On a night of terrible windstorms and roaring gales, full of strange sounds both animal and unearthly in her Las Vegas neighborhood full of performers and celebrities from the casino shows and their exotic pets, of fragments of forgotten stories and conversations with the dead, my mother won her last struggle to free herself from the limits of her form, emerging from an outworn body as a transcendent and radiant being into the limitless possibilities of the Infinite unknown.
Wherever she may be, I hope there is laughter, joy, and dancing.
Dancing was the great joy of her life in retirement, teaching and her beloved students that of her professional life, and the company of her family and friends a joy always.
To all those who shared the journey of her life, I thank you and hope that in bringing joy to others you may also find your own such joys, whatever they may be.
The brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity is an immense sea of darkness, against which we have only the light we can give to each other.
May we all of us by our actions become such lights for each other, and find illumination, hope, and the redemptive power of love in those moments of exaltation offered by others.
These words I wrote five years ago on awakening from strange dreams to discover my mother had died, having come to help and spent some fine days with her in conversation.
In rereading my writings on this event I have come to realize it is a Defining Moment, one which I have interrogated only in terms of the trauma of death and the shape of grief process.
Years later in reflection, I am able to think of this also in terms of the joy my mother gave me and so very many others. I now have a quantitative measure of the half life of my heart as it transforms over time and my grief degrades like the forms we must all one day escape.
Like my father and myself, she was a high school English and Forensics teacher, and whenever students asked her if a thing was true or not, or asked for some pronouncement of interpretation of a book, current events, or political or religious ideologies, she held up her open hands and bounced them side to side, singing “Maybe, maybe not, Maybe, maybe not”. This was a demonstration of one of her Great Lessons, taken from a theatrical performance which included some of her students that toured America as The Reduced Shakespeare Company: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged Comedy; “We do not authorize truths, we question them. And there are no absolute truths.”
To this I wish to add; Your truths and mine will be different because we are, possessed by different histories and embedded in different informing, motivating, and shaping sources. This does not mean that one of us is right and the other is wrong, only that our uniqueness is born of different truths, both those written in our flesh and those we ourselves create.
Another such lesson regards the duty of witness and the sacred calling to pursue the truth; she would begin the first day of class each year with the story of how she asked questions about theology as a twelve year old girl in a private Catholic school until an enraged and brutally cruel nun, as they all seem to be, broke her finger with a ruler, whereupon she got up from her desk and walked out forever from the school and the Church; then she would hold up her crooked finger to the class and say; “We are not silent. We question, we demand proof, we take no authority at their word.”
To this I add, there is no just authority.
The great secret of power and authority, of force and control, is that without legitimacy it is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disbelief and disobedience. Therefore the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Such was her art of education, the bringing forth of truths, both those immanent in nature and written in our flesh and those we ourselves create, and of becoming human.
Who was she as a person, and a primary influence on me?
First, she was funny, imaginative, empathetic, insightful, compassionate, and fearless in her performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen and action in Solidarity and Resistance to systems of oppression.
I rode on her shoulders when we seized the Palace of Justice, headquarters of the city police and courts, in San Francisco in 1968, and held her hand in the front line on Bloody Thursday 1969 in Peoples Park Berkeley when the police opened fire on the student peace protest against the Occupation of Palestine and the University of California’s investments in the Israeli war machine. We worked together in the Sanctuary and Anti-Apartheid Movements of the 1980’s and many other actions including the Liberation of Palestine and of Northern Ireland, that last being why she named my sister Erin, and she marched in protests until her final years, the very last in the 2017 Women’s March to save Roe Versus Wade and the right of bodily autonomy and to protest the inauguration of Traitor Trump and his capture of the state as a fascist theocratic patriarchy.
Her own personal joys included playing the piano as she had from childhood, Scrabble which we played together like I played chess with my father, playing bridge which she was quite good at and once won a Las Vegas championship tournament with a partner, and folk dancing which she learned at the wonderful Papa’s Taverna in Petaluma, Sunday gathering place of the Bay Area Greek community and venue for traveling musicians from Greece, and in retirement as a member of the Las Vegas Ethnic Express troupe which included show dancers and dance teachers from everywhere, who became some of her best friends with whom she traveled to Europe on dance tours. They danced at her 80th birthday party, which included a Flamenco performance by one of Spain’s greatest dancers.
She wrote jokes for comedians including Phyllis Diller, who served as a kind of alter ego of mom’s, a study of psychosomatic muteness from the childhood therapy journals and Soviet hospital records of Jerzy Kosinski which he had fictionalized as The Painted Bird, a master’s thesis on Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and sold a short story she wrote about me, Little Bear Looks, to Maurice Sendak because I wanted to see it illustrated, which became a popular book and television series. Her full list of graduate studies included Biology, Psychology, and English Literature which she had switched to because “all the science jobs had Women Need Not Apply written on them in great big letters”. Always writing she was, and curious about everything. As a child I would ask her for stories with Oulipo-like parameters; she often spoke of my request “Tell me a story about an alligator, and make it rhyme.”
From her I learned to write, to organize political action, and to cook; she was a Chef of the French -Viennese cuisine of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs as a family legacy, an enthusiast of Greek and Russian cuisine, and of the wild game recipes passed down from my great grandmother Apollonia who was a hunting guide, often for expeditions which were like a royal procession and very grand. During my years as a teacher and counselor I used cooking as a reset activity to partition my work life from my personal life; chop things up, set fire to them, and eat them, and any lingering trauma from the day is consumed with them like being one’s own Sin Eater.
My love and receptivity for languages is a legacy from my mother and her family; here I must tell Apollonia’s story as told to me by my mother of how Jewish people saved our family, when no one else would, and without whom none of us would have ever lived.
Upon the docks of America arrived a nine year old girl, alone and without a penny to her name or a word of English. A Stranger, with no one waiting to meet her, no family, no friends, nothing. My maternal great grandmother Apollonia this was, with flaming red hair like my mother’s, whose family had put her on a ship to escape from Austria as their home burned, the sole survivor of her whole town so far as we now know.
She wandered the port of Seattle asking for help, in her five languages and in descending likelihood of recognition; French, Austrian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, and finally, in despair and fear that the reaction would be far worse than being abandoned to starve and freeze to death lost and alone among strangers, Yiddish.
This like a magic spell summoned a crowd, by happy chance not one armed with torches and axes. So a stranger was taken in and raised by Jewish people, a family or families of whom I know nothing, and thus our family’s survival is owed to the entire Jewish community, diaspora, and people.
This happened in 1873, year of the glorious Vienna World’s Fair but also the stock market crash in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War which began a twenty year Depression in Europe and the Jewish persecutions as they were blamed for it; also conflicts between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in their borderlands.
What, there was already a Jewish community in Washington State? In 1875 Bailey Gatzert became Mayor of Seattle; in 1892 he co-founded Seattle’s first synagogue, Ohaveth Shalom. So yes there was; and Apollonia was raised as a Jew by kind benefactors who adopted her.
Not that she was terribly conventional by the standards of her time, regardless of her identity.
She it was who owned her own rifles and horses by the age of sixteen when she began her career as a hunting guide, and died in the saddle at the age of 95, rifle in her hand, having shot the bear that attacked her horses and killed her. The Indians buried her like the Huns buried Attila, on her horse and with her rifle, like a warrior princess.
I was born within days of her death, and as with all ancestors I bear her onward, literally as DNA and the stories which possess us as the ghosts of other lives; incarnated truths written in our flesh. As a child I claimed to be her reincarnation, imaginative and filled with stories I experienced as memories as if I had lived them, until I was old enough to realize how absurd this idea was, though the feeling of being shadowed by her remains with me.
Certainly I identified with her in my love of adventure travel and exploration of unknowns, a figure among the great adventuresses like Isabella Bird and Ida Pfeiffer, enchanted by my mother’s Wild West and Gilded Age stories of her. Somewhere in my twenties, between the 1982 Siege of Beirut and the victory over Apartheid at the August 1987 to March 1988 Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola, her place in my imagination was taken by Sir Richard Francis Burton whose travel books I read voraciously.
Historical context and the fact that my ancestor in the maternal line knew Yiddish makes it possible that under Jewish law we are Jews, and Apollonia had been raised as a member of the Jewish community and because of this influence was clearly Jewish by faith and culture if not by ancestry, though my mother never claimed so and moreover was a radical atheist who raised us with no religious traditions at all. In so doing the family faith she liberated herself from was Catholicism, an artifact of her Austrian paternal line who were exiles of the 1919 fall of the Hapsburg Empire after 600 years.
My mother’s speech was permeated with Yiddish words and phrases, a legacy of my maternal great grandmother; my maternal grandfather was the source of the family German, actually Wienerisch or the Viennese dialect of Austro-Bavarian, combined with the French-influenced Schönbrunner Deutsch sociolect of the imperial court. This was the home language of my mother’s family, though grandpa knew Latin, taught himself English, and to various degrees knew other languages of the Austrian Empire including Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, the Romance language Venetian and its Triestino dialect, and could speak Russian and Polish well enough to do business in their communities here in America.
As a teenager immersed in Holocaust literature while working through the trauma of a near death experience in Brazil the summer before high school, my execution by a police death squad while rescuing abandoned street children they were bounty hunting having been prevented by the Matadors, and conversations with my mother as she wrote her study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet medical records and childhood therapy journal of Jerzy Kosinski which he fictionalized as The Painted Bird, I once asked her directly, Are we Jews?
To this she replied; “Everyone is a Jew. Everyone is someone’s Jew, someone’s scapegoat, someone’s Other. The great task of becoming human is to embrace our uniqueness as we overcome our fear of otherness.”
I find this definition an interesting solution to the dilemma of the question of Jewish identity and the claims of ethnicity or being Jewish by maternal descent and of faith or being Jewish by the Three Knots of the Infinite, of Torah, and of the diasporic community of Israel.
So, who decides how we may think of ourselves, our histories, memories, and identities? How is membership and belonging conferred? And even if it is to be ourselves alone, sovereign, self owned, and possibly self created, by what criterion shall we define our terms?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the defining act of becoming human, and the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
But this is not the end of such questions, and only a beginning; for identity is inherently ambiguous, relational, contingent, and a process in ceaseless motion as a chaotic system, an infinite Moebius Loop of being wherein we shift and change with the horizons of our imagination, the legacies of our history, and the stories we bear like warrior marks.
On this theme a final story for now; among my earliest memories is watching the burning cross my town set on fire on the front lawn of newlyweds, a Dutch Reformed Church man and a Swiss Calvinist girl, which the town was calling a mixed marriage because they were members of different churches, though both white Protestants speaking forms of German. It was like a carnival; I asked a neighbor boy who was laughing madly and running about with a torch in his hand 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 with ferocity 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.”
As I wrote in my post of May 10 2020, On Life Disruptive Events As Gateways of Illumination, and Happy Mother’s Day; The tide crashes in, overwhelming what has been and become familiar, chaotic and ferocious, and we are devastated in that moment as our castles in the sand vanish like illusions that never were, and only emptiness remains.
The tide recedes, revealing wonders; for what is left behind is always extraordinary even if it is commonplace, for it is ours, and unique, belonging to whoever finds and cherishes it.
So with our memories over vast chasms of time; each has its own moment and in this endless impermanence of being some events become Defining Moments and leap across the boundaries of time and space, of our world and ourselves, to reorganize and awaken us like the unpredictable illumination of a lightning strike.
Awake and seize the terror and rapture of our totalizing disruption and sudden realization of nothingness, not in fear and despair at our loss of what we have known and been, but in joy and absolute freedom in who we may become.
Notes on the Composition:
As to form, my intention is to present the afore displayed poem on the left column in Jesuit dialectical journal format, side by side with the interpretive and narrative material which follows on the right, an old habit of mine when writing with a pen to give a full and daily report of my witness of history, the dialectical journal form of the Jesuit daily intelligence report taught to me by my father’s beatnik friend William S. Burroughs. In a responsive digital format, its easier to read on a mobile device as a single text block, as it is here.
Once again I find myself contemplating Gaston Bachelard’s description of sounds as shells of speech, coquilles au parole, as I have throughout my life when the realm of the senses and that of meaning and value seen incongruent and discontiguous, when reality becomes a misaligned juxtaposition of images like a Warhol painting, or like a shadow moving as a living thing independently from the object which casts it, an echo which changes the meaning of its source and returns our words to us in strange languages, a reflection which distorts, falsifies, and reshapes our images in a recursive wilderness of funhouse mirrors.
Identity is like the seashells found along a beach; each one a history expressed in their form of how its bearer solved problems of adaptation and growth over time. Such structures protect us, but also limit us, and like the wise beings who create the shells we admire, we must learn when to cast them aside and create ourselves anew.
Death of our loved ones is the ultimate disruptive event; today I celebrated Mother’s Day having lost mine at the start of this year, with my partner Theresa and her dad Gene for whom I often cook dinner, she also having lost her mother and he his wife of 66 years only two years past. Yet with our shared grief there was also the strength of our bond as a family, humor, wit, and the anchorages of common memories.
On Mother’s Day we celebrate the redemptive and transformative power of love, and our interconnectedness with others through successive generations and our families and communities both natural to us and chosen by us.
May we all find the people through whom we can recreate ourselves as the person we want to become, and for whom we can empower and help actualize the same liberation.
What is death? I once told my mother, after returning from long moments most sincerely dead after the police grenade whose force wave hurled me from my body on Bloody Thursday 1969 and my vision of our myriad possible futures as I stood outside of time; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but awakening from an illusion.”
Of late I have begun to think of death as a defining negative space within the dark mass of the Absurd of all the things we have not claimed as ours and all the hopes and dreams we have not made real by our actions. As I wrote in my post of June 1 2021, Death is a Secret Twin; Death is a secret twin which shares our face but not our dreams which lift and exalt us beyond the limits of our flesh, so he must steal the echoes and reflections of ours, a thing of shadows filled with secret histories, unspoken truths, unsworn oaths, thousands of myriads of loyalties to private loves and desires betrayed by our failures to make them live and become real by action.
Death is the terror of all that we may have been but did not become, the loss of our disconnectedness and the emptiness of meaning in a world where love cannot redeem us, the grief for beauty which loses context when it is no longer shared and is lost with the fragments of memories which like the genie of perfume escape their bottle to trigger moments out of time and then evanesce like the ghost of a beloved hand which no longer grasps ours back.
We are tattered and broken things, our secret shadows and ourselves, who live in the incandescent now with these repositories of our beautiful dreams and our terrible nightmares, bearing them on into eternity; for this is the great secret of being, that our best selves are formed of all we would deny and keep hidden, and which live beyond us as figures of our glorious sins.
Death is an ambush predator made of our histories, memories, and identities, which must steal these things to become real in the moment of our awakening into its realm of beautiful and terrible dreams, a realm of true being beyond the illusions of our lives which bears names including the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism and the alam al mythal in Islam, called by Coleridge the Primary Imagination and by Jung the Collective Unconscious, and waits to seize us unawares and carry us off to eternity while it replaces us like a faery changeling with the image of our unrealized hopes and unexpressed desires.
Death is a unique and personal demon created by our denial of ourselves, a parasite which destroys its host and operates through a process of falsification like the distorted and captured images in a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, but it can become instead a symbiote, a terrible and monstrous guardian spirit and a guide of the soul which speaks from within our greatest darkness with Forbidden wisdom, like a remora borne by a shark on its journeys through chasms of the unknown not as its nemesis and conqueror but as a servant which grooms from us that which we must cast down from the thrones of our hearts; we humans and our silent and unseen partners the angels of our deaths whom we must wrestle not for victory, for everything in life is more powerful than we are, but to become Unconquered in resistance and free.
Thus may we bear without breaking the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, become greater and more real and alive than we were born, transcend the limits of our form, and become sublimed as figures of our truths in Sartrean total freedom and authenticity as an art of life, for all true art defiles and exalts.
Here is a faith which asks us to renounce nothing and embrace our true selves, to reimagine and transform ourselves; and offers a path of working with grief process and death transcendence not of control of our passions and dominion of nature, but as seizure of power and autonomy, of the embrace and celebration of our wildness as beings of nature and of those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
Let us embrace our monstrosity and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
How shall we answer death and the terror of our nothingness? Let us challenge and defy such death, and while it waits to claim us with its cold hand of entropy and unraveled time we must seize and shake our shadow and secret twin of longing to become, transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and perform our best selves, our hopes and our desires, as a guerilla theatre of identities upon the stage of the world in fearless grandeur, and let nothing be lost or remain untested among the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us answer death as Bringers of Chaos and Transformation, and make of our world and humankind a thing of beautiful, terrible truths written in our flesh, and of our dreams and nightmares a brave new world.
As I wrote in my post of January 20 2023, Some Thoughts On the Pandemic, the Fall of Democracy, and the Anniversary of My Mother’s Death; We are a nation which like humankind is united only by our shared public trauma and our grief; by the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. The collapse of global democracy, which threatens centuries if not millennia of barbarism, genocides and wars, and an age of fascist tyranny now made more certain by yesterday’s refusal by our elected leaders to safeguard voting rights and the meaning of citizenship here in America, combines with ecological disasters and looming extinction of our species of which the pandemic is but a sign of nature’s fury, again driven by political decisions and our addiction to wealth and power conferred to us by dominion and control of fossil fuels as a strategic resource of hegemonic elites for whom these things are instruments of our subjugation as slave labor; such is the future to which we awake today.
On this anniversary of my mother’s death after her long struggle against cancer, which began with her first of many surgeries in the fall of 1982 when I took over teaching her classes in high school on the first day of the new semester, with my sister Erin among the students in the Forensics class we founded for her to attend that year, I cannot escape the feeling that the many horrible deaths and the fracture of social systems which result from the pandemic and quarantine and have made open wounds of our modern pathology of disconnectedness are parallel and interdependent disruptive events with the ambiguous and tentatively incipient subversion and fall of our democracy.
Like a nightmare from which we cannot awaken, the loss of our loved ones has been multiplied on a vast and incomprehensible scale, throughout the world and every stratum of society, leveling hierarchies and bridging divisions through shared trauma and grief as these disruptive natural and political events reveal the flaws of our systems and structures and suggest new and better ways of being human together.
