In the wake of the seizure of St. John’s Church for a photo op and ordering police to assault the protestors who had in reply laid siege to the White House, and the refusal of the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs to obey his orders which invoke the Insurrection Act to send military forces against the Black Lives Matter protests, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, made a desperate and final direct call to Putin, after several throughout the previous two months as his regime began to crumble, in which he asked Putin to send the Russian Army to occupy America’s cities.
This was both the final act of madness and the moment of the Fourth Reich’s fall in our nation, as tyranny discovered its limits in a democracy wherein the faith and loyalty of the people to its institutions and ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice remain unbroken despite massive infiltration and subversion of our government from the Presidency through every level and branch by agents of fascism and the influence of foreign tyrants.
Sadly we have yet to purge our destroyers from among us; that great work remains for the future, though many of the principal traitors have been exposed or revealed themselves in refusal to denounce the January 6 Insurrection or to convict Trump and all his minions as treasonous and disloyal foreign spies.
America as a free society of equals and a guarantor of global democracy and our universal human rights, as with democracy throughout the world, remains under existential threat by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil; but we may also say with William Ernest Henley; “my head is bloodied, but unbowed.”
Unconquered; the only title worth having, an idea which has continued to inform, motivate, and shape me since I first discovered it in a poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, as a high school Freshman.
At the first assembly of the new school year members of the incoming class were asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. Ours was a town divided by church affiliation of which my family and I were members of neither and rare new arrivals, my father having been hired as a teacher by the high school; the quiet and unsmiling black garbed Dutch and their Reformed Church, affiliated with that of South Africa’s Apartheid regime, grim giants with snow white hair like Harry Potter villains who thought music and dancing were sinful and whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, and the loud and laughing, earthy, polka dancing, sawdust pit wrestling Swiss and their Calvinist Church, who served beer to anyone over the age of twelve.
Among my earliest memories was when a Dutch man married a Swiss girl, and the town called it a mixed marriage and burned a cross on their lawn.
I asked a neighbor boy among the mob laughing and running about with torches why they were setting fires and he said “We’re punishing the bad people”.
Then I asked my mom, “Are they bad people?”
She said no, and pointed at the crowd with torches, “These are the bad people. And they are always our enemies, yours and mine.”
My next question was, “Why are they bad?”
And she forever simplified a complex set of issues for me with her answer; “Because they want to make everyone the same.”
Here I was notorious, an outsider having arrived as a first grader who attended no church at all and the student for whom prayer in school had been discontinued at the ferocious insistence of my mother, lifelong member of the Peace and Freedom Party because of their platform which included taking the anticommunist propaganda slogan In God We Trust off our money. I had adopted Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-narrative to the Bible the previous year and often quoted it in refutation to my fellow students attempts to cite Biblical authority in the repression of dissent.
My parents were formidable figures who were also misfits; my mother, whose speech was full of Yiddish vocabulary and phrases from my maternal great grandmother; mom’s dual home languages were English and the family German, actually Wienerisch or the Viennese dialect of Austro-Bavarian blended with Schönbrunner Deutsch, a sociolect of the Hapsburg imperial court from my grandfather; grandpa knew Latin, taught himself English from reading newspapers, and to various degrees knew other languages of the Austrian Empire including Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, the Romance language Venetian, and could speak Russian and Polish well enough to do business in their communities here in America.
My mother was a radical atheist, feminist, and peace activist who was also a biologist, psychologist, author, with my father an international class fencer, and scholar of Coleridge and medieval religious art.
My father, who described himself as Cajun and was a nonwhite Louisiana Creole with mostly European but also African and Shawnee ancestry. I am a direct patrilineal descendent of the ally of Scipio Africanus of whom Cicero wrote his treatise on friendship, Laelius de Amicitia, in 44 B.C. We briefly ruled what is called the Gallic Empire in the mid second century A.D., what is now France, Spain, and the British Iles; my ancestors include a deified Roman general and shapechanger, for whom the Bear Dance is still performed in Romania.
Between the fall of the Gallic Dynasty of Rome in 276 AD and coming to America my family were driven out of the Black Forest in 1586 at the start of decades of a witch hunting hysteria. Drachensbrute, Brides of the Dragon, my ancestors were called by Martin Luther, whose fame for grand defiance of Church law eclipsed his infamy as a witch hunter and brutal torturer of women. By modern constructions of race this makes me Bavarian, though we only lived a thousand years or so in Germany and my ancestry in the patriarchal line is equally Shawnee, from the marriage of Henry Lale and Me Shekin Ta Withe or White Painted Dove during the American Revolution.
There is more; the grandmother of Henry claimed to be a Mughal courtier who escaped with Henry’s grandfather from the pirate kingdom of Madagascar after capture from the Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695, Henry being named for the pirate king Henry Every with whom his grandfather sailed; but that is a different story.
To return to my father, the ambiguously ethnic looking high school English, Drama, Forensics, and Fencing Club teacher who was also a counterculture theater director who held court in the San Francisco-Berkeley arts scene and collected intellectuals, including Edward Albee whose plays he directed and William S. Burroughs with whom he practiced magic and whose novel of anarchist werewolves The Wild Boys he may have influenced, both of whom were important personal influences of my childhood.
I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle. Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I’m hoping we can be friends.
The poem I’ve chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. “
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
None who are human are beyond redemption. Sometimes all we need do to conjure the redemptive power of love is offer others entrance into our world, to reveal our pain and our fear, our loneliness and hope of love, the wounds and flaws of our humanity which open us to the pain of others.
This is my advice to anyone who would reach out across the interfaces of our differences to win allies and transform enemies into friends, to all who write, speak, teach, and organize as a fulcrum of action with which to change the balance of power in the world; be unguarded, genuine, raw even, and speak your truth with vision and passion. We must speak directly to the pain we share as fellow human beings to call forth the truth of others.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
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 seize ownership of ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2020, No Velvet Glove, Just the Iron Fist: Trump Attempts to Use Nationwide Protests For Racial Justice Not to Redress Historic Inequalities But to Impose Tyranny; Cowering in his bunker in the darkness, cries of thousands of voices of the marginalized, the dispossessed, and the masses of those re-enslaved through divisions of exclusionary otherness as racist terror thundering through the warrens of his underworld kingdom of lies, Trump made a frantic call to his master in the Kremlin, Putin, former Colonel of the KGB and long his patron and handler.
“Boss? Boss, you gotta get me outta this. Its not going down like we planned. They got the palace surrounded. What do I do?”
“Listen Donald, there’s nothing you can’t solve with greater force. You like Napoleon, right? Conquered Europe, they gave him a princess to marry as tribute. You just do what he did to seize the throne of France; give ‘em a whiff of grapeshot.”
“Can you send the Russian Army to restore order? The Pentagon refused to send in the army to occupy the cities under siege by protestors. Our deal was I keep America out of it when you conquer Ukraine and you send the Russian Army to occupy America for me when we kicked off the boogaloo.…”
Putin laughs. Click.
“Hey, that’s not funny. Pick up the phone.” He smashes things, howling and blubbering in fear and rage. “I’m the joke? I’m never the joke. I’ll make America pay for making a monkey outta me. I’ll make everybody pay.”
And like the petulant child and bully that he is, Trump goes forth to avenge himself on the world that does not love him, visions of a red button in a briefcase dancing in his head, muttering, “Behold, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
In case you thought the danger of civil war was over, the fascists mobilize now for civil war.
As written by Rachel Leingang in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘No way out without bloodshed’: the right believe the US is under threat and are mobilizing: In ‘mirror world’, Trump is martyr and Biden is autocrat, as calls for violence erupt on internet after ex-president’s conviction; “The posts are ominous.
“Pick a side, or YOU are next,” wrote conservative talkshow host Dan Bongino on the Truth Social media platform in the aftermath of former president Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions.
The replies were even more so.
“Dan, seriously now,” one user wrote in response to Bongino. “I see no way out of all this mess without bloodshed. When you can rig an election, then weaponize the government and the courts against a former President, what other alternative is there? I’m almost 70 and would rather die than live in tyranny.”
That’s a common version of how many people on the US right reacted to the Trump verdict, drawing on a “mirror world” where Trump is seen as the selfless martyr to powerful state forces and Joe Biden is the dangerous autocrat wielding the justice system as his own personal plaything and a threat to American democracy.
Calls for revenge, retribution and violence littered the rightwing internet as soon as Trump’s guilty verdict came down, all predicated on the idea that the trial had been a sham designed to interfere with the 2024 election. Some posted online explicitly saying it was time for hangings, executions and civil wars.
In this case, Trump was charged with falsifying documents related to a hush-money payment made to an adult film actor to keep an alleged affair out of the spotlight during the 2016 election – a form of election interference from a man whose platform lately consists largely of blaming others for election interference. The verdict has been followed by a backlash from his followers, those who for years chanted to lock up Trump’s political opponents, like Hillary Clinton.
On the left, the mood was downright celebratory, a brief interlude of joy that Trump might finally be held accountable for his actions. But there was an undercurrent of worry among some liberals, who saw the way these felonies could galvanize support for the former president.
On the right, in the alternate reality created by and for Trump and his supporters, the convictions are a sign of both doom and dogma – evidence that a corrupt faction runs the Joe Biden government, but that it can be driven out by the Trump faithful like themselves.
Trump’s allies in Congress want to use the federal government’s coffers to send a message to Biden that the verdict crosses a line, saying the jury’s decision “turned our judicial system into a political cudgel”. Some Senate Republicans vowed not to cooperate with Democratic priorities or nominees – effectively politicizing the government as recompense for what they claim is a politicization of the courts.
They echoed a claim Trump himself has repeatedly driven home to his followers: that his political opponents, namely Biden, are a threat to democracy, a rebrand of how Biden and Democrats often cast Trump. For his most ardent followers, the stakes of the 2024 election are existential, the idea that he might lose a cause for intense rhetoric and threats.
And, for some, the convictions provide another reason to take matters into their own hands during a time when support for using violence to achieve political goals is on the rise. Indictments against Trump fueled this support, surveys have shown.
Some rightwing media and commentators, like Bongino and the Gateway Pundit, displayed upside-down flags on social media, a sign of distress and a symbol among Trump supporters that recently made the news because one flew at US supreme court justice Samuel Alito’s home after the insurrection.
The terms “banana republic” and “kangaroo court” flew around, as did memes comparing Biden to Nazi or fascist leaders. Telegram channels lit up with posts about how the end of America was solidified – unless Trump wins again in November.
“If we jail Trump, get rid of Maga, end the electoral college, ban voter ID, censor free speech, we’ll save democracy,” says one meme in a QAnon channel on Telegram that depicts Biden in a Nazi uniform with a Hitler mustache.
Tucker Carlson, the rightwing media heavyweight, waxed apocalyptic: “Import the third world, become the third world. That’s what we just saw. This won’t stop Trump. He’ll win the election if he’s not killed first. But it does mark the end of the fairest justice system in the world. Anyone who defends this verdict is a danger to you and your family.”
The former president’s supporters also opened their wallets, sending a “record-shattering” $34.8m in small-dollar donations to Trump’s campaign on Thursday, the Trump campaign claimed.
The massive haul came after Trump declared himself a “political prisoner” (he is not in prison) and declared justice “dead” in the US in a dire fundraising pitch.
“Their sick & twisted goal is simple: Pervert the justice system against me so much, that proud supporters like YOU will SPIT when you hear my name,” Trump’s campaign wrote. “BUT THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN! NOW IT’S TIME FOR ME & YOU TO SHOVE IT BACK IN THEIR CORRUPT FACES!”
The real verdict, Trump wrote on Truth Social, would come on 5 November. Posts calling 5 November a new “independence day” and comparing 2024 to 1776 – but a revolution not against the British, but among Americans for the control of the country – spread widely.
Misinformation and rumors spread as well, with the potential that these rumors could lead to further action by Republicans to avenge Trump.
In one viral claim, people say it’s not clear what crimes Trump even committed (the charges for falsifying documents are listed in detail in the indictment, and have been broken down piece by piece by the media). In another, posts claim the judge gave incorrect instructions to the jury before deliberations, which an Associated Press fact check deemed false.
Suggestions that the conviction was an “op” or a “psyop” – meaning a planned manipulation, a common refrain on the far right whenever something big happens – spread as well.
Talk quickly went to what Maga should do to stand up for Trump, and about how the verdict’s fans, and Democrats in general, would come to regret seeking accountability in the courts.
“This is going to be the biggest political backfire in US history,” the conservative account Catturd posted on Truth Social. “I’m feeling a tremendous seismic shift in the air.”
Kash Patel, a former Trump administration staffer and ally, suggested one way forward: Congress should subpoena the bank records of Merchan’s daughter, he said. The daughter became a frequent target throughout the trial – she worked as a Democratic consultant and has fundraised for Democratic politicians. Ohio senator JD Vance called for a criminal investigation into Merchan, and potentially his daughter, whom Vance said was an “obvious beneficiary of Merchan’s biased rulings”.
Patel also said prosecutor Alvin Bragg should be subpoenaed for any documents related to meetings with the Biden administration. “In case you need a jurisdictional hook- Bragg’s office receives federal funds from DOJ to ‘administer justice’- GET ON IT,” he wrote.
Megyn Kelly said Bragg should be disbarred, without offering a reason for what would justify it.
Some Trump allies sought to project calm amid the vitriol, saying they had known the verdict would come down as it did because the process had been rigged, and that people needed to keep focused on winning in November.
Steve Bannon, who himself is awaiting some time in prison for criminal contempt, said immediately after the verdict was released that it was “not going to damage President Trump at all”.
“It’s time to collect yourself and say, yes, we’ve seen what’s happened. We’ve seen how they run the tables in this crooked process. But you’ve got to say, hey, I’m more determined than ever to set things right.”
Dr. Strangelove trailer
Oppenheimer Quotes the Bhagavad Gita 11.32.; I am become Death
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? With Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton
In case you thought the danger of civil war was over
‘No way out without bloodshed’: the right believe the US is under threat and are mobilizing: In ‘mirror world’, Trump is martyr and Biden is autocrat, as calls for violence erupt on internet after ex-president’s conviction
On this day we remember the weaponization of faith in service to power as authorization of the use of state terror and repression of dissent against the Black Lives Matter protests of racial justice. In this obscene subversion of the message of the brotherhood of men and our duty of care for each other of the Sermon on the Mount, so beautifully written of by Tolstoy, Traitor Trump aped the gestural and rhetorical performance of his model Adolf Hitler as he often does, whose newsreels he studied for years as he sleeps with a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible. This is the true faith of Trump, and his vision of a future for us all.
Let us remember, and bring a Reckoning; but we must remember also that Trump exploited but did not originate the weaponization of faith as authorization and legitimation of theocratic tyranny, white supremacist terror, and patriarchal sexual terror. This special form of totalitarianism is as old as the first city-states founded on mass slave agriculture and conquest as slave raiding, the first priest-kings who spoke for the gods and the first police enforcers who kept the slaves at their work. There is always someone in a gold robe who cons and bullies others into doing the hard and dirty work which creates his wealth and power. This we must resist and change.
As written by Alan Moore in V For Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
As I wrote in my post of June 2 2020, The Great Dictator: Trump’s Reboot of the Chaplin Classic; As the world is gripped by images of Trump’s expulsion of the priests from the church and brutal repression of protestors against racist violence, of his photo op holding a Bible while invoking the use of the military against citizens to silence dissent and bolster his failing regime of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and authoritarian state force and control, I believe it is time to consider the relative merits of our Clown of Terror’s performance of the role of the Great Dictator as compared to its originator, Charlie Chaplin.
To this end I recommend Robert Coover’s 1968 satire The Cat in the Hat for President, written originally about Nixon and republished as A Political Fable, and the luminous and feral 1933 novel on which Trump has modeled his revised Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist by Antonin Artaud.
Let us mock and deflate all such absurd monsters who would enslave us.
As written in the Charlie Chaplin website; “The Great Dictator was Chaplin’s first film with dialogue. Chaplin plays both a little Jewish barber, living in the ghetto, and Hynkel, the dictator ruler of Tomainia. In his autobiography Chaplin quotes himself as having said: “One doesn’t have to be a Jew to be anti Nazi. All one has to be is a normal decent human being.”
Chaplin and Hitler were born within a week of one another. “There was something uncanny in the resemblance between the Little Tramp and Adolf Hitler, representing opposite poles of humanity, ” writes Chaplin biographer David Robinson, reproducing an unsigned article from The Spectator dated 21st April 1939; “Providence was in an ironical mood when, fifty years ago this week, it was ordained that Charles Chaplin and Adolf Hitler should make their entry into the world within four days of each other….Each in his own way has expressed the ideas, sentiments, aspirations of the millions of struggling citizens ground between the upper and the lower millstone of society. (…) Each has mirrored the same reality – the predicament of the “little man” in modern society. Each is a distorting mirror, the one for good, the other for untold evil.”
“Chaplin spent many months drafting and re-writing the speech for the end of the film, a call for peace from the barber who has been mistaken for Hynkel. Many people criticized the speech, and thought it was superfluous to the film. Others found it uplifting. Regrettably Chaplin’s words are as relevant today as they were in 1940.”
Transcript of Charlie Chaplin’s Final Speech in The Great Dictator:
“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost….
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. …..
Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!”
As the notorious St John’s Church incident is described in The Washington Post in an article entitled Trump’s use of the Bible was obscene. He should try reading the words inside it., written by Rev. William J. Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove; “On Monday evening, federal authorities used tear gas to clear Lafayette Square so President Trump could pose for a photo while holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. It wasn’t the first time Trump has used the word of God as a political prop. But it was obscene, even for him.
Though Trump answered ambiguously when asked if the volume he was holding was his Bible, it appeared to be the Revised Standard Version of the text that he has used to signal to his Christian nationalist followers before.
According to David Brody and Scott Lamb’s unironic “spiritual biography,” “The Faith of Donald Trump,” the Revised Standard Version was a gift from Trump’s mother, Mary Anne, on the occasion of his graduation from Sunday Church Primary School at the First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens. Since his 2016 campaign, Trump has publicly claimed that the Bible is “very special” to him, using it frequently to authenticate his faith among what he calls “the evangelicals.” When he took the oath of office at his inauguration, Trump placed that Bible on top of the Abraham Lincoln Bible from the Library of Congress.
Though Trump has said little more about this Bible publicly, charismatic television preachers such as his faith adviser, Paula White-Cain, have developed a mythos around it. According to the version of the story these preachers often recite in sermons, this Bible was sent to Trump’s mother by two aunts in Scotland who were instrumental prayer warriors in an early-20th-century revival there. Among so-called Christian nationalists who believe that America has strayed from its traditional values and must be redeemed by “Christian” leadership, this Bible has become a sort of talisman to convey spiritual authority to an unlikely “chosen one.”
Whether Trump believes any of this, millions of Christian nationalists do. For them, a picture of Trump with what appears to be his great aunts’ Bible in front of a beleaguered church is worth a thousand words of reassurance.
But for those of us who study and preach the Bible’s text, that Christian nationalism is an offense. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, tweeted on Monday evening that the president had “used a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes.” While that is true, we find it even more outrageous that Trump and the religious extremists he appeals to have turned Christian faith against itself.
As preachers in the South, one black and one white, we are painfully aware of the ways Christian faith has been used to justify slavery, white supremacy, legal segregation, corporate exploitation, the dominance of women and the dehumanization of LGBTQ people. As Frederick Douglass put it, “Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”
Millions of Christians and other people of faith see and acknowledge this difference.
We read the prophet Isaiah’s cry, “Woe unto those who legislate evil … make women and children their prey,” and we know it is a challenge to this administration and any political leadership that neglects its responsibility to care for the poor and most vulnerable in our society.
We read the prophet Jeremiah crying out against those who say, “‘Peace, peace’ when there is no peace.” We hear it as a call to listen to the grief of Americans who are not only weary of racialized police violence but also of a pandemic that has fallen disproportionately on black, brown and poor communities who are often asked to do what the essential work of food preparation, sanitation and bodily care.
We read Jesus saying, “Woe unto you … hypocrites … you have neglected the weightier matters of the law,” and we know that, at the very heart of our faith, we are called to challenge those who try to twist belief to use it for their own ends.
The Bible as a talisman has real political power. But we believe the words inside the book are more powerful. If we unite across lines of race, creed and culture to stand together on the moral vision of love, justice and truth that was proclaimed by Jesus and the prophets, we have the capacity to reclaim the heart of this democracy and work together for a more perfect union.
To do that, we need to read the Bible and live it, not wave it for the cameras.”
On May 31 in 1921 America’s Black Wall Street was totally destroyed in a single night of terror by their white neighbors in Tulsa Oklahoma through massive and organized ground and aerial attack, because a black man stepped on a white woman’s foot in an elevator.
This was our Kristallnacht, and it must never happen again.
We must redress the inequalities and injustices of racism, and to reply to white supremacist terror and to fascism with this simple message; Never Again.
Four years ago tomorrow, some fifteen thousand people of Spokane Washington who feel as I do on this issue marched in support of racial justice and equality under the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter, though there is no chapter of this organization in our city. It was a model nonviolent protest and communal grieving, which began with Chief of Police Meidl praying with the protestors and was notable for the police officers who knelt in solidarity with the people, heroic and remarkable acts welcomed with waves of sudden bursts of tears among the crowd. For this brief and glorious moment, the dream of America as a band of brothers and a free society of equals was realized; we were one people.
But when those who had gathered in peace, love, and mutual support to forge a better future had shared their trauma and gone home, several hundred white supremacist terrorists who had infiltrated the crowd remained and began a rampage of pillage and destruction through the business district, as they have in all the major riots across America the week before.
