an increase in pensions, keeping Orbán’s popular tax incentives for families while supplementing them with higher cash transfers, and also maintaining fiscal discipline and avoiding large deficits. These policies would leave working-class Hungarians better off than the status quo, but since increasing the income tax of high earners is not on the agenda, they’d also leave Orbán’s famously regressive tax system largely unaltered.
Péter Magyar positioned himself on the center right and adopted a more pro-EU and pro-NATO stance in foreign policy.
Tisza’s election manifesto promises both tax cuts, increased transfers, and improved public services, while suggesting that anti-corruption measures, a wealth tax on the richest 0.2 percent of households, the confiscation of oligarchs’ illicit wealth, and access to EU funds currently frozen over rule-of-law violations will make these policies fiscally sustainable. Magyar claims to transcend traditional cleavages by populist slogans such as: “There is no left or right — only Hungarian.” If Hungarian Marxist G. M. Tamás were still with us, he would likely repeat his favorite quote from Alain: “Those who cannot decide if they are left-wing or right-wing are right-wing.”
Magyar’s rise coincided with — and contributed to — the fatal decline of various left-liberal formations. Many smaller parties, such as the Hungarian Socialist Party, the neoliberal Momentum Movement, the formerly far-right Jobbik, the Green Party, as well as Budapest mayor Gergely Karacsony’s Dialogue — the Greens’ Party, announced that they will not run in this year’s election to increase Tisza’s chances of ending Orbán’s long tenure. While most leftists and liberals have some reservations about Tisza, most mainstream liberal opinion formers tend to recognize that this is not a normal democratic election and that Magyar might be their only chance of halting further autocratization.
Magyar’s promise of restoring basic democratic standards appears to be enough to rally desperate liberals behind him, while his nationalist rhetoric allows him to gain support among socially conservative voters in Fidesz’s rural heartland. The two small parties left of Magyar that are still running are the Democratic Coalition established by former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, whose unpopular austerity policies directly contributed to Orbán’s first supermajority, and the satirical Two-Tailed Dog Party.
Both are currently polling under the 5 percent threshold needed to enter parliament. If polls are to be trusted, the only party other than Fidesz and Tisza to surmount this hurdle is the Our Homeland Movement, on the lunatic fringe of the Right, bringing together an eclectic mix of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and unapologetic fascists.
In many respects, the secret of Magyar’s success lies in making Orbán “taste his own medicine” by championing a new style of populism suited to the TikTok age. A charismatic orator, he frequently evokes the heroic struggles of Hungary’s 1848 and 1956 revolutions, while pitting “ordinary Hungarians” against Orbán’s kleptocratic elite.
Magyar presents himself as a more credible nationalist than Orbán. On immigration, his party promises to maintain restrictive policies.
Initially, Magyar posted short videos of himself in everyday settings — in the kitchen, at the gym, or at the barber shop. As the election campaign approached, however, his content shifted toward a more statesmanlike image.
While Orbán cozies up to other illiberal leaders in the region, such as Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, Magyar portrays this as a betrayal of Hungarian-speaking minorities in neighboring countries, presenting himself as a more credible nationalist than Orbán. On immigration, Tisza promises to maintain restrictive policies — including the razor wire fence along Hungary’s southern border — but criticizes the government for allowing multinational companies to hire non-EU guest workers on temporary visas.
Civil Society and Mass Mobilization
Hungary’s current chance to democratize does not stem exclusively from the shifts in party politics. It is also contingent on civil society’s ability to mobilize, both to prevent electoral manipulation, if needed, and to ensure that Magyar honors his word once in office. Mass mobilizations already played a significant role in creating a situation in which overturning Orbán is within reach. In March 2025, already trailing in the polls, Orbán announced a sweeping crackdown on the remnants of Hungary’s independent media and civil society. He also warned organizers of the Budapest Pride Parade that any money or effort spent on next year’s event would be wasted.
The effect of these announcements, however, was the opposite of what the government intended. Rather than terrifying civil society actors into submission, the specter of a drift toward open autocracy akin to a country like Belarus reenergized them. The mobilization that followed forced the government to reconsider its promised “spring cleanup.”
To make matters even more embarrassing for the government, the Budapest Pride Parade not only proceeded despite the official ban and threats but became one of the largest public gatherings in recent Hungarian history.
While the Pride ban was likely intended to pressure Magyar into taking a stance on a divisive issue, he stayed out of the controversy, allowing the Green party mayor, Karácsony, to take the lead in making Orbán’s Pride ban unenforceable.
The significance of this massive turnout extends far beyond a show of solidarity with Hungary’s LGBTQ community. Authoritarian leaders have powerful incentives to cling to office by any means available — especially in a kleptocracy like Hungary, where losing control of the justice system could expose corrupt elites to criminal prosecution. In this context, the parade also signaled that any attempt to subvert the election would be a risky gamble, which might not be worth taking, particularly for those with substantial funds in foreign bank accounts.
The Treacherous Path Ahead
Despite the favorable constellation of an opposition in the lead and a mobilized civil society, Hungary’s path toward democratization remains narrow and treacherous. Orban’s camp may opt for dirty tricks out of desperation.
Magyar recently warned the public that Russian-style kompromat may be used against him. He suspects that someone secretly filmed him in an intimate situation. In the current geopolitical climate, fear tactics about war escalation could also frighten voters into supporting the incumbent. Fidesz recently released an AI-generated video depicting the public execution of prisoners of war, implying that Hungary might join the war in Ukraine if voters bring a new government to power.
On Easter Sunday, a week before the vote, Serbian authorities allegedly uncovered a plot to blow up a gas pipeline critical for Hungary’s energy supply. Both Magyar and a former counterintelligence officer suggested that the conveniently timed security threat could be a false-flag operation designed to give Orbán a last-minute boost.
Although largely isolated within the EU, Orbán still has powerful allies abroad, from Moscow to Washington, DC. This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Hungary looked like the “who’s who” of the far-right internationale, with attendees including Javier Milei, Alice Weidel, Eduardo Bolsonaro, and Geert Wilders. Donald Trump assured Orbán of his “total and complete endorsement”; Benjamin Netanyahu thanked him for “standing up for Western civilization, against this tide of radical, fanatical Muslims.” J. D. Vance even visited Hungary just five days before the election to endorse Orbán while also warning of possible interference by “Brussels” — a narrative that could be used to undermine the legitimacy of the results in case Fidesz loses.
Perhaps more worryingly, reports by the Financial Times and the Washington Post suggest that Russian covert operations are currently underway in Hungary to help Vladimir Putin’s most important EU ally stay in power, including by allegedly proposing a plot to stage a fake assassination attempt.
Even in the event of a change in government, democratization remains far from guaranteed. Reversing most of the antidemocratic changes Orbán introduced would likely require a parliamentary supermajority. A new government would also have to govern alongside thousands of Fidesz loyalists deeply embedded in institutions at all levels of the administrative state.
Some polls suggest that a Tisza supermajority is not beyond the realm of possibility. Such a result would allow the new government to enact the institutional reforms needed to restore the rule of law, such as restoring the independence of higher courts, removing the political appointees from the justice system who currently guarantee impunity for corrupt actors, and joining the European prosecutor’s office. Yet it could also tempt Magyar to take control of the very machinery of power Orbán constructed and establish himself as Hungary’s next authoritarian strongman.
In this uncertain climate, civil society organizations that halted Hungary’s slide into “Belarusization” in 2026 must remain vigilant. They will have to prevent potential attempts at electoral manipulation but also pressure a Magyar government to implement the reforms voters mandated.
A Moment of Risk and Opportunity
The weeks ahead carry both significant risks and historic opportunities for Hungarian democrats. While in the worst-case scenario, the regime could cling to power through illegal means, signaling a drift toward open dictatorship, the recovery of Hungary’s diminished democracy is also within reach.
Orbán’s possible departure won’t be a victory for the Left. It would, nonetheless, be a serious blow to the global far right and could offer much-needed hope to citizens in embattled democracies worldwide.”