The Pandemic has claimed my partner Theresa’s father Gene and my sister Erin’s partner Tom, and untethered us from our connectedness, and from our anchorages with the cherished past. And this trauma has repeated endlessly, everywhere, and for everyone.
We have been given a vision of our dehumanization and our meaningless mass death and extinction; what are we going to do about it?
When those who would enslave us come for us, as they always have and will, let them find neither an America nor a humankind submissive with learned helplessness nor divided by narratives of exclusionary otherness, but united in solidarity and refusal to submit to authority.
As I wrote in my post of December 26 2021, Reflections During the After Party; As the festivities of a wonderfully out of control after party swirl around me with raucous and dissonant sounds and the silent hungers, unanswerable pain, and strange desires of our guests press upon me like living brands, I sit among my ghosts, dreaming their dreams, both those they lived and those yet to be realized.
On such occasions as this, surrounded by feasts and family, I am also surrounded by chasms of darkness, loneliness, disconnection, and the voices and presences of the dead which interpenetrate my flesh with the shadows of their histories, literally in the case of our genetic code as transforms of messages about how to shape ourselves to the material world and its imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle to become human.
We are bearers of stories, made of memories and histories which echo back through the numberless unknown lives of our ancestors as an unfolding of human intention and poetic vision, prochronisms or histories expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation like the shells of fantastic sea creatures, songs which reverberate through our lives as epigenetic informing, motivating, and shaping forces which are not unique to us but part of an immense and incomprehensible wave of the limitless possibilities of becoming human, which can seize us with dreams of being, meaning, and value we ourselves cannot imagine.
Such is the power of vision as reimagination and transformation, and the nature of our persona and identities as performances in a theatre of which, as Shakespeare teaches us, all the world is a stage. What is important is to ask, whose stage is it? In whose story do we perform our lives? For these questions direct us not to the subjugation to authority of learned helplessness, but to seizures of power and revolutionary struggle.
How answer we the terrible pronouncement in MacBeth,
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
How shall we answer the terror of our nothingness and the legacies of our history? I have but one reply; to gather and cherish my trauma and pain, and make something beautiful with it. Thus may we stand against the darkness, and remain unconquered.
My answer to the suffering of the world is to give voice to the voices which have been stolen from us, the numberless generations of the silenced and the erased.
Welcome and embrace your pain and the terror of our nothingness as sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Dance your demons before the stage of the world; go ahead, frighten the horses.
Forge great beauty from the flaws of your humanity and the brokenness of the world, and wield it as an instrument of reimagination and transformation in glorious change.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As I wrote in my post of September 20 2021, The Doom of Man Pandemic Has Come to the Ball; As twin systemic failures and existential threats, the Pandemic and the disasters of climate change have exposed the faultiness of our civilization, and the terrible humanitarian crises of disease, fire, and floods have hammered us into strange and new forms and confronted us with our limits through death and life disruptive events.
What can we learn from the Pandemic, and from death?
As public spaces empty, hospitals turn away patients for whom there are no beds, economies fail and both persons and nations sever the ties that bind us together in a global civilization and become islands unto themselves, and the modern pathology of disconnectedness and alienation becomes pervasive and institutionally reinforced in the wake of a great tide of fear and the terror of our nothingness, an emerging truth becomes clear; like the figure of the plague in Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, the Doom of Man Pandemic has come to the ball and no one is safe from its deadly embrace, not even the elites who had thought themselves beyond reach within the walls of their palaces.
It is a disaster created by political decisions and the Gordian Knot of oil as a strategic resource of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, privatization and plutocratic capitalism as instruments of authoritarian hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness which are interdependent with divisions of identitarian racism and patriarchy, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and a carceral state of authoritarian force and control which manifests in police, prisons, borders, and universal surveillance and the falsifications of propaganda; and all of this combines as an engine of death and dehumanization to bring us ecological devastation and human extinction through climate change and the Pandemic.
Nor will the current Pandemic, terrible though it is, be the last test of our social cohesion, mutual interdependence, and solidarity we will face; I expect it is but the first of many successive and worsening waves of plagues to hammer us.
Our nation dies helplessly and alone in despair, like our loved ones whose breath and life are stolen by a disease of terror which need not have been unleashed, and the greatest horror is that they might have lived had they not been sacrificed in service to power. For each of us who has died has been murdered by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his Party of Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, and Perversions as surely as if they had been delivered to the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Science denialism has been weaponized as a loyalty test in vaccine and mask denial, exactly like the suicide Kool-Aid that Jim Jones demanded his followers drink to prove their loyalty; the Fourth Reich of Trump and the Republican Party have betrayed their followers to their deaths, and possibly all of us with them.
For disease has no borders and moves among us like an ambush predator wearing the faces of our family and friends, waiting its moment to strike with silent and unseen death.
How can we respond to this existential threat? We must heal the failed systems from whence it comes.
As I wrote in my post of June 24 2021, What Does the Pandemic Warn Us Of?; The limits of control, the lies and illusions of authoritarian states, and the weaponization of faith in technocratic elites as Plato’s philosopher kings combine in the Pandemic as a man made disaster of political failures to leverage change through destabilization of ossified and hollow forms of power.
The failures of humankind’s responses to the Pandemic are a measure of the distances we have between us and a free society of equals, between authoritarian and democratic societies.
It is also a symptom of the mechanical failure of capitalism from its internal contradictions, like the widening gyre between social classes in the global precariat and the ponderous destabilization of the wealth of nations. Herein are direct consequences of privatization and the emergence of a corporate, oligarchic, and plutocratic elite as it frees itself from its host political systems and claims dominion over humankind.
Ecological disaster and the imminent threat of human extinction, driven by political and economic failures, a direct result of our civilizational dependence on fossil fuels as a strategic resource of global dominion and elite wealth and power, can be read in the signs of the Pandemic and of fire and drought, storms and flood, which have seized the earth in the past few years.
As we bid farewell to yet another summer of record heat waves and water scarcity, let us reflect on the year that may come in which the heat wave never subsides, but worsens, and the wells run dry. Such a time may now be inevitable, and we may have less than two decades in which to change our fate.
If we are to survive, what must change?
As I wrote in my post of February 23 2021, Origins of the Disaster: Elitism and Racist Inequalities and Injustices Drive Our Catastrophic Systems Failures in Our Responses to the Pandemic; Beyond the failures of our government and our economy of disaster capitalism which rig the game to serve the interests of power and wealth, there is the pervasive and endemic racism as the basis of both, the gorilla in the room of our legacy of historical injustices and inequalities like Klimt’s image of Typhoeus in the Beethoven Frieze, which reimagines Goya’s interpretation of a parallel myth in Saturn Devouring His Children, confronts us with a chthonic figure of America’s shadow self which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
There is no liberty for anyone unless there is equality for everyone.
And like Klimt’s bestial rebel or Goya’s mad emperor, this power asymmetry and identitarian elitism creates authority and legitimates our subjugation by it, which in recursion authorizes identities and births tyrannies and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Fear, power, force; here lies the heart of state tyranny and terror, racist police gun violence and white supremacist terror, vote suppression and the subversion of democracy, the falsification of ourselves through propaganda and the shaping of some of us into monsters with which to terrorize and control the others; but also of our plutocratic and oligarchic capitalist kleptocracy and the policies of deregulation and privatization which are directly responsible for the systemic failures of our responses to the Pandemic, and to its origins in ecological collapse and disaster capitalism.
As so often, it was an observation by a friend which redirected my attention to what is important, in this case the need for shared rituals of grief; “We need mourning rituals for the dead and dying of this pandemic. Part of the soul fatigue is a failure to process grief.”
As I wrote in the wake of my mother’s death from cancer, over a year ago now, On the Wisdom of Our Darkness and the Brokenness of the World; Grief, despair, and fear, the trauma of loss, the torment of loneliness, and the guilt of survivorship; the realm of our darkest and most negative passions immerses us in atavistic states with totalizing and tidal force.
Life disruptive events can destabilize identity and realign personality, transform meanings and values, send shockwaves through our network of relationships, shift our worldview and unmoor us from the anchorages of our ideological paradigms and historical contexts.
Such traumas confront us with the unfiltered face of our shadow self as a healing process, a transformative journey filled with dangers but also with the limitless possibilities of rebirth. As redirections of our momentum disruptive events force reflection and redefinition of ourselves as intentional choice; among them the death of a loved one is surely the most terrible.
Overwhelming and painful as they may be, our negative emotions have adaptive value or we wouldn’t have developed them. How then do they help us survive? What is their purpose?
Grief, especially but not exclusively, connects us with other people, opens us to the pain of others, and brings us to a renegotiation of the terms of ourselves and our lives.
We are bound together by the flaws of our humanity, by our brokenness and our pain, by the fragile nature of our lives and our vulnerability to disruptive events.
The negative emotions are a biosocial tax on individuals which in part serve to drive us together to meet threats collectively as societies united in the cause of our survival, wherein the costs are shared among distributed resources. This is the origin of altruism; humans are designed to help each other. Each of us is marked by our nature as our brother’s keeper.
Far from wholly destructive, our darkness can be growth oriented and creative; destruction may be read as liberation and Chaos as the adaptive potential of a system.
Our darkness whispers, embrace your passion and your true self, and be reborn.
Passions of both light and darkness can act as warning buoys as we navigate into the future and the unknown; they can also illuminate and provoke us to abandon the known and discover new possibilities. Joy and sorrow, as with all our myriad passions, come as balanced pairs which help us process events by leveraging change.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
My mother Meta, here with her beloved Belgian grip sword which she used in the Hungarian liberation struggle of 1956. Among other things she and our father smuggled dissidents including members of the Hungarian Olympic fencing team to freedom from behind the Iron Curtain
En Garde!
Dancing on the Beach
The Reduced Shakespeare Company: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged Comedy
Her Last Great Cause: women’s rights of bodily autonomy, equality, and citizenship
Her lifelong political party membership: Peace and Freedom Party, California’s Feminist Socialist Political Party (Because their founding platform includes the goal to take In God We Trust off our money)
We celebrate today what is best and most human in us; our ability to transcend our differences and the legacies of historical and epigenetic inequalities and injustices in compassion for our enemies and solidarity with our fellows, and struggle toward a realization of our values as action and the possibility of redemption for all humankind; freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
We celebrate these things in the figure of a man, who like all human beings was beautiful not in spite of his flaws but because of them; for those who bear the wounds of their differences and allow this brokenness to open them to the pain of others transcend their limits and become a gateway through which others may do the same, and through which hope and love can enter the world.
We mourn the Fall of America as a guarantor state of our universal human rights and of democracy as the ideal of a free society of equals who are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s humanity to a fascist regime of tyranny and terror in tomorrow’s anniversary of the Inauguration of Traitor Trump, most despicable criminal in the history of American public life, Nazi revivalist and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, white supremacist terrorist who commands the ICE campaign of ethnic cleansing in America, leader of the January 6 Insurrection and co conspirator in the murders of police officers and the attempted murders of members of Congress of both parties as well as the many victims of the Ice racist terror force violence, Russian spy and saboteur of our institutions, values, and ideals of liberty, convicted rapist and profiteer of human trafficking whose followers voted for him because he grants them permission and impunity for rape and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, and co conspirator in racist murders whose followers voted for him because he grants them permission for white supremacist terror.
In the chiaroscuro of good and evil, love and hate, mercy and cruelty, our history offers us few such clear and unconflicted choices in becoming human as those of Traitor Trump and Martin Luther King. American has chosen to abandon over two centuries of being citizens rather than subjects and a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, but if we now have devils to rule us we also have angels to show us how to refuse to submit, resist, seize our power, and set each other free.
This is the meaning of Martin Luther King Day to us all; a beacon in the darkness, and hope to balance terror, despair, grief, abjection, and learned helpless as the enemy of humankind unfolds its Theatre of Cruelty across the next three years of the Second Trump Regime and possibly throughout the coming centuries of an Age of Tyrant..
Let us claw our way out of the ruins of our nation and our lives, and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. Because in so doing we become Unconquered and free; and this defining act of becoming human is a power which cannot be taken from us. So long as we refuse to submit, to believe or to obey, and stand in solidarity with each other, hope remains.
Some of us may become mythic and archetypal figures of Liberty and liberation, like Martin Luther King, who bore a sacred vision passed to him from Gandhi to whom it was passed by Tolstoy; others may enact the praxis of our values and ideals in their private lives rather than on the stage of the world, but each of us can be an agent of change, liberation struggle, reimagination, and transformation, and enact the role of the Lightbringer in defiance of authority and as champions of humanity.
In the words of Martin Luther King in a letter advocating passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; “There must be a change. There will be a change. For to deny a person the right to exercise his political freedom at the polls is no less a dastardly act as to deny a Christian the right to petition God in prayer.”
Rejoice with me that we have such figures and examples to illuminate our way through the darkness, and to remind us who we truly are and can become.
As written by Kellie Carter Jackson in The Guardian, in an article entitled On embracing the ‘urgency of now’ and unconditional love on MLK Day: People across the US are moving on from the empty platitudes MLK Day often evokes – and embodying King’s words; “This year, the Dr Martin Luther King Jr holiday forces Americans to grapple with the crisis and protests that have spread across the country, particularly in Minneapolis. Each year on this holiday, we reflect on King’s life and legacy. We wonder about what he might make of this moment. Though civil rights protesters in the 1950s and 60s were repeatedly met with extreme state violence, Americans are now facing a president who is troublingly more powerful than past figures such as the notorious segregationist and Alabama governor George Wallace.
Militarized and masked federal police forces, abetted by a corrupted justice department, are expansive and employ far more deadly weapons against protesters today. Civil rights leaders often sought federal intervention to combat localized racial violence in the south. But now, local and state officials, along with ordinary citizens who have been galvanized by federal violence, are combating government crackdowns against immigrants and their neighbors. Over the span of a week, ICE agents killed an American wife and mother of three, Renee Good, and shot a man from Venezuela during a traffic stop. They have arrested and detained American citizens and have terrorized neighborhoods, businesses and schools. Their irrational, unprofessional and unconstitutional actions have caused chaos, panic and harm throughout American cities. This is far from the progress King dreamed of, and he used his last years to warn Americans to refuse comfort, the status quo, and bring oppression to an end.
Exactly one year before Dr King was assassinated, on 4 April 1967, he gave his famous “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside church in New York City. More than 3,000 people were in attendance. At the time, King had come under intense fire for having renounced the Vietnam war; his outspokenness put him at odds with Lyndon Johnson, who felt King should have been indebted to him for his efforts in pushing through civil rights legislation. It also put King at odds with his own people and the press. The NAACP thought King was conflating civil rights and Vietnam, and wanted him to stick to the strategy regarding domestic issues.
The press hammered him: a Washington Post article claimed that King was diminishing “his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people”. As a Black man and minister, apparently, King was only supposed to care about the oppression of Black Americans. Instead, King called for a “worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation”. He argued for an “all-embracing … unconditional love for all mankind”.
The Trump administration contends that Americans are threatened by the presence of immigrants and anything, for that matter, that resembles diversity, equity or inclusion. King, in a way, forewarned: “We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.”
On the streets of Minneapolis, like the streets of Portland, Chicago, Boston, Charlotte and Los Angeles, people are courageously taking up the responsibility they have to their neighbors. They are embracing the unconditional love for all mankind in opposition to the federal government, which has wreaked havoc on the lives of ordinary Americans and immigrants. King’s words have come back full force.
In his speech, he declared: “These are revolutionary times. All over the globe, men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression.” How can one read King’s words and not think of Minneapolis, Tehran, Caracas or Gaza? Being a minister meant that King not only pointed out the flaws in a system, but also offered vision and a mandate: “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism and militarism.”
These three threats to humanity ruled King’s world then and also define ours now. Today, we can use the “urgency of now” that he spoke of to move on from the empty platitudes that this day of remembrance often evokes. Instead, we can focus on the purpose and costs of the liberties that we are working so hard to manifest. King said it best in closing: “If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when ‘justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream’.” The choice will not be easy or without cost, but the alternative – what we see on our screens and streets today – is unconscionable.”
As written by Robert Reich in his Substack newsletter entitled Sunday thought: It’s time again for good trouble: Time to take action against Trump’s mayhem; “Friends, Tomorrow we honor the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.
Trump has removed MLK Jr.’s birthday from the National Park Service’s fee-free days and substituted his own birthday of June 14 as a fee-free day.
I write this more in sorrow than in anger.
All told, I feel profound sorrow for America. Sorrow for the people of Minneapolis who are enduring this Trump-made hell. Sorrow for Renee Good’s three children and wife.
I also feel sorrow for Greenlanders and Venezuelans and others around the world fearing what the sociopath in the Oval Office may do next. Sorrow for everyone justifiably worried about the future of America and the planet because of him.
I’m old enough to remember when Martin Luther King Jr.’s mission seemed impossible. Just as the mission you and I must now engage in — defeating Trumpism and creating a new and better America out of the rubble and chaos he is wreaking — may seem impossible at this moment.
Martin Luther King Jr. accomplished more than anyone thought he could when he began. He did it with patience and perseverance, with the strength of conviction. He did it with calmness, reason, and quiet passion.
And he did it with civil disobedience — what one of his assistants, the late great congressman John Lewis, called “good trouble.”
Good trouble meant mobilizing the nation against racial injustice by making sure almost everyone saw its horrors. Night after night on the news — watching peaceful civil rights marchers getting clobbered by white supremacists.
I remember watching Bull Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, and his goons use firehoses and attack dogs against Black people — including children — who were peacefully standing up for their rights.
The scenes horrified America and much of the world. Yet were it not for our painful national exposure to racist brutality, we wouldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act.
I’ve been thinking of those scenes as I’ve watched ICE thugs patrolling Minneapolis. Watched armed agents pulling people out of cars, using chokeholds, demanding proof of citizenship. Masked agents in unmarked vehicles grabbing neighbors off the streets, using tear gas and pepper spray, shooting innocent people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest.
This time it isn’t Bull Connor and his racist goons. It’s Donald Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and their fascist goons. It’s armed agents of the president of the United States who are bullying and brutalizing people. Committing a cold-blooded murder of a middle-class white woman in broad daylight who tried to get out of their way. Shooting and injuring others.