This was an extremely sophisticated and logistically massive and well funded campaign of provocation and disinformation which bears the signatures of centralized command, intelligence, and communications, the design of which reveals its true purposes and intentions; to discredit the movement for racial justice, to provoke and justify state repression, and to incite a race war which will overthrow our democracy and result in a white ethnostate. Trump saw in this an opportunity to seize dictatorial powers, and had been conspiring with and using white supremacists as deniable forces throughout his regime of fascist criminality and terrorism.
Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump and his foreign puppetmasters and propaganda machine have called Antifa a terrorist group and attempted to shift the guilt for the mayhem and property destruction of their own organized white supremacists who in capturing the narrative of a peaceful protest movement which seeks constructive change enact the sabotage of democratic process. None of these goals align with those of Antifascists.
It is in the interest of all loyal Americans to defend each other and our democracy as the embodiment of our principles and ideals of freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
To be an American patriot is to be an Antifascist and an antiracist. We hold that all human beings are created equal; those who do not are enemies of Liberty and of our nation.
This I say to all serving and former members of the United States Armed Forces and their families and loved ones, and to all others who have sworn oaths of public service to protect and defend both our universal human rights and our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens; if our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us.
So say I as the founder of Lilac City Antifa and the Abraham Lincoln Brigades of Ukraine and Palestine.
Let us stand together as a nation and as a humankind united in a free society of equals as guarantors of each other’s rights of life and liberty. Not subjugated by division and hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, not obedient with learned helplessness and terror, not falsified with rewritten histories, silence, erasure, authorized identities, and the alternate universes of propaganda and lunatic conspiracy theories nor of faith weaponized in service to power, but as the Band of Brothers, sisters, and others which is the dream of America and the hope of humankind.
Writing in Jacobin, Robert Greene II has called May of 2020 the Red Spring and likened it to the Red Summer of 1919, in which a brutal campaign of racist violence and the annihilation of Black communities swept America. Certainly the murders and other violent crimes against Black people which have ignited rage and chaos throughout our nation that historic spring have a long and terrible history, of which the Tulsa Massacre remains an enduring symbol.
To this there can be but one reply; Never Again.
Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Scott Ellsworth, John Hope Franklin (Foreword)
Among the many horrific incidents of capitalist state terror and police crimes against humanity designed to repress dissent and break the power of organized labor, the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 remains an example of the principle of witness as articulated by the heroine of the telenovela series Wednesday; “If we don’t tell our stories, they will.”
Along with the falsification of rewritten histories as authorized identity is the terror of silence and erasure as a system of control and repression of dissent.
The idea of witness, crucial in Elie Wiesel’s ars poetica and ideology as argued in his famous speech Silence is Complicity, here combines with Michel Foucault’s dialectics in Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia to form a praxis of democracy as a sacred calling to pursue the truth.
As I wrote in my post of December 24 2022, Nevermore A Silent Night, For Silence Is Complicity; Tis the night before Christmas, a liminal time throughout the diaspora of our civilization which was reshaped historically by Paul’s reimagination of classical mystery faiths and Judaism as they collided and transformed each other, a night of magic, the redemptive and totalizing power of love, the rapture and terror of dreams and the power of wishes to redefine us and our possibilities of becoming human.
Clustered in dense layers around this time are rituals and symbols whose roots in our collective psyche are ancient and powerful, among them the family singing of Silent Night, a carol of great beauty composed in 1818 and made a universal cultural heritage by Bing Crosby’s recording in 1935. Its primary meaning remains the same; while the world sleeps, we are recreated anew and reborn with the dawn, to a new life wherein all things are possible. Choose wisely what you wish for, and who you wish to become.
As Kurt Vonnegut teaches us in Mother Night; “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Tonight I write to you not of the freedom and autonomy conferred by such acts of self-creation, nor of poetic vision as a sacred path in pursuit of Truth or of Orphic dream navigation as an art of transformative change, but of the art of making wishes itself. For wishes are a form of what Foucault called truth telling, though he wrote in the context of the witness of history and the primary duties of a citizen to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority. In wishes we speak the truth of ourselves, and shape our lives into an unfolding of our intentions as we have named and so created them, naming, defining, and claiming ourselves as Adam named the beasts. Wishes are a performance of our best selves, and of the truths we have chosen to become and embody; truths written in our flesh.
Herein the key and most precious and unique human act is to perform and make your dreams real.
We must never allow truths to be silenced, nor our souls stolen by those who would enslave us. True faith is living your truth; this sometimes means resistance to falsification and authorized identities as seizures of power and revolutionary struggle, but it always means living authentically and on your own terms, for only you can discover your own best self, and in this you are the only authority and the sole arbiter of choices and decisions, and of human being, meaning, and value.
In the arena of struggle between truth telling and the complicity of silence, I wish for us all Nevermore a Silent Night, for silence is complicity.
To silence in the face of evil there can be but one reply: Never Again.
As I wrote in my post of January 16 2021, Silence Is Complicity: No One Gets to Sit This One Out; A post in which I quote Adam Parkhomenko elicited an interesting reaction from someone, one which makes me question how the rhetoric of fascist and racist privilege creates complicity; the quote is in reference to the massive responsibility avoidance and denial on the part of the Republican lawmakers who refuse to join the call impeach our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his rabble of murderous barbarians.
Here is the quotation; “I have a very simple message for Republicans calling for unity without accountability: the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.”
This was the reaction; first, repetition of the very call for unity without accountability, which I would characterize as granting permission through failure to consequent behaviors, which the quote calls out; “These words are just creating more divisions!”
Second, an attempt at silencing dissent; “Please Stop!”
Third, an attempt at blame shifting; “Whenever one person thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong you are the problem!”
And Fourth, the very worst of the apologetics of historical fascism, a claim of moral equivalence; “Everyone just needs to stop all of these posts because there are good people on both sides!”
And this last I cannot let pass, for on the last occasion of its general use this propagandistic lie and rhetorical device led directly to the Holocaust and the global devastation of total war.
I am unclear which good people she could be referring to; the ones who were going to capture and hang or guillotine members of Congress, the ones who murdered a police officer and attempted to bomb both the Democratic and Republican offices, the white supremacist terrorists who have rallied to the cause of treason and armed sedition, or the mad tyrant who commanded them?
To this I replied; You are wrong. Treason, terror, and the murder of police officers has no excuse. You are either with us as American patriots or against us; no one gets to sit this one out and be counted among the honorable, the moral, and the loyal.
Silence is complicity.
Such is the Talmudic principle, “Shtika Kehoda”, famously paraphrased by Einstein in his 1954 speech to the Chicago Decalogue Society as “If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity”, and referenced by Eli Weisel as “the opposite of love is not only hate, it is also indifference.”
Martin Luther King said it this way in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story; “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
John Stuart Mill expressed a related idea in his 1867 Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews; “Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
Leonardo da Vinci formulated it as resistance to tyranny, with which he was very familiar in the wars of dominion between the princes of Renaissance Italy; “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
Silence is complicity.
Should this concept require further clarification, please refer to the following recording and transcript of Elie Wiesel’s Millennium Lecture at the White House, on April 12 1999, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton:
Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President — Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others — and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people.
Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary — or Mrs. Clinton — for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations — Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin — bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting — more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.
Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner,” as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.
Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God — not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps — and I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance — but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.
And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader — and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death — Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us.
No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history — I must say it — his image in Jewish history is flawed.
The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo — maybe 1,000 Jews — was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back.
I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people — in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?
But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the “Righteous Gentiles,” whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few?
Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war?
Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.
Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?
What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them — so many of them — could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.
Elie Wiesel – April 12, 1999”
As written by Carol Quirke in Workplace Fairness, in an article entitled The Memorial Day Massacre: A Lost Piece of History; “You would think that, having been raised a mile from where 10 workers were killed and 30 more were shot by police while picketing a steel plant, I would have heard of such a tragedy. More confounding, my great-uncle, Eddie Marasovic, was wounded by a police bullet in that violent affair that would become known as a massacre.
Yet I knew nothing of it.
It happened in May, 1937, before I was born, on the prairie outside the Republic Steel plant on Chicago’s East Side. This spit of land, along Lake Michigan’s southern tip, linked the steel plants of southern Chicago to a long string of industry that reached through Indiana, giving rise to what labor economists called the largest steel producing region in the world.
Why did I only learn about the killing of workers from a poster of the massacre that I found in a bookstore, in a city located two states away, nearly half a century after the event transpired?
The Memorial Day Massacre, as many refer to it, was largely repressed by many in the community where it occurred.
In the late 1990s when I began researching it, scholars had also neglected the tragedy for decades. Greg Mitchell’s new PBS film and book, Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried, explore how vital evidence — a Paramount newsreel — helped union leaders and civil libertarians turn the tide against the extreme pro-police news coverage in the immediate aftermath of the killings.
A single newsreel cameraman, Orlando Lippert of Paramount News, captured the tragedy on film. Lippert’s footage, suppressed by Paramount until a congressional committee under progressive Sen. Robert M. La Follette Jr. (D-Wisc.) screened it, showed police firing at protesters, striking 40 of them, the vast majority in the back or on the side.
The newsreel provided vital proof of corporate and state violence against working Americans.
How had events transpired as they did?
Tensions had been ratcheting up for months ahead of the tragedy. In 1935, the new Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO), under the leadership of United Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis, organized industrial labor, unskilled workers flexed their muscle. And, in late 1936, workers set off the sit-down craze, initiating hundreds of strikes from late November 1936 through the spring of 1937.
Lewis’s CIO achieved an agreement with U.S. Steel, the largest producer in the country, but Thomas M. Girdler, the CEO of Republic Steel, and the heads of other smaller steel companies (known as Little Steel), vowed to keep unions out. When workers called a strike at these plants, unionists rallied at Republic Steel. But Chicago police refused to let strikers picket the plant and on May 28, 1937, they viciously beat strikers, including women.
To build community support, workers organized a Memorial Day picnic for families and labor activists on the prairie several blocks from their plant. More than 1,000 people showed up, many in their Sunday best, and then set off on a peaceful march to form a picket line close to the Republic plant.
Police halted them halfway there. Orlando Lippert’s newsreel of events shows men and women gesticulating to police. Seconds later, the film shows workers fleeing. Police run after them, many with guns drawn, and fire upon the crowd. Four workers died of their wounds immediately, and within three weeks, another six had lost their lives. Others were hospitalized due to severe beatings. One boy, age 11, was shot in the foot.
My grandmother’s youngest brother, my great uncle Eddie, was one of those who had been shot. Ironically, though I learned of the massacre in 1983 at the Northern Sun bookstore in Minneapolis, I only discovered our personal connection at a family wedding several years later. My great uncle’s daughter shared the story of her father having been shot that Memorial Day.
In 1996, in the midst of my graduate studies, examining how news photography shaped labor conflict, I interviewed my aunts and uncles to see if I could find out more. They knew nothing of the Memorial Day Massacre. I became fascinated, not only about the events in Chicago, but about the ways in which it had been forgotten.
Only from an oral history that my brother, Michael, conducted with our grandparents did I find out that my grandfather was working in the Republic plant for 17 days before and after the massacre. He was one of the “loyal workers” the company deployed to suggest the strikers did not represent most workers. He was, in effect, a scab. My uncle Eddie, in contrast, stood on the field that day, fighting for the right to a union.
I have few strands of information, hardly more than whispers, of Eddie’s life.
He continued his employment at Republic Steel for nearly four decades. But these are the lone facts I can dredge up. From family, there is little more. Others, notably urban sociologist William Kornblum in his 1975 book Blue Collar Community, have observed that Chicago’s East Siders did not want to discuss the events that so divided their community.
As documentarian George Stoney found in his exploration of Southern millworkers involved in the 1934 general textile strike, being subject to state violence can cause trauma or shame, making workers suspicious and willing to repress their own experiences.
Even the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) refused to honor the massacre’s victims — it took a decade for the union’s newspaper to print the infamous photographs of its members being beaten and shot at by police, even as other union papers and metropolitan dailies published such imagery. In 1937, SWOC was fighting for its right to exist — and it may have feared scaring off membership by highlighting the massacre.
The intransigence of Girdler and the other Little Steel executives soon stymied the union drive. Little Steel only accepted union representation after the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1940 that workers deserved compensation for the companies’ illegal actions against them, and as President Franklin D. Roosevelt forced industry to negotiate with unions if they wanted federal defense contracts.
While workers did not obtain contracts immediately, efforts at curtailing labor spies, corporate mercenaries, and police overreaction to labor disputes mostly succeeded. A committee under Sen. La Follette probed the massacre and exposed the buried Paramount footage.
This spotlight upon extralegal violence helped curb it in the future. Documenting and publicizing the surveillance of workers — and the collusion between private “security” forces, police and the National Guard — lmited such practices. The stifling of violence, and federal support for unions along with workers’ ongoing mobilization, ultimately led a third of the nation’s industrial workforce to enjoy union representation by the early 1950s.
It was only in the mid-1990s that I began to deeply research the story of the massacre. By reading the La Follette transcripts, I was able to find traces of my great uncle.
I knew from a second cousin that her father, Eddie Marasovic, had been shot in his leg, and he carried the bullet in his body to the grave. Unexpectedly I encountered his name, in Exhibit #1463: A medical examiner’s sketch of a body, with dots strewn across the drawing, for all the bullets that more than two dozen activists had borne that day. My great-uncle’s name corresponds to the bullet that wounded his leg.
My family had been touched by history, recorded in history, and yet those marks had been lost to me. Repressed, censored or silenced — I am still trying to learn.”
As written by Howard Fast in a witness statement entitled Memorial Day Massacre: It was a day for parades, picnics and boat-rides–and tear-gas, bullets and death; “Memorial Day in Chicago in 1937 was hot, humid, and sunny; it was the right kind of day for the parade and the holiday, the kind of a day that takes the soreness out of a Civil War veteran’s back makes him feel like stepping out with the youngsters a quarter his age. It was a day for picnics, for boating, for the beach or a long ride into the country. It was a day when patriotic sentiments could be washed down comfortably with Coca-Cola or a Tom Collins, as you preferred. And there’s no doubt but that a good deal of that holiday feeling was present in the strikers who gathered on the prairie outside and around Republic Steel’s Chicago plant.
Most of the strikers felt good. Tom Girdler, who ran Republic, had said that he would go back to hoeing potatoes before he met the strikers’ demands, and word went around that old Tom could do worse than earn an honest living hoeing potatoes. The strike was less than a week old; the strikers had not yet felt the pinch of hunger, and there was a good sense of solidarity everywhere. Because it was such a fine summer day, many of the strikers brought their children out onto the prairie to attend the first big mass meeting; and wherever you looked, you saw two-year-olds and three-year-olds riding pick-a-back on the shoulders of steelworkers. And because it was in the way of being their special occasion as well as a patriotic holiday, the women wore their best and brightest.
In knots and clusters, the younger folks two by two, the older people in family groups, they drifted toward Sam’s place on South Green Bay Avenue. Once, Sam’s place had been a ten-cent-a-dance hall; now it was strike headquarters, which meant, in terms of the strike, just about everything. There, the women had set up their soup kitchen, and there the union strategy board planned the day-to-day work; food was collected at Sam’s place, and pickets used it as their barracks and headquarters.
Today, several thousand people gathered around the improvised platform set up at Sam’s place, to listen to the speakers and to take part in the mass demonstration. How serious an occasion it was, they knew well enough; rumors circulated that the police were going to attempt something special, something out of the run of clubbing and gassing which had marked the strike from the very first day; rumors too that a mass picket line was going to be established today. It was a serious occasion, but somehow something in the day, the holiday, the sunshine and the warm summer weather made the festive air persist. Vendors wheeled wagons of cold pop, and brick ice cream, three flavors in one, was to be had at a nickel a cake.
For the young folks, it was the first strike; they sat under the trees with the girls, grinning at the way the strike committee worked and poured sweat; and the women, cooking inside the hall, reflected, as a hundred generations of women had reflected before, that man’s work is from sun to sun, but women’s work….
A group of girls sang. Strike songs were around, a new turn in the folk literature of the nation. First shyly, hesitantly, then with more vigor, with a rising volume augmented by the deep bass and rich baritone of the men, they sang the deathless tale of Joe Hill, the song-maker and organizer whom the cops had killed; they sang, “Solidarity forever, the union makes us strong….” They sand of the nameless IWW worker, tortured into treason, who pleaded, “Comrades, slay me, for the coppers took my soul; close my eyes, good comrades, for I played a traitor’s role.”
The meeting started and came down to business. The chairman was Joe Weber, who represented the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee. Outlining the purpose of the mass meeting, he flung an arm at the Republic plant, a third of a mile down the road. Twenty-five thousand men were on strike; their purpose was to picket peacefully, to win a decent raise in wages so that they might exist like human beings. But there had been constant, brutal provocation by the police. Well, they were gathered here, as was their constitutional right, to protest that interference.
Dozens of strikers had been arrested, beaten, waylaid; strikers’ property, as for example a sound truck, had been smashed and destroyed. Even women had been beaten, dragged off to jail, treated obscenely. The National Labor Relations Act guaranteed them their rights; today they were going to demonstrate in support of those rights.
Other speakers backed up Weber. When the audience cheered some point, the children present gurgled with delight and clapped their hands. As soon as the meeting had finished the strikers and their wives and children began to form their picketline. After all, this was Memorial Day; the thing took on a parade air. Some of the strikers had made their own placards; also, a whole forest of them appeared from inside the union hall, made by committees. The slogans were simple, direct, and non-violent: “REPUBLIC STEEL VIOLATES LABOR DISPUTES ACT.” “WIN WITH THE C.I.O.” “NO FASCISM IN AMERICA.” “REPUBLIC STEEL SHALL SIGN A UNION CONTRACT.”
The signs were handed out, many of them to boys and girls who carried them proudly. At the head of the column that was forming, two men took their place with American flags. The news reporters, who had come up by car only a short while before, were hopping about now, snapping everything. For some reason that has never been analyzed, news photographers and strikers get along very well, even when the photographers come from McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. There was a lot of good-natured give and take. When the column began to march, down the road from Sam’s place first, and then across the prairie toward the Republic Steel plant, the news photographers moved with it, some walking, some by car. This fact later turned into a vital part of American labor history.
Republic Steel stood abrupt out of the flat prairie. Snake-like, the line of pickets crossed the meadowland, singing at first: “Solidarity forever, the union makes us strong…”; but then the song died as the sun-drenched plain turned ominous, as five hundred blue-coated policement took up stations between the strikers and the plant. The strikers’ march slowed–but they came on. The police ranks closed and tightened. It brought to mind how other Americans had faced the uniformed force of so-called law and order so long ago on Lexington Green in 1775; but whereas then the redcoat leader had said, “Disperse, you rebel bastards!” to armed minutemen, now it was to unarmed men and women and children that a police captain said, “You dirty sons of bitches, this is as far as you go!”
About two hundred and fifty yards from the plant, the police closed in on the strikers. Billies and clubs were out already, prodding, striking, nightsticks edging into women’s breasts and groins. It was great fun for the cops who were also somewhat afraid, and they began to jerk guns out of holsters.
“Stand fast! Stand fast!” the line leaders cried. “We got our right! We got our legal rights to picket!”
The cops said, “You got no rights. You Red bastards, you got no rights.”
Even if a modern man’s a steelworker, with muscles as close to iron bands as human flesh gets, a pistol equalizes him with a weakling–and more than equalizes. Grenades began to sail now; tear gas settled like an ugly cloud. Children suddenly cried with panic, and the whole picket line gave back, men stumbling, cursing, gasping for breath. Here and there, a cop tore out his pistol and began to fire; it was pop, pop, pop at first, like toy favors at some horrible party, and then, as the strikers broke under the gunfire and began to run, the contagion of killing ran like fire through the police.
They began to shoot in volleys. It was wonderful sport, because these pickets were unarmed men and women and children; they could not strike back or fight back. The cops squealed with excitement. They ran after fleeing men and women, pressed revolvers to their backs, shot them down and then continued to shoot as the victims lay on their faces, retching blood. When a woman tripped and fell, four cops gathered above her, smashing in her flesh and bones and face. Oh, it was great sport, wonderful sport for gentle, pot-bellied police, who mostly had to confine their pleasures to beating up prostitutes and street peddlers–at a time when Chicago was world-infamous as a center of gangsterism, assorted crime and murder.
And so it went, on and on, until ten were dead or dying and over a hundred wounded. And the field a bloodstained field of battle. World War veterans there said that never in France had they seen anything as brutal as this.
Now, of course, this brief account might be passed off as a complete exaggeration, as one-sided and so forth–the same arguments might be used that are constantly thrown up whenever it is a case of labor versus capital or labor versus the police. It might be said, as the Chicago Tribune said the next day, that this was the doing of Reds who were plotting to take over the plant, and the police had only done their duty.
But the photographers were on the spot, and everything I have described here and a good deal more was taken down with both newsreel and still cameras. The stills and the moving pictures were placed on exhibit during the hearing on Republic Steel held by the subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor; and I recommend to the special attention of anyone interested in checking this bit of labor history Exhibit 1418, Exhibit 1414, Exhibit 1351, and the morbid chart of gunshot wounds–in the back–known as Exhibit 1463.
That, in brief–and most brief, since the space here is limited–is a summary of what happened in Chicago on May 30, 1937. These events, which came to be known as the Memorial Day Massacre, shook the nation as did few other acts of anti-labor violence since the Haymarket Affair of the 1880’s. Later, the Senate Committee’s investigation highlighted them, and brought home to the American people the full savagery of the police and the men who ran Republic Steel. But then the war washed the memory out for a time, and to understand fully today what happened then in Chicago, certain other facts must be noted.