Should Orban lose his throne, this will be a beginning of the Restoration of Hungary as a democracy and free society of equals, and the path to such a goal will be long and perilous. But a victory today, even a symbolic one, may tilt the balance in favour of liberty and not tyranny.
As written by Gabriela Greilinger and Cas Mudde in The Guardian, in an article entitled Even if Victor Orbán is ousted on Sunday, Hungary’s return to liberal democracy is not guaranteed: Challenger Péter Magyar is no progressive – and after 16 years of creeping authoritarianism, the PM has embedded Fidesz in the Hungarian state; “On Sunday, Hungarians will go to the polls to decide on their country’s direction for the next four years in an election that looks as if it will be a nail-biter. Viktor Orbán, Europe’s longest-serving prime minister – who has been in power for 16 years and transformed his country into an electoral autocracy – could lose the election. Ahead of the vote, EU officials have high expectations for change in Hungary under a potential new leadership. Politico reported that “the Brussels establishment is praying for [Péter] Magyar to win, hoping a Tisza government will deepen ties with the EU”.
Magyar became a trailblazer when he entered the Hungarian political scene in 2024 after a political scandal implicating the former president Katalin Novák and the minister of justice, Magyar’s ex-wife, Judit Varga. By addressing the socioeconomic concerns of ordinary Hungarians, politicising the run-down healthcare and education systems and highlighting the country’s deteriorating economic situation and corrupt government practices, Magyar has steadily risen in the polls.
And yet while an electoral victory for his Tisza party seems within reach, less than a week before the election observers should not set their expectations too high for the election outcome – or for Magyar’s prospects were he to become Hungary’s new prime minister.
First, although all independent pollsters show Magyar and his Tisza party clearly ahead of Fidesz, the prospect of him actually winning the election remains uncertain. While the elections are free, they are unfair, as Orbán has tilted the electoral playing field in his favour over the years, creating an unfair advantage. Measures include repeated gerrymandering, adding “winner compensation” to benefit the strongest party in the districts and granting Hungarian minorities abroad, who are overwhelmingly Fidesz supporters, the right to vote. In addition, investigations have uncovered systematic electoral fraud, including chain voting, voter buying and intimidation, particularly in Hungary’s poorest regions.
Under these circumstances, it remains unclear whether Tisza’s votes will translate into a parliamentary majority, let alone a constitutional majority. Crucially, without a two-thirds majority in parliament it will be near impossible to dismantle the Orbán regime. Over the past 16 years, Fidesz has entrenched its ideas and personnel into Hungary’s political system through cardinal laws that require a supermajority to change or abolish them.
Bringing Hungary back into the fold of electoral democracies would require replacing the Fidesz loyalists who are constitutional court judges and heads of key public institutions, such as the prosecutor general and the chair of the media authority. Making matters worse, Hungary’s president, Tamás Sulyok, elected by parliament, is another Fidesz loyalist who would ordinarily remain in office until 2029. While the president’s role is largely ceremonial, Fidesz has recently passed a bill reinforcing it, possibly in anticipation of being ousted from power in the elections. The president could thus present another obstacle to a Tisza government by sending legislation back or referring it to the Fidesz-packed constitutional court for review.
Given these circumstances, a situation could arise similar to that in Poland when the Law and Justice party (PiS) lost the 2023 elections. After defeating the radical right party, prime minister Donald Tusk was accused of resorting to unlawful means to restore democracy, drawing criticism from legal scholars. In a concerning portent for Hungarian democrats, since the election of PiS candidate Karol Nawrocki as president last year, he has regularly obstructed Tusk’s government by vetoing essential legislation, including a recent judicial reform that was part of the government’s rule-of-law agenda.
A new Hungarian government would face similar obstacles, but an even steeper uphill battle. After 16 years in power, twice as long as PiS in Poland, Fidesz is much more entrenched in the state than PiS ever was, making a return to the status quo ante even more challenging.
Even if Tisza’s vote share translates into a majority in parliament and enables it to implement reforms, democrats should not expect too much from a Magyar government. The leader of the opposition comes from a conservative family and was a member of Fidesz for more than two decades – he spent years working for the Orbán regime and is clearly ideologically aligned with his former party.
In fact, some preliminary analyses of Tisza’s voting patterns in the European parliament suggest that the party mostly aligns with Fidesz, especially on immigration and Ukraine. While this could be tactical, given the sensitivity of these issues in Hungarian political discourse, Tisza’s party programme also vows to reject the EU’s migrant pact and quotas and to oppose Ukraine’s accelerated accession to the EU. So even though Tisza will undoubtedly be a more constructive force in its relations with European partners, some fundamental disagreements will remain.
Finally, although Tisza’s voter base mainly comprises liberal and leftwing voters, progressives should not get their hopes up for a swift transition to liberal democracy in Hungary. According to recent polling, the new parliament will be made up solely of rightwing parties: the rightwing Tisza, the far-right Fidesz and potentially the extreme-right Our Homeland Movement. Magyar, while generally claiming to support equality, has so far avoided taking a clear supportive stance on some core ideological issues, such as LGBTQ+ rights. While this could also be part of a strategic approach to avoid offering Fidesz any vulnerabilities it could exploit for its propaganda, it is also in line with his political history and the rightwing nature of his party’s programme.
Considering the challenges Magyar will encounter if he is elected, not to mention his own rightwing ideology, it seems unlikely that he would prioritise restoring liberal democracy to Hungary beyond trying to undo 16 years of Orbánism. Progressives and democrats need to manage their expectations ahead of Sunday’s vote. As it stands, the best case scenario for Hungary is a return to electoral democracy under a Magyar government. Liberal democracy, however, will probably remain out of reach for now.”
Orban and Trump are linked together as Nazi revivalists committed to the subversion of democracy and the abandonment of the ideas of our universal human rights and of the equality of all human beings. America’s Republican Party has weaponized fear of otherness in service to power much as has Hungary’s Fidesz.
Why should an American political organization which designates itself as “conservative” find a safe haven for Nazi revivalism, allyship, kinship, and an aspirational figure of the America and global humankind they want to shape as our common future in Viktor Orban’s Hungary?
Because here Nazis are celebrated as national heroes, officially and openly in holidays, parades, and monuments. This is unique among nations in all the world, though fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are now the world’s dominant ideology and tyranny has eclipsed democracy as the system by which we have chosen to be human together.
Hungary in the jaws of Viktor Orban models how fear can be weaponized in service to power and identity politics leveraged to manufacture consent and centralize authority. Of this I say; beware of those to claim to speak and act in your name, for they are trying to subjugate you to their will and uses.
And this we must resist. To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of March 31 2020, Democracy Falls in Hungary; As the pandemic disrupts and destabilizes the global order, eager would-be tyrants seize the chance to amass and consolidate power against the forces of democracy pulling structures and systems in the other direction.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban is among the most venal and odious of democracy’s foes, having already established Hungary as a fascist state which lionizes Nazis and provides a secure base of operations and launchpad for the reconquest of Europe by the Fourth Reich.
Yesterday he seized totalitarian powers as well, making Hungary the first nation to surrender liberty to the fear with which the pandemic has gripped the world.
As described in The Washington Post; “A decade under the nation’s illiberal nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, has corroded the state’s checks and balances, cowed the judiciary, enfeebled civil society and the free press, and reconfigured electoral politics to the advantage of Orban’s ruling Fidesz party. So, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Budapest’s ailing democracy proved all too vulnerable.
On Monday, Hungary’s parliament passed a controversial bill that gave Orban sweeping emergency powers for an indefinite period of time. Parliament is closed, future elections were called off, existing laws can be suspended and the prime minister is now entitled to rule by decree. Opposition lawmakers had tried to set a time limit on the legislation but failed. Orban’s commanding two-thirds parliamentary majority made his new powers a fait accompli.”
In the words of Dalibor Rohac; “COVID-19 is about to claim a new victim: Hungary’s democracy.
The country’s parliament is set to adopt a new law that will give the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban a legal mandate to rule by decree, without any sunset clause and without parliamentary oversight. The government initially sought to fast-track the legislation and adopt it already on March 24, but it lacked the supermajority needed to accelerate the proceedings. The party, however, does not lack the votes to ensure that the legislation is passed through the normal legislative process a few days later.