This time it’s Trump and the thugs around him making up stories to justify this brutality, lying about the protester’s motives, and threatening even more brutality.
Take a wider look and you see their lawless bullying on a different scale: a criminal investigation of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board for failing to lower interest rates as fast as Trump wants. Criminal investigations of U.S. senators and representatives for telling America’s soldiers that they don’t have to follow illegal orders. Criminal investigations of the governor of Minnesota and mayor of Minneapolis for refusing to cooperate with Trump’s brown shirts.
The Justice Department searching the home of a Washington Post reporter and seizing her laptops and other devices.
Trump raising tariffs on our trusted allies — until and unless they support him in taking over Greenland. Greenland!
A crazy old man saying “fuck you, fuck you” and giving the finger to an American factory worker who criticizes him in public. The crazy old man is president of the United States, and the worker has been suspended from his job because he dared criticize that crazy old man.
I remember the good trouble that occurred 65 years ago. I believe it’s time for it again. Time for all of us — every one of us — to cause it.
What kind of good trouble?
A huge national demonstration, far larger than anything before. Everyone in the streets.
A giant general strike where we stop purchasing all products for two weeks (stocking up beforehand).
A massive boycott of all businesses sucking up to Trump.
A coordinated effort to get all our employers, our churches and synagogues, our unions, our universities to condemn this madness.
A loud demand that our members of Congress impeach and convict him of his high crimes.
There is no longer any neutral place to stand. Either you’re standing up for democracy, the rule of law, and social justice, or you’re complicit in the fascist mayhem Trump has unleashed.
That, for me, is the lesson of all this.
Trump and his thugs have brought us to this point. They are the Bull Connors of today.
We stand with the people of Minneapolis and with the people of every other town and city where Trump’s thugs are prowling or will prowl, and where people are resisting.
We stand with the citizens of Greenland and Venezuela. With Canadians and Europeans. With every nation now threatened by Trump’s lawless abuses of power.
We stand proudly and sturdily everywhere the bright lights of freedom and truth still shine.
We will overcome the darkness of Trump’s fascism. We reject the hate, the bigotry, the fear, and the murderous lawlessness of his regime. We dedicate ourselves to causing good trouble — ending this mayhem, and building a new and better America.”
As written by Nicole Chavez for CNN, Here are the Martin Luther King Jr. words that inspire today’s social justice leaders; “More than a half a century has passed since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial calling for freedom and equality — and the fight for social justice appears to be far from over.
Activists and athletes fighting for equality in the Black, Latino, Asian American, Native American and Muslim American communities took a moment to reflect on King’s words when asked by CNN last year.
They shared their thoughts weeks after the insurrection at the US Capitol and months after the police killing of George Floyd sparked widespread protests and rekindled the Black Lives Matter movement.
A year later, their views remain relevant as more than a dozen states have moved to enact restrictive voting laws and King’s family demands action on federal voting rights legislation.
Each of the activists and athletes who spoke with CNN selected a quote from the civil rights movement leader and shared why it resonates with them. Here are their responses, some of which have been edited for clarity:
Dolores Huerta
Huerta, a Mexican American civil rights icon, formed a farmworkers union with Cesar Chavez and is president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. She chose a quote from King’s speech titled “The Three Evils of Society.”
“We are now experiencing the coming to the surface of a triple prong sickness that has been lurking within our body politic from its very beginning. That is the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Huerta pick that quote?
“Racism is a sickness. Many Americans with that sickness stormed the nation’s Capitol recently as racism feeds fascism. Racism stems from ignorance and creates, hate, fear violence and destruction,” Huerta said.
“Dr. Martin Luther King warned us that racism threatened the very foundation of our democracy. Racism began with slavery, the oppression of workers, the subjugation of women and children.”
Huerta said that a national effort is needed to save the United States’ democracy from fascism and to end the racism which “is so ingrained in our body politic.”
“We have no choice but to heal.”
Patrisse Cullors
Cullors is an artist, political strategist, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, and author of the upcoming “An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World.” She chose a quote from King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Cullors pick that quote?
“On January 6, the world witnessed a failed attempted coup by White supremacists extremists. These are the same people who have taunted, humiliated and threatened Black Lives Matter members and our leadership. And while these White supremacists are scary and dangerous, our movement has historically seen the White liberal as a barrier to the freedom of Black people,” Cullors said.
“To keep it plain. We need White folks to show up. Showing up in more ways than just saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ or putting ‘Black Lives Matter’ on their social media,” Cullors added.
“We need white folks to show up by following the leadership of Black folks, the very same Black folks who have transformed this country over and over again. On this MLK day let’s remind ourselves that Black people deserve dignity, care and power.”
Nneka Ogwumike
Ogwumike is a WNBA player and president of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association. She chose the following quote:
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Ogwumike pick those words?
“It is not enough for good people to know they are good for goodness to take place,” she said. “We must hold ourselves to actionable accountability that plants the seeds for sustainable change; allowing both its roots and branches to grow over time, naturally and intentionally.”
Nihad Awad
Awad is the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He chose a quote from King’s book “A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings.”
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Awad pick those words?
He said the quote speaks to the “five years of indoctrination and lies by (President) Donald Trump and his enablers created a poisonous environment in which millions of Americans believe in falsehoods and conspiracy theories that make our society and the world less stable and less peaceful.”
Sruti Suryanarayanan
Suryanarayanan is a spokesperson for the advocacy group South Asian Americans Leading Together. They chose a few sentences from King’s 1967 book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”
Why is equality so assiduously avoided? Why does white America delude itself, and how does it rationalize the evil it retains? The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Suryanarayanan pick those words?
“Building a just world starts with the abolition of White supremacy, in all its forms — structural, institutional, and personal,” Suryanarayanan said. “But as non-Black people of color, we must also unpack and combat our own complicity in White supremacy and American imperialism. Without the deconstruction of anti-Black racism, no liberation is possible.”
Kimberlé Crenshaw
Crenshaw is the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum. She chose a quote from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Crenshaw pick that quote?
“Martin Luther King Jr.’s framing of the failures and promises of America makes clear how the nation’s unaddressed deficits become the justification for even greater disenfranchisement and expropriation. The right-wing attacks on his dream and the physical embodiment of the ideological assault on multicultural democracy that we witnessed last week are a repudiation of the very idea that there exists a ‘promissory note’,” Crenshaw said.
“King was often critical — most famously in his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ — of those moderates who chronically advocated for a ‘more convenient season’ to pursue racial justice. On this Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, we should acknowledge — in the face of so much tragedy and depravity — that we are never going to be in a stable position when it comes to injustice. And it is from the illusion of stability that the further deterioration of Black people’s material status occurs. The fight for justice must continue — always.”
Crystal Echo Hawk
Echo Hawk is the founder and executive director of IllumiNative, a national Native-led non-profit group. She chose an excerpt from King’s book “Why We Can’t Wait.”
We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it…It was upon this massive base of racism that the prejudice toward the nonwhite was readily built, and found rapid growth. This long-standing racist ideology has corrupted and diminished our democratic ideals. It is this tangled web of prejudice from which many Americans now seek to liberate themselves, without realizing how deeply it has been woven into their consciousness.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Echo Hawk pick that quote?
“Dr. King taught us that racial injustice in the United States started with the arrival of colonizers on Native land. The violence these settlers used first against Indigenous peoples, then against Black slaves, was predicated on White supremacist beliefs. White supremacy is upheld by false origin myths about the United States, ignored by whitewashing brutal anti-Native and anti-Black policies, and sustained by stereotyped, inaccurate portrayals of Native people and people of color in popular culture,” Echo Hawk said.
“To create a just world, all people of every race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender expression, and age, must stand together and tell truthful stories about our past and hopeful stories about our future.”
A’ja Wilson
Wilson, who plays for the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces, is a member of the league’s Social Justice Council. She is also the founder of A’ja Wilson Foundation, which supports children who struggle with dyslexia. She chose a King quote that gives her hope.
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Wilson pick that quote?
“There is so much going on in the world right now. So many disappointing, tragic and gut-wrenching moments,” Wilson said. “We all have to keep our foot on the gas but historically, we have always come together as a people to celebrate the wins, big or small, and that’s one of the greatest things about our culture. We can never give up.”
Jaren Jackson Jr.
Jackson Jr. plays for the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies. He chose a King quote that he said “resonated” with him the most.
“People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Why did Jackson Jr. pick that quote?
“This quote resonated with me the most given our current climate because we have become so polarized. We no longer sit down and have conversations about our differences and as Dr. King said it is purely out of fear of what we don’t know about each other,” Jackson Jr. said.
“I believe in order for us to move past the horrible events of the past few months as well as the past several decades, we need to have open and honest dialogue. (We need) a conversation where no matter your race, religion, sexual orientation or any other difference, we listen with compassion and find a common ground. If the pandemic taught us nothing else, we must value time and we must talk to each other. We can’t let fear dictate who we are. We gotta be better than that. It’s time to achieve Dr. King’s dream.”
As written by Nicholas Powers in Truthout, in an article entitled Following in MLK’s Footsteps Means Resisting Christian Nationalism: King’s life gives us a blueprint to fight the religious right; “Martin Luther King Jr. yanked the burnt Ku Klux Klan Christian cross from his front lawn as his child looked on. It was 1960. Many Black families in Atlanta woke to charred crosses left as a warning to civil rights activists.
Sixty-one years later, a Christian nationalist group called Jericho’s Road stoked the January 6 insurrection with prayer vigils and marches. A right-wing mob waving flags emblazoned with “Jesus 2020” and “Jesus is My Savior” stormed the Capitol, armed and threatening to kill Democrats and Republicans. Outside, men prayed near a giant cross. A year after the January 6 attempted coup, the Christian far right is more isolated, extreme and preparing to strike again.
White Christian nationalists, the extreme fringe of the religious right, are increasingly turning to violence. They want to make Christianity the state religion, ban abortion, reinforce conservative gender roles and dramatically cut immigration to ensure a white majority. MLK Jr. endured attacks from racist evangelicals, using redemptive suffering and taking the moral high ground to unite a multiracial coalition, the Poor People’s Campaign. What worked for him then can work for us today.
The Cross or the Switchblade
Christian nationalists don’t turn the other cheek, they turn to the gun. Whether the targets are abortion doctors, mosques or immigrants, a rifle’s crosshairs is the real cross they pray to.
The United States has the largest number of Christians of any nation. Out of 333 million people, roughly 64 percent are Christian, a number in dramatic decline but nevertheless one that includes Catholics and evangelical Protestants, among others. More important is that conservative Christians, according to Pew Research, tend to be white, older, less educated, pray daily, believe in a literal Hell and Heaven, and skew Republican. They also tend to cultivate racist ideas and deny the reality of systemic racism.
On the conservative fringe are Christian nationalists, a toxic brew of American jingoism and Bible thumping. In an interview with The Young Turks, Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, said, “It basically is the idea that America is founded as a Christian nation … we’ve moved away from that and the right kind of Americans need to take it back … it divides ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ the ‘pure’ from the ‘impure’ … it is an organized quest for power.”
In this biblical struggle, white Christian nationalists imagine themselves as the foot soldiers of Jesus. Secular society looks to them, Stewart said, to be “Satanic. Demonic. Inhuman.” It is a theology that is anti-democratic and juvenile. It is a simple-minded story of good and evil that demonizes whoever is different; the gay person, the Muslim, the immigrant. Finally, the unconverted must kneel at the foot of the cross, by court order or force if needed.
“We should be proud to be Christian nationalists,” boasted Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the latest face of the movement. Today’s upsurge of white Christian nationalism is a reaction to the social protests that have rocked the U.S. — Black Lives Matter, the Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage, #MeToo and Occupy Wall Street. Each protest disrupted long accepted power dynamics and exposed the dirty underside of the “American Dream.”
How does one effectively handle this hatred? Turning to the past, we see that MLK took the Gospel back and used it to effectively expose their racism, sexism and classism.
The Two Faces of Christ
“I had to know God for myself,” Martin Luther King Jr. said in a 1967 sermon. “I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage … it seemed at that moment I could hear an inner voice saying, ‘Stand up for truth! Stand up for justice!’ … I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘fight on’; he promised to never leave me.”
You can hear the fatigue and sorrow in his thunderous but trembling voice. The FBI file on King showed hundreds of threats against him, from bomb threats targeting planes he flew on to the KKK trying to hire a hit man. He lived in the shadow of death. A contract was put on his life, a cross burned on his lawn, his house bombed and finally King was shot and killed at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, just a year after he wearily said, “Jesus promised to never leave me.”
Jerry Falwell, Sr., a Southern fundamentalist preacher, relished attacking the civil rights movement and King specifically as either ignorant, secret Communists or going against God’s will. He did not publicly advocate violence, but he laid the foundation for Christian nationalism with his mix of racism, patriotism and Bible scholarship.
“If Chief Justice (Earl) Warren and his associates had known God’s word … I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made. The facilities should be separate,” said Falwell in his 1950s era sermon, Segregation or Integration: Which?. “When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”
Just to put a fine point on it, Falwell added, “The true Negro does not want integration.”
In a contest over public support for civil rights, King and Falwell were two faces of U.S. Christianity. King read the same Bible as Falwell, but instead of Falwell’s vengeful Jesus, casting sinners into the fiery pit of Hell, King saw Jesus as a revolutionary pacifist.
What King found in the Bible were the Black voices, who across the generations had called out to God for deliverance from slavery. They prayed for the return of loved ones sold on auction blocks. They prayed to go from sunup to sundown without a whip cutting their skin to bloody rags. They prayed to walk free, to read and question and wonder, to hold children and dance with neighbors and live, just live.
King’s Jesus was a Black Jesus. He loved the poor. He healed the sick. He was willing to break an unjust law for the greater moral good of love. King wrote about unjust laws in his 1963, Letter from Birmingham Jail, “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”
King’s Jesus did not reduce anyone’s humanity to skin color, class or sex. The Christian tradition he represents always transcended the limits of the Bible’s text to reach its spirit. In order to make it real, King and the millions who followed him risked their lives and suffered, in hopes to redeem — really rescue — the racists trapped in their hatred.
Falwell’s Jesus would have none of that. His Jesus was the Jesus of punishment and terror. It was tradition, too. A corrosive line can be drawn from the 1741 sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards, who ranted, “Men are held in the Hand of God over the Pit of Hell; they have deserved the fiery Pit, and are already sentenced to it,” to Falwell saying after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “The pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle … I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”
Fire. Brimstone. Punishment. The secret of Christian nationalists is they are sadists. They love Jesus for the authority it gives them to hate others. And they hate Christians like King, who took the Bible back and made everyone into angels.
The Return of the King
The crisis today is the collision of these two traditions: King’s Jesus versus Falwell’s Jesus. As the United States (and the West overall) becomes more diverse while sliding into a deepening social chasm of inequality, the appeal of white Christian nationalism will grow for a shrinking majority.
King died in ’68. Falwell, in 2007. They live on in their legacies. In 1971, three years after King’s assassination, Falwell founded Liberty University, a think tank for the Christian right, and in 1979 established the Moral Majority, a political lobby hub for evangelicals. The Moral Majority got “souls to the polls” for Republicans and eventually in the ‘90s was overtaken by the Christian Coalition, a non-profit voter registration group, which is now controlled by pro-Trump Christian nationalists.
In 1971, Jesse Jackson, who fought alongside King, founded the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. He later ran for the presidency and said at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lies only a few miles from us tonight. He must feel good as he looks down upon us. We sit here together, a rainbow, a coalition.” He picked up where King had left off: “What’s the moral challenge of our day? We have public accommodations. We have the right to vote. We have open housing. What’s the fundamental challenge of our day? It is to end economic violence.”
Today the theological and political descendants of King and Falwell again fight for the direction of the nation. Former President Donald Trump seeks to lead a ramshackle, fascist coalition of Christian nationalists, Ayn Rand fanatics, plutocrats and hucksters. Should he fail, a new cast of characters are hungry to lead like Gov. Ron DeSantis, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and failed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano.
Contrast them to King’s followers, a growing multiracial, democratic socialist America led by Dream Defenders, Cooperation Jackson, Extinction Rebellion, Rev. William Barber, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Christian socialist intellectual Cornel West and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The George Floyd protests were a glimpse of a possible future when the progressive youth outnumber and overpower MAGA reactionaries.
King stood at the edge of the promised land and urged us forward. Fifty years later, it’s time to enter.”
In a speech which for myself articulates the best of our limitless possibilities of becoming human, The Other America, Martin Luther King teaches us this; “Rev. Dr. Harry Meserve, Bishop Emrich, my dear friend Congressman Conyers, ladies and gentlemen.
I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight and to have the great privilege of discussing with you some of the vital issues confronting our nation and confronting the world. It is always a very rich and rewarding experience when I can take a brief break from the day-to-day demands of our struggle for freedom and human dignity and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned people of goodwill all over our nation and all over the world, and I certainly want to express my deep personal appreciation to you for inviting me to occupy this significant platform.
I want to discuss the race problem tonight and I want to discuss it very honestly. I still believe that freedom is the bonus you receive for telling the truth. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. And I do not see how we will ever solve the turbulent problem of race confronting our nation until there is an honest confrontation with it and a willing search for the truth and a willingness to admit the truth when we discover it. And so I want to use as a title for my lecture tonight, “The Other America.” And I use this title because there are literally two Americas. Every city in our country has this kind of dualism, this schizophrenia, split at so many parts, and so every city ends up being two cities rather than one. There are two Americas. One America is beautiful for situation. In this America, millions of people have the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality flowing before them. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits. In this America, children grow up in the sunlight of opportunity. But there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this other America, thousands and thousands of people, men, in particular, walk the streets in search for jobs that do not exist. In this other America, millions of people are forced to live in vermin-filled, distressing housing conditions where they do not have the privilege of having wall-to-wall carpeting, but all too often, they end up with wall-to-wall rats and roaches. Almost forty percent of the Negro families of America live in sub-standard housing conditions. In this other America, thousands of young people are deprived of an opportunity to get an adequate education. Every year thousands finish high school reading at a seventh, eighth and sometimes ninth-grade level. Not because they’re dumb, not because they don’t have the native intelligence, but because the schools are so inadequate, so over-crowded, so devoid of quality, so segregated if you will, that the best in these minds can never come out. Probably the most critical problem in the other America is the economic problem. There are so many other people in the other America who can never make ends meet because their incomes are far too low if they have incomes, and their jobs are so devoid of quality. And so in this other America, unemployment is a reality and under-employment is a reality. (I’ll just wait until our friend can have her say) (applause). I’ll just wait until things are restored and. . .everybody talks about law and order. (applause)
Now before I was so rudely interrupted… (applause), and I might say that it was my understanding that we’re going to have a question and answer period, and if anybody disagrees with me, you will have the privilege, the opportunity to raise a question if you think I’m a traitor, then you’ll have an opportunity to ask me about my traitorness and we will give you that opportunity.