Let us look at the situation of the steel industry after the worst part of the depression. Taking United States Steel as an example, we find that by 1935 the firm was well on the way over the hump, with a net profit of $6,106,488. Wheels had begun to turn again in America, and the next year’s profit took an enormous jump upwards, a net of $55,501,787 in 1936. Then the graph inclined even more sharply, and in the first three months of 1937 the company recorded a net profit of $28,561,533.
This was big steel. Republic, a light steel industry, was a part of what was known as little steel, and while the profits there were smaller–$4,000,000 in 1935 and $9,500,000 in 1936–they were part of the upward spiral.
It was within this framework of hot furnaces and mounting profits that the C.I.O. began to organize. And as they built their industrial unions, the steel companies built their armed goon squads. It was in 1936 that the C.I.O. began to make real progress in organizing the steel industry, and by the middle of 1937 half a million steelworkers had joined the union. Over 750 union lodges were formed, and by now most of the steel manufacturers had realized that it was a most destructive kind of insanity to fight organizaion. Again, by June 1937, some 125 companies had signed union contracts. Among these firms, which employed 310,000 workers, were Carnegie-Illinois and several other subsidiaries of US Steel.
But the big independents, the Little Steel combine, still held out. Let us name them as they stood on that Memorial Day of 1937. There was Tom Girdler’s Republic Steel, employing 53,000 workers. There was Bethlehem Steel, with 82,000 workers. There was Youngstown Sheet & Tube, with 27,000. Then there were the smaller firms, National Steel, American Rolling Mills and Inland Steel. All together, these firms employed almost 200,000 workers and they accounted for almost forty per cent of the steel produced in America.
They were lined up for a knock-down, drag-out fight; no quarter asked, no quarter given. Tom Girdler was granted nominal leadership; a latter-day “robber baron,” to use Matthew Jospehson’s phrase, he was a natural for such a position, and we shall see later how his tactics led to the Memorial Day Massacre.
But he did not introduce the concept of violence; it was not necessary for him to do so. As far back as 1933 the steel companies were arming themselves for the coming struggle. For example, the following order was shipped to Bethlehem Steel. The invoice entered on the books of Federal Laboratories, and signed by A.G. Bergman, is dated September 30, 1933:
That makes for quite a sizable armament, but Youngstown Sheet and Tube went in for more and deadlier protection against unarmed strikers and their dangerous wives and children. On June 6, 1934, this firm was billed for the following order:
10 1½” cal. riot guns 201, $60 ea.
10 riot gun cases 211, $7.50 ea.
60 1½” cal. long range projectiles, $7.50 ea.
60 1½” cal. short range projectiles, $4.50 ea.
60 M-39 billies, std. barrel no disc, $22.50 ea.
600 M-39 billy cartridges, $1.50 ea.
200 grenades 106M, 10% disc., $12 ea.
These are only two examples of widespread gun-toting by the steel companies. Nor were these the only techniques they used. They hired spies and special agents. They organized goon squads composed of thugs, professional gangsters, and assorted degenerates. They bribed police chiefs and sheriffs.
And under their natural leader, Tom Girdler, they set themselves for violence.
That was part of the background to the Memorial Day Massacre. Another part was Tom Girdler himslef, and it is worthwhile to look into that gentelman’s history.
Matthew Josephson’s fine book, The Robber Barons, should be read as background to any study of Tom Girdler. Girdler is a latter-day Morgan, a Jim Fisk, a John D. Rockefeller–but operating at a time when the tactics of these financial pirates were supposed to be outdated and hopeless. Perhaps in some new edition of Josephson’s book, Girdler will be included, along with a few other of his worthy contemporaries, as a sort of appendix.
Girdler is a farm boy, and he likes to think of himself as a part and a little more than a part of the good old log-cabin tradition. He was fond of saying, in those days of steel trouble, that he liked a good rough-and-tumble fight; and he talked tough and tried to look and act tough. But his toughness was the toughness of the rear-echelon general, the armchair two-gun man. It was never his lot to face even a small reflection of the violence he created.
In the 1920’s, Cyrus Eaton, a Middle-Western manipulator, formed Republic out of four small steel companies. Eaton, too, had dreams of becoming an Andrew Carnegie; but his skill did not measure up to his ambition. He tangled with a very hard-boiled customer, Bethlehem Steel, and in the ensuing struggle Republic’s shares fell from 80 to 2. At that time, Girdler was making a very local name for himself in Jones and Laughlin Steel; Eaton pulled him out, promised him an arm and a leg, and told him to save Republic. In that case, anyway, Eaton’s judgment was not at fault, for not only did Tom Girdler save Republic: he turned it into the most up-and-coming steel company in the land–and in doing so, he took just a little more than the arm and leg; he eased Eaton entirely out of the picture.
There is no doubting that Girdler made the most of what he stepped into. Republic was light steel, specializing in steel for furniture, boilers, automobiles, light trains, various types of metal containers. Nor could this kind of production be changed; the plants, too, were specialized. Reluctantly, Girdler worked with what he had. His own fancy was for heavy stuff: girders, plates for warships–the kind of work Bethlehem did. He looked to a future alliance with Bethlehem, but in the meantime he worked with what he had. He hired scientists and picked their brains in the traditional fashion. He forced the development of more and better alloys, until his stainless steel had gained a national reputation.
The plants were old and inefficient, so he began to replace them. Cyclical depression usually winds up with a replacement of fixed capital which has become outdated, and the fact that Girdler’s action was being duplicated all over the nation in the middle thirties set at least a part of the wheels of industry in motion. At this point, Girdler was not too interested in profits; profits could be assured for a later period if he was successful in replacement and in mergers.
He worked for control of Republic by chasing down small holdings of shares wherever he could locate them. He begged proxies. Because his Ohio plants were a good distance from the ore deposits of Minnesota, he planned and executed a merger with Corrigan-McKinney of Cleveland. When this went through he had a lake port to operate from, and a modern steel plant to add to his growing empire. For four years he worked to get proxies and control, until at last he was sitting firmly in the driver’s seat, with plant after plant coming into the growing orbit of Republic. He went after Truscon Steel, the largest fabricator of building-shapes, doors, lockers and window frames in the Middle West, effected a merger, and built up Truscon until it was the largest plant of its kind in the world. All this cost money, and from 1930 to 1935 Republic lost something around $30,000,000. This did not affect Girdler; he drew his income from his own huge salary. He did not own the combine; he merely had control. No single stockholder held more than 6 percent of the total stock, but by 1935 Girdler was so firmly in the saddle that no one could challenge his rule–and since the financial-industrial empire was growing, in spite of some 2,000,000 additional shares of watered stock, no stockholder or group of stockholders made serious efforts to challenge or unseat him.
For all of his drive and his large talk about free enterprise, Girdler demonstrated in action that he not only did not believe in what American business calls “free enterprise,” but that he personally was working night and day to destroy it in the steel industry. His tactics were toward monopoly. He interlocked with Youngstown Sheet and Tube; he interlocked with Jones and Laughlin. He thought and talked combine–and he operated in that direction with a ruthlessness that bowled over his competitors like tenpins.
And when it came to dealing with his 50,000 workers, he chose the same tactics of ruthlessness and direct aggression.
He liked to refer to himself as a worker, but that was an out-and-out fiction; from his very beginnings in the industry, he had been an ally of management, and then, very soon, he became a part of management.
He entered the industry as a salesman for Buffalo Forge. Then he was employed by the Oliver Iron Company. He was an assistant superintendent with Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and he held similar jobs elsewhere. But always it was over labor or apart from labor. It was Tom Girdler getting ahead and using his brains in the best Horatio Alger tradition, while all around him heavy-set, heavy-muscled men by the thousands worked long hours to turn the ore into metal and to shape it, forge it, tool it. One would surmise from his later actions that he had never held anything else but contempt for those who worked with their hands.
He was schooled well for the battles of 1937. Jones and Laughlin’s Aliquippa Works was known as the “Siberia of America.” Their company town was a place where the few brave union organizers who dared to enter faced death, literally, tar and feathers, or some of the more gruesome and less printable fates that goon squads specialize in. The town was also called “Little Hell,” a more descriptive name.
Apparently it was a place that suited Girdler excellently, for in a space of four years he rose from an assistant to president. And after that, he continued to climb steadily on the irreproachable ladder of success. As he climbed, his technique of dealing with the men he employed became progressively more ruthless. When the Memorial Day slaughter occurred, he was earning $130,000 a year. One might consider his statement that he would go back to hoeing potatoes before he bargained collectively with his employees as a piece of not too original verbiage. At the same time, he never gave any indication that the dead men and wounded women and children strewn over the Chicago prairie disturbed either his sleep or his equanimity.
Yet it would give a very false picture of the industrial situation in the second half of the third decade to single out Tom Girdler as industry’s bad boy. Nor could the dreadful occurrence of Memorial Day be understood from that point of view. From that point of view alone, the Chicago incident becomes an isolated instance of one man’s callousness–but it was by no means such an isolated instance.
Half a century before, the Haymarket Affair, also in Chicago, became the labor cause célèbre of the nation and the world. The four labor leaders who were then framed and put to death in Chicago became martyrs or devils, according to the reaction of one class or another. But they could not have been so framed and murdered had there not been complete accord on the part of the most powerful forces in American finance. The same accord operated in the case of Girdler and the Chicago bloodshed.
Girdler was the front, the testing ground, the trial balloon of the most reactionary forces in American capitalism. This is not a matter for speculation. Keen economic observers of the time analyzed the situation of Republic Steel in terms of the shareholders as well as the Wall Street moguls.
I pointed out before that Girdler never owned even a tiny fraction of Republic’s stock. The big stockholders in Republic–and among them were some of the most powerful finance blocks in America–willingly allowed him to climb into the saddle and, once there, made no effort to unseat him. It should be historically noted that the Chicago dead did not arouse either the ire or the disgust of these same shareholders. Their attitude was that of smiling behind their palms, and quietly letting Girdler bear the brunt of the storm. Also, Girdler all during that period was responsible to a board of directors. This board represented, in its composition, far-reaching and important interests; but at no point is there any record of their reprimanding Girdler or disagreeing with his action. Other factors can be cited. A handful of key men in Wall Street could have picked up their phones, called Girdler, and called a quick halt to the bloody, senseless battle with labor which he was promoting; they did not, and there is every reason to believe that they silently backed Girdler in his policy.
Following this line of thought, it is interesting to observe the general press reaction to the Memorial Day Massacre. Although brief, the description of events on that day given earlier in this account makes a fairly good picture of what happened in the meadows outside of Republic. Further documentation, hundreds of pages of detailed testimony, is included in the Senate Report, S. Res. 266, 74th Congress, Part 14, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937. Exhibits presented also run into the hundreds. The testimony is explicit; it goes into minutiae, as may be gathered from the following extract, page 4939. John William Lotito, one of the strikers, is being examined by Senator La Follette:
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: All right. Did you see Captain Mooney while you stood there in front of the police?
MR. LOTITO: I think Captain Mooney was standing on the side where the other flag was–that is, to my left.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: Did you see what he was doing?
MR. LOTITO: Well, he had his hands up like this here. He was talking to the strikers. His lips were moving anyway. I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: You could not hear what he was saying?
MR. LOTITO: No.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: About how long would you say you stood there?
MR. LOTITO: Oh, maybe five minutes.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: All right. Now, tell me exactly, from your own knowledge, what happened at the end of this five-minute period.
MR. LOTITO: At the end of the five-minute period? Well, I was talking to this policeman there, and the first thing I knew I got clubbed, while I was talking to him.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: And then what happened?
MR. LOTITO: I got clubbed and I went down, and my flag fell down, and I went to pick up the flag again, to get up, and I got clubbed the second time. I was like a top, you know, spinning. I was dizzy. So I put my hand to my head, and there was blood all over. I started to crawl away, and half running and half crawling, and I didn’t know what I was doing, to tell you the truth. After I got up, why there was shots, and everything I heard, I didn’t know which way to run. Anyway, I retreated back that way.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: You mean back toward Sam’s Place?
MR. LOTITO: And then I got shot in the leg.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: How far away were you from the place where you had been standing talking to the police when you were shot in the leg, would you say?
MR. LOTITO: Oh, I got quite a ways from there, all right.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: Can you approximate how far?
MR. LOTITO: Maybe thirty or forty yards away I got.
This is just a page of testimony, chosen at random; there are far more harrowing details that might be listed; but the point is this: all the details necessary are there. They are reports of thousands of eye-witnesses who saw what happened. Newspaper reporters on the scene saw what happened. And if that were not enough, in addition to the still photographers, the Paramount News people took down a detailed photographic record of the whole affair.
In other words, the newspapers knew the facts of the case. They could not plead ignorance, even the carefully conditioned ignorance which allows them to interpret events precisely as they please. With all that, they too acted, with very few exceptions, very much as if they were part of the combine behind Tom Girdler. They lied about what had occurred outside the Republic Steel plant. They lied hugely and in unison, although they departed from the truth on many different levels.
The Chicago Tribune, for example, was overt and completely unabashed. It described the unarmed men and women and children who composed the picket line–none of whom were ever proved to possess a firearm during the march–as “lusting for blood.” It raised a red scare, which was sedulously promoted by the Hearst and the McCormick interests and their fellow hatemongers. The more conservative journals doubted that the police had indulged in provocation and pointed out that force was a necessary ingredient to the preservation of law and order. One looked in vain in such papers as the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune for editorials reproaching Tom Girdler, or his private police, even in the mildest terms. No criminal action was ever taken to seek justice for the men who had died in Chicago. Only the few independent newspapers and the labor press kept the issue alive and fought for justice–and there too is a remarkable parallel to what happened before in the Haymarket Affair.
You may wonder how it was that you do not recall seeing the newsreel which so graphically describes all that happened, and which was shown at the La Follette investigation. The following editorial from the New Masses of June 29, 1937, sheds a good deal of light on that:
The reason given by Paramount News for suppressing its newsreel of the Chicago Memorial Day steel-strike massacre is an obvious sham. Audiences trained on the Hollywood school of gangster films are not likely to stage a “riotous demonstration” in the theater upon seeing cops beating people into insensibility, and worse. Against whom would the riot be directed anyway? The Board of Directors or Republic Steel and the Chicago municipal authorities are hardly likely to be found in the immediate vicinity.
The real reason behind the film suppression is its decisive evidence that virtually every newspaper in the country lied, and continues to lie, about the responsibility for violence in the strike areas. The myth that the steel strikers have resorted to violence to gain their just ends is now the basis for the whole campaign of slander and misrepresentation against them. That is why Tom Girdler of Republic Steel refuses to confer with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, and that is why 95 per cent of the press carries on a publicity pogrom against the strikers.
Even after the St. Louis Post Dispatch performed a genuine service to the American people in breaking the story of the film (for which, though it is Pulitzer owned, it is very unlikely to get the Pulitzer award), the venal press still continued to blast away at the strikers with the same old legend. Not a comma has been changed in the editorials which, day after day, have defended the steel tycoons on the ground that there can be no compromise with labor violence.
And all this time, the film record exists–and has been described–which would enable the public to make up its own mind on this very crucial point!
At this point, with the added emphasis of the above editorial, we begin to have a very different picture of the Memorial Day Massacre than that which popularly surrounds it. Not that Tom Girdler’s responsibility is lessened, not that the brutality of his agents is mitigated one iota, not that the Chicago police bear any less the responsibility for murder; but the incident in whole becomes broader and more inclusive. We find that far from being an isolated case of managerial violence, it was a focal point for the theory and the technique of reactionary capitalism in the organizational struggles of the thirties. It was a test case; it was symptomatic. Steel is, as was said, the industry of industries, and in 1937 steel was chosen by the entrenched forces of the open shop as the battleground for the open shop–against industrial unionism.
It is the difficult and tedious task of the labor historian to document every statement he makes. There is a good reason for this, of course; the body of knowledge (press, magazines, most books, etc.) presented to the public, both currently and contemporaneously to the times of which he writes, contradicts almost every premise and almost every fact which he brings forth. Only the labor press, which has a limited readership compared to the commercial press, bears him out. This is not the case with other historians. For example, one could start a story about Lincoln with the accepted premise that we was a great and good man; in the case of Eugene Debs, one would first have to document his actions and prove his intentions.
In connection with that, the charge that labor promotes almost all industrial violence cannot be dismissed as a lie; it must be proved to be a lie–and once proved, this small account of the Memorial Day Massacre can be closed. I have shown some of the facts in the arms orders of the steel companies. After our account of what happened in Chicago, it might do to cite the New York Times headline for May 31, 1937:
4 KILLED, 84 HURT AS STRIKERS FIGHT POLICE
IN CHICAGO, STEEL MOB HALTED.
Technically, that is not a lie. Only four men had died then; eventually five more succumbed from wounds. If you called the picket line a mob, then there is no doubt but that it was halted–although some might prefer the word “slaughtered.” And some of the strikers did fight for their lives against the police. But this is pettifogging; the sense and intent of the headline, which very much set the pattern for nonsensational headlines all over the country, is more than apparent for anyone.
Let’s go on with the record. Monroe, Michigan–ten days after Chicago. There is a Republic plant which employs about 1,350 persons. The strike is called; the workers go out, and for two weeks picket lines are maintained in a disciplined fashion. There is absolutely no disorder.
Then, suddenly, there appears on the scene what we know familiarly as “the bloodthirsty mob of strikers,” and the hospital wards are full, and the damage is reckoned in lives as well as thousands of dollars. But the records show that after due deliberation and planning, Police Chief Jesse Fisher swore in enough special police to form a small army–at an expense of $9,000 to the little town. Leonidas McDonald, a Negro C.I.O. organizer, was attacked by a mob and severely beaten. This incident, which members of the mob assured reporters was carefully planned, touched off the riot. Then Chief Fisher ordered his men to attack the picket line. They went to work with tear-gas shells and grenades. The next day, the hospital wards were full, but Chief Fisher, bursting with pride, set about organizing a shotgun brigade of six hundred men.
It had worked in Chicago. Why not Monroe?
Newspapers told us that in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, the same pattern of violence was being inaugurated by strikers of the Moltrop Steel Products Company. But George Mike was not a picket and not a striker. He was a crippled war veteran, who stood on a corner in Beaver Falls, selling tickets to a C.I.O. dance. A deputy sheriff leveled his gas gun at him and fired. The shell smashed his skull, and he died the next day. Our newspapers, during the same weeks, described the frightful riot provoked in Youngstown by–not the strikers, but their wives. Women too can be a frightful menace to society, if you only see them in the proper perspective. Many of these women carried their small children on this particular day, and no doubt that added to their potential menace. They were coming home from a meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, and a few of them paused to rest on an embankment that was a part of Republic’s property. The deputies on guard ordered them off. The women and children responded too slowly, and the deputies helped them along with gas shells. As the women fled, their screams brought men to the scene, and when the men appeared, the deputies switched to repeating rifles.
Result: two dead, thirty injured.
Massillon, July 11, and strikers holding a meeting outside C.I.O. headquarters. Again, the firing starts, and in a little while there are three dead strikers and five more on their way to the hospital. Then C.I.O. headquarters is surrounded, and for an hour lead is poured into the building. And in the building, there is not one firearm.
But the newspapers said, the next day: “STRIKING MOB ATTACKS MASSILLON POLICE.” That was a Middle-Western paper, but most others bore variations of the same.
This sort of record could be continued indefinitely. One labor historian estimates that casualties suffered by the working class in organizational struggles outnumber total casualties suffered by United States Armed Forces in all of this country’s wars up to World War II. Though the violence of Tom Girdler’s Republic Steel was sharp and dramatic, it could be matched by the violence of any one of a hundred other corporations, over a period of half a century.
Some of the background to the Memorial Day Massacre has been presented here. It was shown that the incident itself was both a part and a focal point in the pattern of closed-shop violence. The strange, wild, tragic, and disordered years of the third decade of the twentieth century, here in America, were not unproductive. Out of depression and despair came the greatest organization of labor this country ever knew–the industrial unionism of the CIO. Out of the broad united front against fascism, led by the C.I.O. and other organizations, came the strength and desire to resist Hitlerite Germany and to carry the world through its sharpest crisis.
The America of today is not and cannot ever be the America of a decade ago. History does not stage repeat performances. It is very likely that there will be violence in connection with future strikes; but the American people have learned a good deal. And if such an incident as that in Chicago occurs again, it is wholly possible that those responsible will have to face the anger of millions instead of thousands.”
Presenting “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression” Chapter 6: Three Strikes. Dr. Lewis Andreas talks about being at the 1937 Memorial Day massacre and providing medical care during the Depression. Justin McCarthy discusses his job conditions at Ford Assembly Plant prior to the unions implementation. Mike Widman remembers heading up union negotiations and the strike at the Ford Plant in 1940-41. Bob Stinson discusses working at General Motors and how the sit-down strike began. Union songs performed by the Almanac Singers are played throughout the episode.
Jubilation, fireworks, and dancing in the streets; America erupts in a spontaneous block party in neighborhoods throughout our nation. Here in Spokane Washington in the shadow of the old Jesuit monastery at Mount St Michaels everyone has come out of their houses to celebrate like it’s the Fourth of July, and as a day of liberation they are exactly right.
I’m hoping they give Trump his buddy Epstein’s old cell, and it’s the last we hear of him for a hundred years.
But just in case there are more of his kind, let us now purge our destroyers from among us.