The brazenness of Orban’s power grab is without any parallel in recent European history.
Like Hungary, other European countries have declared a state of emergency and are resorting to draconian measures. They include shutting down air travel, closing borders, restricting personal freedom and even nationalizing sectors of the economy. While all European governments need flexibility in order to respond to the lethal pandemic in real time, any new powers they acquire are subject to parliamentary review and are planned to remain in effect only for limited periods.
Similarly, the Hungarian constitution allows the government to maintain a state of emergency (in place since March 11) only for an initial period of 15 days, after which it must seek parliamentary approval.
Yet instead of asking parliament for an extension for a fixed period, to be followed by another round of parliamentary deliberation if necessary, the new Hungarian legislation would ensure that the state of emergency remains in force as long as the government deems necessary, while normal parliamentary oversight is suspended. Throughout that time, the government would be free to legislate by decree. No snap elections or referendums could be held, and even the rules of procedure of the country’s Constitutional Court could be altered by its president.
The proposed legislation also creates two new crimes. Interfering with the quarantine would lead to a prison sentence of up to five years (eight if anyone dies as a result). More strikingly, to “claim or spread a falsehood or claim or spread a distorted truth in relation to the emergency in a way that is suitable for alarming or agitating a large group of people” would be punishable by up to three years of imprisonment (Section 10 of the law). A government-run news outlet has already called for the prosecution of opposition politicians under the new statute — simply for pointing out the lack of readiness of the country’s public health system.
Everyone should think twice before giving Orban the benefit of the doubt. His decade-long premiership has been marked by a continual assault on any constraints on his power — whether by courts, civil society or the media. Hungary’s previous moves toward authoritarianism were disguised as a necessary reaction to outside threats: foreign corporate interests during the financial crisis, “cosmopolitan elites” during the refugee crisis of 2016, or, whenever the occasion demands, the philanthropist George Soros (a staple of Orban’s nativist playbook).
True to his past, Orban did not hesitate to connect the virus to migration: “We are fighting a two-front war. One front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus. There is a logical connection between the two, as both spread with movement.”
Indeed, the first patient with covid-19 in Hungary appears to be an Iranian student. The government responded by imposing a travel ban on Iran (among other countries) and expelling 15 Iranian students. Yet, the 2,500-strong Iranian student population in Hungary is not a result of uncontrolled immigration imposed from Brussels but of Orban’s conscious policy choices, especially the gradual warming of Hungarian-Iranian and Hungarian-Syrian relations, visible also in the lenient treatment of wealthy Syrians applying for residency in Hungary.
Hungary’s new Law on Protecting Against the Coronavirus demonstrates that Orban will never let a serious crisis go to waste in the quest to entrench himself as prime minister for life. As of now, there are few reasons to believe that his wager will fail, as the combination of nativism and fear of a deadly yet invisible threat makes for a potent political mix. Unless there is strong pushback from Brussels and Washington — which are both understandably preoccupied by more urgent matters — Hungary is bound to emerge from the current crisis as a full-fledged dictatorship.”
As I wrote in my post of March 15 2020, Hungary: in the Shadows of Nazi Revivalism and Dominion; As Viktor Orban elevates Hungary’s Nazi past to a national mythology, Budapest has become a center and staging area for Nazi revivalism throughout Europe. This has occurred in concert with the weaponization of Christian faith and the use of the Syrian and Libyan refugees from the Turkish-Russian conflict of dominion as a fear factor in the seizure of political power by European fascists.
The Fourth Reich has met varying degrees of success in its attempts to reawaken global fascism; there are now many tyrannies and autocracies throughout the world, including the United States of America under Traitor Trump’s Republican alliance of white supremacist terrorists and Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Narendra Modi’s India, and other fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but only in Viktor Orban’s Hungary are actual Nazis celebrated as heroes and zealously sheltered by the power and authority of a government. In Hungary the Fourth Reich has an incubator for the reconquest of Europe.
And this is the nightmare which has come to Texas.
The twilight of democracy looms over the world, and with it comes an age of fascism and of darkness.
To which we may reply with Shakespeare; “”If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
As I wrote in my post of May 21 2022, The World the Fourth Reich Wants to Condemn Us To: Orban’s Hungary; This week’s gathering of global fascist leadership in Hungary holds up a mirror to the world the Fourth Reich and their front organization the American Republican Party wants to condemn us to.
This includes the use of faith and race in divide and conquer strategies of authoritarian state tyranny and terror and the institutionalization of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and Gideonite Christian fundamentalist identity politics, as well as the total control of all information and history by the state as propaganda.
Remember always the names of the fascists attending CPAC, among the most notorious Fourth Reich organizations of global tyranny and terror which in the arrogance of power does not conceal itself and its members, unlike myriads of other such cabals which conceal secret power and agendas of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which wait as ambush predators to pounce on us from the shadows. Remember, and bring a Reckoning.
First we must establish clearly that CPAC is a Nazi revivalist institution, beyond its public identification with White Replacement Conspiracy Theory whose origin is in Nazi antisemitic propaganda. As I wrote in my post of February 28 2021 Nazi Terror and Tyranny: SS Black Magic and Madness at the CPAC Anti-Democracy White Supremacist Rally; When I write of exposure as hunting Nazis, I don’t mean people I disagree with; I mean actual Nazis, members of a network of hate crime organizations committed to our destruction, and only those active threats of hate crime who by mission of action intend death, mass destruction, and harm to others they consider subhuman. This week’s Conservative Political Action Caucus was designed and attended by Nazis as well as ideological fascists, among them the descendants of war criminals our government collected to use against Communists and others they deemed subversive during the Red Scare of the 1950’s McCarthy Era.
They form a global network which I refer to as the Fourth Reich, a secret society whose membership is exclusive to families of the original Nazi loyalists and their allies and minions, thousands and possibly tens of thousands who have had seventy years in which to infiltrate the world’s governments and elites. I say this not as speculation or as a conspiracy theory, but as a simple fact, one which remains a threat to our liberty.
Someone knew enough about black magic as it was practiced by the SS to design the CPAC stage as a Nazi symbol, soul-stealing magic aimed at transferring the life force of the audience to the speaker for the purpose of submission to the leader’s will, exactly as it was used at the Nuremberg Rallies. It is a masterpiece of propaganda, a dog whistle hidden in plain sight which would have gone entirely unnoticed by outsiders but for the many vigilant Norse pagan antifascists who monitor social media.
Among them is my sister Erin, an antifascist and prominent Norse pagan and gythia or priestess, author of Asatru A Beginners Guide to the Heathen Path and manager of the Asatru facebook forum, literate in Old Norse and medieval forms of Gaelic and German among other languages, and practitioner of the traditional arts of galdur or poetic vision, seidr or sacred trance, and berserkergangr or martial arts, and like myself an admirer of Loki the Trickster.
Here is her post on Witches and Pagans entitled The Nazi Symbol That Is the CPAC Stage; “There are photos circulating on social media of the stage of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Caucus. One is included in this blog post. The stage is an odd and awkward looking design that could not have arisen purely from functionality, it looks like “the Odal Rune,” and it appears that the speakers at CPAC will be standing on a Nazi platform.
Let’s talk about Othala as distinct from “The Odal Rune.” The symbol you see in the photo is “The Odal Rune” which is 100% a Nazi symbol. The upturned feet on the ends of the legs appear only on the Nazi version, Odal, not on any version of Othala, the historical rune used in historical heathen alphabets.
A curious thing, though. Modern rune magic has adopted the “symbol upside down = opposite” thing that is common to Tarot cards, aka regular or reversed, and of course the dichotomy between the regular cross and the upside down cross. From the perspective of speakers backstage, the symbol is right side up in this photo, but from the perspective of the audience it’s upside down. Regular Othala in rune readings basically means real estate or psychic inheritance, but the “Odal Rune” is usually said to mean “heritage.” So, whose “heritage” is being protected and encouraged in this photo? Not the audience’s. If whoever designed this stage actually understands magic, the intent is to concentrate power in the hands of the speakers, away from the general public. Magically, it would take heritage energy from the audience and allow the people standing on the platform to vampirize that energy for their own use.