Now let me get back to the point that I was trying to bring out about the economic problem. And that is one of the most critical problems that we face in America today. We find in the other America unemployment constantly rising to astronomical proportions and black people generally find themselves living in a literal depression. All too often when there is mass unemployment in the black community, it’s referred to as a social problem and when there is mass unemployment in the white community, it’s referred to as a depression. But there is no basic difference. The fact is, that the negro faces a literal depression all over the U.S. The unemployment rate on the basis of statistics from the labor department is about 8.8 per cent in the black community. But these statistics only take under consideration individuals who were once in the labor market, or individuals who go to employment offices to seek employment. But they do not take under consideration the thousands of people who have given up, who have lost motivation, the thousands of people who have had so many doors closed in their faces that they feel defeated and they no longer go out and look for jobs, the thousands who’ve come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. These people are considered the discouraged and when you add the discouraged to the individuals who can’t be calculated through statistics in the unemployment category, the unemployment rate in the negro community probably goes to 16 or 17 percent. And among black youth, it is in some communities as high as 40 and 45 percent. But the problem of unemployment is not the only problem. There is the problem of under-employment, and there are thousands and thousands, I would say millions of people in the negro community who are poverty-stricken – not because they are not working but because they receive wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. Most of the poverty-stricken people of America are persons who are working every day and they end up getting part-time wages for full-time work. So the vast majority of negroes in America find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. This has caused a great deal of bitterness. It has caused a great deal of agony. It has caused ache and anguish. It has caused great despair, and we have seen the angered expressions of this despair and this bitterness in the violent rebellions that have taken place in cities all over our country. Now I think my views on non-violence are pretty generally known. I still believe that non-violence is the most potent weapon available to the negro in his struggle for justice and freedom in the U.S.
Now let me relieve you a bit. I’ve been in the struggle a long time now, (applause) and I’ve conditioned myself to some things that are much more painful than discourteous people not allowing you to speak, so if they feel that they can discourage me, they’ll be up here all night.
Now I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames. And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I’m absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquillity and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
Now every year about this time, our newspapers and our televisions and people generally start talking about the long hot summer ahead. What always bothers me is that the long hot summer has always been preceded by a long cold winter. And the great problem is that the nation has not used its winters creatively enough to develop the program, to develop the kind of massive acts of concern that will bring about a solution to the problem. And so we must still face the fact that our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. As long as justice is postponed we always stand on the verge of these darker nights of social disruption. The question now, is whether America is prepared to do something massively, affirmatively and forthrightly about the great problem we face in the area of race and the problem which can bring the curtain of doom down on American civilization if it is not solved. And I would like to talk for the next few minutes about some of the things that must be done if we are to solve this problem.
The first thing I would like to mention is that there must be a recognition on the part of everybody in this nation that America is still a racist country. Now however unpleasant that sounds, it is the truth. And we will never solve the problem of racism until there is a recognition of the fact that racism still stands at the center of so much of our nation and we must see racism for what it is. It is the nymph of inferior people. It is the notion that one group has all of the knowledge, all of the insights, all of the purity, all of the work, all of the dignity. And another group is worthless, on a lower level of humanity, inferior. To put it in philosophical language, racism is not based on some empirical generalization which, after some studies, would come to the conclusion that these people are behind because of environmental conditions. Racism is based on an ontological affirmation. It is the notion that the very being of a people is inferior. And their ultimate logic of racism is genocide. Hitler was a very sick man. He was one of the great tragedies of history. But he was very honest. He took his racism to its logical conclusion. The minute his racism caused him to sickly feel and go about saying that there was something innately inferior about the Jew he ended up killing six million Jews. The ultimate logic of racism is genocide, and if one says that one is not good enough to have a job that is a solid quality job if one is not good enough to have access to public accommodations if one is not good enough to have the right to vote if one is not good enough to live next door to him if one is not good enough to marry his daughter because of his race. Then at that moment, that person is saying that that person who is not good to do all of this is not fit to exist or to live. And that is the ultimate logic of racism. And we’ve got to see that this still exists in American society. And until it is removed, there will be people walking the streets of and living in their humble dwellings feeling that they are nobody, feeling that they have no dignity and feeling that they are not respected. The first thing that must be on the agenda of our nation is to get rid of racism.
Secondly, we’ve got to get rid of two or three myths that still pervade our nation. One is the myth of time. I’m sure you’ve heard this notion. It is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. And I’ve heard it from many sincere people. They’ve said to the negro and/to his allies in the white community you should slow up, you’re pushing things too fast, only time can solve the problem. And if you’ll just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out. There is an answer to that myth. It is the time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I’m sad to say to you tonight I’m absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the forces on the wrong side in our nation, the extreme righteous of our nation have often used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill and it may well be that we may have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words of the bad people who will say bad things in a meeting like this or who will bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say wait on time. Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability, it comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. And so we must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.
Now there is another myth and that is the notion that legislation can’t solve the problem that you’ve got to change the heart and naturally I believe in changing the heart. I happen to be a Baptist preacher and that puts me in the heart-changing business and Sunday after Sunday I’m preaching about conversion and the need for the new birth and regeneration. I believe that there’s something wrong with human nature. I believe in original sin not in terms of the historical event but as the mythological category to explain the universality of evil, so I’m honest enough to see the gone-wrongness of human nature so naturally, I’m not against changing the heart and I do feel that that is the half-truth involved here, that there is some truth in the whole question of changing the heart. We are not going to have the kind of society that we should have until the white person treats the negro right – not because the law says it but because it’s natural because it’s right and because the black man is the white man’s brother. I’ll be the first to say that we will never have a truly integrated society, a truly colorless society until men and women are obedient to the unenforceable. But after saying that, let me point out the other side. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.
And so while legislation may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men when it’s vigorously enforced and when you change the habits of people pretty soon attitudes begin to be changed and people begin to see that they can do things that fears caused them to feel that they could never do. And I say that there’s a need still for strong civil rights legislation in various areas. There’s legislation in Congress right now dealing with the whole question of housing and equal administration of justice and these things are very important for I submit to you tonight that there is no more dangerous development in our nation than the constant building up of predominantly negro central cities ringed by white suburbs. This will do nothing but invite social disaster. And this problem has to be dealt with – some through legislation, some through education, but it has to be dealt with in a very concrete and meaningful manner.
Now let me get back to my point. I’m going to finish my speech. I’ve been trying to think about what I’m going to preach about tomorrow down to Central Methodist Church in the Lenten series and I think I’ll use as the text, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
I want to deal with another myth briefly which concerns me and I want to talk about it very honestly and that is over-reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. Now certainly it’s very important for people to engage in self-help programs and do all they can to lift themselves by their own bootstraps. Now I’m not talking against that at all. I think there is a great deal that the black people of this country must do for themselves and that nobody else can do for them. And we must see the other side of this question. I remember the other day I was on a plane and a man starting talking with me and he said I’m sympathetic toward what you’re trying to do, but I just feel that you people don’t do enough for yourself and then he went on to say that my problem is, my concern is that I know of other ethnic groups, many of the ethnic groups that came to this country and they had problems just as negroes and yet they did the job for themselves, they lifted themselves by their own bootstraps. Why is it that negroes can’t do that? And I looked at him and I tried to talk as understanding as possible but I said to him, it does not help the negro for unfeeling, sensitive white people to say that other ethnic groups that came to the country maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty years voluntarily have gotten ahead of them and he was brought here in chains involuntarily almost three hundred and fifty years ago. I said it doesn’t help him to be told that and then I went on to say to this gentlemen that he failed to recognize that no other ethnic group has been enslaved on American soil. Then I had to go on to say to him that you failed to realize that America made the black man’s color a stigma. Something that he couldn’t change. Not only was the color a stigma, but even linguistic then stigmatic conspired against the black man so that his color was thought of as something very evil. If you open Roget’s Thesaurus and notice the synonym for black you’ll find about a hundred and twenty and most of them represent something dirty, smut, degrading, low, and when you turn to the synonym for white, about one hundred and thirty, all of them represent something high, pure, chaste. You go right down that list. And so in the language a white life is a little better than a black life. Just follow. If somebody goes wrong in the family, we don’t call him a white sheep we call him a black sheep. And then if you block somebody from getting somewhere you don’t say they’ve been whiteballed, you say they’ve been blackballed. And just go down the line. It’s not whitemail it’s blackmail. I tell you this to seriously say that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma and then I had to say to my friend on the plane another thing that is often forgotten in this country. That nobody, no ethnic group has completely lifted itself by its own bootstraps. I can never forget that the black man was free from the bondage of physical slavery in 1863. He wasn’t given any land to make that freedom meaningful after being held in slavery for 244 years. And it was like keeping a man in prison for many many years and then coming to see that he is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. Alright good night and God bless you.
And I was about to say that to free, to have freed the negro from slavery without doing anything to get him started in life on a sound economic footing, it was almost like freeing a man who had been in prison many years and you had discovered that he was unjustly convicted of, that he was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted and you go up to him and say now you’re free, but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town or you don’t give him any money to buy some clothes to put on his back or to get started in life again. Every code of jurisprudence would rise up against it. This is the very thing that happened to the black man in America. And then when we look at it even deeper than this, it becomes more ironic. We’re reaping the harvest of this failure today. While America refused to do anything for the black man at that point, during that very period, the nation, through an act of Congress, was giving away millions of acres of land in the west and the mid-west, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. Not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges for them to learn how to farm. Not only that it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming and went beyond this and came to the point of providing low-interest rates for these persons so that they could mechanize their farms, and today many of these persons are being paid millions of dollars a year in federal subsidies not to farm and these are so often the very people saying to the black man that he must lift himself by his own bootstraps. I can never think … Senator Eastland, incidentally, who says this all the time gets a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year, not to farm on various areas of his plantation down in Mississippi. And yet he feels that we must do everything for ourselves. Well, that appears to me to be a kind of socialism for the rich and rugged hard individualistic capitalism for the poor.
Now let me say two other things and I’m going to rush on. One, I want to say that if we’re to move ahead and solve this problem we must re-order our national priorities. Today we’re spending almost thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight what I consider an unjust, ill-considered, evil, costly, unwinnable war at Viet Nam. I wish I had time to go into the dimensions of this. But I must say that the war in Viet Nam is playing havoc with our domestic destinies. That war has torn up the Geneva accord, it has strengthened, it has substituted. . .(interruption). . .alright if you want to speak I’ll let you come down and speak and I’ll wait. You can give your Viet Nam speech now listen to mine. Come right on.
Speaker: Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Joseph McLawtern, communications technician, U.S. Navy, United States of America and I fought for freedom I didn’t fight for communism, traitors and I didn’t fight to be sold down the drain. Not by Romney, Cavanagh, Johnson–nobody, nobody’s going to sell me down the drain.
Alright, thank you very much. I just want to say in response to that, that there are those of us who oppose the war in Viet Nam. I feel like opposing it for many reasons. Many of them are moral reasons but one basic reason is that we love our boys who are fighting there and we just want them to come back home. But I don’t have time to go into the history and the development of the war in Viet Nam. I happen to be a pacifist but if I had had to make a decision about fighting a war against Hitler, I may have temporarily given up my pacifism and taken up arms. But nobody is to compare what is happening in Viet Nam today with that. I’m convinced that it is clearly an unjust war and it’s doing so many things–not only on the domestic scene, it is carrying the whole world closer to nuclear annihilation. And so I’ve found it necessary to take a stand against the war in Viet Nam and I appreciate Bishop Emrich’s question and I must answer it by saying that for me the tuitus? cannot be divided. It’s nice for me to talk about … it’s alright to talk about integrated schools and in integrated lunch counters which I will continue to work for, but I think it would be rather absurd for me to work for integrated schools and not be concerned about the survival of the world in which to integrate.
The other thing is, that I have been working too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up at this stage of my life segregating my moral concern. I must make it clear. For me justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Now for the question of hurting civil rights. I think the war in Viet Nam hurt civil rights much more than my taking a stand against the war. And I could point out so many things to say that. . . a reporter asked me some time ago when I first took a strong stand against the war didn’t I feel that I would have to reverse my position because so many people disagreed, and people who once had respect for me wouldn’t have respect, and he went on to say that I hear that it’s hurt the budget of your organization and don’t you think that you have to get in line more with the administration’s policy … and of course those were very lonely days when I first started speaking out and not many people were speaking out but now I have a lot of company and it’s not as lonesome now. But anyway, I had to say to the reporter, I’m sorry sir but you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader and I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or by kind of taking a look at a gallop poll and getting the expression of the majority opinion. Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a succor for consensus but a mold of consensus. And on some positions cowardice ask the question is it safe? Expediency asks the question is it politics? Vanity asks the question is it popular? The conscience asks the question is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politics nor popular but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.
Now the time is passing and I’m not going to… I was going into the need for direct action to dramatize and call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment. I’ve been searching for a long time for an alternative to riots on the one hand and timid supplication for justice on the other and I think that alternative is found in militant massive non-violence. I’ll wait until the question period before going into the Washington campaign. But let me say that it has been my experience in these years that I’ve been in the struggle for justice, that things just don’t happen until the issue is dramatized in a massive direct-action way. I never will forget when we came through Washington in 1964, in December coming from Oslo. I stopped by to see President Johnson. We talked about a lot of things and we finally got to the point of talking about voting rights. The President was concerned about voting, but he said Martin, I can’t get this through in this session of Congress. We can’t get a voting rights bill, he said because there are two or three other things that I feel that we’ve got to get through and they’re going to benefit negroes as much as anything. One was the education bill and something else. And then he went on to say that if I push a voting rights bill now, I’ll lose the support of seven congressmen that I sorely need for the particular things that I had and we just can’t get it. Well, I went on to say to the President that I felt that we had to do something about it and two weeks later we started a movement in Selma, Alabama. We started dramatizing the issue of the denial of the right to vote and I submit to you that three months later as a result of that Selma movement, the same President who said to me that we could not get a voting rights bill in that session of Congress was on the television singing through a speaking voice “we shall overcome” and calling for the passage of a voting rights bill and I could go on and on to show. . .and we did get a voting rights bill in that session of Congress. Now, I could go on to give many other examples to show that it just doesn’t come about without pressure and this is what we plan to do in Washington. We aren’t planning to close down Washington, we aren’t planning to close down Congress. This isn’t anywhere in our plans. We are planning to dramatize the issue to the point that poor people in this nation will have to be seen and will not be invisible.
Now let me finally say something in the realm of the spirit and then I’m going to take my seat. Let me say finally, that in the midst of the hollering and in the midst of the discourtesy tonight, we got to come to see that however much we dislike it, the destinies of white and black America are tied together. Now the races don’t understand this apparently. But our destinies are tied together. And somehow, we must all learn to live together as brothers in this country or we’re all going to perish together as fools. Our destinies are tied together. Whether we like it or not culturally and otherwise, every white person is a little bit negro and every negro is a little bit white. Our language, our music, our material prosperity and even our food are an amalgam of black and white, so there can be no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white routes and there can ultimately be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster without recognizing the necessity of sharing that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity. We must come to see. . .yes we do need each other, the black man needs the white man to save him from his fear and the white man needs the black man to free him from his guilt.
John Donne was right. No man is an island and the tide that fills every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. And he goes on toward the end to say, “any man’s death diminishes me because I’m involved in mankind. Therefore, it’s not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” Somehow we must come to see that in this pluralistic, interrelated society we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And by working with determination and realizing that power must be shared, I think we can solve this problem, and may I say in conclusion that our goal is freedom and I believe that we’re going to get there. It’s going to be more difficult from here on in but I believe we’re going to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is freedom and our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. Before the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth we were here. Before Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence we were here. Before the beautiful words of the Star-Spangled Banner were written we were here. And for more than two centuries our forbearers labored here without wages. They made cotton King, they built the homes of their masters in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to grow and develop and if the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face including the white backlash will surely fail.
We are going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. So however difficult it is during this period, however difficult it is to continue to live with the agony and the continued existence of racism, however difficult it is to live amidst the constant hurt, the constant insult and the constant disrespect, I can still sing we shall overcome. We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.
We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. “No lie can live forever.” We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. “Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.” Yet that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the Bible is right. “You shall reap what you sow.” With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all of God’s children all over this nation – black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, “Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We Are Free At Last.”
We will walk out because a free America is the only America worth calling great. On January 20th, 2026, at 2 PM local time, we move towards a future that belongs to us all. By joining in non-compliance and walking out of work, school, and commerce, we stop cooperating with fascism and fight for a Free America. We walkout because now is not the time for business as usual. Now is the time for action to protect each other and to fight for our freedoms. Take the pledge to walk out now: https://act.womensmarch.com/survey/FreeAmericaWalkoutPledge/
In a few days we mark an anniversary of the recapture of the state by the Fourth Reich, the inauguration of our Rapist In Chief, Traitor Trump.
Seldom in history has such a mad idiot monster squatting at the apex of power used his position to subvert and dismantle the state and its institutions to transform a republic of free and equal citizens into a tyranny of masters and slaves; Caligula and Heliogabalus come to mind.
Nor is the Trump regime alone in its complicity in state terror and tyranny, for there remain those Republicans who voted for him and have not disavowed and fled their party, all of whom twice elected a white supremacist terrorist and Nazi revivalist and a patriarchal sexual terrorist and figurehead of theocracy because they wanted permission and impunity to do the same.