As I have written, I believe a just and nonviolent natural consequence for treason, espionage, insurrection, and leading a campaign of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror is revocation of citizenship and exile.
As I wrote in my post of January 9 2022, How Shall We Answer Treason?;
Disloyalty and the betrayal of trust are among the worst and most terrible of true crimes, for they signify and represent the failure and collapse of all other values and meaning. This is why Solidarity as Fraternity is among the three principles on which the Revolution is built, along with Liberty and Equality, for without them there can be no free society of equals.
A brilliant Meidas Touch video which indicts Trump as a domestic terrorist for the January 6 Insurrection provoked me to question, How shall we answer treason? So wrote the following in reply:
Actually, I would like to see Trump achieve his true nature by being fed to dogs and transformed into dog shit. Wouldn’t it be a lovely display in a glass case exhibited in a museum of holocausts, atrocities, and crimes against humanity? Let his monument read thus:
Here lies Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, in his true form, most terrible enemy democracy has faced since Alcibiades betrayed Athens, most dangerous foreign agent to ever attack America even including Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, who subverted our ideals and sabotaged our institutions, and nearly enacted the fall of civilization as the figurehead of the Fourth Reich and herald of an age of fascist tyranny and state terror.
Yet here he lies, nothing but a pile of dog shit. Look upon the rewards of tyranny, you who are mighty, and despair.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
We can but wish. Beyond such fantasies, exclusion is a just balance for crimes of treason, disloyalty, and betrayal, in the forms of loss of citizenship, the most terrible punishment any nation can inflict, and exile and erasure.
To be clear, all participants in the January 6 Insurrection, and all who conspired in this crime, had knowledge aforehand but did not sound an alarm, or acted subsequently to conceal, abet, or deny and excuse its perpetrators and its nature including all legislators who voted not to investigate it, bear responsibility in its crimes and should be repaid with loss of citizenship, seizures of assets, exile, and erasure.
Exile as the natural consequence of treason was explored in the short story “The Man Without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale, first published in The Atlantic in December 1863. It is a story of a traitor who comes to understand the true meaning of his crime; the renunciation of his social contract, connection and interdependence with other human beings, and membership in a national identity.
As described in Wikipedia; “It is the story of American Army lieutenant Philip Nolan, who renounces his country during a trial for treason, and is consequently sentenced to spend the rest of his days at sea without so much as a word of news about the United States.
The protagonist is a young US Army lieutenant, Philip Nolan, who develops a friendship with the visiting Aaron Burr. When Burr is tried for treason (that historically occurred in 1807), Nolan is tried as an accomplice. During his testimony, he bitterly renounces his nation and, with a foul oath, angrily shouts, “I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” The judge is completely shocked at that announcement and, on convicting him, icily grants him his wish. Nolan is to spend the rest of his life aboard US Navy warships in exile with no right ever to set foot on US soil again and with explicit orders that no one shall ever again mention his country to him.
The sentence is carried out to the letter. For the rest of his life, Nolan is transported from ship to ship, lives out his life as a prisoner on the high seas, and is never allowed back in a home port.”
So for Exile; now also for Erasure. As I wrote in my post of January 7 2021, Treason and Terror: Trump’s Brownshirts Attack Congress; This leaves the ringleader and chief conspirator of treason, sedition, insurrection, and terror to be removed from power and denied a platform from which to spread madness and violence like a plague; our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. I believe we must remove, impeach, deplatform, and prosecute him for his many crimes against America; Trump must be exiled from public life and isolated from his power to destroy us.
Roman law called this damnatio memoriae, the erasure of public forgetting, and coupled with the Amish practice of shunning provides a useful model of minimum use of social force in safeguarding ourselves from threats, without the brutality of torture and prison to which we have become addicted. A fascinating article by the classical scholar Alexander Meddings examines its use in the cases of Trump’s nearest Imperial parallels, Caligula and Nero.
Exile and Erasure; neither prison nor violence or the use of force and fear. Let us simply cast out those who would destroy us from among us, and forget them.
I came to my lifelong interest in the origins of evil by three Defining Moments of life disruptive events and trauma, which include a childhood growing up in a savagely repressive community of religious fanatics of the patriarchal and xenophobic Reformed Church, once the state faith of South Africa’s Apartheid regime, a childhood wherein divisions of exclusionary otherness and the three primary terrors, faith weaponized in service to authority and power as violence, subjugation, and identitarian-sectarian division, patriarchal sexual terror, and white supremacist terror and other racially motivated hate crime and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, were symbolized for me by two fires; a witch burning and the burning of a cross on the lawn of newlyweds who had married outside of their churches, a Dutch Reformed Church man and a Swiss Calvinist woman, both white Protestants, referred to locally as a mixed marriage and officially shunned by the Reformed Church. When one begins by forbidding music as sinful and the use of buttons as non-Biblical technology, divisions of exclusionary otherness and membership become reinforced by authority as a grim regime of force and control.
Second came a near-death experience of disembodied timeless vision and frontline witness at nine years of age of the most massive incident of state terror in American history, Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969 in People’s Park, Berkeley.
Third were my experiences in the summer of 1974 just before high school, when I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children and other outcasts from the police bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and my near-execution by police which echoes that of Maurice Blanchot in 1944 by the Gestapo and of Fyodur Dostoevsky’s 1849 mock execution by the Czar’s secret police as recounted in The Idiot.
This trauma and historical context I processed by reading and writing, and during my last two years of high school I discovered books which became instrumental to this process and to my understanding; Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, whose protagonist I felt a deep identification and kinship with, and was a dinner table subject of conversation as my mother wrote her study of psychosomatic muteness from his childhood therapy journal and the Soviet mental hospital records Kosinski wrote his magnificent and terrible novel from, the works of Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, and Jean Paul Sartre, and other Holocaust survivors and Resistance fighters who engaged with the problem of evil as tyranny and state terror, and Robert Waite’s magisterial study of Hitler in The Psychopathic God; this last work inspired me to question the origins of evil as fear, power, and force under the triple lens of psychology, history, and literature as a field of scholarship at university and throughout my life.
How is this relevant to ideas of justice? Because we must not become our enemies in the use of social force, even to guarantee our universal human rights.
Remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
We must escape the maelstrom of dehumanization which is the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force if we are to free ourselves from the disfiguring and crippling legacies of our history. To do this we must abandon power over others and the social use of force; but first we must seize our power over ourselves from those who would enslave us.
Donald Trump found guilty of hush-money plot to influence 2016 election
The worst thing that can happen to a nation, a Revolution, a liberation movement, to any human community bound together in solidarity by mutual social contract, is fracture and division; both ideological fracture and that of manufactured divisions of blood, faith, and soil when fear is weaponed in service to power by those who would enslave us.
In South Africa, still emerging from the legacies of her history, we have examples of both kinds of threats to unity and solidarity of action, compounded intersectionally with the predictable phase of revolutionary struggle of authoritarian nationalism which creates and enforces elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege of the revolutionary classes which have seized power from the former elites, often becoming kleptocratic oligarchies. This is a consequence of the imposed conditions of struggle, especially in anticolonial revolutions, and as such its inequalities and injustices may be laid at the door of the former colonial power and not its successor state.
The question remains; what do we do with this awful freedom?
As we are taught with the lyrics of the song Where Do We Go From Here?, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7 of season 6, Once More With Feeling, possibly the greatest musical episode of any telenovela yet created;
“Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
The battle’s done,
And we kinda won.
So we sound our victory cheer.
Where do we go from here.
Why is the path unclear,
When we know home is near.
Understand we’ll go hand in hand,
But we’ll walk alone in fear. (Tell me)
Tell me where do we go from here.
When does the end appear,
When do the trumpets cheer.
The curtains close, on a kiss god knows,
We can tell the end is near…
Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
Where do we go
from here?”
Yet hope remains when all is lost, and whether it becomes a gift or a curse is in our hands. These lyrics speak of the modern pathology of disconnectedness, of the division and fracture of our Solidarity, of subjugation through learned helplessness and the dominion of fear. But this is not the end of the story, nor of ours.
Once More With Feeling ends not with abjection, but with The Kiss, between the Slayer and Spike, one of the monsters she hunts. A very particular kind of monster, who is also the hero of the story in its entire seven year arc; one who is made monstrous by his condition of being and forces beyond his control, imposed conditions of struggle very like that of the violence used by a slave to break his chains which is not morally equivalent to the violence of a slavemaster, forces and systems of oppression against which he struggles for liberation and to recreate and define himself as he chooses, a monster who reclaims his humanity and his soul. This is why we continue to watch the show twenty years after its debut; we are all Spike, locked in titanic struggle for the ownership of ourselves with authorized identities and systemic evils, a revolution of truths written in our flesh against imposed conditions of struggle and dehumanization versus orders of human being, meaning, and value.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an allegory of Sartrean freedom in a world without inherent value or meaning, of the joy of total freedom versus the terror of our nothingness, and above all a song of the redemptive power of love to return to us our true selves.
Let the forces of unequal power find not a humankind nor a South Africa abject in learned helplessness and submission to authority, divided and dehumanized by the legacies of historical inequalities and injustices and divided by hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, but united in solidarity and refusal to submit to force and control; for in resistance we become unconquerable and free.
This is how we defeat fracture and division, colonialism and white supremacist terror, unequal power and capitalist exploitation, imperialist dominion and fascist tyranny in the long game, after we bring a Reckoning for its crimes against humanity and its subversion of democracy and the equality of all human beings; in this first election in which the generation who grew up free from Apartheid can vote, let us answer hate with love, division with solidarity, fear with hope, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Rachel Savage in The Guardian, in an article entitled South Africa elections: what are the issues and will ANC lose its majority?; “South Africans go to the polls on 29 May in elections in which the ruling African National Congress party could lose its majority for the first time since it swept to power in 1994 after the end of apartheid. Chronic unemployment, inequality, power cuts and corruption have contributed to a haemorrhaging of support for the ANC, which won the 2019 election with 57.5% of the vote.
Who are the ANC’s challengers?
The ruling party is battling against established opposition parties such as the economically liberal Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Marxist-inspired Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). It is also being challenged by upstarts such as the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party, led by the former president Jacob Zuma, who is bitterly opposed to the current South African leader, Cyril Ramaphosa.
Polls have consistently shown the ANC getting less than 50% of the vote. A telephone tracking survey by the Social Research Foundation had it on 44.1% of the vote in a 60% turnout model this week, compared with 39.1% a month earlier.
Some analysts think the ANC could still scrape a majority, noting that phone polls often have significant flaws, including underestimating ANC support in rural areas where many poorer votes do not have phones.
Why are these elections important?
South Africans voted Nelson Mandela and the ANC into office in 1994 on a wave of hope. Thirty years later, the mood is bleak. More than four in five adults said the country was going in the wrong direction in a 2022 survey by Afrobarometer, a non-profit African research network, 10 percentage points higher than 18 months earlier.
The ANC losing its parliamentary majority would mark a tipping point for a party that, especially for older and rural voters, still carries the halo of liberation. If it gets more than 45% of the vote, it may be able to form a coalition with smaller parties and continue policies such as trying to end power cuts. But if it gets closer to 40%, it may have to share power with the DA or EFF, which could mean radical policy changes.
What are the key issues?
The lack of jobs is the most pressing issue for South Africans. Almost a quarter of adults told Afrobarometer that joblessness, which has deepened the poverty and inequality that stalk the country, was the most important problem for the government to address.
The unemployment rate hit almost 33% this year, more than 10 percentage points higher than in 1994, with almost half of young people out of work.
South Africans are also fed up with scheduled power cuts known as load shedding, violent crime – South Africa has one of the world’s highest murder rates – and corruption.
What have the parties pledged?
The ANC has promised to learn from its mistakes and warned that “forces” are seeking to undo South Africa’s democratic progress. It has pledged to create 4 million “work opportunities”, introduce national health insurance and a basic income grant, and tackle corruption and illegal immigration.
The DA, the biggest opposition party, has campaigned on the slogan “Rescue South Africa”. Its promises include lifting 6 million people out of poverty and creating 2m jobs, as well as a “balanced approach” to privatising state-owned companies. Many black South Africans see the DA as favouring the interests of white people.
The EFF argues that apartheid did not end in 1994, saying the democratic settlement left the economy in the hands of “white monopoly capital”. It wants to expropriate land without compensation and nationalise companies, including banks and mines.
Zuma’s MK has similarly leftwing economic policies, but dates South Africa’s “prolonged period of national shame” back to 1652, when the first Dutch settlement was established. It also wants to move from constitutional democracy to parliamentary supremacy and to increase the powers of traditional leaders.
How will the elections work?
Almost 28 million South Africans are registered to vote in national and provincial elections, less than half of the 62 million population.
The 400-seat national parliament will vote for the president no later than two weeks after election day. There is no constitutional process for forming a coalition government.
South Africa uses a system of proportional representation. Voters get three ballots – two for the National Assembly, each allocating 200 seats, and one for their provincial legislature. One of the national ballots will only have political parties on it. The second will be for one of nine multi-member provincial constituencies. Voters can either opt for a party, which will list its candidates’ names, or an independent.
This is the first time independent candidates are competing, with just 11 independents out of almost 15,000 people running for office across South Africa, while 70 parties are putting up candidates.“
As written by Steve Bloomfield in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘We didn’t fight for this’: ANC’s grip on power in peril in South Africa election: Thirty years after the end of apartheid, corruption is rife, crime is high and the economy is a mess. The party of Mandela admits it ‘made mistakes’. But will the people forgive them?; “In the heart of Soweto, the birthplace of South African democracy has been burned, looted and stripped for parts.
Almost 70 years ago, in the early days of apartheid, more than 3,000 people gathered in a dusty square to draw up the Freedom Charter, demanding a series of rights and proclaiming that South Africa “belongs to all who live in it, black and white”.
When apartheid ended in 1994 and Nelson Mandela was elected president by a landslide, the charter became the foundation for the country’s optimistic new constitution. So it made sense, 50 years on, to mark its anniversary and turn this square in the Kliptown area of Soweto into a place that represented the new South Africa.
There would be shops and offices, a museum, a monument to freedom. To top it off, a new hotel opened, marketed as “the first four-star luxury hotel offering African hospitality in the heart of Soweto”. A flame of freedom was lit, surrounded by the words of the charter.
South Africa then was on the up. New homes had been built, and access to electricity and water extended across the country. While much of the country’s wealth still rested in a few white hands, a black middle class was growing and South Africa was preparing to host the football World Cup.
But if the first 15 years of democracy was a success, the same cannot be said for the last 15 years. And the impact can be seen vividly in the square where modern South Africa was born.
Poverty is rampant, unemployment is high and three years ago riots led to the burning and looting of shops. Everything that can be stolen and sold has gone, including the metal grates that covered the sewers. The hotel is still here but staff admit there are barely any guests. And in the monument where the charter lies, the flame of freedom has long since burned out.
As South Africa prepares to go to the polls on Wednesday, 30 years on from the first democratic elections, it is a nation in crisis. It’s the most unequal country in the world and among the most dangerous. The economy is stagnant, with almost zero growth in a decade and nearly half of adults are out of work.
Basic public services are falling apart. In many parts of the country there is no clean water, while rolling power cuts have become a regular feature of daily life. The government proudly points out it has been 55 days since the electricity went off, a streak that the more cynical expect to last until election day but not much longer.
And in the final week of campaigning, Johannesburg has suffered a strike by rubbish collectors, leading to piles of garbage on streets corners and strewn across pavements.
At the heart of it all is corruption. What was a minor issue under Mandela and his successor Thabo Mbeki exploded when Jacob Zuma came to power in 2009. By the time he was kicked out of office by the African National Congress (ANC) in 2018, billions was looted from the state, leaving almost every part of it bankrupt, from the national airline to the agency that ran the railways.
“The tax authority was effectively taken over by a syndicate of criminals,” says Anthony Butler, a professor of politics at the University of Cape Town. “It’s proved to be very difficult to rebuild those institutions.”
An inquiry into what became known as “state capture” concluded that “the ANC under Zuma permitted, supported and enabled corruption”, though Zuma himself denies any direct role in corruption.
After Zuma, the ANC tried to turn the page, choosing a former Mandela ally, Cyril Ramaphosa, as the new president. Despite admitting his party “made mistakes”, Ramaphosa has been unable to change the country for the better and is now haunted by the ghosts of the ANC past.
An unrepentant Zuma has formed his own party, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) – named after the former paramilitary wing of the ANC – which has peeled away support, particularly in the province of KwaZulu-Natal.
Coupled with the strength of another populist leftwing party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) led by Julius Malema, a former ANC youth league leader, the opinion polls suggest the party of Mandela will fall to its lowest level of support since 1994, and could even slip below 50%, meaning it would have to rule as a minority government or go into coalition.
The size of Ramaphosa’s task can be seen on the streets of Alexandra, one of Johannesburg’s largest townships and once an ANC stronghold. “It’s filthy, densely populated, ungovernable,” says Vusi Khosa, a softly spoken Alexandra native. “It’s anarchy. People do what they wish.”
Khosa used to work in construction, building RDP (reconstruction and development) houses, the government-built homes provided for free to millions of poor South Africans since 1994.
But like many here, the 46-year-old now struggles to find work. He lists friends who trained to be doctors and engineers but are now unemployed. “That doesn’t give a good picture, does it?”
He worries about crime too. It’s rare to see a police officer, he says – “We can wait until Jesus comes back, it’s not going to happen” – so some people have set up patrols at night. But one person’s neighbourhood watch is another person’s militia. “Some people take extreme measures,” Khosa admits.
For Queen Pungula, who works at a local creche, crime keeps her inside once the sun goes down. “By 6 o’clock I can’t go outside,” she says. Pungula lives and works in one of Alexandra’s hostels, built by the apartheid government in the 1970s to house migrants from rural areas who were allowed to come to the city to work. Her hostel is relatively safe, but others are notorious for overcrowding and crimes.
Housing remains a nightmare for most. Parts of Alexandra have expensive bungalows with high walls and manicured lawns, but across the road and round the corner it’s a slum – ramshackle one-room houses made of cinder block and corrugated iron, open sewers, people living cheek by jowl. None of the homes have toilets, so along one street hundreds of portable toilets are lined up along a wall. “We have no flushing toilets,” yells a passing pastor, Charles Mahumani. “This is an insult to us!”
The ANC will not have his vote, and it may not have Khosa’s either. He is an ANC member, but – he pauses, sighs – “I do not know. I do not know.”
Khosa is not alone. In most democracies, a ruling party that has been in power for 30 years and presided over such a horrendous series of interlocking crises, would be facing a long period in opposition. But the ANC is not just a political party – it’s a former liberation movement, and that makes a difference. People have a different attitude to a movement that won their freedom: for many South Africans, it’s a complicated relationship, and the decision to take their vote elsewhere is as much emotional as pragmatic.
There is a fear among older ANC supporters that their children’s generation are unaware of just how bad life was under apartheid, or just how vital the ANC was to ending the racist system. “I know where I came from,” says Frank Baloyi, a 56-year-old teacher in Kliptown’s freedom square, officially called Walter Sisulu Square. “I’m from apartheid. If you’re from that era, you understand. There was no silver platter. We suffered a lot.”
He describes the ANC’s failings as “minor mistakes” made by “human beings”. Young people, he says, “don’t understand what we went through”.
Those worries are present among the ANC’s leadership too. “We’re pleading with South Africans to give us another chance,” says Snuki Zikalala, president of the ANC’s veterans’ league and an ally of Mbeki, who has returned to frontline politics after the end of Zuma.
They are not just pleading, they are promising. The minimum wage has been raised by 8.5%, social grants have risen, and this month Ramaphosa signed into law a national health insurance bill giving access to healthcare for all. Left unsaid is how the government will pay for it.
Zikalala admits the party lost its way under Zuma, who “brought down the whole South African state. That’s why the country is in a mess. It took us 100 years backwards. It was all about himself and his family.”
Sounding perhaps more like an opposition politician than a governing party apparatchik, he adds: “We have everything in this country. If we can just have proper governance and run the country professionally…”
The ANC will still be running the country on Thursday, but if the polls are right, it will be in coalition. However, its potential alliances are fraught with problems. How can it do a deal with Zuma, a man who it now freely admits perpetrated one of the biggest corruption scandals of any government anywhere in the world?
How can it do a deal with Malema’s EFF, a party that wants to appropriate land and who Zikalala says “does not believe in the rule of law”?
Of the main parties, that just leaves the Democratic Alliance, a centre-right party opposed to the ANC’s social spending and, more importantly, still seen as dominated by and catering for white people.
Optimism is hard to find. But Butler, who wrote a biography of Ramaphosa, believes the president might be “the right person for this situation. He’s a consensus politician, a negotiator. He’s exactly the leader you’d want for a period of coalition government. This is his thing.” Also, he adds: “There isn’t anyone else. He’s all they’ve got.”
There is another question about what happens after the election: where does the anger go if things don’t improve? Several people last week muttered darkly about foreigners, accusing them of taking jobs and being responsible for crime.
Migrants, predominantly from neighbouring Zimbabwe, may make up just 3% of the population, but the proportion is higher in the poorest, most densely populated, most crime-ridden parts of the cities. South Africa has been hit by waves of xenophobic violence over the past 16 years and some parties have embraced an anti-immigrant position.
But there are reasons to be hopeful too. No one doubts the election will be free and fair – unlike in the US, there is no possibility of a coup attempt if the ANC was to lose power. The country’s institutions, especially the judicial system, have remained independent and strong. There is a free, vibrant press. And while the state has collapsed, business and civil society has stepped in, providing health and education, delivering social services, filling potholes.