If the intent behind the choice of the shape was not magical, though, it’s probably meant to be a dog-whistle to neonazis. Experts on neonazis are mostly being more cautious about calling this out. American Iron Front tweeted the picture and called it “probably a coincidence.” I’m glad that the anti-fascist community is being careful not to stomp on heathens and pagans when they aren’t sure what symbol they’re looking at. But I’m an expert on heathen symbols and I know this isn’t one. There is no possible way an actual Asatruar drew the footed or winged version on a design program thinking it was a nice historical heathen rune. It’s unlikely the stage designer is heathen, anyway. That is not Othala, the heathen rune, it’s Odal, the Nazi symbol.
You can read about more symbols in my article Heathen Vs. Hate in the latest issue of Witches & Pagans Magazine.”
And why should an American political organization which designates itself as “conservative” find a safe haven for Nazi revivalism, allyship, kinship, and an aspirational figure of the America and global humankind they want to shape as our common future in Viktor Orban’s Hungary?
Because here Nazis are celebrated as national heroes, officially and openly in holidays, parades, and monuments. This is unique among nations in all the world, though fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are now the world’s dominant ideology and tyranny has eclipsed democracy as the system by which we have chosen to be human together.
Hungary in the jaws of Viktor Orban models how fear can be weaponized in service to power and identity politics leveraged to manufacture consent and centralize authority. Of this I say; beware of those to claim to speak and act in your name, for they are trying to subjugate you to their will and uses.
And this we must resist. To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of March 31 2020, Democracy Falls in Hungary; As the pandemic disrupts and destabilizes the global order, eager would-be tyrants seize the chance to amass and consolidate power against the forces of democracy pulling structures and systems in the other direction.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban is among the most venal and odious of democracy’s foes, having already established Hungary as a fascist state which lionizes Nazis and provides a secure base of operations and launchpad for the reconquest of Europe by the Fourth Reich.
Yesterday he seized totalitarian powers as well, making Hungary the first nation to surrender liberty to the fear with which the pandemic has gripped the world.
As described in The Washington Post; “A decade under the nation’s illiberal nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, has corroded the state’s checks and balances, cowed the judiciary, enfeebled civil society and the free press, and reconfigured electoral politics to the advantage of Orban’s ruling Fidesz party. So, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Budapest’s ailing democracy proved all too vulnerable.
On Monday, Hungary’s parliament passed a controversial bill that gave Orban sweeping emergency powers for an indefinite period of time. Parliament is closed, future elections were called off, existing laws can be suspended and the prime minister is now entitled to rule by decree. Opposition lawmakers had tried to set a time limit on the legislation but failed. Orban’s commanding two-thirds parliamentary majority made his new powers a fait accompli.”
In the words of Dalibor Rohac; “COVID-19 is about to claim a new victim: Hungary’s democracy.
The country’s parliament is set to adopt a new law that will give the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban a legal mandate to rule by decree, without any sunset clause and without parliamentary oversight. The government initially sought to fast-track the legislation and adopt it already on March 24, but it lacked the supermajority needed to accelerate the proceedings. The party, however, does not lack the votes to ensure that the legislation is passed through the normal legislative process a few days later.
The brazenness of Orban’s power grab is without any parallel in recent European history.
Like Hungary, other European countries have declared a state of emergency and are resorting to draconian measures. They include shutting down air travel, closing borders, restricting personal freedom and even nationalizing sectors of the economy. While all European governments need flexibility in order to respond to the lethal pandemic in real time, any new powers they acquire are subject to parliamentary review and are planned to remain in effect only for limited periods.
Similarly, the Hungarian constitution allows the government to maintain a state of emergency (in place since March 11) only for an initial period of 15 days, after which it must seek parliamentary approval.
Yet instead of asking parliament for an extension for a fixed period, to be followed by another round of parliamentary deliberation if necessary, the new Hungarian legislation would ensure that the state of emergency remains in force as long as the government deems necessary, while normal parliamentary oversight is suspended. Throughout that time, the government would be free to legislate by decree. No snap elections or referendums could be held, and even the rules of procedure of the country’s Constitutional Court could be altered by its president.
The proposed legislation also creates two new crimes. Interfering with the quarantine would lead to a prison sentence of up to five years (eight if anyone dies as a result). More strikingly, to “claim or spread a falsehood or claim or spread a distorted truth in relation to the emergency in a way that is suitable for alarming or agitating a large group of people” would be punishable by up to three years of imprisonment (Section 10 of the law). A government-run news outlet has already called for the prosecution of opposition politicians under the new statute — simply for pointing out the lack of readiness of the country’s public health system.
Everyone should think twice before giving Orban the benefit of the doubt. His decade-long premiership has been marked by a continual assault on any constraints on his power — whether by courts, civil society or the media. Hungary’s previous moves toward authoritarianism were disguised as a necessary reaction to outside threats: foreign corporate interests during the financial crisis, “cosmopolitan elites” during the refugee crisis of 2016, or, whenever the occasion demands, the philanthropist George Soros (a staple of Orban’s nativist playbook).
True to his past, Orban did not hesitate to connect the virus to migration: “We are fighting a two-front war. One front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus. There is a logical connection between the two, as both spread with movement.”
Indeed, the first patient with covid-19 in Hungary appears to be an Iranian student. The government responded by imposing a travel ban on Iran (among other countries) and expelling 15 Iranian students. Yet, the 2,500-strong Iranian student population in Hungary is not a result of uncontrolled immigration imposed from Brussels but of Orban’s conscious policy choices, especially the gradual warming of Hungarian-Iranian and Hungarian-Syrian relations, visible also in the lenient treatment of wealthy Syrians applying for residency in Hungary.
Hungary’s new Law on Protecting Against the Coronavirus demonstrates that Orban will never let a serious crisis go to waste in the quest to entrench himself as prime minister for life. As of now, there are few reasons to believe that his wager will fail, as the combination of nativism and fear of a deadly yet invisible threat makes for a potent political mix. Unless there is strong pushback from Brussels and Washington — which are both understandably preoccupied by more urgent matters — Hungary is bound to emerge from the current crisis as a full-fledged dictatorship.”
As I wrote ion my post of March 15 2020, Hungary: in the Shadows of Nazi Revivalism and Dominion; As Viktor Orban elevates Hungary’s Nazi past to a national mythology, Budapest has become a center and staging area for Nazi revivalism throughout Europe and the world. This has occurred in concert with the weaponization of Christian faith and the use of the Syrian and Libyan refugees from the Turkish-Russian conflict of dominion as a fear factor in the seizure of political power by European fascists.
Fascism requires others who define the limits of membership and belonging; to make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence and a crime of hate.
The Fourth Reich has met varying degrees of success in its attempts to reawaken global fascism; there are now many tyrannies and autocracies throughout the world, including the United States of America under Traitor Trump’s Republican alliance of white supremacist terrorists and Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Narendra Modi’s India, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, and other fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but only in Viktor Orban’s Hungary are actual Nazis celebrated as heroes and zealously sheltered by the power and authority of a government. In Hungary the Fourth Reich has an incubator and launchpad for the reconquest of Europe.
The twilight of democracy looms over the world, and with it comes an age of fascism and of darkness.
To which we may reply with Shakespeare; “”If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled Viktor Orbán Turns Texas Conference into Transatlantic Far-Right Love-In; “The authoritarian Hungarian leader was embraced as a kindred spirit by Trump fans at the CPAC event in Dallas.
“The globalists can all go to hell,” declared Viktor Orbán. “I have come to Texas!”
The crowd roared, whooped and gave a standing ovation as if at a campaign rally for former US president Donald Trump. It was evident they saw in Orbán a kindred spirit – a blunt weapon to wield against liberal foes.
The Hungarian prime minister was the opening speaker at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, and perhaps the most vivid demonstration yet of the mutual and rapidly growing affinity between the far right in America and Europe.