As I wrote of our duties of witness and remembrance in my post of June 5 2021, Remember Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and His Legacy of Dishonor, Treason, and Fascist Tyranny; Our Clown of Terror; his jests did distract us from his subversion of democracy until almost too late. Idiot madman of monstrous perversions that he was, we must give the devil his due; Trump was the greatest foreign agent to ever attack America, and he nearly brought our democracy down into fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror.
Remember the Clown, and his absurd empire of lies and depravities, his subversions of democracy and violations of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, his kleptocracy of looting the public wealth, his Wall of Hate, his syndicate of Epstein sexual terror and human trafficking, his orchestration of white supremacist terror and treason, his use of racists in disrupting the Black Lives Matter protests in a campaign of violence, arson, vandalism and looting to discredit the mass action for equality and racial justice and provide a pretext for the federal occupation of Democratic cities and the founding of a fascist tyranny, and the pathetic puppet show of Traitor Trump and his master Putin.
Remember him and his era of fascism as the collapse of values which nearly became the Fall of America, for the enemies of democracy never rest, and neither must we.
Thanks for showing us all what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
And remember, you can always discover someone’s secret Republican name whereby they recognize each other; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.
The American Fourth Reich of the Trump Regime is a moral leprosy which must be Resisted everywhere and in all its forms and guises, and if we do not purge ourselves of our destroyers not only America has fallen, but soon democracy and human civilization throughout the world.
This we must Resist, and rage against the dying of the light. But how?
All Resistance is War to the Knife, for who so ever respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
By Any Means Necessary, a phrase coined by Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands and made famous by the great Malcolm X.
Of these two principles of action in Resistance and revolutionary struggle I offer some thoughts on implementation in the context of the imposed conditions of struggle we face now, directed to bring change both to forces of repression we now fight in the streets and the systems of oppression which they enforce and perpetuate.
Let us make mischief for the Fourth Reich and seize our power, let us perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority through Disbelief and Disobedience.
Let us unite in mass action and solidarity as guarantors of each others humanity and in liberation struggle against the Trump regime which would devolve us from citizens into subjects.
Let us Resist Falsification and Trump’s Tongue of Lies; possessed of Moloch the Seducer is he, who spins mirages and illusions, rewritten histories and alternate realities, propaganda, surveillance, and thought control as repression of dissent and the manufacture of consent to be subjugated like a spider’s web by which to ensnare us in a Wilderness of Mirrors.
Let us Resist Commodification as things to be used and profited from by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, through a kleptocracy of plutocrats and oligarchs who wield the state as an instrument of centralization of wealth and power for which our lives and our labor are the raw material, like Charlie Chaplin caught in the gears of the great machine he serves in The Factory. In the words of Mario Savio in his iconic speech at Berkeley in 1964; “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even tacitly take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop.”
Let us Resist Dehumanization and the theft our souls, of our rights of conscience and of co-ownership of the state, our duty of care for each other in a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s equality, liberty, and humanity. With the founding values and ideals of democracy under assault from a captured state and the principle of universal human rights abandoned in our streets as the ICE white supremacist terror force perpetrates a campaign of ethnic cleansing and the federal Occupation of our sanctuary cities, and as our taxes buy the deaths of children in Palestine to clear a path for the Trump-Netanyahu plan of a Riviera of casinos and unfettered vices on the bones of a people, we must defend each and every one of us as if it were all of us. For no matter where those who would enslave us begin with policies of identity politics and divisions of belonging and otherness, we always end at the gates of Auschwitz.
Modern Times, Charlie Chaplain
“We Declare Our Right On This Earth To Be A Human Being, To Be Respected As A Human Being, To Be Given The Rights Of A Human Being In This Society, On This Earth, In This Day, Which We Intend To Bring Into Existence By Any Means Necessary.” Malcolm X
Michael Sheen performs ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ by Dylan Thomas
Studies and Theoretical Origins of Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty
Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, Antonin Artaud
Happy Chinese New Year to all humankind; may we find the joy of total freedom to balance the terror of our nothingness, embrace the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves in liberation struggle from authorized identities and the masks others make for us, discover the truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh with which to free ourselves from the lies and illusions of our falsification, build solidarity to triumph over the subjugation of our divisions, rekindle the absurd hope we need to claw our way out of the ruins of our fallen civilization and make yet another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival, and love to transcend the limits of our form, redeem the flaws of our humanity, and heal the brokenness of the world.
Such is the spell I cast this night with my wishes, ephemeral and possibly going nowhere at all as my words drift like candles set free upon the winds and the tides, yet this is their beauty.
We lost and broken things, who refuse to submit and abandon not our fellows.
Here in this place of darkness ruled by fear and force we light up the night with fireworks and hurl defiance to those who would enslave us; this earth, this sad and glorious humankind.
In Hong Kong tonight I unleash the fire of poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation of ourselves and of human being, meaning, and value, as revolutionary struggle and making mischief for tyrants, one among many with my brothers, sisters, and others throughout the world.
We are coordinating actions among networks of democracy and liberation organizations throughout South Asia and the world, systems of alliances referred to as the Milk Tea Movement, in Hong Kong, Beijing and other cities in China, Thailand, Myanmar and its sister state Sri Lanka, which during the past years have morphed with protean strangeness to include Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, West Papua, the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, India, Kashmir, possibly a whole emerging South Asian Spring, and reenergized with the outbreak of World War Three and the invasion of Ukraine has solidarity with democracy movements as well as direct agents of change within Russia and its imperial dominion of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya, and Africa and within the dominion of Iran including Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and since Black Saturday October 7 2023 in Gaza and regionally as a theatrical performance in three dimensions; anticolonial struggle of Palestine versus America and her colony of Israel, second the broader conflict between the Arab-American Alliance and the Dominion of Iran which is driven by the ancient sectarian Sunni-Shia division, and World War Three as Iran’s ally Russia attempts to re-found her Empire, and all of this as civilizational collapse and rebirth in the titanic struggle between forces of liberation and a theatre of cruelty and imperial state terror in the regimes of Putin and his puppet tyrant Trump.
There is a saying attributed as a Chinese curse but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong, “May you live in interesting times.”
We are now living in interesting times; whether we make of our time a curse or a fulcrum with which to change the balance of power in the world from tyranny to democracy and free societies of equals rests with each of us.
Join us.
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.”
Let us bring the Chaos.
As I wrote in my post of February 15 2022, Monsters, Freaks, Transgression of the Forbidden, the Sacred Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves: On Chaos as Love and Desire; Watching the sunrise overlooking Hong Kong from Lion Rock, seized many times in recent years by democracy protesters and revolutionaries in the struggle for liberation and independence from China, in the wake of the last celebrations of Chinese New Year and several nearly sleepless nights of making mischief for tyrants under cover of the festival, my thoughts turn to the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature, of ourselves as wild and glorious things, of love and desire as anarchic forces of liberation, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden and the violation of norms as seizures of power from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and the refusal to submit to authority.
Freedom, and all that comes with it; above all freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, as defiance of authorized identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of love and desire as liberating forces of Chaos, and all of this as sacred acts of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
And of our myriad possible futures, sorting themselves out in our daily lives like a hurricane governed by the flight of a hummingbird; tyranny or liberty, extinction or survival.
Order and its forms as authority, power, capital, and hegemonic elites of patriarchy and racism, class and caste, which arise from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, which appropriates and subjugates us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization and weaponizes hierarchies of otherness and belonging and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and creates states as embodied violence, tyrannies of force and control, carceral states of police and military terror, and dominions of imperial conquest and colonial assimilation and exploitation; all of these systems and structures are born in fear, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and submission to authority, have a key weakness without which they cannot arise and perpetuate unequal power, for this requires the renunciation of love.
Chaos has as its champion the totalizing and uncontrollable divine madness of love, which leaps across all boundaries to unite us in solidarity of action against those who would enslave us.
Love exalts us beyond the limits of ourselves and the flags of our skin, disrupts authorized identities and narratives as imposed conditions of struggle, seizes power as ownership of ourselves, and reveals the embodied truth of others.
Once we have a definition of democracy as a free society of equals and a praxis of love, there are some principles which can be derived as an art of revolution and seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
Order is unequal power and systemic violence; Chaos is liberty, equality, interdependence, and harmony.
Order subjugates through division and hierarchy; Chaos liberates through equality and solidarity.
Authority falsifies; speaking truth to power or parrhesia as Foucault called truth telling and performing the witness of history confer authenticity to us in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, and delegitimize tyrants.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s just an old humbug.
The four primary duties of a citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
There is no just Authority.
Law serves power and authority; transgression and refusal to submit confer freedom and self-ownership as primary acts of becoming human and Unconquered.
Always go through the Forbidden Door. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Such is my art of revolution and democracy as love; there remains poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our limitless possibilities of becoming human, and love and desire as unconquerable informing, motivating, and shaping forces and innate human realms of being and powers which cannot be taken from us as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, anarchic and ungovernable as the tides, and it is love and desire as forms of wildness and embodied truth which offer us a definition of freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
The Hunger Games Salute of the Revolution
The Unique and Its Property, by Max Stirner (Introduction), Wolfi Landstreicher (Translator), Apio Ludd (Introduction)
As the Chinese Communist Party celebrates one hundred year anniversary of in founding in Shanghai in 1921 with military displays and belligerent threats to her neighbors, Hong Kong mourns the twenty fourth anniversary of her abandonment by Britain to China and the second anniversary of its democracy movement born of Xi Jinping’s rapacious and brutal conquest and repression of liberty.
I swear this now before the world and on the stage of history; I will never abandon the people of Hong Kong, nor of China. If this sounds personal, its because it is.
I am a bicultural person in my origins, raised from the age of nine to that of nineteen in part within traditional Chinese culture, and these were the first people whom I recognized as my extended family, though as languages are a hobby of mine and I have lived as a member of many different cultures in the years since my sense of continuity through others has broadened to include all humankind on principle. Yet I feel a kinship with Chinese peoples as a legacy of my childhood, and I owe them for their laughter and inclusion when I was young and needed a space of belonging, and I will restore that balance as I am able.
The Black Flag still flies from the barricades in Hong Kong where we raised it on New Year’s Day in 2020, and its primary meaning has not changed since its use by the First International and the veterans of the Paris Commune; freedom versus tyranny, the abolition of state terror, surveillance, and control, and resistance to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil,
With this bold signal the people declare: We have no masters; we shall be ruled by none.
As I wrote in my post of August 19 2019, Weekend Eleven of Hong Kong’s Democracy Revolution: a Quarter of the City Defy the Imperial Conquest of Beijing; In a stunning display of fearlessness and solidarity, a quarter of the people of Hong Kong, one million seven hundred thousand of its citizens, defy the communists and the brutal totalitarian police state of Beijing to march for democracy, freedom, and the universal rights to which every human being is entitled.
The revolution against communism and the struggle to liberate Hong Kong from the unjust and imperialist rule of the mainland government and the torture, surveillance, and xenophobic racist ethnic cleansing which the Chinese Communist Party and its tyranny of faceless bureaucrats represents is now too large to crush through its usual means of abductions, secret trials, re-education camps, and the use of criminal gangs as enforcers.
A quarter of the population cannot be murdered and terrorized in secret, without the true nature of the Communist Party being revealed; a vast system of slave labor for the benefit of a plutocratic elite no different from the aristocratic mandarinate the communists themselves rebelled against a hundred years ago.
The true origin of the Chinese Communist Party which now exists is the Loyalty Purge and Massacre of the Jiangxi Soviet of 1930-31, in which Mao killed three out of four of the communists, some one hundred thousand people, all who were not personally loyal to him, and seized absolute control.
Then of course there was World War Two, during which the CCP used the Japanese army as a proxy force against their own pro-democracy enemies and fellow Chinese, and against bastions of freedom protected by foreigners such as Hong Kong.
After 90 years of tyranny, the people of China are fighting back; it’s time for the free nations of the world to help them liberate themselves, and to recognize the independence of Hong Kong.
As I wrote in my post of December 16 2019, Hong Kong’s democracy revolution: a Children’s Crusade; Hear the voices and testimony of the innocent in Hong Kong’s struggle for independence; a Children’s Crusade which opposes evil with a fearless and united voice declaiming; No!
This is the crucible in which nations are born; in the dreams of liberty of its children and of those with nothing left to lose, willing to risk their lives to reach for a better future. Hong Kong is discovering its identity as a nation and a people under the occupation of a Chinese Communist Party no less terrible than that of Imperial Japan from December 25 1941 until liberation on August 30 1945.
In many ways the methods of state terror and control are parallel between Fascist Japan and Communist China and suggestive of a master-disciple relationship as with serial killers. For example, the Japanese Imperial Army had mobile processing factories whereby Chinese persons killed in the conquest were cannibalized, which accounts for the speed with which the Imperial Army could move without outrunning its supply lines, a terror operation which became the model for the Chinese Communist Party, which used Imperial Japan as a tool for ridding themselves of the British and pro-democracy Chinese Nationalists, in the use of organ harvesting of democracy activists which they employ today.
As with the cannibalism of their former secret partners against democracy, the horrific terror and refined social control of the Chinese Communist Party, whether directed against the economic prize of Hong Kong or ethnic minorities such as those in Tibet and Xinjiang in campaigns of genocide, methods of repression, force, and intimidation fail to convince, and in fact recruit membership for the resistance. China should have learned this from the Rape of Nanking; far from being brutalized into passivity and subjugated by learned helplessness, survivors of terror will gladly die if in doing so they can claim vengeance on an enemy, save others from victimization, and redeem the future.
Our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by Cadmus; from each arise multitudes, and become an unstoppable tide.
And the family and friends of every person in Hong Kong whom the Communists in Beijing abduct and imprison, shoot or beat to death in the streets, torture, and assassinate, will awaken to a new day with solidarity in the common cause of liberty and a vast network of alliances forged by the inhumanity of a violent and evil authoritarian enemy.
In the long run, resistance and revolution always win because tyranny creates its own counterforce and downfall.
As I wrote in my post of October 6 2019, Vendetta Lives: Hong Kong Defies the Mask Ban; I am one man, of limited understanding, though I have worn many masks in many places, and not all of my causes have been lost; through all my forlorn hopes and a lifetime of last stands I yet remain to defy and defend.
Of our many possible futures I can only say this; all is not yet lost, nor is anything past redemption when the will to resist and to become better can be found.
So I leave you with the words of Alan Moore from 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.”
Here are my journals of last years Genocide Games held by China:
February 6 2022 The Genocide Games: China’s Glorification of State Terror and Tyranny
The Genocide Games have begun in China, a glorification of state terror and tyranny funded by the profiteers of slave labor and ethnic cleansing. But this arrogant provocation and demonstration of power designed to intimidate the world into submission through learned helplessness as an opening move of conquest and dominion and to win gestures of appeasement which move their neighbors into the status of tributary states, so horrifically evocative of the Nazi Games of 1936 in Berlin and occurring as a historic warning sign at the same point in the development of the enemies of democracy’s plans for world conquest, have failed to silence dissent through the brutal repression of their citizens just as they have failed to divide the solidarity of the international community and the free nations of the world with the peoples of China, and those of their criminal and illegitimate colonies imposed on the free, independent, and sovereign states of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong.
China under the iron boot of the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping has its true origins in the Loyalty Purge and Massacre of the Jiangxi Soviet of 1930-31, in which Mao killed three out of four of the communists, some one hundred thousand people, and seized absolute control. In this mass murder and crime against humanity Mao established the First Rule of Tyranny; When the state’s absolute monopoly on power is in doubt, kill everyone not personally loyal to you. This aphorism, not included in the public version of the Red Book, became the founding principle of the Chinese Communist Party as an instrument of terror and tyranny, as autocratic and totalitarian as the regime of any king or emperor.
Democracy in China is a dream stolen by a dead tyrant, but one which may be restored. Now is the time we must stand in solidarity with the people of China against tyranny and state terror, for who stands alone dies alone. As the line in the film Brazil goes which inspired so many adventures of my youth; “We’re all in this together.”
February 11 2022 Genocide Games: the Case of Xinjiang
A year ago I wrote in my post of February 19 2021, China Genocide Slavery Sexual Terror; The Chinese Communist Party is responsible for vast horrors, including xenophobic ethnic cleaning and slavery. But we are also responsible, if we buy the products of injustice.
And like a monster in a horror film which attacks from the darkness when we are distracted, new revelations expose the government of China’s campaign of rape and sexual terror against the Islamic minorities of Xinjiang.
If anyone questions the centrality of a nonsectarian government and the principle of separation of church and state to democracy and our universal human rights, consider the examples of Yemen and Xinjiang.
Little has changed for the peoples of China or of her imperial conquests Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong in the year since I wrote these words in support of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction China movement, words like the screams of terror of the victims of China’s tyranny and terror, swallowed in the howling chasms of darkness of their Occupations and nearly lost to human memory and the witness of history like the countless lives of the silenced and the erased.
But I remember, and bear witness.
In the example of Xinjiang we can see the links between racist and sectarian terror as systemic violence, imperial conquest, and colonial dominion and exploitation.
Here also is the most horrific example of a carceral state of force and thought control as institutionalized dehumanization and enslavement in the world today; as Xinjiang is China’s laboratory for a Brave New World, whose technologies of dehumanization, commodification, and falsification they are exporting to fellow tyrannies globally.
And if we do nothing to change this monstrous crime against humanity or to disrupt Xi Jinping’s plans for the Conquest of the Pacific Rim, in Xinjiang we can see the future which awaits all of us.
Let us unite with the peoples of China, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong in solidarity against imperial conquest and occupation by a regime of tyranny and terror, while we still can.
February 19 2022 Genocide Games Part Three: the Legacy of Tiananmen
We behold the spectacle of the Olympic Games, an institution of world peace often used in service to power by tyrannies like the Chinese Communist Party, whose brutal repression, silencing, and erasure of dissent is baroque and monstrous. Beneath the mask of nationalist triumphalism and militaristic glory they show to the world and to their own citizens there is another face, a secret one they do not wish to be seen, and it is this secret face we must expose and defy.
The four primary duties of a citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to the Wizard of Oz, “You’re just an old humbug!”