Despite everything, South Africa remains a country of successful businesses, vibrant creative scenes and a thriving tourism industry.
But back in Kliptown, over the railway tracks from the square, Bob Nameng disagrees. The head of a local youth organisation, he points back over the tracks to the Freedom Charter and its proclamations about the new South Africa. “It’s bullshit, it’s a contradiction. You speak of land – us here are congested in a small piece. You speak of rights – there are no rights here.”
He won’t vote ANC – “I can’t afford to sell myself again” – and will instead support Malema’s EFF. Not that he’s is hopeful anything will change.
“Nothing is OK in our country. I can’t be lying. This is not what we fought for.”
As written by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled The ANC has left South Africa a land of broken dreams. Its time seems over: At this month’s elections, the party of Mandela should be judged on its dismal record over the past 30 years; “Who will save South Africa from itself? Not the ruling African National Congress (ANC), whose 30 unbroken years of under-achievement have brought the country to its present sorry pass. Not “reformist” president Cyril Ramaphosa, widely considered a disappointment. And not Russia or China, either, to which Pretoria’s flailing regime, increasingly at odds with the west, looks for succour.
Three decades after Nelson Mandela’s historic poll victory formally vanquished apartheid, and less than three weeks before another watershed election, it’s all going wrong for the Rainbow Nation. Africa’s most developed country is now its most unequal, the World Bank says. Crime is rampant, corruption endemic, growth is tanking. More than 60% live in poverty. Unemployment among black people is 40%.
Voters face a choice on 29 May between a discredited, tarnished ANC, which is predicted to lose its parliamentary majority for the first time, and a broad array of disunited opposition parties. Like 1994, it is also a fundamental choice about what sort of South Africa they want – democratic or authoritarian, open or closed, free market or centrally directed, inclusive or exclusive.
The same pivotal choice faces other would-be 21st-century powers – countries such as Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Indonesia. As when Mandela completed his long walk to freedom, the international community, and the western democracies especially, are watching closely to see which way South Africa jumps. It has a chance to lead again.
The statistical story so far is an index of broken dreams. Reporting in 2022, the World Bank identified race, apartheid’s legacy and unequal land ownership as ongoing core problems. Even now, 30 years on, about 10% of the 60 million population controls 80% of the wealth.
Government attempts to level the playing field frequently misfire. Ramaphosa says about 25% of farmland is now owned by black South Africans. But critics argue the land restitution programme has sharply reduced productivity and employment. Government “equity targets” to ensure workplaces accurately reflect the country’s racial make-up attract similar controversy.
The official, overall unemployment figure is a dismaying 32%. Surveys suggest vast disparities between the average monthly incomes of black and white households are persisting. Housing and education are other big problem areas, where the discriminatory and segregationist practices of the past still disadvantage the least well off.
Yet at the same time, white South Africans, angry at the institutionalised bias of the Black Economic Empowerment regulations and spooked by violent crime, continue to vote with their feet. Nearly one-fifth of 1994’s total white population has emigrated, exacerbating present-day skills shortages. This has led to arbitrary curbs on capital export and pension payments, and declining tax revenues. Only about 12% of South Africans pay income tax. About 62% of the black population receives state grants (welfare benefits).
In his state of the nation address in February, Ramaphosa implicitly laid much blame for post-1994 failures on his predecessor, Jacob Zuma, who was briefly jailed amid corruption allegations in 2021. “For a decade, individuals at the highest levels of the state conspired with private individuals to take over and re-purpose state-owned companies, law enforcement agencies and other public institutions,” he said.
“Billions of rands that were meant to meet the needs of ordinary South Africans were stolen. Confidence in our country was badly eroded. Public institutions were severely weakened. The effects of state capture continue to be felt across society, from the shortage of freight locomotives to crumbling public services, from the poor performance of our power stations to failed development projects.”
It was an extraordinary confession, inadvertently highlighting Ramaphosa’s own ineffectiveness since taking office in 2018. Organised corruption remains a hugely destructive problem. The speech provided an odd preface to the coming election, in which Ramaphosa, as ANC leader, is seeking a second presidential term.
The main challenger is the liberal, centre-right Democratic Alliance, good for an estimated fifth of the vote. Unsustainable state spending, low growth and investment, crime and graft are key DA campaign issues. Yet if the ANC does fall below 50% support, it may be the land-expropriating, hard-left Economic Freedom Fighters and a new populist party, uMkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation), backed by Zuma, that do the most damage.
Messy coalition negotiations could lie ahead. By rights, in any modern democracy, the ANC’s record should “cast it into oblivion”, wrote Brian Pottinger, former editor of South Africa’s Sunday Times. “Not so in South Africa. To many, particularly poor and rural black people, [it] is a powerful, even mystical brand. There is nostalgic pride in the ANC’s 112-year-long struggle for black emancipation and dignity.”
Yet research shows loyalty to the ANC is weaker among post-1994 generations – the so-called “born frees”.
Pottinger believes that, while the country desperately needs change, the ANC is incapable of delivering it – and will double down on failure. “The ANC will stick to its catastrophic redistributive economic policies rather than pursuing growth, batten the hatches against capital flight and pre-emptively seek to chill free speech,” he predicted.
As western political confidence and business investment wanes, the ANC is relying ever more heavily on defence, security and commercial ties with Russia and China. South Africa has refused to condemn Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and joined naval operations with China and Russia last year. Beijing is South Africa’s largest trading partner. Russian oligarchs have helped fund the ANC.
For all who value democracy, freedom and the rule of law, these are plainly the wrong choices. Exploitative great powers and dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will not save South Africa from itself. Nor will self-serving ANC elites. Only South Africans themselves can do that – by exercising en masse the power of the vote bequeathed to them by Nelson Mandela.”
In the context of a Zuma-Ramaphosa showdown, this election reprises the Insurrection of 2021 but as electoral politics rather than open factional battle, and in this sense represents progress and victory for an imperiled democracy. Voting is always better than shooting; just look at America’s January 6 Insurrection and the volatile and totally polarized election campaign in which we are now engaged and still so much better than civil war. As in America, South Africa faces the same moment of decision in choosing a future, and for now the people seem willing to give democracy one last chance to deliver a true free society of equals, in the rising shadows of authoritarian tyranny and its iron answers for the unequal wealth and power of democracy’s internal contradictions and systems failures as capitalism globally tries to free itself from its host political institutions.
Who do we want to become, we human beings; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals? In South Africa’s elections today we may scry our future, in America and for all humankind.
As I wrote in my post of July 20 2021, Chaos in South Africa: A Window of Opportunity for Revolutionary Struggle and Transformative Change; Our topologies of human being, meaning, and value shift with the action of the tidal forces of history, and in South Africa the economic disparity and mass precariat brought on by a failed political system of one party rule and a failed economic system of nepotism, kleptocracy, plutocratic capitalism, and oligarchic criminal syndicates combines with a failed social system of identitarian tribalism and patriarchy, and has been destabilized and thrown into chaos by the trigger event of the Zuma Insurrection.
Here as in many other postcolonial liberation states, the conditions of revolutionary struggle imposed by tyrannies of white supremacist terror and elite hegemonic wealth, power, and privilege bear legacies of historic injustices and inequalities which continue to unfold in the lives of its peoples long after their freedom was won, for the values and psychosocial qualities necessary for victory against colonial tyranny, values which include authoritarianism and submission to charismatic leaders, narratives of victimhood and martyrdom, identitarian nationalism, and a culture of militarist-patriarchal violence and the valorization of war, become corruptive and subversive of democracy when institutionalized by successor states.
Victims often become perpetrators once power has been seized, abandoned in a world wherein fear and force are the only means of exchange and the only things which have meaning; in this, nations are no different from individuals.
Tonight in South Africa feral bands of looters skirmish with vigilante militias while under cover of this confusion death squads, mercenaries, and assassins hunt each other to decide the future of the nation.
And in the darkness I hear a song of war.
Usuthu! Umkhonto wami womile! The first is a universal Zulu battle cry, which asks the spirits of ones ancestors to awake and bear witness to the glorious acts of heroism one is about to perform, also a call for solidarity and unity against an intrusive threat which rings with history as the rallying call of the loyalists of King Cetshwayo, deposed by the British in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. The divide and conquer policy of Britain fragmented the Zulu nation into thirteen scraps, resulting in the Third Zulu Civil War of 1883–1884 and the uSuthu Rebellion of 1888; a legacy of resistance which lives today.
The second phrase has a personal and specific meaning for me; I learned it at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the largest battle ever fought in Africa, even more vast than El Alamein.
In a massive campaign which broke the grip of Apartheid on South Africa involving over 300,000 Cuban volunteer soldiers between December 1987 and March 1988, in coordination with Angolan and other indigenous forces, international volunteers, and with Soviet aid and advisors, defeated the far larger and technologically superior South Africa and their UNITA and American allies and mercenaries in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, an Angolan military base which South Africa had failed to capture with five waves of assaults. The results included the independence of Namibia, the withdrawal of South African troops from Angola, the replacement of the racist Prime Minister Botha by de Klerk in South Africa and his negotiations with the African National Congress, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, and the end of apartheid.
While the spectacle of this grand final battle in a decades long liberation struggle was unfolding, I was making mischief behind enemy lines in the bush. Here I discovered a lost unit, mainly Zulu, 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.
If the Zulu as a nation have decided that the government of South Africa has not played fair with them, the entire region is about to be plunged into a kind of chaos not seen since the Mfecane, the Zulu Conquest led by Shaka.
Yet war and ruin are not yet inevitable, for the chaos which has seized South Africa is both an existential threat to ossified and failing systems, structures, and institutions, here a three-part harmony of failed political, economic, and social systems, is also a window of opportunity for revolutionary struggle and transformative change.
Chaos is not simply disorder; chaos destructures order and creates new possibilities of adaptation. Chaos is a force of revolution and liberation, and a measure of the potential for change of a system.
Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, 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 reimages 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.”
In South Africa, the time has come to bring the Chaos.
As written by Benjamin Fogel in Jacobin; “There Is No Silver Lining to South Africa’s Zuma Insurrection: South Africa’s immense poverty and inequality have been weaponized by former president Jacob Zuma and his supporters through a massive economic sabotage campaign. Any response must address the miseries saturating the country as well as the chaos now unleashed.
South Africa is not a normal country. Almost half of the labor force is unemployed; the number rises to 76 percent for young people, who have no hope for their future. South Africa has the highest inequality rate in the world, with extreme wealth living next to extreme poverty. It is a country in which violence, state dysfunction, and broken services are normal. It is a country that lacks a strong opposition party, despite the fact the ruling African National Congress (ANC) government is no longer able to govern.
For years, given these conditions, many have predicted imminent mass unrest. But it was not poverty, broken services, or unemployment that triggered the worst unrest in South Africa since the end of apartheid. Instead, it was the imprisonment of former president Jacob Zuma for contempt of court last Wednesday.
For years, Zuma, his children, and his criminal cronies have threatened to unleash violence and spill blood in the event of his imprisonment for one of the many crimes he stands accused of. Now, mass unrest across South Africa’s two most populous provinces has caused at least one hundred deaths, over a billion dollars of damage, and the destruction of the province of KwaZulu-Natal’s entire supply chain.
Hundreds of businesses, shopping malls, mosques, clinics, liquor stores, factories, vaccination centers, water treatment facilities, logistics hubs, and cell phone towers have been ransacked and burned in a campaign of both spontaneous looting and more covert and targeted sabotage. Mobs now control the highways leading in and out of KwaZulu-Natal. The Port of Durban, the busiest shipping terminal in sub-Saharan Africa, has suspended operations. KwaZulu-Natal is already facing food and fuel shortages. The medical goods so urgently needed to respond to the devastating third wave of COVID-19 that is wreaking havoc across the country are in short supply or unable to be delivered to hospitals. The country’s vaccination drive has been knocked off course just as it was starting to gain momentum.
The police have mostly stood aside, either unwilling or powerless, as thousands have descended on shopping malls and businesses. In response to the state’s inability to halt the violence, vigilante militias have been formed by mostly white, Indian, and coloured communities to protect their neighborhoods and businesses. South Africa’s powerful taxi association mafias have also stepped in to provide security at shopping malls and other locales. There have been numerous reported deaths from confrontations between “looters” and “community self-defense” groups.
Of course, not all the unrest can be accredited to Zuma. The unrest is taking place amid South Africa’s third lockdown, and the government has opted to provide no social assistance to workers and the poor. To make matters worse, the government introduced harsh austerity measures, including cuts to education and health budgets, along with the social grants that are the lifeline for over 17 million South Africans. With so many South Africans desperate and angry, mass looting is predictable.
But this is not a bread riot or the “Tunisia moment” that many predicted. It is a symptom of the current crisis that Zuma shoulders much of the blame for, as well as a symptom of the ANC’s failures since coming to power in 1994 to create an inclusive economy and a society that does not render much of the population surplus. There is a lack of leadership at all levels from civil society, from politicians to unions. The majority of South Africans remain impoverished, face extreme violence and social deprivation, and lack credible leadership and any hope that their social conditions can be improved.
Though the events are still unfolding, and a significant amount of misinformation has circulated about them, we can hazard some initial analysis of it. This unrest cannot be categorized as a “bread riot” or a spontaneous outburst of collective rage from the oppressed. This began as a political campaign aiming to free Zuma and was launched by a set of actors including rogue security service members, Zuma’s sons and daughters, mafia elements, and other close Zuma allies — in other words, a faction of the ANC.
The campaign resembles a well-coordinated and planned type of insurgency seen during a civil war or coup attempt that targets key logistics, transport, and communication infrastructure. There are numerous reports of people claiming they had been paid to start looting or of people being bused into shopping malls to loot there.
There is also an ethnic component to this, in that Zuma and his supporters have explicitly sought to mobilize ethnic nationalist Zulu tropes in his defense. This campaign has, in the words of the justice minister, Ronald Lamola, resulted in “economic sabotage” in that it has targeted key parts of the economy. This factional violence not only follows past patterns of sabotage campaigns against transportation infrastructure, but also has taken place in the same locales as the political violence of the late 1980s and early 1990s that took as many as thirty thousand lives, as well as xenophobic pogroms in more recent years.
In the words of Unemployed Peoples’ Movement leader Ayanda Kota, the protests are “organized on tribalist, male chauvinist and ethnic bases.” They also have an ugly xenophobic character, and reports indicate that foreign-owned businesses and foreign traders have been targeted.
This campaign is targeting South African democracy itself and is being led by a faction of the ruling party that is willing to quite literally burn the country down to accomplish its aims. It is a threat to the country’s future and must be countered by progressive forces.
This is a clear political campaign, and therein lies its power and danger. It is targeting South African democracy itself and is being led by a faction of the ruling party that is willing to quite literally burn the country down to accomplish its aims. It is a threat to the country’s future and must be countered by progressive forces.
Such unrest is sadly predictable in South Africa, given the extent of state dysfunction and mass impoverishment. COVID-19 and austerity have only worsened these preexisting social problems. Any response to mass unrest must deal with the underlying structural conditions that make South Africa the most unequal country in the world.”
Sarafina trailer
Cry Freedom film trailer
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 6 episode 7- Once More, with Feeling – Where Do We Go From Here?
South Africa elections: what are the issues and will ANC lose its majority?
International Brigade Against Apartheid: Secrets Of The People’s War That Liberated South Africa,Ronnie Kasrils (Editor), Muff Andersson (Editor), Oscar Marleyn (Editor)
Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and Its Consequences by Tom Lodge
No Future Without Forgiveness, The Rainbow People of God, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time, Made for Goodness: And Why This Makes All the Difference, by Desmond Tutu
Down Second Avenue, Africa My Music, Eskia Mphahlele
The Madonna of Excelsior, The Sculptress of Mapungubwe, The Whale Caller, Little Suns, Zakes Mda
To Every Birth Its Blood, Gods of Our Time, History is the Home Address, Rumors, Mongane Serote
Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K., Foe, Age of Iron, Master of Petersburg, Elizabeth Costello, Doubling the Point: essays & interviews, J.M. Coetzee
A Dry White Season, Death’s Valley, The Other Side of Silence, The Blue Door, The Cape of Storms, Imagings of Sand and The Rights of Desire, Philida, On The Contrary, Andre Brink
Burger’s Daughter, July’s People, My Son’s Story, A Sport of Nature, None to Accompany Me, A Guest of Honour, Life Times: Stories, 1952-2007, Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008, by Nadine Gordimer
A note on South African languages:
South African English is the primary language of official documents like voting ballots and bureaucracy, a legacy of the British Empire, although it is spoken natively by only ten percent of the population.
There are thirty five South African languages, including the twelve official languages Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, South African Sign Language, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, and English (actually the dialect South African English, which like Anglo-Indian has thousands of special vocabulary words; of these I myself am familiar with only SAE, Zulu, and Afrikaans, a trade language created by Cape Malays using the Arabic influenced Jawi script of Classical Malay with which I was already familiar and based on Dutch with which I grew up as an outsider in a Reformed Church community. Afrikaans, home language of 14% of South Africans including much of the Islamic community, the only Germanic language written natively in an Arabic based script, also incorporates vocabulary from indigenous Khoi, San, and Xhosa which is mutually intelligible with Zulu. Nearly a quarter of the people are Zulu speakers; among the Nguni group of languages including Xhosa, Swati and Ndebele, the other major language group being Sotho–Tswana which includes Southern Sotho, Northern Sotho and Tswana.
During my fight to end Apartheid, I served in my usual role as a scout with Soviet Spetznaz advisors and Cuban and other international volunteers, and indigenous soldiers of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s direct action arm; mostly we spoke Russian, Cuban Spanish, Zulu, Afrikaans, and in Angola Portuguese.
To be very clear in the wake of this Memorial Day in America: I am not a soldier nor a veteran of any nation’s military service, nor do I claim any such valor; though I have helped where I could, including the great struggle against Apartheid.
But while I am my own master and commander and refuse to serve in any chain of command whatsoever, and swear allegiance to no nation but to my comrades in solidarity and liberation struggle, there are and have been many causes which I believe merit support and for which I have volunteered. Another pair of eyes never hurts, a man who refuses to stay down or abandon his comrades regardless of the consequences can be very useful, my skill set is unusual and I make a reasonable scout, and in Apartheid South Africa I could go freely and without suspicion as a white man where many of my comrades could not.
What I have done, here and elsewhere, was nothing more than what anyone capable of seeing others as fellow human beings would do, when confronted with systems of oppression and dehumanization; 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. Be the result victory in seizures of power or failure to claw something of our humanity back from the darkness, with this I am content.
Zulu
May 29 2024 INingizimu Afrika Ikhetha Ikusasa Okhethweni Lwayo
29 Mei 2024 Suid-Afrika kies ‘n toekoms in haar verkiesings
Die ergste ding wat met ‘n nasie, ‘n Rewolusie, ‘n bevrydingsbeweging, met enige menslike gemeenskap wat in solidariteit saamgebind is deur onderlinge sosiale kontrak kan gebeur, is breuk en verdeeldheid; beide ideologiese breuk en dié van vervaardigde verdelings van bloed, geloof en grond wanneer vrees in diens aan mag gewapen word deur diegene wat ons sal verslaaf.
In Suid-Afrika, wat steeds voortspruit uit die nalatenskap van haar geskiedenis, het ons voorbeelde van beide soorte bedreigings vir eenheid en solidariteit van optrede, interseksioneel saamgestel met die voorspelbare fase van revolusionêre stryd van outoritêre nasionalisme wat elite hegemonieë van rykdom, mag skep en afdwing. , en die voorreg van die revolusionêre klasse wat die mag van die voormalige elite oorgeneem het, wat dikwels kleptokratiese oligargieë geword het. Dit is ‘n gevolg van die opgelegde voorwaardes van stryd, veral in antikoloniale rewolusies, en as sodanig kan die ongelykhede en ongeregtighede daarvan voor die deur van die voormalige koloniale mag gelê word en nie sy opvolgerstaat nie.
Die vraag bly staan; wat maak ons met hierdie aaklige vryheid?
Soos ons geleer word met die lirieke van die liedjie Where Do We Go From Here?, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7 van seisoen 6, Once More With Feeling, moontlik die grootste musikale episode van enige telenovela wat nog geskep is;
“Waar gaan ons van hier af
Waar gaan ons van hier af
Die stryd is klaar,
En ons het nogal gewen.
So klink ons ons oorwinningsgejuig.
Waar gaan ons van hier af.
Hoekom is die pad onduidelik,
Wanneer ons weet huis is naby.
Verstaan ons sal hand aan hand gaan,
Maar ons sal alleen in vrees loop. (Vertel my)
Sê vir my waarheen gaan ons van hier af.
Wanneer verskyn die einde,
Wanneer juig die trompette.
Die gordyne gaan toe, op ‘n soen weet god,
Ons kan sê die einde is naby…
Waar gaan ons van hier af
Waar gaan ons van hier af
Waar gaan ons
van hier af?”
Tog bly hoop wanneer alles verlore is, en of dit ‘n gawe of ‘n vloek word, is in ons hande. Hierdie lirieke praat van die moderne patologie van ontkoppeldheid, van die verdeeldheid en breuk van ons Solidariteit, van onderwerping deur aangeleerde hulpeloosheid en die heerskappy van vrees. Maar dit is nie die einde van die storie nie, ook nie van ons s’n nie.