Orbán, who has been prime minister for 12 years, boasted about his hardline stance on illegal immigration, law and order and “gender ideology” in schools. He touted a rise in marriages and fall in abortions. He was unapologetic in his defence of blood-and-soil nationalism and contempt for “leftist media”.
And extraordinarily for a foreign leader, he overtly sided with an opposition party – the Republicans – rather than the incumbent Democrats, paying homage to Trump at his golf club in Bedminister, New Jersey, while ignoring Joe Biden at the White House.
Calling for Christian nationalists to “unite forces”, Orbán told CPAC: “Victory will never be found by taking the path of least resistance. We must take back the institutions in Washington and in Brussels. We must find friends and allies in one another. We must coordinate the movements of our troops because we face the same challenge.”
He noted that US midterm elections will be later this year followed by the presidential contest and European parliamentary elections in 2024. “These two locations will define the two fronts in the battle being fought for western civilisation. Today, we hold neither of them. Yet we need both.”
Rarely has the alliance between nationalist parties across the Atlantic been so bold, overt and unshackled. CPAC was once the domain of cold warrior Ronald Reagan. But in recent years guest speakers have included the Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage and Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, niece of the far-right French politician Marine Le Pen.
On Friday the lineup included Steve Bannon, who has worked with openly racist far-right leaders across Europe and once leased a medieval monastery outside Rome to run a “populism bootcamp”.
Bannon is former executive chairman of Breitbart News, which he once described as “the platform of the ‘alt-right’”, a movement associated with efforts to preserve “white identity” and defend “western values”. He served as chief strategist in the Trump White House and is now facing prison after being convicted of contempt of Congress for failing to comply with the January 6 committee.
CPAC Texas also heard from the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who railed against the media and told the audience: “When I said that I’m a Christian nationalist, I have nothing to be ashamed of because that’s what most Americans are.” The event will close on Saturday with Trump who, like Orbán, has faced scrutiny over his relationship with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at the non-profit group Right Wing Watch, said: “Rightwing leaders, and especially the religious right leaders in the US, love Viktor Orbán for the same reasons they love Vladimir Putin. This overt embrace of Christian nationalism, willingness to use strongman tactics and the power of the government to enforce so-called traditional values about family and sexuality.”
Montgomery added: “We’ve actually seen some signs of that illiberalism and authoritarianism on the Trumpist right in their efforts to ban the teaching of racism in schools, in their aggressive attacks against LGBTQ materials and information in schools and libraries, and even their encouragement of harassment and violence that we’ve seen against election officials and school board members.
“All those signs are signs of a disturbing embrace of authoritarianism on the US right and Orbán is a model and a hero for that to them.”
Orbán has few bigger fans than Tucker Carlson, a Fox News host who interviewed him during a week-long broadcast from Hungary last year. Carlson has promoted “great replacement theory” – the baseless claim of a plot to turn white people into a minority through immigration – in 400 of his shows, according to an analysis by the New York Times.
Orbán’s visit to the US came amid backlash over anti-migrant remarks in which he warned that Europeans must not “become peoples of mixed race” and cited The Camp of the Saints, a 1973 French novel by Jean Raspail that portrays a dystopia in which a flotilla of south Asian people invade France. The novel has also been promoted by Trump allies such as Bannon and Stephen Miller.
Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Orbán represents a quiet part out loud element of today’s Republican party. That quiet part out loud is the overt appeal to racial politics, the not-bothering-to-hide-it white supremacy element of the global alt-right and authoritarian movement. Donald Trump was the thing that let it loose in the US.
“Orbán has struck a set of blows against the media in Hungary, which is one of their main targets here. He has overtly embraced the sort of white replacement politics that are so popular with the Tucker Carlson set and a lot of the other folks that are members of the American Maga [Make America great again] movement.”
Wilson, author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, added: “Those things have all added up to giving Orbán a kind of fanboy following in the US of people who were once conservative Republicans and who are now racially driven authoritarian wannabes. He’s the guy who’s pulling it off at a scale that Donald Trump didn’t achieve in the US.”
That appeal includes a stealth attack on democracy. Critics say that Hungary’s judiciary, media and other institutions are suffering death by a thousand cuts as Orbán slowly and surely consolidates power. His rightwing Fidesz party has drawn legislative districts in Hungary in a way that makes it very difficult for opposition parties to win seats – not dissimilar to partisan gerrymandering efforts for state legislative and congressional seats in America. The process currently favors Republicans because they control more of the state legislatures that create those boundaries.
And at CPAC, purveyors of Trump’s “big lie” – the false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him – held prominent slots. Mike Lindell, chief executive of MyPillow, pushed preposterous conspiracy theories about voting machines. Several speakers denounced the congressional investigation into the January 6 insurrection as a sham.
Kurt Bardella, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee, said of Orbán: “They see a blueprint for fascism. They see someone who embodies the Republican party’s values of obstructing free and fair elections, of undermining democratic institutions, of expanding government power and politicising the judicial branch, marginalising minority communities and corrupting the pillars of a free society.
“When you talk about an autocratic regime, that’s what Prime Minister Orbán is in Hungary and it’s exactly the blueprint that Republicans are hoping to follow here in the United States of America. It’s not surprising in the least that, especially in a place like CPAC Texas, these rightwing white nationalists are embracing someone like Orbán.”
Earlier this year, when CPAC held an event in Europe, it naturally chose Hungary. Orbán remains an outlier on the continent – for now. Le Pen lost the French presidential election to Emmanuel Macron, though she gained the far right’s biggest share of the vote yet. In Italy Giorgia Meloni, leader of a party with neofascist origins, is strongly positioned to become prime minister after snap elections this autumn.
Robert P Jones, founder and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute thinktank in Washington and author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, said: “There is this identifiable movement. The difference in many of the European countries is it is represented in minority parties.
“In the US now, I think it’s safe to say that this ethno-religious vision of the country has taken over one of our two major political parties. Even demographically speaking, nearly seven in 10 Republicans are white and Christian today in a country that’s only 44% white and Christian. You can see that identity taking hold as the animating beating heart of the party. It’s a really dangerous situation.”
Why should an American political organization which designates itself as “conservative” find a safe haven for Nazi revivalism, allyship, kinship, and an aspirational figure of the America and global humankind they want to shape as our common future in Viktor Orban’s Hungary?
Because here Nazis are celebrated as national heroes, officially and openly in holidays, parades, and monuments. This is unique among nations in all the world, though fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are now the world’s dominant ideology and tyranny has eclipsed democracy as the system by which we have chosen to be human together.
Hungary in the jaws of Viktor Orban models how fear can be weaponized in service to power and identity politics leveraged to manufacture consent and centralize authority. Of this I say; beware of those to claim to speak and act in your name, for they are trying to subjugate you to their will and uses.
And this we must resist. To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of March 31 2020, Democracy Falls in Hungary; As the pandemic disrupts and destabilizes the global order, eager would-be tyrants seize the chance to amass and consolidate power against the forces of democracy pulling structures and systems in the other direction.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban is among the most venal and odious of democracy’s foes, having already established Hungary as a fascist state which lionizes Nazis and provides a secure base of operations and launchpad for the reconquest of Europe by the Fourth Reich.
Yesterday he seized totalitarian powers as well, making Hungary the first nation to surrender liberty to the fear with which the pandemic has gripped the world.
As described in The Washington Post; “A decade under the nation’s illiberal nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, has corroded the state’s checks and balances, cowed the judiciary, enfeebled civil society and the free press, and reconfigured electoral politics to the advantage of Orban’s ruling Fidesz party. So, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Budapest’s ailing democracy proved all too vulnerable.
On Monday, Hungary’s parliament passed a controversial bill that gave Orban sweeping emergency powers for an indefinite period of time. Parliament is closed, future elections were called off, existing laws can be suspended and the prime minister is now entitled to rule by decree. Opposition lawmakers had tried to set a time limit on the legislation but failed. Orban’s commanding two-thirds parliamentary majority made his new powers a fait accompli.”
In the words of Dalibor Rohac; “COVID-19 is about to claim a new victim: Hungary’s democracy.