+ Here are some essays I have written about the meaning of Tiananmen:
June 4 2019 Tiananmen Massacre 30 year anniversary: freedom requires historical memory
As we celebrate the heroes who challenged the authority and power of the Chinese Communist Party’s totalitarian state terror, as absolute as any monarchy of divine right in history, as xenophobic and racist as the tyranny of any fascist or theocratic state, and moreover a brutal criminal regime which has enslaved its own people, let us also recognize that when they fired on the democracy protestors of Tiananmen Square thirty years ago today, the government of the Chinese Communist Party lost all legitimacy and became a rogue state.
From that moment forward no signatory nation to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights nor heir to the legacy of the Rights of Man should give aid nor comfort to a government which is the enemy of human rights, and who should be subject to a total trade embargo. Certainly we should not be building up their warfighting capability by manufacturing there, nor should we allow their scientists and professors to come here and steal our patents and secrets.
However, the unquestionable venality and genocidal imperialism of the state which conquered Tibet and is ruthlessly enacting ethnic cleansing of its Islamic Uighur minority, as well as launching the conquest of South Asia and the Pacific through provocations and intimidations of its neighboring states, is the context but not the issue of my commentary today. That would be the role of truth as the keystone of freedom and the Achilles Heel of tyranny.
Consider the words of Ai Weiwei writing in The Guardian; “Why do autocratic and totalitarian regimes, in fact most forms of power, fear facts? The only reason is because they have built their power on unjust foundations. Once facts are established, justice will be restored. And this is the greatest fear of powerful regimes. This is true not only of China, North Korea, or most non-democratic societies, but also some societies with democratic frameworks. When I consider the experience of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange, they remind me of my time living in a totalitarian society that suppresses and whitewashes fact, creates no-go zones and fears the light of public disclosure. Even if the lives of an entire generation are wiped out, no prisons and no amount of lies or censorship can expunge or conceal the facts. This is why memory – individual and collective – is such an important part of civilization. To remove the memory of the past is to rob what is left of an individual, because our past is all we have. Without it, there is no such thing as a civilized society or nation. Any attempt to destroy, remove or distort memory is the act of an illegitimate power.”
Freedom requires historical memory and freedom of information; open education and a free press, and freedom from surveillance, censorship, or any form of repression or thought control. For historical memory is also identity, our ownership of ourselves, and the agency and power of autonomous individuals.
Any autocratic totalitarian state, be it aristocratic feudalism, theocracy, fascist, or communist, rules through force and the dehumanization of its members and survives only so long as truth and history can be controlled and access restricted to authorized versions of both.
This is the best way to fight for freedom and challenge tyranny; through exposure of its lies and open public access to the truth.
Truth is subversive to power, and the truth will set us free.
April 19 2020 Dare to Dream: Repression and Resistance in China’s Dystopia of State Terror and Thought Control
As I learned of the arrest of the democracy activists in a mass purge by the Chinese Communist Party, I wondered what life is like for the ordinary Chinese person living under a system of state terror in which they have no power whatsoever, no ability to choose their own identity or to shape the circumstances of their lives, and with constant threat of death and torture for the most trivial of infractions against an elaborate and byzantine bureaucracy. What is it like to be dehumanized utterly?
As Xiaolu Guois, filmmaker and author of the novel I Am China, sister of a Tiananmen Square protestor and daughter of an Impressionist painter sentenced to hard labor during the Cultural Revolution for ‘anti-revolutionary bourgeois thoughts’ writes in Reading Howl in China, in China it requires courage to dream dreams of one’s own, for everything is shadowed by the authorized versions of oneself and others ceaselessly promulgated by the state; “When Xi Jinping became China’s president in 2012, the term ‘Chinese Dream’ swept the yellow earth of the East like a new ideological fashion. But what is this Chinese Dream? The expression is most certainly a mutation of the American Dream grafted on to Chinese socialism. It is about improving the role of the individual in Chinese society. President Xi has described the dream as a ‘national rejuvenation, an improvement of people’s livelihoods, prosperity and a military strengthening’. He has said that young people should ‘dare to dream, work assiduously to fulfil their dreams and contribute to the revitalisation of the nation’.
Dare to dream! Since when do we need courage to dream? In China, it depends on what sort of dream a young person is ‘given’. Our dreams are so textured by the minds of our masters that it can sometimes seem as if there is no true dream left in the human imagination.”
June 4 2021 A Legacy of Refusal to Submit to Tyranny and State Terror: Anniversary of Tiananmen Square
A lone hero confronts tanks with refusal to submit, and bequeaths to humankind a legacy of moral vision and the unconquerable human dream of liberty; today we celebrate the anniversary of Tiananmen Square and the stand of its iconic Tank Man against tyranny and state terror.
There will be no mass action in China today in recognition of the solidarity and courage of the democracy movement of 1989, nor of that which propagates throughout China today, for the long shadow of the Chinese Communist Party’s iron fist has cast the nation under a spell of fear, darkness, and silence like that of a fairytale wicked witch.
But in Hong Kong today, a people unite in subversion of their conqueror’s laws and find subtle ways to signal solidarity in revolutionary struggle. The brutal repression of the CCP’s regime has galvanized, not subjugated, the democracy movement of the Chinese peoples. Like the Rape of Nanking, the terrors of Xi Jinping’s regime has failed to drive the people of China into abject submission through learned helplessness, and like the thuggery of the British Empire’s reply to Gandhi’s Salt Tax Protest has sacrificed any pretense of legitimacy for its hegemony of power.
It is a triumph of the human spirit that the hope of freedom and democracy still lives and is an indestructible part of the Chinese national character, for the peoples of China must struggle in a vast laboratory of pervasive and endemic surveillance and thought control, like rats trapped in a maze by demented captors whose bizarre experiments and crimes against humanity are designed to falsify and dehumanize their own citizens.
And this is nothing compared to the imperial conquest of Hong Kong now underway and the genocide of Islamic minorities in Xinjiang, spectacles of terror and brutal repression perpetrated with the arrogance of power of an authoritarian state bereft of all moral values, wherein only violence, force, and power have meaning.
Yet the peoples of China resist and yield not, and abandon not their fellows, as the Oath of the Resistance challenges us all to do, and we who love liberty must stand in solidarity with them.
A wave of vigils, protests, mass actions, and forlorn hopes commences this week throughout the world, as peoples of all nationalities unite as one humankind, inheritors of our universal human rights and the principles of freedom, equality, truth, and justice which democracy is designed to uphold and which none of us may deny any other.
As the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem teach us; “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
Man vs. Chinese tank Tiananmen square – June 5, 1989 CNN
Tiananmen Square: What happened in the protests of 1989? – BBC
February 20 2022 Genocide Games Part Four, The True Face of the Chinese Communist Party: Case of the Human Bodies Exhibition
China’s Genocide Games continue through the 20th of this month as a pageant of nationalist triumphalism, and so will my witness of history in my daily journal to the true face of the Chinese Communist Party’s regime of tyranny and state terror, violations of our universal human rights, repression of dissent and democracy, xenophobic ethnic cleansing of minorities, imperial conquest of the independent and sovereign nations of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong, and the looming threat of the Chinese conquest of the Pacific Rim for which an archipelago of artificial fortress islands has already been constructed as a launchpad.
As I wrote in my post of January 18 2020, Hong Kong’s often imprisoned democracy activist Joshua Wong speaks; How we must cherish and defend the principle of free speech, without which there is no liberty.
In Hong Kong under the heel of the Chinese Communist Party’s occupation of state terror and control, as in so many tyrannies throughout our world, thought crimes are punished more severely than any other, for no tyranny can survive exposure and defiance. Xi Jinping, tyrant of Beijing, can permit challenge to his authority no more than any other, for truth is not on his side nor can his regime long survive where it flourishes.
Tyranny may have horrific instruments of terror and repression at its command; in China today this includes the abduction of its critics and dissenters, the harvesting of their organs and immurement in concentration camps, torture and genocide, slave labor and universal constant surveillance, but such force is brittle and hollow. It may be shattered and proven meaningless by anyone willing to defy it regardless of the costs.
And so heroes like Joshua Wong are vital rallying points and examples, for he has called out the emperor who has no clothes, withstood his punishments and returned unconquered to fight again. The fact that China dared not torture or kill him while in prison is a sign that the occupation is weakening; only two years ago the Chinese Communist Party paraded before the world the carcasses of its victims on a world tour of the Real Bodies Exhibition.
We have come far from this provocation and arrogance by the government of Beijing, from this brazen display of power intended to dehumanize and humiliate its political opponents and openly threaten America and Europe into submission as it seeks a stranglehold on the Pacific Rim and South Asia. This was a calculated act of terror designed to hammer learned helplessness into the free nations of the world as the Chinese Communist Party prepares to enforce its Overseas Chinese policy on every nation with a Chinatown as imperial conquest and dominion. As to their plans for all of us, we need only look to their actions in the occupied nations of Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet.
And for the exposure of its cruelty and antihuman barbarism before the eyes of the world we offer thanks and celebrate the courageous and unconquerable people of Hong Kong, and champions of liberty like Joshua Wong.
February 19 2021 China Genocide Slavery Sexual Terror
The Chinese Communist Party is responsible for vast horrors, including xenophobic ethnic cleaning and slavery. But we are also responsible, if we buy the products of injustice.
And like a monster in a horror film which attacks from the darkness when we are distracted, new revelations expose the government of China’s campaign of rape and sexual terror against the Islamic minorities of Xinjiang.
If anyone questions the centrality of a nonsectarian government and the principle of separation of church and state to democracy and our universal human rights, consider the examples of Yemen and Xinjiang.
As written in my post of March 2 2020, The New Imperialism: Profiteers of Chinese Slave Labor; Among the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing genocide of religious and ethnic minorities and testing of new methods of thought control and state terror in the vast laboratory province of Xinjiang we have a new horror; massive slave labor sold to foreign corporations to prop up Beijing’s regime of force and darkness.
As the BBC describes; “ASPI said it had identified 27 factories in nine Chinese provinces that had been using Uighur labour transferred from Xinjiang since 2017.
It said the factories claim to be part of the supply chain for 83 well-known global brands, including Nike, Apple and Dell.
At the factories, ASPI said the Uighurs were typically forced to live in segregated dormitories, have Mandarin lessons and “ideological training” outside of working hours, were subjected to constant surveillance and banned from observing religious practices.”
“The Washington Post visited a factory mentioned in the report, which produces trainers for sports giant Nike. It said it resembled a prison, with barbed wire, watchtowers, cameras and a police station.”
We must apply the principles of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement which brought down Apartheid in South Africa and are now deployed for the liberation of Palestine from Israel to the cruel and racist government of mainland China.
Xi Jinping’s policy of sinofication is nothing less than one of erasure of its minorities; it is the Chinese Communist Party’s modern version of Hitler’s policy of Judenfrei. Is this something we really want to bankroll?
Why not make a law that says if you sell something in America you must build it here? Our economy would reawaken as jobs and wealth return, plus we would no longer be building up the warfighting capabilities of an implacable enemy which shares none of our values of democracy or human rights.
Who is responsible for the genocide of the Uighur and Kazakh peoples, beyond Xi Jinping and the CCP’s xenophobic tyranny of state terror? We are, if we buy the products of an unjust system and do nothing to oppose it.
As I wrote in my post of August 19 2020, China’s Holocaust: the Genocide of the Uighurs of Xinjiang and the Colonization of Hong Kong; It begins with the Great Wall of Silence and the control of truth, the repression of dissent and silencing of heroes like Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai, and Cai Xia, but it always ends in concentration camps like those in Xinjiang; the path of tyranny and fascism leads ever downward into degradation and dehumanization.
What do you call it when a government enacts the erasure and genocide of an ethnic and religious minority, and profits by their slave labor in concentration camps?
I call it a Holocaust.
What do you call a government which uses forced sterilizations, mass abductions, torture, murder, sending children to orphanages to be taught only in the official language, the outlawing of religious practice, and all this and more horrors and crimes against humanity targeted against those who do not fit the authorities paradigm of blood, faith, and soil?
I call it fascism.
And I say that whatever lies such governments tell about their crimes, what they call themselves or the particulars of their inhumanity, means nothing. All that matters is this; the powerful are inflicting harm on the powerless and the dispossessed.
Shall we let the vulnerable and wretched of the earth stand alone? Are all humans our brothers and sisters?
In the conquest and genocide of the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang the Chinese Communist Party has revealed their true nature as a xenophobic authoritarian state of force and control and a criminal organization of state terror and tyranny. They are a government without legitimacy.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
“The point is not to teach us something in particular. The point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached. And to give pleasure.” Susan Sontag
One unforgettable afternoon, as a young university student lingering in museum, I found myself standing before an incomprehensible painting lost in thought when I became aware of someone very close behind me, out of sight, also silent.
Several minutes must have passed before the presence spoke, asking “What do you see?” I forget how I answered, but as I moved to turn away and find something easier to behold (it may have been I need something easier) hands delicately lighted on my shoulders, almost not there, but fixing me in place, pinioned before my subject.
And she said, “Look again”.
This was Susan Sontag, who remained the afternoon to discuss art and other subjects, shifting topics without warning to unrelated fields, epigrammatic statements, bizarre quotations, and somehow bringing it all together in devastating insights, a dazzling and bewildering conversation, with eyes that could see right through a thing to its heart, intimate and not a little terrifying.
She spoke as if she were a hyperdimensional being, unbounded by time and space and assembling collages of meaning from disparate realms. I’m not surprised people had difficulty following her narratives, but it was always worth the effort to understand.
For she will always be with us, a presence just out of sight, saying “Look again”.
This, the moment of our first encounter, occurred sometime after her 1980 publication of Under the Sign of Saturn, by some measure a final and apex achievement of her revisioning of humankind, and before my September 1982 conversations over strawberry crepes at breakfast with Jean Genet, in Beirut after my summer of gourmet travel became a summer of resistance to the Israeli invasion and siege.
In Susan Sontag I discovered a fellow in the adoration of Wagner and the opera in general but also of David Bowie, and in the uncommon vice of being both a classicist and a radical postmodernist influenced by French theory in apprehension and inclination regarding literature and the arts, academic tribes often siloed and unable to comprehend or discuss works beyond their own specializations. Susan transgressed boundaries, curious about everything as was I, and there never was a better companion with whom to solve unknowns or parse meaning from the shock of the new, whether in art, music, or literature, than Susan Sontag, for unlike Nietzsche she said yes to life, and refused nothing.
Like the protagonist in her short story The Dummy, referential to Dostoevsky’s The Crocodile, who created a doppelganger to perform all the routine and banal tasks he wishes to escape, only to witness his proxy self offload these duties to other simulacra of his own, Susan Sontag, as with Gertrude Stein before her, sought to escape from the prison of history and the tyranny of other people, to reimagine herself and all mankind as acts of creative liberation.
She it was who signaled for me a reframing of dialectical struggle in humanistic terms; the self is literally a persona or theatrical mask, and the first revolution in which we all must fight is the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
Susan Sontag referred to the differences between a thing and its image as the creative potential between bounded realms, a theme which runs through all her works and accounts for her interest in pop art and photography. I describe this as Chaos or the adaptive range of the system of self and society.
Could I but wield the power of wishes I would grant us all her transparency of insight and the ability to transform ourselves and our world through imaginative vision, to make of life a work of art. Each of us must find this for ourselves.
Her collections of essays, which source Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot for her aesthetics and ideology of Art, especially in the reinterpretation of Nietzsche, include Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, Under the Sign of Saturn, Where The Stress Falls, and the monumental On Photography, and her novels The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, are together a superb introduction to American arts & letters, as I think they shall remain for some time.
The Benefactor is a masterpiece which explores homosexuality as both identity and desire and describes coming out as an escape from a Dream of Mirrors. A deconstruction of Freud by way of Gaston Bachelard and others, it provides a tour of critical theory and applies the methods of Derrida and Foucault, the philosophy of Sartre and de Beauvoir, and the aesthetics and mystical dream quest of Surrealism to issues of gender, sex, and power.
Death Kit is a metafictional novel of polyphonous layered images, cleaving tightly to the model of Camus, and references Maurice Blanchot as he faced mock execution by the Nazis in 1944 as an existential crisis.
The Volcano Lover presents literary history as an unfolding of intention through the lives of its characters. Time, memory, history, and the struggle for meaning and self ownership are among the interdependent constellation of themes which echo those of Vladimir Nabokov, and like his explorations of them Susan Sontag’s works can be read as teleological questioning of the nature of being, of the cosmic fate and order of the universe and its meaning, and of our place in it.
In America explores possible reinventions of ourselves and our nation. Read it together with its companion work, Philip K. Dick’s alternate universe puzzle The Man in the High Tower; they are metaphysical and ideological topologies which Janus-like present very different faces of the same Surrealist quest.
An icon of the magisterial arbiter of culture as well as the literary rebel and a type of the New York Intellectual, arguably the last of her kind in the latter case as she seems to have overthrown herself and the authority of her own class, Susan Sontag is a universal reference known to all as the woman who monkeywrenched hierarchies of aesthetic value and leveled high art with pop culture, legitimizing Warhol’s Factory among other revolutionary acts.
And she argues that the historical memory from which identity grows is undergoing a massive transformational change from a literary-linguistic to a photographic-visual basis, from words to images, and represents a shift in human consciousness comparable to the invention of language. She wrote at the dawn of a new humanity as its Pythian seer, and like the original mythic figure was not always understood or believed.
As to the painting, an abstraction of a classical Japanese koi pond, my answer at second look was “Movement- these forms are in a series of states of transition, with the symbols alongside, not ideograms but where one might expect a poem, acting as time marks like in a musical score. This is an allegory of change.”
To which she said, “Yes it is! Who are you? Oh, I’m Susan.”
I reached out to shake hands during introductions; she took my hand, and did not let it go.
Such is the legacy of Susan Sontag for all humankind as a civilizing influence in learning to see Beauty; for she is always with us, just out of sight, when we turn away from things beyond our understanding, especially those which provoke revulsion, disgust, horror, abjection and the Uncanny Valley effect, to hold us fast with her talons and whisper; “Look again.”