Once More With Feeling eindig nie met abjection nie, maar met The Kiss, tussen die Slayer en Spike, een van die monsters wat sy jag. ‘n Baie besondere soort monster, wat ook die held van die verhaal in sy hele sewe jaar boog is; iemand wat monsteragtig gemaak word deur sy toestand van wese en magte buite sy beheer, het strydtoestande opgelê, baie soos dié van die geweld wat deur ‘n slaaf gebruik word om sy kettings te breek wat nie moreel gelykstaande is aan die geweld van ‘n slawemeester nie, magte en stelsels van onderdrukking waarteen hy stry vir bevryding en om homself te herskep en te definieer soos hy wil, ‘n monster wat sy menslikheid en sy siel terugeis. Dit is hoekom ons twintig jaar na sy debuut voortgaan om na die program te kyk; ons is almal Spike, vasgevang in titaniese stryd vir die eienaarskap van onsself met gemagtigde identiteite en sistemiese euwels, ‘n rewolusie van waarhede wat in ons vlees geskryf is teen opgelegde voorwaardes van stryd en ontmensliking teenoor orde van menswees, betekenis en waarde.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is ‘n allegorie van Sartreaanse vryheid in ‘n wêreld sonder inherente waarde of betekenis, van die vreugde van totale vryheid teenoor die terreur van ons niksheid, en bowenal ‘n lied van die verlossende krag van liefde om ons ware self aan ons terug te gee. .
Laat die magte van ongelyke mag nie ‘n mensdom of ‘n Suid-Afrika vind in aangeleerde hulpeloosheid en onderwerping aan gesag nie, verdeel en ontmenslik deur die nalatenskap van historiese ongelykhede en onregverdighede en verdeel deur hiërargieë van elite-behoortheid en uitsluiting andersheid, maar verenig in solidariteit en weiering om aan geweld en beheer te onderwerp; want in weerstand word ons onoorwinlik en vry.
Dit is hoe ons breuk en verdeeldheid, kolonialisme en wit oppergesag terreur, ongelyke mag en kapitalistiese uitbuiting, imperialistiese heerskappy en fascistiese tirannie in die lang wedstryd verslaan, nadat ons ‘n afrekening gebring het vir sy misdade teen die mensdom en sy ondermyning van demokrasie en die gelykheid van alle mense; in hierdie eerste verkiesing waarin die generasie wat vry van Apartheid grootgeword het kan stem, kom ons antwoord haat met liefde, verdeeldheid met solidariteit, vrees met hoop, en bring genesing vir die gebreke van ons menswees en die gebrokenheid van die wêreld.
A crow confronts his image in a pool of water, and as Nietzsche warned the darkness looks back. Of this I have written a paragraph on the Nietzschean idea of the Abyss, and of tragedy as failure to embrace our monstrosity and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh; the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
Here also is a fable for Memorial Day and the sacred dead of war, at whose table I have eaten many times now.
As Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil goes; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
It is also an origin of evil as the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; written in the tyrannies and systems of unequal power which hold humankind in their iron grip of force and control as Kristevan abjection, despair, and learned helplessness, and the ecological catastrophe which threatens our species extinction as disconnection from nature, control of nature as capitalist exploitation of resources and theft of the commons, carceral states of force and control as embodied violence, and our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the Wilderness of Mirrors.
All of this requires the renouncement of love, as Wagner’s figure of tyranny Alberich the Dwarf must do to seize the Ring of power and dominion, a story more familiar to us as Tolkien’s retelling of the Nibelungenlied in his trilogy of novels which recast World War Two as an allegory of the abandonment of addiction to power. This has a corollary; the redemptive power of love, like the power of poetic vision to reimagine and transform ourselves, can free us from the Ring of Power and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Jean Genet in Miracle of the Rose; “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”
Here follows the paragraph of my thoughts on seeing this image, which if considered as a poem I now think of as the True and False Crows: a fable.
Who is this imposter? If he is me, where now am I? Avaunt, my nemesis, for I shall pursue retribution for this theft of myself beyond all wrath now remembered, through death and hell and the terrors of our nightmares. Come and let us grapple for the truth of ourselves in this place where angels fear, and end not in silence but in exaltation and fire, with roars of defiance hurled against the chasms of our nothingness, supernal and magnificent as the Morningstar, and illuminate for all humankind the path of escape from this prison of illusions and lies.
To this my sister replied, Such poetry!
This is as direct as I can be, O my sister. Should I merit some kind of monument one day, an absurd fantasy as I mean nothing to history and will vanish from the world without a trace, and nothing to anyone beyond yourself as the remnants of family, Dolly as my partner, and those few friends and allies who know my true story and identity which I have tried to leave a record of here in my journal Torch of Liberty, inscribe this therein.
I have tried to salvage something of our humanity and to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world these past forty years since I was sworn to the oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet, and often failed, but this is not what is important.
What is important is to refuse to submit.
And one thing more; to act with solidarity in revolutionary struggle. As the Oath of the Resistance created in Paris 1940 by Jean Genet from the oath of the Foreign Legion in which he once served, and given to me in Beirut 1982 in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and which I offer to all of you as a tradition to bear forward into the future; “We swear ourselves to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
In this my chosen life mission I have held true, for if each and every one of us stands in solidarity with others regardless of how different they may be from ourselves, we will become liberators and guarantors of each other’s uniqueness, and in refusal to submit will be victorious and free.
He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, the Oath of the Resistance, but I often think of this in terms of a definition of the beauty of human beings; to become Unconquered and free as self created beings in refusal to submit to authority and its instruments of violence, force and control, and the repression of dissent, to refuse our dehumanization and the theft of our souls and autonomy and to do all of this in solidarity and absolute loyalty to each other.
As he once said to me; “Is this not the beauty of men, to resist and never yield, to cede nothing to the enemy, not love nor hope, not our history nor the chance for a future of our own choosing, neither our monstrosity nor our grandeur, nothing of our humanity nor of any human being whose life is in our power to harm or help, to live beyond all limits and all laws and to risk everything to do this for each other?”
Here is our Beauty as Keats defined it in his famous quote; “
I dream of a future something like the future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations; the idea first put forth in the episode Is There In Truth No Beauty?, described in the first issue of the fanzine Inside Star Trek as; “that beauty, growth, progress — all result from the union of the unlike. Concord, as much as discord, requires the presence of at least two different notes. The brotherhood of man is an ideal based on learning to delight in our essential differences, as well as learning to recognize our similarities.” As stated in the episode The Savage Curtain; “I am pleased to see that we have differences. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us.”
Liberty as freedom from authorized identities and truths, and equality and its corollary solidarity; these are the personal and social preconditions of democracy as a free society of equals.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did in Mariupol and in the year of the fall of Afghanistan, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must embrace our darkness and claim our truths, and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Love is crucial both to poetic vision and as solidarity in action as processes of self-construal and becoming human; Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling.
Let us always take the risks of our humanity, and place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Send me out in flames, for this is how I have lived
Not silent but incandescent in the night
An agent of change and illumination, like fire itself
In Celebration of Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche who awakens, Nietzsche who challenges, Nietzsche who illuminates and inspires; these are the three Nietzsche’s who have been my companions throughout life, my guides and muses, and whom I offer you as a Song of Orpheus and Ariadne’s Thread whereby to find your way through the labyrinth of life.
Protean in his forms, he may take whatever shape is needed in your quest; and will play his roles as befitting at different stages of the journey. There are many Nietzsche’s, who like an endless series of dancing Schrodinger’s Cats offer possibilities which echo and reflect those of his readers as an inkblot test. Who is Nietzsche to me?
Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a space in my life and imagination like no other shaping, motivating, and informing source, because my discovery of him in the year before I began high school first broke the Great Chain of Being which bound me to the will of authority and my fellow schoolmates ideas of virtue, truth, and beauty in a theocratic, patriarchal, and racist society aligned with the Apartheid regime of South Africa, and set me free to create myself in a universe without imposed meaning or value; then helped me to process a primary trauma which became a Defining Moment as I joined the liberation struggle of a foreign land whose glittering citadels of splendor concealed horrible truths.
Nietzsche it was who helped me to balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.
When I speak of the enforcement of normality as an evil to be resisted, it is with the voice of the old woman burned alive in her home as a witch by a mob which included fellow children I grew up with. To fully understand Nietzsche, you must inhabit the historical space of liberation from systemic tyranny which his anti-authoritarian iconoclasm represents.
I grew up in such a world, a premodern world bound to the laws of a cruel and implacable Authority of alien and unknowable motives and those who would enslave us and claim to speak in his name as a tyranny of the Elect, whose hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege rely on our commodification as weaponized disparity and theft of the commons, falsification through lies and illusions, subjugation through learned helplessness and divisions of exclusionary otherness, fear as an instrument of the centralization of power by carceral states of force and control through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and faith weaponized in service to power as theft of the soul.
Such atavisms of barbarism hold dominion still over much of humankind and possess us as legacies of our history, bound by embedded tyrannies of many kinds, a world America was founded to replace as a free society of equals. Ours is a very fragile civilization, threatened always by chasms of darkness which surround us and with relentless, pervasive, and systemic enemies in fascist tyranny, patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, the fetishism of death and violence in identitarian nationalism and its police states and imperial militarism, and dehumanization. This we must resist, and I read Thus Spake Zarathustra as a luminous song of resistance.
Among the great loves of my literary life, I first discovered him after reading through all the works of Herman Hesse in seventh grade, in whom I found resonance with the Taoist poetry and Zen riddles which were among my subjects of formal study, then abandoning fiction after the nightmare of Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties and its implied erotic horror, which I had chosen after reading his stunning novel of my favorite game after chess, The Master of Go, and turned thereafter to Plato whom I adored, and read voraciously all his works throughout my eighth grade year. The Trial of Socrates founded our civilization as a self-questioning system of being human together, and in the dialectics of Socratic method offered me tools of self-construal and reinvention which became central to my identity.
My father, who was a theatre director as well as my English, Drama, and Forensics teacher, Debate Team coach, and my Fencing Club coach throughout high school, and who taught me fencing and chess from the age of nine, suggested I might like the discussion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; Nietzsche’s vision of civilization as a struggle between passion and reason, chaos and order, conserving and revolutionary forces, which interlinks with that of Kawabata and of Herman Hesse in The Glass Bead Game to form a unitary vision of a process of becoming human, and informs my reading of literature, politics, and all human activity, to this day.
So it was that during the summer of my fourteenth year before I began high school I discovered with unforgettable joy and recognition a book written by someone who spoke for me, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Wedded in my imagination to the context of my encounter with his work was the grand adventure and disruptive trauma of my first solo foreign travel, to Brazil to train for the Pan American Games with fellow fencers.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen to train with a group of fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there; I was the San Francisco Bay Area champion in saber and foil in my age division. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial arts and sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls.
Remembering this Defining Moment now, the day I looked beyond my limits and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden to discover and question the basis of my own privilege and reach across divisions of authorized identities of class and race in solidarity with those who do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us and create our wealth, to whom we have exported the true costs of production and excluded from its benefits as our de facto slaves, what fixes my imagination is that I lived an allegory of awakening which recapitulates the story of the Buddha and has become a world myth as the Prince in the Golden Cage. I had no charioteer to answer my questions and create order and meaning from my trauma of witness; I had a whole tribe of them, the Matadors. We’ll get to that part shortly.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, and a jar of tagged ears. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; that fully ten percent of Brazilians were abandoned and orphaned street children on whom bounties had been placed as a solution, that a quarter of the population lived in shantytowns, that life expectancy for 80% of the people was 35 years, that 350,000 children died before the age of five each year and only 13% finished primary school, that nearly half the people were illiterate.
And yet it was a rich nation; the Brazilian gold boom of the 1700’s created Europe’s industrial revolution, and at this same time of pervasive and systemic poverty and racism Brazil was the worlds number one coffee, sugar, orange, and gasohol producer, #2 cocoa, and #3 timber and beef producer. But over half of the wealth was owned by less than two percent of its people, like the family who were my gracious hosts.
Above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we buy the products of an unjust system, remain silent as witnesses of history to injustices, or abandon our duty of care toward others when evil unfolds before us and by a mission of action we may safeguard others from harm. This is the true mission of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege; to disrupt our interdependence and the solidarity of our universal brotherhood as a precondition of unequal power.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a second near death experience, this time similar though not as formal as those of Maurice Blanchot’s mock execution by the Nazis in 1944 and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s by the Czar’s secret police in 1849; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was my Ring of Fire and the first of more Last Stands than I can now clearly remember, and I find hope for us all in the instinctive duty of care of the young boy I once was to whom it never occurred to run, to surrender, or to abandon a stranger to harm, and like Wagner’s great hero Siegfried chose instead the fire.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did this spring in Mariupol and last year in Afghanistan, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling.
When the disembodied voice of my executioner reached out from the darkness of the purgatorial labyrinth in which we were trapped to order my surrender, with the life of a stranger in the balance, I asked how much to let us walk away, and he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who had been arrested the previous year. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
As one of my rescuers phrased it; “Come with us. You are one of us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
May we all be granted the gift of vision of our interdependence and the universality of our humanity, and wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Throughout all of this, Nietzsche’s great song of liberation pulled me into its heart and ignited in me a will and vision to transgress beyond our boundaries into the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons.
I thereafter read all his works, though Thus Spake Zarathustra remained a kind of sacred text to me; I used to quote it in refutation to my fellow students who quoted the Bible to me as an instrument of subjugation to authority.
Redolent with the cadences of poetic oratory and a phraseology which echoes that of the beautiful King James Bible, pervasive in my town of Reformed Church stalwarts whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, it was both familiar and utterly strange, an empowering work of liberation proclaiming the death of Authority and the limits of the Forbidden. How I cherished it, this treasure and marvel; by summer’s end I could recite it entirely by memory so many times had I read it.
May we all find such books, which illuminate our imagination and offer to us the Promethean fire.
Read therefore the immortal classics of Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Geneology of Morality, The Case of Wagner, The AntiChrist, Twilight of the Gods, and Ecce Homo.
American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen provides an insightful overview.
Maurice Blanchot’s lifelong engagement with Nietzsche can be illuminating and wonderful; The Step Not Beyond, a reply to Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle which references Deleuze, The Writing of the Disaster, and The Infinite Conversation all center on his reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return as an Existentialist principle in which the negation of presence is a path of total freedom. In the pivotal 1945 essay On Nietzsche’s Side, Blanchot reimagines Karl Jaspers’ seminal thesis on Nietzsche; thereafter his works interrogate Nietzschean themes including the Will to Power, the nature of time, ecstatic vision and the Dionysian principle, the Death of God as symbol and metaphor of the emptiness of tyranny and the illusion of authority, and the relativity of meaning and value.
A student of the philosopher Henri Bergson, Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis “Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State” interrogates the reimagined doctrine of Original Sin as the innate Depravity of Man, which is the basis of all our law and an apologetics of authoritarian power which both Nietzsche and Kazantzakis made a life mission of overthrowing, a theme which continued to inform Kazantzakis throughout his life and is central to understanding his unique brand of Existentialism. In large part his works explore the implications of the Nietzschean conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian as personal and social struggle.
Do read also C.G. Jung’s work Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, notes from the 86 seminars he chaired over 11 university terms exploring the great epic poem which seized and shook me awake. An engagement with Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-gospel and Zarathustra as a figure of Liberation like Milton’s rebel angel, as for both Jung and myself, will lead you as it did me to the works of William Blake and his rebel figure Los; Milton, Nietzsche, and Blake form a line of transmission which unfolds gloriously in Jung’s Red Book.
Last of all I must cite the influence which prefigured and later reinterpreted the meaning of Nietzsche for me, the great storyteller of my childhood William S. Burroughs, whose own ideology was shaped by his friend Georges Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche. Bataille’s On Nietzsche brilliantly interrogates the problem of the Deus Absconditus, the god who bound us to his laws and abandoned us to free ourselves from them, in a fearless reimagination of the will to power as a will to transgress. The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology, compiles the secret documents of his occult circle, disciples of Nietzsche who attempted to reimagine civilization and whose ritual transgressions echo de Sade and Jean Genet.
The influence of Bataille on William S. Burroughs cannot be overstated. Burroughs derived his Anarchist Trilogy, The Wild Boys, The Cat Inside, and the Revised Boy Scout Manual, from Bataille’s synthesis of Nietzsche, de Sade, and Freud, though its central premise, The Algebra of Need, references Marx.
This is the Burroughs with whom I found connection as a teenager; the anarchist philosopher for whom the Wolfman was a figure of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, whose novel on the subject, The Wild Boys, was written during the period of his visits at our home and possibly influenced by my father’s tales of our family history.
For Burroughs, writing was conjuration; an act of chaos magic and liberation struggle in which the tyranny of authorized identities and orders of human being, meaning, and value can be destabilized as fracture, disruption, and delegitimation, and created anew through poetic vision.
In this mission William S. Burroughs was the successor and reinterpreter of of Bataille and of their shared model Nietzsche, as ritual transgression, the delegitimation of authority and seizures of power as liberation struggle, poetic vision and ecstatic trance as the reimagination and transformation of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Burroughs also believed himself to be the literal successor of Nietzsche as the possessed avatar of a chthonic underworld god, a Shadow figure in Jungian terms which represents his animal nature and inchoate desires as a beast with a beast’s soul, unconquerable and free, in reference to the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow and that Burroughs’ nanny had cursed him with as a child. A powerful guardian spirit and otherworld guide to be offered, as was I in reciting together the line with which Burrough’s often ended his bizarre versions of Grimm’s fairytales, a line written by Shakespeare in The Tempest for Prospero, who says of Caliban; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
So the circle of meaning returns to swallow its own tail like an Ouroboros or an infinite Mobius Loop in the embrace of our darkness as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and of the balance we must find for the terror of our nothingness in the joy of total freedom in a universe without imposed meaning, wherein the only being, meaning, and value that exists are those we create for ourselves, even if we must seize them from those who would enslave us.
Walk Through the Fire, song from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode Once More With Feeling
Friedrich Nietzsche, a reading list
Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography, by Lesley Chamberlain
Friedrich Nietzsche, zu seinem Geburtstag 15.10.2022 Revision
Nietzsche, der erwacht, Nietzsche, der herausfordert, Nietzsche, der erleuchtet und inspiriert; das sind die drei Nietzsches, die meine Lebensgefährten waren, meine Führer und Musen, und die ich Ihnen als Lied des Orpheus und Ariadne-Faden anbiete, um Ihren Weg durch das Labyrinth des Lebens zu finden.
Veränderlich in seinen Formen, kann er jede Form annehmen, die für Ihre Suche benötigt wird; und wird seine Rollen in den verschiedenen Phasen der Reise so spielen, wie es sich gehört. Es gibt viele Nietzsches, die wie eine endlose Reihe tanzender Schrödinger-Katzen Möglichkeiten bieten, die die seiner Leser als Tintenkleckstest widerspiegeln und widerspiegeln. Wer ist Nietzsche für mich?
Wie keine andere prägende, motivierende und informierende Quelle nimmt Friedrich Nietzsche einen Platz in meinem Leben und meiner Vorstellungskraft ein, weil meine Entdeckung im Jahr vor meinem Abitur erstmals die große Kette des Seins durchbrochen hat, die mich an den Willen der Autorität gebunden hat und die Vorstellungen meiner Mitschüler von Tugend, Wahrheit und Schönheit in einer theokratischen, patriarchalischen und rassistischen Gesellschaft, die mit dem Apartheidregime in Südafrika in Einklang steht, und die mir die Freiheit gegeben haben, mich in einem Universum ohne auferlegte Bedeutung oder Wert zu erschaffen; hat mir dann geholfen, ein primäres Trauma zu verarbeiten, das zu einem entscheidenden Moment wurde, als ich mich dem Befreiungskampf eines fremden Landes anschloss, dessen glitzernde Zitadellen der Pracht schreckliche Wahrheiten verbargen.
Nietzsche war es, der mir half, den Schrecken unseres Nichts mit der Freude der totalen Freiheit in Einklang zu bringen.
Wenn ich von der Durchsetzung der Normalität als einem Übel spreche, gegen das man sich wehren muss, dann mit der Stimme der alten Frau, die in ihrem Haus als Hexe von einem Mob lebendig verbrannt wurde, zu dem auch andere Kinder gehörten, mit denen ich aufgewachsen bin. Um Nietzsche vollständig zu verstehen, müssen Sie den historischen Raum der Befreiung von der systemischen Tyrannei bewohnen, den sein antiautoritärer Bildersturm darstellt.
Ich bin in einer solchen Welt aufgewachsen, einer vormodernen Welt, die an die Gesetze einer grausamen und unerbittlichen Autorität aus fremden und unergründlichen Motiven und jenen gebunden ist, die uns versklaven und behaupten würden, in seinem Namen als Tyrannei der Auserwählten zu sprechen, deren Hegemonien des Reichtums , Macht und Privilegien stützen sich auf unsere Kommodifizierung als bewaffnete Disparität und Diebstahl der Gemeingüter, Fälschung durch Lügen und Illusionen, Unterwerfung durch erlernte Hilflosigkeit und Spaltung des ausschließenden Andersseins, Angst als Instrument der Machtzentralisierung durch gefängnisbedingte Macht- und Kontrollstaaten durch Faschismen des Blutes, des Glaubens und des Bodens und durch Glauben, der im Dienst an der Macht als Diebstahl der Seele bewaffnet wird.
Solche Atavismen der Barbarei beherrschen immer noch einen Großteil der Menschheit und besitzen uns als Vermächtnis unserer Geschichte, gebunden durch eingebettete Tyranneien vieler Art, einer Welt, die Amerika als eine freie Gesellschaft von Gleichen ersetzen sollte. Unsere Zivilisation ist sehr zerbrechlich, ständig bedroht von Abgründen der Dunkelheit, die uns umgeben, und von unerbittlichen, allgegenwärtigen und systemischen Feinden in faschistischer Tyrannei, patriarchalischem Sexualterror, weißem rassistischem Terror, dem Fetischismus des Todes und der Gewalt im identitären Nationalismus und seinen Polizeistaaten und imperialer Militarismus und Entmenschlichung. Dem müssen wir widerstehen, und ich lese Also sprach Zarathustra als ein leuchtendes Widerstandslied.