The country’s parliament is set to adopt a new law that will give the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban a legal mandate to rule by decree, without any sunset clause and without parliamentary oversight. The government initially sought to fast-track the legislation and adopt it already on March 24, but it lacked the supermajority needed to accelerate the proceedings. The party, however, does not lack the votes to ensure that the legislation is passed through the normal legislative process a few days later.
The brazenness of Orban’s power grab is without any parallel in recent European history.
Like Hungary, other European countries have declared a state of emergency and are resorting to draconian measures. They include shutting down air travel, closing borders, restricting personal freedom and even nationalizing sectors of the economy. While all European governments need flexibility in order to respond to the lethal pandemic in real time, any new powers they acquire are subject to parliamentary review and are planned to remain in effect only for limited periods.
Similarly, the Hungarian constitution allows the government to maintain a state of emergency (in place since March 11) only for an initial period of 15 days, after which it must seek parliamentary approval.
Yet instead of asking parliament for an extension for a fixed period, to be followed by another round of parliamentary deliberation if necessary, the new Hungarian legislation would ensure that the state of emergency remains in force as long as the government deems necessary, while normal parliamentary oversight is suspended. Throughout that time, the government would be free to legislate by decree. No snap elections or referendums could be held, and even the rules of procedure of the country’s Constitutional Court could be altered by its president.
The proposed legislation also creates two new crimes. Interfering with the quarantine would lead to a prison sentence of up to five years (eight if anyone dies as a result). More strikingly, to “claim or spread a falsehood or claim or spread a distorted truth in relation to the emergency in a way that is suitable for alarming or agitating a large group of people” would be punishable by up to three years of imprisonment (Section 10 of the law). A government-run news outlet has already called for the prosecution of opposition politicians under the new statute — simply for pointing out the lack of readiness of the country’s public health system.
Everyone should think twice before giving Orban the benefit of the doubt. His decade-long premiership has been marked by a continual assault on any constraints on his power — whether by courts, civil society or the media. Hungary’s previous moves toward authoritarianism were disguised as a necessary reaction to outside threats: foreign corporate interests during the financial crisis, “cosmopolitan elites” during the refugee crisis of 2016, or, whenever the occasion demands, the philanthropist George Soros (a staple of Orban’s nativist playbook).
True to his past, Orban did not hesitate to connect the virus to migration: “We are fighting a two-front war. One front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus. There is a logical connection between the two, as both spread with movement.”
Indeed, the first patient with covid-19 in Hungary appears to be an Iranian student. The government responded by imposing a travel ban on Iran (among other countries) and expelling 15 Iranian students. Yet, the 2,500-strong Iranian student population in Hungary is not a result of uncontrolled immigration imposed from Brussels but of Orban’s conscious policy choices, especially the gradual warming of Hungarian-Iranian and Hungarian-Syrian relations, visible also in the lenient treatment of wealthy Syrians applying for residency in Hungary.
Hungary’s new Law on Protecting Against the Coronavirus demonstrates that Orban will never let a serious crisis go to waste in the quest to entrench himself as prime minister for life. As of now, there are few reasons to believe that his wager will fail, as the combination of nativism and fear of a deadly yet invisible threat makes for a potent political mix. Unless there is strong pushback from Brussels and Washington — which are both understandably preoccupied by more urgent matters — Hungary is bound to emerge from the current crisis as a full-fledged dictatorship.”
As I wrote in my post of March 15 2020, Hungary: in the Shadows of Nazi Revivalism and Dominion; As Viktor Orban elevates Hungary’s Nazi past to a national mythology, Budapest has become a center and staging area for Nazi revivalism throughout Europe. This has occurred in concert with the weaponization of Christian faith and the use of the Syrian and Libyan refugees from the Turkish-Russian conflict of dominion as a fear factor in the seizure of political power by European fascists.
The Fourth Reich has met varying degrees of success in its attempts to reawaken global fascism; there are now many tyrannies and autocracies throughout the world, including the United States of America under Traitor Trump’s Republican alliance of white supremacist terrorists and Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Narendra Modi’s India, and other fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but only in Viktor Orban’s Hungary are actual Nazis celebrated as heroes and zealously sheltered by the power and authority of a government. In Hungary the Fourth Reich has an incubator for the reconquest of Europe.
And this is the nightmare which has come to Texas.
The twilight of democracy looms over the world, and with it comes an age of fascism and of darkness.
To which we may reply with Shakespeare; “”If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
Hungarian opposition ousts Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power
Orbán’s defeat in Hungary is also a major loss for Trump and the right in the U.S.: The ripple effects of Hungary’s lopsided elections will be felt far and wide — including in the White House
‘Hungary has chosen Europe’: EU leaders jubilant after Péter Magyar’s victory over Orbán:: Congratulations pour in from across EU, with leaders from Spain, Poland, France, Britain, Denmark, Romania, Sweden and beyond hailing a new chapter
2026. április 12. Győzelem Magyarország! A fasiszta hullám megfordul Európában
Magyarország polgárai napok óta ünneplik Orbán Viktor bukását a hétvégi választásokon, jóval azelőtt, hogy elismerte volna vereségét. Olyan hatalmas volt a mozgalom a demokrácia helyreállításáért és Magyarország orosz befolyás alóli felszabadításáért, egy olyan árapályos esemény, amely megfosztja a náci újjáéledés híveit Európa visszahódításának biztonságos menedékétől, és a történelem folyását a demokratikus társadalmakban kódolt felvilágosodás értékei felé tereli; a szabadság, az egyenlőség, az egyetemes emberi jogok, a tesztelhető igazság és az igazságosság mindenki számára.
A szakállas hölgy, J.D. Vance Orbánért és fasiszta kleptokráciájáért, a fehér felsőbbrendűséget hirdető nacionalizmusért és a teokratikus terrorért kampányolt, amely modellként szolgált a Trump-rezsim és mindazok számára, akik rabszolgasorba taszítanának minket. Az amerikai Negyedik Birodalomnak pedig nem sikerült hűséget szereznie és hatalmon tartania szövetségesét, ahogy Putyin oroszországi rezsimjének sem, amely a magyar választásokba is beavatkozott, ahogyan a miénket is tette Trump 2016-os ellopott választása során.
Orbán ma megbukott, vajon Trump követi-e? Vajon a Negyedik Birodalom többi zsarnokát, Olaszország Meloniját, Oroszország Vlagyimir Putyinját és másokat is letaszítanak a gyűlölet, a hazugság és a kapzsiság trónjáról? Vajon megakadályozzák-e azokat a politikai pártokat, amelyek veszélyeztetik az európai demokráciákat, Marine Le Pen Nemzeti Tömbjét Franciaországban, Németország Alternatíva Németországért pártját, Nigel Farage Reform UK pártját Nagy-Britanniában, Santiago Abascal Vox pártját Spanyolországban és túl sok más pártot abban, hogy olyan államot hódítsanak meg, amilyent Amerika elszenvedett?
Egy Orbán utáni Magyarországnak számos kihívással kell szembenéznie a Trump utáni Amerika számára, és a demokrácia helyreállítása Európában nem lesz sem gyors, sem könnyű, amint azt a demokraták kudarca is bizonyítja, hogy nem sikerült megtartaniuk az elnökséget Trump államvisszaszerzése ellen a legutóbbi választásunkon.
Visszaállítható-e a fasizmus elleni kordon sanitaire?
Hungary, a reading list
History
The Spirit of Hungary : A Panorama of Hungarian History and Culture,
We confront the ICE white supremacist terror force in mass action throughout America today, for while heroes of our universal human rights and the parallel and interdependent rights of citizens in a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s humanity have cloned the Minneapolis model of solidarity of action and the championing of our American ideals as codified in the great poem by a Jewish girl which greets migrants in New York harbor inscribed on the Statue of Liberty; “give us your tired, your poor, your huddled m asses yearning to be free”, we must do more than wait for the terror force to come for our neighbors and disrupt their programme of ethnic cleansing; we must take the fight to the enemy.
On this first National Fuck Ice Day we hunt the monsters to their lairs and lay siege to the gates of the concentration camps at every known ICE facility location, here in America and at secret gulags throughout the world.