As I wrote in my post of July 21 2025, I Am A Leaf On the Wind: On Beauty In A Time Of Chaos; “I am a leaf on the wind”; now an iconic line from the telenovela Firefly and film Serenity and pervasive in popular culture, this quote has a unique meaning and history for me; some twenty years before these films I answered a question from a student during a class with this line, quoting the death poem of a kamikaze pilot.
The question; “What are you?” was in the context of a discussion of national identity and how we construct ourselves through history, what I now refer to along with race and other forms of identity as the flags of our skin.
I had just returned from the Siege of Beirut where Jean Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance, the second of my many Last Stands, and in no way wished to align myself with identity politics or identitarian nationalism by claiming any ancestral homeland, nation, or people in the sense of die Volk as the Nazis used it, as remains true now.
Especially in this moment wherein the spectre of fascisms of blood and soil have once again been raised from the abyssal chasms of darkness by Trump and his regime of white supremacist terror in the pogrom of ICE now ongoing throughout Vichy America.
My solution to the question What am I was to reply “I am a leaf on the wind.” In the shadows of Beirut and becoming involved in liberation struggle and solidarity in Guatemala versus the Mayan Genocide, Central America generally, Angola and South Africa versus Apartheid, and other places, I felt a deep kinship with that kamikaze pilot. Because I am forever a Last Stand, as I place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon dubbed The Wretched of the Earth. This is who I am and shall always be, and it is the only identity that matters.
This remains my reply now, to any attempt to define me not by my actions but by condition of being.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
As I wrote of my last wishes in a poem entitled Final Thoughts;
Bury me at sea, for I belong to no nation but to the world
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.
This is my answer to the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world; to embrace the darkness and live with grandeur in refusal to submit.
As Genet wrote in Miracle of the Rose; ‘A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.’
There remains the question of how to find beauty, joy, hope, faith in our humanity, and love by which to transcend ourselves and the limits of our skin, to balance the terror and horror of our imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle under systems of oppression, to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
As I wrote in my post of March 22 2025, Creating Spaces of Refuge, Serenity, Beauty, and Reflection To Balance the Trauma, Grief, and Horror of the Criminal Trump Regime of White Supremacist Terror and Theocratic Patriarchal Sexual Terror, His Performances of Tyranny In the White Man’s House As Atrocity Exhibits and Theatre of Cruelties, In This Year of the Fall of America and the Capture of the State As Vichy America Under the Fourth Reich: the Gardens at Dollhouse Park; In this time of shared public trauma as our nation and our civilization begin to collapse and fall, and the Age of Democracy passes into the Age of Tyrants, and as our values and ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice are violated and inverted and our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and our universal human rights are stolen from us, resilience becomes key to our survival.
While solidarity of action and refusal to submit to authority remain fundamental to our humanity and becoming human, we must also find joy to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
Such safe spaces of play and means of returning to ourselves under imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle designed to inflict despair, abjection, and submission through learned helplessness will be as unique as we are, but herein I wish to share an example from my own life, on the principle of Virginia Woolf that “If we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, we cannot tell the truth about anyone else.”
Though I greatly relish and glory in my own aesthetics of total transparency regarding my lived truths, in which I am inspired by that of Kenzaburo Oe whose public display of his private life is regarded as terrifying in Japan and part of his personal legend, my offering and example of finding joy as a survival and adaptive strategy today involves nothing more transgressive than gardening.
One can often measure the burden of moral harm and disfigurement of the soul a human being bears by the quietude of their hobbies; for Nietzsche’s warning that the Abyss begins to look back at you remains horrifically true.
What is important about my gardens at Dollhouse Park, so named because my partner Theresa whose childhood nickname was Dolly wanted a park, is that it is an act of love offered to my partner; that I designed and created an idyll of serenity and reflection meticulously constructed to appear natural from a deep personal need for a retreat from the world is secondary.
Relationships are primary because the modern pathology of disconnectedness makes us vulnerable to despair, crushing loneliness, compulsive and self destructive behaviors, and harms our capacity to adapt to change and heal from harm.
Despair and submission is what the enemy wants from us, and this we must Resist.
Find or create spaces of your own, bracketed off from your ordinary life and sandboxed from your public identity and the roles you must play, and you will find it easier to rise from the ashes once again.
So, here is a tour of the world I have made in which to recover between adventures; yours will be different, but you must find or build one of your own if you must fight monsters without becoming one. I tell you this in recognition that it is a mission in which I have failed like so many others, for I am a monster who hunts other monsters, and after forty years of living so there is very little humanity left to me.
I am without pity, fear, or remorse, and this is not who you wish to become.
Find your joy, my friends.
My refuge from the world in which I recover between adventures is idyllic and serene, a private wildlife sanctuary with rolling greens dotted by shade and fruit trees and enormous evergreens, tea gardens with one hundred eighty roses, leaning toward David Austin varieties, clematis of blues, purple, and wine red climbing on spiderwebs of fishing line to the roofs, phlox, daylilies, towering hollyhocks and riotously colorful columbines, irises, lilacs, Colorado Blue Spruce set against flaming barberry and gold spirea.
A long curving boundary line of softly rounded granite boulders spaced at eight feet and mountain ash full of white flowers and red berries in their season at sixteen feet defines the Park along a dirt road in the cliffside view direction, mixed with bristling evergreens of mugo pine, bird’s nest spruce, ferns brooding in their darkness, and aromatic shrub juniper, color spots of burning bush, potentilla, Japanese snowball bush festooned with white pom poms, rose glow barberry, goldflame spirea, vivid carnival colours of lilacs, irises, hostas, and roses.
A bird bath of entwined swans offers water at the feeding area just outside my bay window where we can watch the city lights at night from a sofa. The paths are marked with Alberta spruce and arbors of climbing roses, clematis, and Mandarin honeysuckle, and defined with processions of roses and boxwood shaped to green orbs, and stone terraces of roses, phlox, daylilies, raspberries, blackberries, lilacs, and columbines descend the hillside terraces behind my cottage into a secret valley. Here live eighteen deer, a family of racoons, over a hundred quail, eight wild turkeys, five Great Horned Owls, woodpeckers, crows, robins, magpies, doves, goldfinches, chickadees, sparrows, and visited by other birds including ducks and Canadian geese, and in the hills of pine forest which wind up the gulch beyond the wetlands and the frog pond where the blue heron reign to one side live bear, mountain lion, moose, porcupine, fox, and bald eagles, and on the other in sight of the monastery on its nearby hill along a creek in a ravine whose cliffs are unscalable by them a pack of coyotes who think they are my family and will sometimes accompany me on my nightly walks, talking to me in yips and howls. As the line in Coppola’s magnificent film Dracula goes; “There is much to be learned from beasts.”
Our Park is a highly controlled, purpose built, and artificial paradise which I designed to look like a natural landscape, with curving lines of sight to make it seem endless though it is only two acres of gardens among the true wilderness.
Dollhouse Park did not begin this way, as a private park and nature preserve nestled among alpine forest, but as a bare and rocky hill with a view, and shared ideas of home from childhood enthusiasms for fantasies of gothic romance like the Addams Family house, and in Dolly’s case the European grand hotels, castles, musical theatres, and cruise ships she spent twenty years playing piano and living in; museums and theatrical stages for the performance of our relationship full of curiosities, antiquities, and wonders. Dolly sat in a chair watching the sun set from different views for several days, and the one she liked the best was where we sited and built the house, with the front toward the setting sun and the city lights, and the back toward the rising moon, our secret valley, and the hills beyond.
I designed and created it based mainly on Gertrude Jekyll’s designs and some ideas from Penelope Hobhouse. We can see the hill where we first kissed from our home, on a wagon ride in the snow driven by her father; she was twelve, I was a very precocious eight.
A cherub fountain ornaments the front lawn by the arbor at the start of the curving Rose Walk, planted with roses at both sides under dark pink Montana Rose stone and in high summer flanked by walls of hollyhocks with their dinner plate size flowers, which leads around the Cat Tower to the terraces. Yes, it’s just for cats, twelve hundred square feet of it on three levels with two flights of stairs, with connecting doors to the main and lower floors of the cottage and to the Tiki Bar deck overlooking the terraces and secret valley with a forested stream at the rear of the house, where we can watch the moon rise. There in the Cat Tower Amok holds court, he of the ringed tail; he reminds us to run amok and break some rules, violate norms, and bring the Chaos.
He has four new companions in his posse this year; Oscar Wild, so named because he is beautifully striped but wild and very strong and will run all the way up walls, Biscuit who is named for being sweet though I also call her Pwetty Pwincess, the elegant and regal Fluffy who prefers her own company unless her brother Oscar is on hand as guard, and Socks who showed up a couple weeks ago, greeted me on the front porch by putting his paws on my shoulders and head butting me, and now lives in the garage; his fur is morning-coat dove grey. There is also Beebo but like nephews he only shows up for dinner and then goes walkabout.
We also have an enormous German Shepherd named Mala we inherited from her father; it means garland in Hindi, possibly an artifact of a job he had in India as a young engineer, building their national irrigation system. Mala thinks the cats are her herd and follows them protectively, nosing them apart when they wrestle, and they snuggle up with her in front of the fire in the evening. She’s with us always, and patrols the territory with us on our nightly two and a half mile walks; our primary line of defense should something choose to hunt us.
Dollhouse Park is situated in the foothills of the Cascade mountains, in an alpine forest region home to bear, mountain lion, wolf, coyote, fox, porcupine, racoon, hawk, Great Horned Owl, Blue Heron, and the American Bald Eagle; full of predators who would be formidable opponents. A mountain lion, for example, can jump fifteen feet up and forty feet out, and carry five times its body weight in its jaws, and will attack exactly like an African lion. When asked what I would do if a bear, symbol here of near-unstoppable force, took an unhealthy interest in me, I say “I shall sing the Bear Song, and we will dance the Bear Dance.”
But as someone who has lived alone in the bush by subsistence hunting all over the world, I follow a rule of my own invention, the principle of three plus three; having three contact and three distance weapons on my person at all times. Mala counts as a distance weapon and alarm system, and my walking stick counts as a contact weapon as I can use it like a saber, katana, jian, assegai, or escrima fighting stick. In the bush my primary weapon is the Winchester Model 70 Safari Express in 375 Holland & Holland, my backup is a Ruger Redhawk, and as a final resort I carry a kukri with which I can field dress a moose or behead rascals. Beyond the boundaries of my hill the imposed conditions of struggle determine who I can be and how I must meet the moment, but on my own ground I am untouchable and can dream better dreams.
This is why democracies throughout the world are falling to tyrannies; the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force operates the same on personal and national levels, especially when overwhelming and generalized fear is created and weaponized by authority in service to power, birthing carceral states of force and control and imperial wars of conquest and dominion as consequences of identitarian nationalism.
Beware always those who claim to speak and act in your name, for this is a primary strategy of fascism, and the next step in the tyrant’s process of subjugation is to commit unforgiveable acts in which you are complicit as a forge of identities of blood, faith, and soil.
Hence Modi’s conquest of Kashmir, Putin’s of Ukraine, and countless other atrocity exhibits and failures of humanity throughout history, including Netanyahu’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in the conquest of Palestine in which both Biden and Trump have made all of us Americans complicit as our tax dollars buy the deaths of children and other innocent civilians.
As my father taught me, politics is the Art of Fear.
Subjugation to authority is an escalating spiral of commitment through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by those who would enslave us and steal our souls.
And it always collapses in ruin because of a simple truth; security is an illusion. Systems of oppression entrap us in the Ring of Power and its recursive forces to create false security from existential threats by the siren call of becoming so powerful we can not be threatened, and I know all too well the seduction of power and of becoming the arbiter of virtue.
As a Freshman in high school, during my first political action in which I staged a student walkout because the local Reformed Church tried to close our Forensics class and debate team for asking inconvenient questions about Apartheid, I actually told I my fellow students; “I am your Sheriff, and when we are trespassed against come to me and we will settle it together.” And then I quoted an unforgettable line from a comic book which for years was my guiding principle, spoken by Dr Doom, a villain I had mistaken for the hero; “Only I can bring order to this world of chaos.” When we won and our classes were reinstated, nearly the whole student body carried me on their shoulders through the hallways in triumph.
But these things cannot free us from systems of oppression which perpetuate themselves; only love can do that, as Wagner teaches us in his great opera. I did not see the entire Ring cycle performed until I had graduated high school, and only much later did I begin to understand.
Love, solidarity of action, community, interdependence, mutual aid, and our stewardship and duty of care for each other; these things can free us from the yoke of fear by which elites have stolen our power since the rise of mass slave agriculture and the priest-kings who harnessed us to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
To paraphrase Freud; Civilization begins when we cast words instead of stones. So if I meet a bear in the forest, I will sing the Bear Song if I can.
If the fear between us, which divides us and binds us together in the Ring of Power and mutual violence, can be transcended by the love which animates all living beings and makes of us partners in the struggle to become and allies in the struggle to free ourselves from the systems of oppression which seek to enslave us as the raw material of engines of power and destruction.
If we can escape the fate chosen for us by the legacies of our history and those who would subjugate us to meet in battle as brother warriors to find the truths of ourselves, but instead meet in solidarity of action to dismantle those systems of unequal power which are our true and mutual enemy.
If we can see beyond the flags of our skin and the limits of ourselves and embrace the truths and uniqueness of others no matter how different from ourselves.
If we can imagine and discover and create among the limitless possibilities of becoming human truths and uniqueness which exalts that of others in a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and co-owners of the state and as human beings.
If, brother bear, we can come together without fear and do the Bear Dance not as each other’s destroyers, but as each other’s liberators.
If, if, if.
As I wrote in my post of September 29 2025, Epicurean Delights at Dollhouse Park: Culinary Arts As a Practice of Joy and a Pursuit of Beauty; Herein I offer entrance into my private world of epicurean delights here at my cottage, Dollhouse Park.
Someone has asked me to share my recipes, and like a genie of the lamp I hear and manifest the truths of our wishes.
Recipes are wonderful things, prescriptive and descriptive stories which anchor us in history, across vast gulfs of time and space within the lives of other people and other versions of ourselves, and most usefully across cultures. As such they can provide insight into other ways of being human different from our own, one of the most interesting riddles of culture being the idea of Good To Eat.
Like travel, reading the national literatures of peoples beyond our own, and learning languages, culinary arts allow us a chance to perform otherness, interrogate belonging, test normalities, and escape the legacies of our history.
I have used cooking as a coping strategy for trauma and a reset activity to sandbox personal time from work since my years at university and throughout my fourfold career teaching English and Forensics and coaching the debate team at Sonoma Valley High School, as a teacher and business owner of Lale’s Kung Fu Academy of Sonoma which was how I put myself through university entirely with my own money, as a private counselor mainly with angry boys, and as a maker of mischief for tyrants and ally in global democracy and liberation struggle.
There is nothing like chopping things up, setting fire to them, and eating them to restore one’s serenity in a world of madness and horrors, especially when one works in a museum of private holocausts.
The culinary arts as I practice them are about control of inchoate and incomprehensible forces of passion which are vast and unstoppable as the tides, forces which include systems of oppression and imposed conditions of struggle including truths written in our flesh and not of our own making, which we must wrestle with not to conquer, when they are unimaginably more ancient and powerful than ourselves, but like Jacob wrestling the angel to remain unconquered by, and as with all things not by sealing ourselves off from our monstrosity and the flaws of our humanity but by embracing them and dancing with our demons, for such are sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others.
As the Roman playwright Terence wrote; “I am human; nothing human is alien to me”, and in the original Latin; “Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.”
So for cooking as a restorative art of finding balance; joy and beauty to answer the flaws of our humanity, the brokenness of the world, the terror of our nothingness, and to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
Culinary arts are a practice of joy and a pursuit of Beauty; herein I mean Beauty as Keats defined it; “What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not”, and Joy as in Whitman’s Poem of Joys; “O to have my life henceforth a poem of new joys!
To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on,
To be a sailor of the world, bound for all ports,
A ship itself, (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air,)
A swift and swelling ship, full of rich words—full of joys.”
Or as I recall these final lines having been paraphrased somewhere; ““Henceforth I will go celebrate anything I see or am,
and deny nothing!.”
What is the purpose of joy, that we should have adapted to possess such a thing? What evolutionary value does it confer, and how can it help us to survive?
As T.S. Eliot writes in The Wasteland; “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Or in the words of Rebecca Solnit; “When you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.”
My art of cooking unfolds from my history as part of my identity and a prochronism or history expressed in form shaped by the nested set of puzzle boxes of stories I bear; the first of which is the influence of my mother who taught me to cook as I grew up. Primarily this was the French influenced Viennese and Hapsburg court cuisine with which she grew up, like the family German which was Schönbrunner Deutsch mixed with the Viennese dialect of Bavarian, Wienerisch. Mom adored Hungarian spices and her dishes leaned heavily in this direction, possibly an artifact from my parents actions in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, during which she seized a border checkpoint with her beloved Belgian Grip sword as they smuggled out dissidents to the West; by my twenties she also cooked Greek cuisine, an influence from her folk dancing enthusiasm and Sunday afternoons spent at Papa’s Taverna in Petaluma, where some of the finest Greek musicians played when in the Bay Area and a whole community danced and ate exquisite food.
Thus for my family history as an origin story of my cooking hobby embedded in its ancestral deep time; my other culinary enthusiasms were artifacts of chosen family and a boundless curiosity for what lies beyond the boundaries of the known, in the empty spaces on our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons.
I am become a Tower of Babel, layers of arcologies of human being, meaning, and value gathered from the many places I have traveled and lives I have inhabited; an Atlas of Human Possibillities.
It was my great good fortune to be situated ideally in time and place as a university student at San Francisco and then UC Berkeley while living and working in Sonoma in the 1980s during the Culinary Revolution, near the James Beard house and a fifteen minute drive from the Culinary Institute of America in Napa. Sonoma was home to iconic businesses like the Sonoma Cheese Company, the Sonoma Bakery, and the Sonoma-Williams flagship store, as well as thirty five wineries and a few four star Michelin Guide restaurants. For many years I made a weekend treat of eating at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, where Alice Waters revolutionized French cuisine and from whom I learned much.