Unter den großen Lieben meines literarischen Lebens entdeckte ich ihn zuerst, nachdem ich in der siebten Klasse alle Werke von Herman Hesse gelesen hatte, in dem ich eine Resonanz mit der taoistischen Poesie und den Zen-Rätseln fand, die zu meinen formalen Studienfächern gehörten, und dann die Fiktion aufgab nach dem Albtraum von Kawabatas Haus der schlafenden Schönheiten und seinem impliziten erotischen Horror, den ich ausgewählt hatte, nachdem ich seinen atemberaubenden Roman über mein Lieblingsspiel nach dem Schach, The Master of Go, gelesen hatte, und mich danach Platon zuwandte, den ich verehrte, und alles gierig las seine Werke während meines achten Schuljahres. Der Prozess des Sokrates begründete unsere Zivilisation als ein sich selbst hinterfragendes System des gemeinsamen Menschseins und bot mir in der Dialektik der sokratischen Methode Werkzeuge der Selbstkonstruktion und Neuerfindung, die für meine Identität zentral wurden.
Mein Vater, der Theaterregisseur, mein Englisch-, Schauspiel- und Forensiklehrer, Trainer des Debattierteams und Trainer meines Fechtklubs während der gesamten High School war und mir seit meinem neunten Lebensjahr Fechten und Schach beibrachte, schlug vor, dass ich vielleicht gefallen könnte die Diskussion des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen in Friedrich Nietzsches Die Geburt der Tragödie; Nietzsches Vision von Zivilisation als Kampf zwischen Leidenschaft und Vernunft, Chaos und Ordnung, bewahrenden und revolutionären Kräften, die sich mit der von Kawabata und Herman Hesse in Das Glasperlenspiel zu einer einheitlichen Vision eines Menschwerdungsprozesses verzahnt und informiert meine Lektüre von Literatur, Politik und allen menschlichen Aktivitäten bis heute.
So entdeckte ich im Sommer meines vierzehnten Jahres vor dem Abitur mit unvergeßlicher Freude und Anerkennung ein Buch, geschrieben von einem, der für mich sprach, Also sprach Zarathustra. In meiner Vorstellung mit dem Kontext meiner Begegnung mit seiner Arbeit verbunden war das große Abenteuer und das zerstörerische Trauma meiner ersten alleinigen Auslandsreise nach Brasilien, um mit anderen Fechtern für die Panamerikanischen Spiele zu trainieren.
We remember the valor and sacrifice of our sacred dead on this Memorial
Day, of those killed in action and all those who served in defense of our liberty and equality and in solidarity with that of others against the malign forces of racism and fascism, tyranny and terror, from the beginning of our day of recognition of the Union soldiers and Abolitionists who died in the Civil War fighting a human trafficking syndicate which had declared itself a nation answerable to no civilized law, and since its proclamation as a national holiday all those who died in our endless and terrible wars including the First and Second World Wars and thereafter to free the world of fascist imperialism, terror, and the darkness of organized violence, and all others who have died to achieve the dream of a free society of equals, whether in uniform or not, on the battlefields of civilizational conflicts or as victims of white supremacist terror, at Gettysburg 1863, Normandy 1944, Charlottesville 2017, the January 6 Insurrection 2021, Ukraine and Palestine ongoing now, and countless others.
In America and throughout the world, Confederate-Nazi revivalism and fascist tyranny once again emerges from the darkness to subjugate us, and this we must resist.
There is an iconic conversation between George Washington, about to be hanged, and Mick Rory who has come from the future to rescue him in Legends of Tomorrow, Season Two Episode 11 Turncoat; and in this historical moment wherein the fate of democracy and humankind hang in the balance, I answer now with the words of Mick, no one’s idea of a hero or even of a good man but my idea of a man like myself, of being an American as national identity, and of becoming human as a path of resistance to tyranny, seizure of power and freedom, and revolutionary struggle.
“ Washington: I’ve been a soldier since I was twenty years old. But our cause is the cause of all men. To be treated equally, regardless of hereditary privilege. We must prove to the world that you don’t need a title to be a gentleman. The British may be dishonorable, but I am not. By my death, I will prove to the Crown what it means to be an American.
Mick: You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re misfits. Outcasts. And we’re proud of it. If they attack in formation, we pop ’em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, you raid their camp at night. And if they’re gonna hang you, then you fight dirty. And you never, ever, give up. That’s the American way.”
We live now in such a time of decision, in which tyranny and liberty play for the fate of humankind.
World War Three began its European theatre of operations with the conquest of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, much as the Second World War began with fascist conquests of Spain and Manchuria, and broadened with general invasion of Ukraine last year, as a development of the conflict between Turkey and Russia for imperial dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean with the Russian intervention in Syria and Libya in 2015 and in the Nagorno-Karabakh Civil War of 2020; Russia also began a campaign of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa in 2016, operates Sudan and Belarus as client states, and invaded Kazakhstan to support a proxy tyrant with brutal repression during the revolt of January 2022. Here in America of course Russia’s star agent, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, captured the state as its President during the Stolen Election of 2016, and began systematically attacking the values, ideals, systems, structures, and institutions of democracy.
We are winning in that we have exposed our enemies for what they are and delegitimized them, but the fight is not yet won, not in Ukraine and not in America.
Twenty four centuries ago Pericles of Athens said of the heroes of democracy; “Not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions, but there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.”
On this Memorial Day let us cherish and exalt the gift of liberty given to us by our fellows, elders, and ancestors, and by all those throughout history who have answered those who would enslave us with defiance and resistance.
Such is our legacy as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others united by our refusal to submit to force and control, in our struggle for one another as Antifascists and antiracists, and as Americans but also as human beings who hold the universality of our condition above any divisions of otherness, and perform our uniqueness within the limitless diversity of our community of humankind.
As such it remains among our highest principles that we accord others those universal rights which we claim for ourselves, that each of us must possess the right to imagine and become human as a free choice in a community of autonomous individuals, and that we are committed to our common defense of those rights of ownership of identity, freedom of conscience in our faith, and of bodily autonomy which define what is human.
America was founded as an anti-theocratic, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonialist revolutionary experiment in forging a society free of the conceit of aristocratic feudalism that some of us are by nature better than others, and to redress injustices perpetrated against the many by the few.
While in the course of revolutionary struggle and the resistance to tyranny we may find just cause for action in our defense or the defense of others, there is never any justification for wars of imperialist aggression nor to secure strategic resources such as oil or any economic colonialist thievery, nor for wars of dominion or the conquest and assimilation of cultures different from our own. Different is neither better nor worse, merely an opportunity to learn new ways of being human together that we might become better than we were alone.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, but to liberate as a guarantor of our universal human rights and the principles of democracy as a free society of equals; freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
We now face near certain odds of six to eight centuries of total global war and nationalist tyranny, an age of civilizational collapse ending with the extinction of humankind. I calculate the chances of human survival among our possible futures as great as twelve and as few as two in one hundred, as of now, and we are on a countdown to a point of no return. Every moment of delay, appeasement, bargaining with our head in the lion’s mouth of the Fourth Reich, and failure to purge our destroyers from among us brings us nearer our doom.
What does our future look like? To this end I have assembled here my references in iconic films of war, with a word of caution; the wars of the Age of Terror and Tyranny will be fought with weapons unimaginable to us now and incomparably destructive as measured against those of the Second World War.
In America we have tracked and brought to justice the deniable assets of the Republican Party and the criminal and treasonous Trump regime in the January 6 Insurrection, but not its high command, nor its conspirators in Congress, nor its propagandists, nor the plutocrats and elites who fund and benefit from it all. Our institutions of Law have failed us, captured or subverted by the enemy as is the Supreme Court, and we must look beyond the law for a Reckoning and our survival.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
In Ukraine the free world hesitates to confront a Russian empire which uses terror, genocide, and threat of nuclear annihilation in its mad conquest, while in America, Europe, and throughout the world the guarantors of democracy are being destabilized and captured by fascist tyrannies. Here appeasement works as well as it did for Chamberlain in World War One, which is not at all, and when someone tells you as did Hitler in 1938 “This is my last territorial demand”, he who trusts the lie is about to become extinct. The first rule of Resistance is: everything the enemy says is a lie. Ukraine is a test of our solidarity and will, and like the 1939 invasion of Poland a gate to the conquest of Europe, and as in Gaza and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians paid for by our taxes and granted permission by American complicity, a line from which there can be no retreat, if we are to salvage something of our humanity from the darkness.
To quote the lines of Winston Churchill in the magnificent film Darkest Hour, which the historical figure never said; “You cannot reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
References
Churchill’s speech in Darkest Hour: You Cannot Reason With a Tiger When Your Head Is In Its Mouth
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow “Turncoat” Season 2 Episode 11
Our future, as echoes and reflections of the past:
How shall we see and understand images of war, death, pain, horror, and evil such as those of war films, which both glorify and authorize violence and the use of social force in the manufacture of virtue and national identity, and interrogate, subvert, and liberate us from such systems of control as stories which possess us and from which we must emerge?
How can we give answer to such darkness in our own lives?
The Second World War: A Complete History, Martin Gilbert
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts
The Battle of Britain: Five Months That Changed History, May-October 1940, Fortress Malta: An Island Under Siege 1940-43, Together We Stand: Turning the Tide in the West: North Africa, 1942-1943, Sicily ’43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe, Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned Britain’s War in the East, Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France, James Holland
Britain and Churchill
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, Erik Larson
Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts
Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat, Giles Milton
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, William Manchester, Paul Reid
France
The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940, France: The Dark Years 1940-1944, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, Julian T. Jackson
Paris at War: 1939-1944, David Drake
The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis, Matthew Cobb
Outwitting the Gestapo, Lucie Aubrac
The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, Paul Kix
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler, Lynne Olson
The Liberation of Paris: How Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and von Choltitz Saved the City of Light, Jean Edward Smith
Italy
Mussolini Warlord: Failed Dreams of Empire, 1940-1943, H. James Burgwyn
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Rick Atkinson
Bitter Victory: The Battle For Sicily, July August 1943, Carlo D’Este
Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, Peter Caddick-Adams
Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944, Lloyd Clark
Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy, Norman Lewis
Spain
Picasso’s War, Russell Martin
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
The Spanish Civil War, Hugh Thomas
The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War, Giles Tremlett
Russia
Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945, Richard Overy
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943, Antony Beevor
Jewish Peoples
Night, Elie Wiesel
Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, Ariel Burger
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy, Sergio Luzzatto
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom, The Murderers Among Us, Krystyna: The Tragedy of the Polish Resistance, Simon Wiesenthal
Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Moshe Arens
Auschwitz, Laurence Rees
Treblinka, Jean-François Steiner, Simone de Beauvoir (Preface), Terrence Des Pres (Introduction
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva
America and the Second World War in the Pacific
But Not in Shame: The Six Months After Pearl Harbor, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945, John Toland
Storm Clouds over the Pacific, 1931–41, Japan Runs Wild, 1942–1943, Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze, Peter Harmsen
The Eagle & the Rising Sun: The Japanese-American War 1941-43: Pearl Harbor through Guadalcanal, Alan Schom
Tomorrow is Memorial Day in America, a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, multiplicities of history from which conflicting and ambiguous narratives of identity can be forged, stories we live within and inhabit and those which possess and falsify us, both those we must claim and those from which we must emerge.
This holiday codifies national identity as veneration of the sacred dead who died to win our liberty, for myself primarily a celebration of antifascist struggle in World War Two and in the ongoing theatres of World War Three in Russia, America, Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Mali and the whole of sub Saharan Arica and the region of Lake Chad, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and now Gaza and the divided nation of Israel and Palestine, and should we fail to turn the tide of the Fourth Reich and its puppetmaster Putin’s mad dreams of empire and a conflict which will engulf the whole of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, in which case civilization collapses and the world begins an age of tyranny and total war which humankind will not survive.
A spectre of our doom made all too real and timely as one year ago this week Putin began positioning his nuclear arsenal in Belarus for the Final Solution to the Ukrainian problem, and then Moldova and Poland, then NATO and the EU. Here is bottled death, the death of cities, nations, peoples, our species, and it calls to him like an evil genie, whispering; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
We must stop it here, this massive failure of our humanity which is the Russian conquest of Ukraine and the Israel genocide of the Palestinians, because from this point of no retreat history collapses and we become nothing.
History, memory, identity; our symbols and holidays are a ground of struggle, which open and close doors to possible futures.
Who do we want to become, we humans? This is the question which drives and organizes our interrogations of the past and the future possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; not our addiction to power and wealth which the family storyteller of my youth William S. Burroughs called the Algebra of Need in his reimagination of Marx nor the processes of dehumanization of capitalism, imperialism, and carceral states of force and control which my friend Jean Genet described as necrophilia in his famous 1970 May Day speech at Yale in support of the Black Panther Party. These too are crucial to understanding why we are rushing blindly to our extinction, as we are falsified, commodified, and dehumanized by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, force, and power.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Such questions illuminate the interdependence of our social and material systems, and the bidirectionality of forces of action and reaction. For our politics reflects and echoes our relationship not only with ourselves and each other, but with nature itself; our fear or embrace of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of September 7 2019, As the Amazon Dies in a Bonfire of Our Vanities, a Final Message From Its Indigenous Peoples; Vast tracts of priceless and irreplaceable resources are now burning to clear the land for cattle and palm oil monoculture, in the Amazon and Borneo, and so many other sacred places of the earth, its beautiful wildness and glorious marvels sacrificed to profit and greed.
Jean Genet was right to call capitalism a kind of necrophilia; capitalism is a pimp at a bus station, an ambush predator waiting to cut the vulnerable out of the herd and convert beauty into profit, life into dead money. And what is money but a belief system, the promise to pay of a government and its value nothing more than the faith of those who trade with it in the reliability of that promise?
It is insubstantial as the wind, its value shifting with the confidence of those who use it, while real things, a leopard, a hornbill, an orchid, a tribal people living in harmony with nature, have intrinsic value which relies on nothing beyond themselves.
Which kind of things shall we value and preserve, the illusionary or the real, the impermanent or the eternal, the living, transcendent, and ineffable or the dead, meaningless, and profitable?
As I wrote in my post of August 1 2022, Politics Is About Fear as the Basis of Human Exchange, the Origins of Evil In the Wagnerian Ring of Fear, Power, and Force, and the State As Embodied Violence, and Revolution is the Art of Freeing Ourselves From It; A friend whom I regard as wise has asked me the question which redeems the Fisher King in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; are you all right?
Such questions become a moral compass which can reorient us when we are lost among the unknowns and nameless places of our topologies of human being, meaning, and value, for the bearers of questions as truthtellers perform the functions of the Just Humans in Jewish mythology who maintain the world and actualize its ongoing regeneration, an idea which references Maimonides’ principle of continual creation, that the universe is destroyed and recreated with each moment and must be remembered and renewed through tikkun olam or repair of the world lest we be consumed by the darkness of grief and despair, the loneliness of our modern pathology of disconnectedness, the guilt of survivorship, and our helplessness and meaninglessness before the unanswerable tidal forces of death.
Here is my reply; As the line in Hamlet goes, “The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to” remain with us always as an imposed condition of struggle; yet I shall resist and yield not, and abandon not my fellows in their hour of need, as I was sworn to do by Jean Genet, nor shall I go quietly into the night which beckons, but rage against the dying of the light, of the fall of civilization, and of the negation of our humanity.
It gladdens me to hear that you are well in the wholeness of your soul; I am not, for in Mariupol the darkness began to look back at me as Nietzsche warned us.
There I tried to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness, and failed. But as the Matadors said to me in Brazil the summer before high school when they welcomed me into their society, “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
The question for me now is whether this is enough to tip the scales of history toward democracy and away from fascism and tyranny, enough to salvage some fragment of my humanity as a balance against degeneration, to remain a man and not become a monster and a beast.
As with our myriad futures and limitless possibilities of becoming human, we begin the journey of each new day toward the discovery of ourselves, a grand and fearsome thing which requires the transgression of boundaries and the testing of unknowns. And so hope remains for us all, for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Be well, my friend, and never let our duty of the repair of the world become a task of abjection and despair, for it is a labor of Sisyphus shared by all humankind.
Thank you for your question, Professor Levine. I am not okay, and neither is America nor humankind okay; but one day, if we keep asking questions, we will be.
As I wrote in my post of August 1 2021, Freedom and Revolution as an Art of Fear and Pain: “A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free,” so John Stuart Mill exhorts us in Principles of Political Economy, and I am thinking of this in terms of the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle and the primary strategic problem of how to delegitimize authority and demonstrate the meaninglessness of its power, how to seize power against impossible odds and in the face of twin threats of force and control, the brutal repression and massive military resources of state tyranny and terror and the pervasive surveillance and thought control of propaganda, lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls.
My father once said to me; ‘Never play someone else’s game. Whoever sets the terms and the rules of a game wins, so this is what you must seize first, and change the rules.” This wisdom was imparted as an observation of the differences between sports of personal combat, which have rules, and combat in war and revolution or anywhere beyond the boundaries of law or games with rules, which has none. In this it is like the distinction between politics and revolutionary struggle.
The Olympics playing out before us now offer us spectacles of excellence and the limits of human achievement, and I have been watching the fencing competition with great interest as performances which enact metaphors and tactical principles of struggle, a background against which a great theatre of shadow puppets is unfolding here in Brazil where mobilization for the re-election of Lula to the Presidency is coordinated with mass actions of the precariat underclass and workers unions, the resistance of indigenous peoples to genocide, and direct action against the institutions of state terror and tyranny.
As my father was a fencing coach, whose right arm was magnificently adorned with scars from actual sword duels, who taught both privately at our home and as a club at our high school where he also taught Forensics, English, and Drama, it was inevitable that I would have participated to some degree, but I loved saber and was reasonably good at it. How I came to discover this, and what it came to mean to me in time, is a story relevant to my understanding of freedom and the art of revolution as its praxis.
It was the Incident of the Bubble Gum which brought the disciplines of fencing and martial arts into my life, and changed how I was raised and who I became as a scholar and warrior.
As a nine year old I spent recess at elementary school either playing chess with the Principal in his office, reading in the library, or experimenting with the chemistry set in the lab, which doubtless seemed unfriendly and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals in bottles marked with a skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing would get a dose. That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. I told my father about it that night.
To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear and power as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.
Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and you can use it as a lever to win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?
Fear, power, and the use of social force are balanced with the need to belong. Membership, too, is a means of exchange. Sometimes its best to do what others do to fit in, but it isn’t always best, and it can be very wrong.
Best is to discover what’s best for you, no matter how different that is, and find belonging on your own terms and no one else’s. Even if you have to create that community yourself.
What you need now is a way to confront people directly when you’re upset with them that doesn’t cause more harm than it solves.”
So my father described to me Sartrean authenticity and freedom as an escape from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as a philosophy of total Resistance.
From this time I was engaged in the study of martial arts, fencing, and wilderness survival. Martial arts is a vast subject, and I trained in a number of fighting arts, but competitive saber fencing is a game with a very specific set of conditions which are directly relevant to actual combat, because like politics and war it is an Art of Pain and Fear.
Politics and how we choose to be human together, and the arts of revolution and war as seizures of power when we can no longer hear and speak to one another’s pain and dialog and negotiation finds its limit; these are arts of swallowing pain and metabolizing it as power and freedom.
To be clear, these are arts of power as intimidation, subjugation, and dominion through inflicting pain, and freedom won through discipline in embracing it. A fencing saber is a semi flexible steel whip with which we inflict pain to establish dominance; fencers run at each other and deliver punishing hits that feel like real cuts, a white hot searing pain so intense it can disrupt consciousness.
On the first pass I preferred trading hits or counterattack to any defense; why defend and be reactive and controlled when you can teach your enemy to fear you? On the second pass a weak opponent will hesitate, betrayed by his flesh and the fear of remembered pain it holds, and be lost. If he is without fear we meet as equals in the second and third engagements, and the game becomes one of chesslike multilayered strategies, diversion and surprise, timing, precision, and control through continuous assault and patterns of attack and entrapment which set up multi-staged openings by making the opponent react in defense to establish habits and expectations of action as norms and misdirection which one then violates with an unpredictable surprise. An art of politics, war, and revolution.
I love saber because it is primarily a contest of will and only secondarily of skill, in which ferocity in attack and willingness to accept pain to achieve victory are decisive, though guile, deception, concealment of intent, and an ability to think moves ahead of one’s opponent improvisationally in a time-compressed fluid and dynamic situation define greatness in this arena.
So also with the arts of revolution as both war and political struggle.
To be beyond control by pain and fear is to be free from the limits of our form and from subjugation by authority, for who cannot be compelled becomes Unconquered. As Jean Genet said to me when we were trapped by soldiers in a burning house, moments before we expected to be burned alive having refused to come out and surrender, “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
To once again tell the tale of how Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982:
Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.
We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said with an ironic smile; “Fix bayonets?”
And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty nine years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the first of many Last Stands.
This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death and pain over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell, I am broken open to the suffering of others and to the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.