Let us fight them on the beaches, friends.
To fascist tyranny and state terror and to imperial conquest and colonial dominion by the white supremacist theocracy which has captured America, let us offer no quarter.
For ours is a fight for democracy, civilization, and our universal human rights, and all Resistance is War to the Knife. War to the Knife, krig pa kniven, among the few phrases which comes into English direct from Old Norse, and for us it means liberation struggle without pity, fear, or remorse, for those who respect no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
Offer no target, give no warning, leave no trace.
As the fascists who have captured the state as Vichy America begin to collapse, let us unite in solidarity to purge them from among us. Therefore I say; Bella Ciao, Fascists.
As I wrote in my post of April 1 2026, Let Us Enact Reversals of Order and Bring the Chaos: April Fool’s Day; A joke on April Fools Day, because no one would ever do to police terrorists what they do to us all the time.
How to deal with ICE, in a Bizarro World where everything we know is reversed and there is justice for all:
Never let them abduct anyone.
Say nothing to the enemy, and hear nothing they say, because everything the enemy says is a lie.
Never obey, for we are not their property.
Flood them with false leads, fragment their efforts, send up general alarms regarding their movements and actions, set them against each other, rescue and escort their targets to safety, and render them useless and harmless.
Flash mob and capture them. Send them to secret foreign gulags like they do with us at Cecot.
Follow them home and publish their names and addresses. Shame and cast them out.
If they come for us, we come for them.
As the enemy does, so let it be done in return.
This ends the prank part of this communication, which does not authorize direct action in resistance and liberation struggle like Nelson Mandela did against the Apartheid regime on December 16 1977 by underlining a passage of the play Julius Caesar in the Robben Island Bible, a copy of Shakespeare passed among the prisoners;
“Cowards die many times before their deaths.
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.
We come now to the Gate of Decision, and must give answer, with our lives if necessary, to the question with which Tolstoy founded the principle of nonviolent resistance with which Gandhi and Martin Luther King defended our common humanity, and with which Lenin began the Russian Revolution; “What is to be done?”
As I wrote in my post of November 8 2024, Elegy For the Fall of America; In the wake of the Fall of America to the Fourth Reich and the advent of the Age of Tyrants, of the obliteration of possible futures in which humankind survives the terrors and cataclysms to come, our shared public trauma, grief, and rage gathers us all together as it generates waves of consequences which will reach their limit not in the destruction of our nation, nor of our civilization throughout the world, but only in the extinction of humankind.
We are now all of us prisoners of a madhouse run by its most brutal, degraded, perverse, and delusional inmates, the mask of the Fourth Reich which is the Republican Party, and set to enact our authorized identities and declaim our lines with gibbering whimsy by the sadistic fiend who modeled himself on Hitler, lost and won several fortunes as the kingpin of a human trafficking syndicate and launderer of Russian oligarchs secret wealth, whose mission as a Russian spy is the subversion of democracy, and worships only Moloch the Seducer, demon of lies; Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief, Traitor Trump.
This we must Resist; but how?
First, everything the enemy says is a lie. Question, seek proof, test, and share your truths as a witness of history and a truth teller, for to become human is to pursue the truth. Perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. Beware of those who claim to speak and act in your name, for this is a primary strategy of fascism. Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Speak, write, teach, organize. And remember always, silence is complicity.
Second, let us act in solidarity and as guarantors of each other’s parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and universal human rights. Such action gathers momentum and becomes an unstoppable force.
Third, refuse to submit to authority. Never stay down, regardless of the costs, the fear and pain, ostracism and brutal repression. Claw your way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. This is our victory, for it is a power which cannot be taken from us.
So, Resistance is asking questions, witness, and truth telling; solidarity of action, and refusal to submit.
All Resistance is War to the Knife; those who respect no limits and no laws may hide behind none.
Herein two warnings I give; the first is that violence and the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and always operates in both directions, so you must know precisely what consequences you are trying to achieve. My question for the use of force is simple; who holds power? Not who is innocent or the victim, for as Shaw teaches us in My Fair Lady this places a moral burden of judgement on victims, and often there are no innocent. My question for missions of action is, Who is suffering? And because we must avoid the false dilemma of moral equivalence, my rule for changing the balance of unequal power is Malcolm X’s dictum; By Any Means Necessary.
The second is to remember always Nietzsche’s principle; “He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare long into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you.”
As I wrote in my post of February 6 2025, We Rise and Resist: We Seize the Streets In Mass Actions and Protests Throughout America Against Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and Closure of US Aid, Against Musk the Troll King’s Information Warfare, and Against Capture and Dismantling of the State By the Fourth Reich; We rejoice in the glorious Resistance which arose yesterday in mass actions and protests throughout America, against Traitor Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and shuttering of US Aid, and against Musk the Troll King’s monkeywrenching and sabotage of our nation’s social security, medicare, tax, and other financial records, a federal bank heist, espionage, and information warfare performed by his troupe of fascist child soldiers.
In the space of a few days we organized marches on every state capital in America as well as key federal sites in Washington DC, a broad spectrum of alliances and interests which united in solidarity of action to challenge and confront the criminal seizure of our government by the Republican Party, front organization of the Fourth Reich, a liberation movement which parallels legislative and legal actions and theatres of war.
For war is precisely the word for what is now upon us.
America now faces her “fight them on the beaches” moment; though we have been a theatre of the Third World War since the Stolen Election of 2016. But we have never before fought a war of survival against our own captured state.
In this great cause of liberty, equality, truth, and justice for all, of the American Way as a free society of equals wherein we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and rights as citizens who are co-owners of the state, I offer us all the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of darkness and terror; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to Resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
He wrote it in Paris 1940 for the new Resistance, rephrased from the oath of the French Foreign Legion he took in 1928; he said it was the finest thing he ever stole. And we now find ourselves in a parallel situation to that of Vichy France, and must engage the imposed conditions of struggle by the same means and strategies as then; hopefully we have learned a few new tricks since then. But Solidarity is the keystone, with Disbelief and Disobedience on either side.
This, this, this.
When they come for one of us, let them be met with all of us.
As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession and Letter to a Suicide Squad; Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.
Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.
What if we teachers told our students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all except whatever meaning we can bring to it, and the best you can do is survive another day and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the darkness since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.
Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have sometimes forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
Refusal to submit is the primary human act. We can be killed, tortured, starved and imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated so long as we refuse to obey. This is our victory, in which we seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, and nothing can take this from us. In our refusal to submit, disobedience, and defiance of authority we become unstoppable as the tides, for force fails at the point of disobedience and authority has no power which is not granted to it by those it claims, and once questioned, mocked, exposed, and challenged as illegitimate the illusions with which it seduces us vanish into the nothingness from which they came.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?
Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another Last Stand, there is hope.
And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the Unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.
Such is the only possible response to the terror of our nothingness and its weaponization by those who would enslave us; the roar of defiance, as lions who are masterless and free.
Winston Churchill Speech We Shall Fight On The Beaches
As depicted in the film Darkest Hour
text of the whole speech, The International Churchill Society
The magnificent Lt Aldo Raine in the film Inglorious Basterds wears the crossed arrows patch of the First Special Service Force, the Black Devils, whose daring exploits inspired it. After the war the Black Devils were unified with the OSS Jedburg teams to become our Green Berets, the US Army Special Operations Force; this is the tradition of service which I call upon now, and look to for inspiration in combating ICE fascist terror today.
Becky G – Bella Ciao (From the Netflix Series “Casa de Papel”)
February 11 2025 How To Be An Antifascist: Historical Sources and Contexts For The Resistance
January 23 2026 Liberty Versus the ICE White Supremacist Terror Force of the Fourth Reich In the Battle of Minneapolis: the Case of Liam Ramos and the Three Thousand Eight Hundred Stolen Children
June 12 2025 Why We Fight: Authorized Versus Chosen And Ambiguous National Identities As a Ground of Struggle, Symbolized By the Mexican Flag In the Battle of Los Angeles
April 17 2025 Trump Regime Tests Its Power to Violate the Constitution and Abduct and Imprison Without Cause Or Trial Any Random Person and All Of Us: Case of Kilmar Ábrego García
The first lesson of the art of war is Diversion and Surprise. This involves a cornucopia of misdirection, illusion, concealment, and the arts of ambush and improvising channels, traps, and arenas to escape pursuit.