It is a principle of action I recommend to you all, for when we eliminate personal survival from our victory conditions, when we accept death and “the many ills to which the flesh is heir” as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, as imposed conditions of struggle against overwhelming force and power, authority, and state terror and tyranny, we free ourselves from the limits of our flesh and can turn pain and fear as the means of enslavement against the tyrants of our dehumanization as forces of liberation and seizure of power. Freud called this death transcendence, and it is a precondition of autonomy in revolutionary struggle as self ownership of identity.
As Max Stirner said, “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized”.
Let us resist authority whenever it claims us, by any means necessary, and become exalted beyond ourselves in a liberty which cannot be taken from 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 before his capture and imprisonment by Israel, 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.
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again. And to the tyranny and terror of those who would enslave us, let us give reply with the immortal words of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, the play which Nelson Mandela used as a codex to unify resistance against Apartheid among the political prisoners of Robben Island; Sic Semper Tyrannis, Ever Thus to Tyrants.
Known as the Robben Island Bible, this copy of Shakespeare was passed around as the key to a book code for secret messages which referred to page and line; it was also underlined. On December 16th 1977, Nelson Mandela authorized direct action by underlining this passage from Julius Caesar;
“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.”
Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.
Notes on Letter to a Suicide Squad
I wrote this as guidance and general principles of Resistance to tyranny, Antifascist action, and Revolutionary struggle; but also as a letter to a suicide squad who had volunteered to hunt the hunters and rescue their victims, in the confusion of mass action during the Black Lives Matter protests of the Summer of Fire in 2020 which became a moving street fight in hundreds of cities with forces of repression, which the government of the United States of America used as concealment for Homeland Security death squads to abduct, torture, and assassinate innocent civilians at random as state terror to repress dissent through learned helplessness. A state which sacrifices its legitimacy for control has doomed itself; if its actions can be exposed and its fig leaf stolen. Such is a primary goal of revolutionary struggle; but the people must also be protected, and publicly witnessed to be so, by those who would liberate them. As Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth says; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”
A fascinating essay by Cecil Bloom published in the Jerusalem Post, entitled The 36 Just Men Who Save the World, examines the mythic idea that existence is perpetuated not by the mighty, by Plato’s Philosopher-Kings or Hegel’s World Geniuses, not by Nietzschean Supermen or hegemonic elites, but by ordinary people through everyday acts of kindness toward others, as the movements of a butterflies’ wings may create whirlwinds.
This I call becoming Living Autonomous Zones rather than lamedvavnikim, and among the origins of the idea of mutualism and interdependence as the moral basis for society, one owned and originating in the unauthorized identities of the underclasses as a primary seizure of power from imposed ideas of virtue as submission to authority, the myth of Good Acts as the force which creates and maintains the material universe remains a compelling vision.
“There is an old Jewish legend that every generation has 36 saints (lamedvavnikim) on whose piety the fate of the world depends. The Book of Proverbs provides an early source for the belief that the just man is the basis of the existence of the world: “When the storm wind passes, the wicked is no more, but the righteous is an everlasting foundation” (10:25). That is to say, that the righteous man holds up and supports the world just as the foundations of a building support it. Another source for the legend is from the Mishnaic period (1st-2nd century): “When the righteous come to the world, good comes to the world and misfortune is removed but when the righteous pass away disaster comes and goodness leaves the world” (Tosefta, Sofa 10:1). The specific reference to this phenomenon is in the Babylonian Talmud, which attributes to a fourth-century Babylonian teacher, Abbaye, the statement: “There are not less than 36 righteous men in every generation who receive the Shechina (the Divine presence). It is written, happy are all they who wait for Himâ” (Sanhedrin 97b; Sukkot 45a).
The Hebrew for Himâ (lamed vav) also represents the number 36 in Hebrew numerology (Gematria) and this provides the basis for the number of saints. The number may also be derived from the verse “Happy are all they who hope for Himâ” (Isaiah 30:18), which has been interpreted to mean: Happy are all they who hope for the 36,†that is, who depend or rely on these 36 just men.
There is a less well-accepted belief that there are 72 saints. The Zohar points to Hosea 10:2, which reads: “Their heart is divided.” The gematria of their heart in Hebrew is 72, which some have interpreted as representing 36 saints in Eretz Israel and 36 in the Diaspora.
At first the Talmud viewed lamedvavnikim merely as being good individuals, but later they began to be seen as hidden saints and many legends then circulated about them. Unrecognized by their fellow men and unknown even to each other, they are said to pursue humble occupations such as artisans or water-carriers. They do not admit their identity to anyone and, if challenged, would deny their membership. The Almighty is said to replace a lamedvavnik immediately upon death. A just man is believed to emerge and use his hidden powers when a Jewish community is threatened and return to obscurity once his task has been completed. This belief has given rise to the suspicion that a stranger who suddenly appears and who seems mysterious may be a lamedvavnik. Several legends claim that one of the 36 is the Messiah, who will reveal himself when the time is ripe. Others contend that as soon as a hidden just man is revealed, he dies.
It has been argued that the number 36 derives from sources other than those discussed above. One is that it comes from ancient astrology where the 360 degrees of the heavenly circle are divided into 36 units of dean and these deans were looked upon as guardians of the universe. Another theory is that 36 is the square of six which is said to be the symbol of the created world in Alexandrian Jewish philosophy but both these theories are not convincing.
Little research, however, seems to have been carried out to conclusively identify the legend’s origin. The lamedvavnik tradition is an Ashkenazi belief Sephardim do not recognize it but it has been present in Kabbalistic literature from the 16th century and in hassidic legends from the late 18th century. There are two 18th-century kabbalistic books whose authors, Rabbi Neta of Szinawa and Rabbi Eisik, a shohet from Przemysl, have been described as being lamedvavnikim. Hassidim recognize two categories of saint: those who work in full view and the hidden ones who belong to a higher order of men. Tales of the lamedvavnikim are widespread, particularly in hassidic literature. The noted hassidic scholar, Martin Buber, also introduced the lamedvavnik into some of his writings. Some hassidic tales emphasize the role of the saint behind a boorish or uncouth facade, a theme also used in some stories of the Baâl Shem Tov. Apparently, this was to make people believe that a noble soul could live within every man and that one should not draw conclusions from appearances.
Prominent writers, from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav in the 18th century to 20th-century writers of the stature of S.Y. Agnon and Elie Wiesel have been attracted to the subject. Rabbi Nachman’s The Prince who was made entirely of precious stones introduces us to two lamedvavnikim who, on different occasions, helped a king to beget a daughter and a son and also to save the son from disaster. In Agnon’s The Hidden Tzaddik, the lamedvavnik is a stovemaker who wants to be buried in a plot where the stillborn are buried and whose grave should not be marked with a tombstone. Agnon followed the tradition faithfully, but Rabbi Nachman’s tale indicated that others knew of the identity of the two lamedvavnikim because it was only when the king ordered the Jewish community to help him that the two saints were produced. Elie Wiesel’s One of the Just Men also abandons the idea that the identity of these men is hidden, but Albert Memmi keeps to the traditional view in his The Unrecognised Just Men.
One novel on the subject, Andre Schwartz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, achieved best-seller status in 1960. Ernie Levy, a descendant of the 12th-century R.Yom Tov Levy is depicted as being one of the Just Men, inheriting the honor through his family line. The story of the Levy family begins in York in 1185, covers the Inquisition and pogroms in Kiev and describes many other indignities. Ernie is the last of the line and he is destroyed in Hitler’s gas chambers. Schwartz-Bart’s interpretation of the legend is a controversial one because the honor of being a lamedvavnik is not handed down from father to son. Nevertheless, this novel that won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, France’s most important literary award, gave rise to much interest in the legend.”
Here is my witness of history regarding how I learned the principles of revolutionary struggle at the age of nine; I spent recess at school during fifth grade either playing chess with the Principal or experimenting with the chemistry set in the classroom, which doubtless seemed odd, unfriendly, and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals marked as poison with the skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing ball at recess would get a dose. That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. I told my father about it that night.
To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear and power as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.
Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and fear becomes a lever you can use to seize power and win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?”
On this anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd, a transformative moment in the Reckoning of our nation with institutional and systemic racism, a discredited and corrupt police state of white supremacist terror and brutal tyranny of force and control, and the legacies of historical inequalities and injustices as a national epigenetic illness of racism and power, we mourn the tragedy of his murder, one incident of racist cruelty and the arrogance of power among countless others, but we also celebrate the triumphant solidarity and refusal to submit of the Black Lives Matter movement which it triggered, and which may yet redeem us with transformative change and a reimagination of our possibilities of becoming human.
We meet the moment of this anniversary with all its inchoate multiplicities of meaning, shifting and relative truths, bidirectional forces of reaction and resistance, of despair at our powerlessness as victims of the carceral state, systemic racism, and the sacrifice of our nation’s children by the Republican Party on the altar of their power in refusal to confront an epidemic of gun violence and enact reasonable laws to keep weapons of terror, death, and mass destruction out of the hands of madmen and criminals in subservience to organizations of white supremacist terror like the NRA; in the midst of all of this and the epigenetic trauma and shared public grieving of the legacies of historical and systemic racism and the fetishization of violence and of guns as symbols of white male power and privilege, but also rage which may transform into action.
Look at the faces of the victims of gun violence and white supremacist terror. Why did they die?
They died for the power and wealth of elites for whom their lives are nothing. For this crime there can be no justice, as justice too is owned by those who would enslave us. For the dead we can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged, and the systemic inequality of the business of empire which sacrifices children on the altar of imperial dominion and elite hegemonies of wealth and power wherein the carceral state requires an unchecked and limitless civilian gun market to keep arms manufacturers in business so we are always tooled up to fight vast wars of dominion and defend our markets and control of strategic resources like oil, regardless of the costs of randomly murdered civilians. Indeed this helps the state justify its police forces of occupation and repression of dissent; pervasive gun violence creates fear which the state weaponizes in service to power.
As Joe Biden said; “As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”
Regarding solidarity and the total freedom conferred by the act of refusal to submit as Resistance, I have a story to tell you, and a gift to share with you; membership in a tradition of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Here I offer you the Oath of the Resistance, as it was given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut in 1982.
During the summer before my senior year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Feral bands of soldiers were roaming the streets committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, we joined whole networks of such groups already fighting, and more joined us; together we united in mass action with a vast and diverse resistance and liberation struggle. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.
A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”
To which I replied, “Moments stolen from death belong to us, and set us free. This is all we truly own and which make us human, such defining moments; memories, stories, histories, identities. Against the terror of our nothingness we have only this with which to find a balance; the truths written in our flesh and the joy of total freedom to discover them. It is a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before the Fall of Beirut, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path.
There came a day when the barricades were overrun and our neighborhood along with it, one of our last days together. With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers in a sack of murder and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, ordering people into the streets to surrender and setting fires to burn alive in their homes anyone who refused, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes as the building we were in was set on fire, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with an apologetic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”
We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all.
Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’
To which I replied, “No.”
“Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation which friends of mine were forming. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny and fascism with Liberty and Equality; to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.
To all those who hunger to be free, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, whom Frantz Fanon named The Wretched of the Earth, this I say; you are not alone.
Let none stand alone who refuse to submit to the tyranny and terror of force and control, who speak truth to power and question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, who answer division with solidarity, control with disobedience, authorized identities, virtue, and normality with transgression, who run amok and are ungovernable.
Nor can our souls be stolen from us by either the brutal repression of fear nor the seduction of lies and illusions, we who call the enemy by his true names and stand united in the cause of our liberty, for who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled by force and control becomes Unconquered and free.
In Resistance we are all, each of us, Living Autonomous Zones. No one speaks or answers for us, nothing is beyond question, and all authority which claims us is without legitimacy or meaning.
When those who would enslave us come for one of us, let them be met with all of us; let the fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil and the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege find not a humankind broken by cruelty and state terror nor divided by hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, not hopeless and abject as products of a system of dehumanization, commodification, and falsification, not disempowered by learned helplessness nor conditioned to submit to authority and force, but a humankind united in resistance; an unconquerable and United Humankind.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of June 20 2022, Say Their Names: the Visual Iconography of the Black Lives Matter Movement for Racial Justice as Ritual Mourning; As I reflect on the visual iconography and witness of history in film and photography of our epochal reckoning of equality and racial justice, I am awed by the possibilities for civilizational transformation of this moment, by its tidal force as the people reclaim their power from governments throughout the world which have betrayed them in three successive waves of revolution; #metoo, Extinction Rebellion & Fridays for Future, and Black Lives Matter, all driving motives and informing sources which empower the global democracy revolution against fascism and tyranny. If we are to be free, we must begin by being equal.
The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in Anderson’s The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of America’s historical memory and vision of ourselves; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort. This image is shaped by the three primary forces of race, wealth, and gender which together act to subjugate, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us. And this we must resist.
According to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as written in The Root; “In the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (1525-1866), 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Of them, 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. Only about 388,000 were transported directly from Africa to North America”.
If we count only the known victims of racial violence since Emancipation, we have a legacy of crimes against humanity in a nation founded on the principle that all persons are created equal which reveals this to be an Original Lie; racism is not a failure of our system, but a key element of its design. Now count all the Black people who lived and died as American slaves from the first landing in 1661 to Juneteenth.
The names of the victims of racism in our nation become an infinite loop of misery and despair, a lamentation of the brokenness of the world and of the human cost of a system which uses divisions of exclusionary otherness to change some of us into things to be used for the profit of a few oligarchic families of apex predators. Ideologies of white supremacy perpetuate inequality in our society today; the wolves are still among us, even if they must disguise themselves as sheep.
Among the most terrible instruments of those who would enslave us is this erasure and silencing of Black voices, of concealment of the scope and horror of the legacy of slavery in the power asymmetries and inequalities we are heir to. We have hundreds of years of lost lives and names to reclaim, and we can not lose a single one more.
Every one of those lost lives is an Unknown Soldier in the struggle for Liberty; let us honor them with our actions as songs of survival and revolution, and make of one another living monuments to our unconquered freedom in defiance of those who would enslave us.
Of the many insightful essays written of this moment in history and its transformative and revolutionary consequences for human meaning and being, few are as eloquent as Chaédria LaBouvier’s writing in The Cut, entitled
The Afterlife of George Floyd: A Portfolio by Photographer Eli Reed American iconography of a death, history, and a Black southern homecoming; “It is a beautiful symmetry to have Eli Reed’s photographs capture and canonize this American chapter and George Floyd’s funeral. Reed is one of the best living photographers and is walking history himself; he is the first Black photographer to join Magnum Photos and is a member of Kamoinge, the Black photography collective that has in its DNA Roy DeCarava, a founding father of black-and-white fine photography.
The images are something, as they say down South, perhaps even more so because George Floyd is so present and absent from them. Where is he? It’s just as well that Floyd be in absentia, in a sense, from a photo series about him. Find George Floyd, the human, the person who unsuspectingly became a symbol, the father, the man who called out for his mother as he lay dying. Reed’s photos aren’t the expected intimacy of a funeral’s mise-en-scène with the casket and Floyd’s family — like that of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King — but it is hard to find a real reason why America would have deserved that kind of record for the ages anyway. In lieu of photographing Floyd, Reed’s camera tenderly captures the minutiae of people, in the middle of a pandemic, social collapse, and a revolution, willing themselves to bear witness.
The iconography of George Floyd’s death begins, in the modern sense, in the lynching postcards of the early 20th century. They are a perverse picture of Americana; they are souvenirs from the scenes of murders. Like the leather wallets and belts fashioned from human skin afterwards, these postcards were first and foremost evidence of many things — murder, the unhinged fantasies of White subconsciousness that have long been anchored in the idea of a Black chattel class and a belief in the unalienable right to act out that role play. That a reminder of that kind of unforgettable horror could even be necessary or even desired is an indication of what has long not been well with White America, and for quite some time; Lillian Smith, a Georgia native who framed White supremacy as a mental illness, wrote in Killers of the Dream, “These ceremonials in honor of white supremacy … slip from the conscious mind down deep into the muscles.” James Baldwin put it more explicitly: “And they have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are White.”
Video is not infinite, but it is the strongest contender in humankind’s constant quest to conquer the infinite in real time. In its cruel loopability and limitless excess, what is immortality if not an excess of everything? Everything becomes excessive on video: the length, the audience, the distribution, the distortion, the filters. America has met its match. America has found a medium capable of showing her to herself without tiring and with the matched coldness and unrelenting brutality with which America has always treated Black people.
Perhaps this helps explain why the last moments of Black life on video have found an audience and momentum to catalyze protest and people in our contemporary times. That objectivity and excess of video have distilled the core of the moment in a way few mediums can: The combination of free-range prerogative and unhinged fantasies of White people has long been at the center of these murders and subjugations. The person and the body may be Black, but they are not the subject. It’s what makes Emmett Till’s body so difficult to look at; it is not him, it is not Mamie’s child. It is the site of an imagination, deranged, it is the deadly narcissism of Whiteness’s desires as bluntly as the point can be made, and infinitely as need be. Watching Derek Chauvin kneel on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes is truly unhinged, and we are watching him enact the same fantasy that his forefathers stood proudly for in photographs when Black bodies were swinging from poplar trees. Video does not tire, and as such on a cellular level, we know America and we know that we will see another Black person die on video again. And that has absolutely nothing to do with Black people.
And so, it is in this weird moment — between the slight beginnings of a White reckoning and the evermore Black activism that has always been this country’s moral North Star — that the afterlife of George Floyd begins.
He is a child of Texas, a son of Houston’s Third Ward, Cissy Floyd’s firstborn, and as the sun set on June 9, 2020, he returned to them. Watching the procession of Floyd’s horse drawn recalled Ossie Davis’s eulogy for Malcolm X: “and we will know him then for what he was and is — a prince.” Indeed, Floyd’s homecoming was fit for a king; this has always been the visual thesis of African-American funerary, especially when someone has been stolen from us. The horse-drawn carriage, the gold casket, the choir, the Appian Way procession of the last mile to his grave; George Floyd was given a state funeral by the people, his people.
For it is in the visuals and the iconography of the homecoming — so called by enslaved people because they believed, upon death, their soul would return to Africa — that the person, the human, the humanity reemerges. The last moments of Black life under the duress of unpoliced imaginations, to paraphrase Claudia Rankine, have very little to do with Black life. And if the afterlife is a journey that is filled with abundance, beauty, and absent of all the ignorant, cruel, and dull things that make this physical one at times unbearable, it would make sense that the beginnings of the Black afterlife have absolutely nothing to do with White people. And yet, it is also never not complicated and complex; the Houston Police Department escorted his cortege on its final journey. Make of that what you will.
The visual foundation of Floyd’s afterlife incorporates themes of majesty, splendor, and nobility that are a deeply historical call-and-response to Blackness in funerary and the afterlife across time. It recalls the ancient Egyptians, New Orleans’s jazz funerals, the funeral pageantry of West African tribes, Geechee and Lowcountry funerals, the work of photographer James Van Der Zee and the promised abundance of the “upper room” in works such as Alma Thomas’s painting “Resurrection.” Floyd returned home to the very specific African-Creole corridor of East Texas and Western Louisiana is worth considering. Here, his iconography and afterlife begins in one of the most stunning ancestral regions for African-Americans — and one of the most infamously racist. A place from which the most desperate domestic refugees fled and still, to this day, flee up North for a different type of racism. Floyd himself had fled up North, to Minneapolis, like Mamie Till went up to Chicago. Further east, Emmett Till’s afterlife had its beginnings in this corridor too in the Mississippi Delta — in the Tallahatchie River, to be exact.
Where is George Floyd? How do we find him? We have no clue how and where he will settle in history, art history, how his last moments will enter a canon of filmed death. What we are looking for, beyond the momentum of canonization and movement, is him. Those intimate, quotidian, and mundane things which begrudgingly and solemnly construct a life and one’s work in it. Who will replace his hello to the people who are used to seeing him every day? If he is that person in the neighborhood who takes out the trash for the elderly women who live alone on the block, who will take his place? Who will lead George Floyd’s Bible studies or be the gentle giant in the barbershop, on the block, and at the corner store? How do a community and a family replace what is irreplaceable? Reed’s photographs began looking for these unanswerable questions.
His images recall the tenderness and difficulty of a watercolor portrait. A watercolor portrait is a small miracle; a painter must work quickly, with sustained velocity and controlled chaos, to bend the fluidity of water and the subject’s essence to reveal something luminous, telling, and coherent. Maybe it is the same mastery of application at work here; Reed’s camera captures the uncapturable, what it meant to be in the sticky humidity of that Houston evening that smelled like grief, mosquito repellent, candle wax, and cedar wood. For those not there, Reed’s work acts as a bridge to translate the mourning, the prayer circles, the enormous and quotidian worries of those there — the traffic afterwards, if the chicken left in the sink had fully thawed by the time they got home, if something calamitous would happen on the way back, what would happen now to George’s family, now that he was in the ground and the real shattering, breaking, and healing (maybe) begins. The luminosity of the human experience is here in the artist’s offering to George Floyd, a lion in the winter of his years who has captured wars at home and abroad, still working, this time in the looming discontent of Juneteenth, a plague, and the knocking knees of an empire in collapse. Somewhere in there is a radical love, a belief that George is still owed more, that Black people are deserving of more and that they must have it, and they must have it yesterday, today, tomorrow, and forever. Like watercolors, the fervency of this simple truth is hard to capture. It is that love for, and of, and by Black people at the very root of it all which propels the people to the street, prepared to die if it should come down to it. And it is because, like Ossie Davis said of Malcolm, they love us so.
It is, as they say down South, truly something.”
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This article is more than 3 years old
The killing of Floyd by a white officer reflected a common history of violence against Black people that united protesters in a renewed global movement
Torch of Liberty 