The second lesson is to Be Unpredictable, and use your enemy’s routines against him to create windows of opportunity. Change your patterns and routines, your playbook, rules, strategies and tactics. Surprise yourself, and the enemy too will be surprised.
The third lesson is to Seize the Rules; never play someone else’s game, on their terms or by their rules, but on ground and at a time of your choosing. If you become trapped in such a game, change the rules and make it yours.
The fourth lesson is to Seize Initiative and Control through continuous attack and patterns of action; make the enemy react to you and you will tie up his resources in defense which may otherwise be free to threaten and attack you. Plan ahead of the enemy’s moves, and use patterns and expectations to create dilemmas, openings, ambushes, and traps.
The fifth lesson is to Seize the Timing, or wrongfooting the enemy. No one can be everywhere at once with equal force, and one must gather maximum force and strike where least expected and where the enemy is weakest. This means luring the enemy into being where you want him to be, such as massing forces where they are useless while exposing strategic targets.
The sixth lesson is to Seize the Momentum and point of balance when attacked; defend nothing, but neutralize greater force and power through evasion and redirection. The principles of simultaneous counterattack to seize control as momentum, and of continuous attack as conservation of momentum, work together in this as a Doctrine of No Defense or pure counterattack and ambush.
The seventh lesson is to Embrace Your Fear and use your pain. Why defend when you can counterattack and teach the enemy to fear you? As my father said; “Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?”
The eighth lesson is to Seize the Narrative of the conflict, for all conflict is theatre. Here we instrumentalize history, famously described by CIA Chief of Counter Intelligence Angleton as the Wilderness of Mirrors.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I disambiguate in comparison with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, racism, and capitalism, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
Our goal in revolutionary struggle is to seize the legitimacy and authority of the enemy, to take their power, by claiming the moral high ground, shaping opinion through narratives of victimization and solidarity by championing the people against those who would enslave us. For who stands alone, dies alone; and who stands in solidarity with his fellows becomes unstoppable as the tides.
The last lesson is the same as the first; diversion and surprise.
All else is the will to resist and refusal to submit, beyond victory or even survival.
From the Committee to Fuck Up ICE:
Bring your voice on April 11th. Bring your anger and your humor and your friends. Bring whatever props best express your particular brand of absolutely not. And yes, bring a protest dildo if you have one — because nothing short-circuits the dignity of authority faster than a crowd that is so spectacularly, creatively ungovernable that the cops don’t even know which form to file.
National F%CK ICE Day — April 11th — is a non-violent direct action. Here is what that means in practice:
Do not throw anything at anyone. Not a dildo, not a flyer, not a water bottle, not your feelings. Nothing. The moment a projectile leaves your hand in the direction of a federal agent, you have handed Trump’s goons exactly what they have been waiting for.
Dildos are props. Legally protected, constitutionally enshrined, deeply silly props. Display them with pride. Don’t throw them at anyone.
Know your exit. These agents are trigger-happy. The person running the operation at your location is not the one with the body armor. Know where you’re going if things go sideways and make sure the people around you know too.
You did not sign up for everyone else. If you are personally prepared to get arrested, that is your business and your right. The person standing behind you may not share that risk tolerance. Don’t make decisions for them by escalating.
The world is poorer for her loss. She was a comrade in the Resistance to fascist tyranny and terror, relentless in pursuit of justice, and a champion of our humanity.
My condolences to all her friends and family, but the future does not need our grief; its needs our solidarity of action, refusal to submit, and loyalty to each other of which she remains an example to all who knew her.
Friends, our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus, from which legions arise. And so long as we refuse to abandon our humanity, we shall be victorious.
In memoriam of our comrade Paula Profitt-Cornell I celebrate the grandeur and the glory of all who place our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, as did she. While there are those who do so, hope remains, and we may yet change the balance of power in the world and the direction of our fate, and claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Paula, and to all who live as a fulcrum of change, I’ll see you on the other side of forever.
Vanessa Nassif :
“I have sad news. My dear friend Paula has passed away peacefully in her sleep this morning. She was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer back in August. She said she wanted to make it to Easter and she did. Paula always does what she says she’s gonna do. She was surrounded by her partner of 20 years Luann Redmond, her daughter Tana and her fur baby, Toby.
Paula was a wise woman full of love and compassion. Paula and I worked together admining several large political groups starting in 2019. We worked together with a wonderful team of people and became “Brothers in Arms” so to speak. We came from many different backgrounds but we all knew what was coming with Trump so we banded together and did everything in our power to stop the second term. Paula was very proud of the work she did. When she got sick she video called me and said how sad she was that she couldn’t work anymore. She still tried until she physically couldn’t. Paula put her heart and soul into these groups. She would do research and post thought provoking pieces that really made you think. She was deeply loved and will be sorely missed.
Paula cared about her country and she cared about the people in it. The last time I talked to her she said that the thing that made her sad was that she wouldn’t be here to see the world change. She had faith that it would. My deepest condolences to Lu and Tana. All of my love to you.”
Vanessa Contessa;
“I have sad news. My dear friend Paula ProfittCornell has passed away peacefully in her sleep this morning. She was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer back in August. She said she wanted to make it to Easter and she did. Paula always does what she says she’s gonna do. She was surrounded by her partner of 20 years Luann Redmond, her daughter Tana and her fur baby, Toby.
Paula was a wise woman full of love and compassion. Paula and I worked together admining several large political groups starting in 2019. We worked together with a wonderful team of people and became “Brothers in Arms” so to speak. We came from many different backgrounds but we all knew what was coming with Trump so we banded together and did everything in our power to stop the second term. Paula was very proud of the work she did. When she got sick you see video called me and said how sad she was that she couldn’t work anymore. She still tried until she physically couldn’t. Paula put her heart and soul into these groups. She would do research and post thought provoking pieces that really made you think. She was deeply loved and will be sorely missed.
Paula cared about her country and she cared about the people in it. The last time I talked to her she said that the thing that made her sad was that she wouldn’t be here to see the world change. She had faith that it would. My deepest condolences to Lu and Tana. All of my love to you.”
Andrea Boggs;
“Paula has been my friend since we were 9 years old. She is unforgettable. The loss is immeasurable. I pray that the grieving can eventually turn the void into smiles when I remember all of our sleepovers, antics, crazy double dates as teenagers, sharing our stories of love, motherhood, being a grandma, and our mutual commitment to save our democracy.
She found so much love and peace with Luann. I am blessed to have the honor of their friendship. RIP my beautiful friend. Leave the light on and save me a place.”
Starr Helton;
“I only knew Paula from Facebook but when you are connected to someone for over ten years, you get to know their heart and soul. Paula had the unique ability to make everyone feel special or feel like they were the most important person to her. She put her heart and soul into everything that she did. She worked hard in the groups because she wanted a better world for everyone that she loved. She balanced that intensity with a very funny sense of humor. She loved like she worked with great intensity. She deeply loved and was concerned about Luann who has been a rock through this. She adored Tana and her grandson (?) who was in College. She was so proud of him. She would brag about him all of the time.
We were expecting this but it is still really hard. I know that she has had her Peter Pan wings restored and will be looking over our shoulders to make sure that we are all carrying on as she would want us to. I am from Georgia and if I can do anything to help her loved ones then please let me know and I will do my best.”
Vittorio Felaco:
“My most sincere condolences to a wonderful woman who knew how to guide us to resist till the very end.
Hi Paula!
You knew we were going to be with you till the very end… whenever that was going to be… and will continue to think of you even after the end because good friends and good inspirations are rare and hard to come by.
Stay strong and safe as you go into that dark night with courage and strength and send us good vibes so we may know you are now the saint who will always look over us from above and beyond.
You did so well and have been and are a model of humanness and decency! We remain your devoted friends and coworkers on this planet till our days are done always drawing inspiration from your sacrifices and hard work for all human beings.
Torch of Liberty 