By the time I embarked on a summer tour of the Mediterranean in 1982 to learn to cook I was a serious hobbyist of the art. My itinerary included France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and finally Lebanon, French-Arabian Riviera of the Levant though it now seems antique to think of it that way, where I was trapped for some time by the Israeli Siege of Beirut and set on my life path with the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet.
In my Pinterest board entitled Epicurean Delights I have gathered over two thousand recipes for your delectation; but here I wish to share some simple daily standby dishes anyone can make without anything unusual required, quickly. These are my staple dishes. In so doing I have also provided my usual daily routine when at home; Morning Plate, Breakfast or Lunch, and Dinner.
One consequence of living alone in the wild by hunting all over the world is that I prefer not to eat fellow sentient beings unless I must, so these recipes skew vegetarian; you are warned.
Herein I wish to explicitly state my own personal idea of Good To Eat, in accord with the principle of Virginia Woolf that “If you cannot tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about others”, an idea shaped by my travels and a history of living both as a Buddhist monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana order in Kathmandu Nepal and as a scholar of Islam and Sufi poetry of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism in Srinagar Kashmir, and in formal study of Zen Buddhism for ten years from the age of nine.
Don’t eat sentient beings. It’s evil. But there is an exception; do whatever you must to survive.
So while I don’t eat according to the Eight Precepts as written by Nagarjuna in his Treatise on the Ten Bodhisattva Grounds, I do follow a modified and conditional version of the first one when I can; to abstain from killing living beings like ourselves. This means that I eat fish, chicken, eggs, and dairy, which many vegetarians do not, and while I only eat what is halal that leaves many things which I by preference do not though by necessity may, including beef or the carcass of any being which like ourselves loves, fears, and dreams.
Bon appetit.
For my final exhibit in the Art of Seeing Beauty from my personal history I offer the case of perfume. Fragrance can be an art which brings Beauty to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world. I like fragrance because it asks nothing of us other than breath to behold and live its conjured dreams, being a thing of the Invisible and unbound from of the limits of form. So also may it take us up into the gaps as it ascends to the heavens, opening passages to the Infinite as vision, exaltation. and rapture.
What I’d like from a fragrance with which to launch the day is something to wear while defending the Bridge at San Luis Rey; “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
There is a truth to perform in being alive, in never staying down and refusal to submit regardless of the cost and becoming Unconquered, in living with grandeur as Jean Genet once advised me to do, in embracing both the terror of our nothingness and the joy of total freedom which balances it; for each moment of our lives is a victory no matter the horrors that may come with it, the grief and loneliness of our disconnectedness, the pain and flaws of our humanity which like sacred wounds open us to the pain of others as compassion.
Each day is a Last Stand, as I have now made more times than I can remember, as I did in recent years at Mariupol in Ukraine, Panjshir in Afghanistan after the Fall of Kabul, throughout Palestine and in the Red Sea Campaign to counter blockade the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza where both Biden and Trump tried and failed to kill me in bombing our positions in Yemen. As I said to Genet when we met in Beirut, after my morning dash across a sniper alley to reach a marvelous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world, in reply to his asking me “I’m told you do this every morning, steal breakfast from death”; Such moments stolen from death are all we truly own, and which make us real.
I have lived for forty four years now in the places beyond all laws and all limits, where human being, meaning, and value are forged from nothing, in the unknown spaces marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human, where we can claw back something of our humanity from the darkness and make yet another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and I say to you that we must live our lives as if every day were a Last Stand. Live boldly, on your own terms and by your own rules, and love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner.
Live with grandeur, friends.
With all of this written into my flesh like a living brand, I find myself like Schopenhauer increasingly reliant in my sixth decade of life on Beauty to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
So I look herein to fragrance as a kind of Beauty which is unbound from the limits of form as conceptual art.
As I wrote in my post of May 18 2024, What Is a Man? A Taxonomy in Perfume; Why perfume? Because it is an art free from the limits of our form, in one dimension, that of time, which relies on memories and imagination wholly; as we grow up and learn to create ourselves and become human, how we see is crucially important, as Rorschach argues, and we each of us bear the sacred calling of Picasso; “I want to see in a new way”, but how we remember and construe ourselves and our Defining Moments as events of which we are made and as human being, meaning, and value is equally important.
Chemistry as an art of memories and references in which we ourselves are the artifact and not an image in three dimensions, like music, also transports us immediately beyond the flags of our skin and the forms in which we are trapped and possibly realized. Pure abstraction, which allows us to speak in terms of poetic truths, of metaphors, allegories, symbols, archetypal figures, myths and histories, makes of our interrogations of ourselves a project of Surrealism, of rapture and exaltation, and liberation from the material basis of existence.
Fragrances create interior structures of memories in time, in ways which reflect the construction of identity as mimesis.
Mine is a path of immersion in the Infinite as ecstatic or poetic vision and as revolutionary struggle, what Coleridge called the Primary Imagination, ibn Arabi the alam al mythal, the Bardo in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Logos in the Gospel of John and Plotinus, and C.G. Jung called the Collective Unconscious. Herein I pursue those truths written in our flesh, and those beyond.
Our bodies are an imposed condition of struggle, and our choices about what we do with them seizures of power and autonomy, but can also become marvelous windows into other ways of being human.
Dare to dream, friends, and to perform your truths upon the stage of the world.
As I wrote in my post of July 10 2021, Idealizations of Masculine and Feminine Beauty and the Struggle Between Authenticity and Authorized Identities: the Case of Chanel’s Paris-Edimbourg; Chanel Paris-Edimbourg is a new masculine fougere and luxury shaving paraphernalia which transports one to a fantasy Scotland of dark forests redolent of earthy wildness.
It comes in a bottle shaped like a huntsman’s flask, a reference to Guerlain’s iconic Habit Rouge and the role of man as hunter, and smells of sharp tangy juniper, peaty smoky Islay Scotch, and the leathery musk of furs.
Edimbourg conjures memories and images of riding to hounds, tweed jacketed estate hunts, midnight campfires, the sorrowful voices of bagpipes. Ah, but the stories it tells; ghosts, witches, monsters, vendettas, rebellions, lost causes and forlorn hopes, and the divine madness of love, like those of Scotland herself as typified in Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor and its source in the novel by Sir Walter Scott, which reimagines the iconic story of an ancestor of my partner Dolly.
More importantly, Edimbourg sets out to define what a man is today, and authorized identities of sex and gender and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty reside at the heart of becoming human, the one problem we must all solve as we grow up and seize our power of self-ownership and self creation; who do we want to become?
In this quest to sculpt a form of iconic manliness which like Michelangelo’s David can both inspire awe and invite intimacy, Chanel’s auteur Olivier Polge has abandoned the recent enthusiasm for unisex fragrances and reimagined the art of perfume’s roots in classic fougeres. These references include the original aristocratic Houbigant Fougere Royale, and its imperial successor Guerlain Mouchoir de Monsieur, which encode the values of the conservative Bourbon Restoration and the revolutionary Napoleonic Second Empire respectively, both now august with tradition.
Polge is a master of balance, chiaroscuro, suggestion, and implied gesture, and Edimbourg is an evocation of dark forests and moonlit paths where Red Hot Riding Hoods and their wolves may hunt each other with impunity and the delicious frisson of incandescent secrets and glorious desires beyond all boundaries of the Forbidden. Here transgression is distilled in a fragrance hung with signs of desire as an inherently uncontrollable force of nature, which can liberate us and restore us to our true selves as Sartrean freedom and authenticity.
Chanel has offered us in Edimbourg a fragrance which beckons to those we desire with the words written by Franz Kafka to his lover in Letters to Milena; “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.”
As I once said to Jean Genet upon first meeting him after a mad dash across a sniper alley to reach a café that served the best strawberry crepes in the world, in reply to his observation “I hear you do this every day, steal breakfast from Death”, it’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.
Perfumes tell stories composed of invisible molecules borne on the winds, conjured to life by the magician’s art of chemistry. This particular story reimagines masculinity and femininity in terms of Jean Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast, with secondary intertexts and references including Angela Carter’s version of Red Riding Hood in The Company of Wolves and its film starring Amanda Seyfried as linked myths, and Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake as reimagined in terms of Freudian horror in the Aronofsky film Black Swan starring Natalie Portman.
Edimbourg opens with a bracing alpine Juniper which bears a mentholated Fernet- Branca amaro character as a sign of its barbershop heritage, tangy citrus undertones which sing its chorus, paired with a smoky resinous cypress which recalls both campfires and the monastic cleanliness of incense, made beautiful and strange by its supporting cast of frankincense and cloves.
Remote apothecary spices linger at the edge of awareness through the progression of Edimbourg’s unfolding of intention structured in time as a song of wildness and triumphant love.
Next unfold the sumptuous midnotes; cedar with its cues of cleanliness and hope of hidden treasures to be found within its bearer, associations from wardrobe trunks and closets, which extends the forest references of the initial cypress, paired with a smoky, peaty vetiver of brooding green darkness which plays the same role for the juniper, which dance to the tune of an evanescent dry lavender, another cleanliness cue and a soap reference, which recalls the windswept heaths overlooking trackless wilderness.
As the curtain of the third act rises we are offered the spectacle of a gorgeous pas de deux of vanilla and musk, like the White and Black Swans freed from the limits of their forms as abstract ideas of dyadic performative roles and identities, which each contain the other as well as define their limits and interfaces, a transposition of the male-female dialectic to an interior space within the same flesh. The vanilla is a thing of light, home, safety, femininity as mother and nurturer, which recalls childhood smells of baked confections; the musk a thing of darkness, wildness, transgression, femininity as hunter and protector like the Sekhmet or lioness aspect of the Eqyptian cat goddess who is also a mother figure as Maat, as interrogated by Margaret Atwood brilliantly in her novel Cat’s Eye, but is also typified as figural masculinity as a point of gender convergence. Transposed to the masculine sphere the White and Black Swans form identifications with the Huntsman and the Wolf of Red Riding Hood; parallel gendered representations of domesticity as provider and protector and of wildness.
Behind the mask of its delicious vanilla lies the intoxicating fathomless darkness of its musk, rich and spicy, a fistful of truffles fresh from the earth, dangerous, forbidden, and irresistible. Edimbourg’s vanilla is a game of hide and seek in a formal hedge maze, ravishing beauty and monstrous desire pursuing each other to a place of secret joys at its heart. Edimbourg’s musk balances the scales with a complex and multilayered animality which recalls both the leather of saddles and the cashmere-silk of mink fur; like inhaling a beast one has pursued into its cave or ripping a lovers clothes off to bury ones face in their secrets.
One notices that with Edimbourg Polge defines masculinity in contrast and complementarity with femininity, in an interrogation of identities of sex and gender in terms of Jungian anima-animus interdependence using the traditional three stages of perfume as a theatrical device to lead his audience along a ritual labyrinth path from thesis to antithesis and finally to synthesis, and using pairs of opposites at every step which reference mythic and archetypal figures, images, and allegories, in a Hegelian dialectics of gendered identities as subversion, reimagination, and transformation. Here is an art of revolution as a mythic and Existential hero’s journey to wholeness.
As to character and the roles it offers us to play, Edimbourg suggests both Red Hot Riding Hood as a flirtatious and sly trickster goddess who in her theriomorphic form as a fox lures her playmates beyond all hope of rescue to her realm of unknowns where possibilities of becoming human await discovery, and the fierce-bearded and feral huntsman and his form as a wolf of vast hungers who masquerade as each other; wild things of unfettered desires who can match each other’s daring.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Herein is bottled the wildness of nature, and the wildness within ourselves.
What principles of action can be drawn from these examples from my life of how human beings can learn to see Beauty and use it as a power of poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation of our possibilities of being, meaning, and value?
As I wrote in my post of April 11 2025, Poetry Month: Poetic Vision as Reimagination and Transformation of Our Possibilities of Becoming Human; April 11 2025 Poetry Month: Poetic Vision as Reimagination and Transformation of Our Possibilities of Becoming Human; Here in five acts as in a theatrical performance of myself do I offer my thoughts on Poetry Day, with an autobiography in poems, best poetry lists, and an example of my writing process.
Do write a poem of one’s own to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, every day if possible; it’s a tool for processing the experience of life and for creating meaning and connection.
Act One
A definition of terms, or What is Poetry?
First before all must be the true names of things.
Words matter. They can divide us, and they can unite us. Words can exalt and defile; they can shape our images and possibilities of becoming human and create or limit the worlds to which we can aspire, they can replace stones we hurl at one another and heal the pathology of our disconnectedness.
Always treasure words, for they represent the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and harbour imaginal creative power. We bear them forward as memories, histories, identities, like the shells of fantastic sea creatures; sounds which are analogies of form or what Gaston Bachelard called coquilles au parole.
So also do they bear us forward, and await their moment of wakefulness as seeds of becoming.
Act Two
Being an Apology for my digressive ars poetica; my writing style is idiosyncratic and strange, but so am I.
Once I sailed on the Lake of Dreams, was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision; and in such visions I fell into a sea of words, images, songs, histories, layered and interconnected with one another like a web of reflections and the echoes of voices lost in time, a wilderness of mirrors which capture and distort and extend ourselves infinitely in all directions.
Here is a shadow self of our histories which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tale and tail, legacies from which we must emerge to create ourselves anew and those which we cannot abandon without losing who we are.
Here my intertexts are manifest, seize and shake me with tumultuous voices and untrustworthy purposes, for where do our histories end and we begin?
We cannot escape each other, my shadows and I.
Act Three
An offering, ephemeral as memories borne by perfume and soaring on the wind, up into the gaps of reality through the gates of our dreams, to the Infinite, free from the flags of our skin, of which only echoes and reflections remain, etched upon our histories by the lightning of illumination to balance against the terror of our nothingness.
Sounds and Echoes
Once there was a sound
Without a shell to echo it
Not the vast roar and thunder
Of the sea
And her moonstruck tides
Chaos and the birth of universes
Undulating with the splendor of life
In all our thousands of myriads
Limitless possibilities of becoming
Dance with the Impossible in rapture and terror
Hope and despair, faith in each other as solidarity of action
Versus the pathology of our disconnectedness
And the lightning shatters us with fracture and disruption,
Sublimes the chasms of darkness we are lost in
A negation which is also a gift
Opening spaces of free creative play
Such is the embrace of death as liberation
From the limits of our form,
The flaws of our humanity,
And the brokenness of the world.
We escape the spirals of our shell
Soar among celestial spheres
Become exalted and defiled
Free and nameless as wild things
I am sound and echo
Abandoning the shell I have sung myself free from
Where am I now?
Act Four
Manifestoes of Action; poetry as revolutionary struggle.
As I wrote in my post of October 14 2021, On Art as Poetic Vision, Transgression, Seizure of Power, Reimagination, and Transformation: a Manifesto; Why do I write?
I offer here a manifesto of art as poetic vision, reimagination and transformation in the contexts of the performance of identities and in the guerilla theatre of political action and revolutionary struggle.
Art is transgressive when it challenges and violates our ideas of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, it is a seizure of power and refusal to submit to authorized identities which confers freedom and autonomy through becoming self-created and self-owned, Unconquered and beyond subjugation by force and control, and it is poetic vision as Surrealist reimagination and transformation when it depicts and guides our passage through the labyrinth of time, history, memory, and the falsification of our captured and distorted images in the wilderness of mirrors, lies, and illusions, to enact our rapture and exaltation, our transcendence into realms of dream and of vision wherein rules do not apply and when it seizes us with truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Art is intended to question and transform the rules and substance of human being, meaning, and value; to discover within the boundaries and interfaces, the silent and empty places of change and the limitless adaptive potential of systems, of unknowns, disconnects, misaligned juxtaposition and strange angles of view, new possibilities of becoming human.
I first understood the power of the unknown as a force of liberation as a boy whose bedroom wall was a collage of Bosch prints, curious and strange, which I would project myself into as dream gates. William S. Burroughs, beatnik friend of my father the counterculture theatre director, would show up for dinner without warning and tell weird fairytales into the night; he also drew curious figures into the collage of heavens and hells, and here was a definition of art and of its purpose; transformation of the possibilities of becoming human through reimagination and ecstatic poetic vision.
This is why I claim as the purpose of my writing to incite, provoke, and disturb; change and growth originate in disruption, fracture, and chaotization, and in the four primary duties of a citizen; to question, mock, expose, and challenge authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
This free space of play, of the unknown as unclaimed space and the adaptive potential of a system, whose boundaries like the known shores on our maps of becoming human frame the range of choices and act as authorized identities and an intrinsic limit on freedom as future possibilities, remains outside and beyond all limits and systems of knowledge, like Gödel’s Theorem; no matter how much we learn and shift the boundaries of the known universe, the Infinite remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance.
If so the task of becoming human involves Bringing the Chaos; reimagination and transformation, the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
As I wrote in my post of December 21 2022, We Are the Toys of Santa’s Workshop, and We Are Made of Words; On this day of winter solstice, darkest of all our days, and possibly as democracy itself begins to die from lack of faith as Tinkerbell warns us with the ritual command to clap our hands lest the faeries die, as Russia and China test our will and threaten to unleash global nuclear war and the fall of civilization, as the survival or extinction of our species hangs in the balance under threats of war, pandemic, and ecological catastrophe, as the Pentagon on this day only one year ago issued rebukes without accountability as tacit authorization to the fascist infiltrated and subverted military units on the brink of mutiny and civil war, it is good to remember who we are, who we have chosen to be, and who we wish to become.
Now is the time to rage against the dying of the light.
When those who would enslave us come for any one of us, let them find an America and a humankind not subjugated with learned helplessness or divided by exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united in solidarity and resistance.
And in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free.
Owning our stories as the songs of ourselves is a primary human act in which we become autonomous and self-created beings; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
The first question we must ask of our stories is this; whose story is this?
If we imagine the processes of our construction as a vast workshop like that of Santa’s elves, I believe that the parts of our assemblage are words and the rules for using them to create meaning as grammar.
As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake, a work which he began in 1922 with the German publication of the TLP and which occupied the rest of his life, as a response like that of Yeats in The Second Coming and of T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland to the collapse of civilization in three successive waves of mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
He envisioned a united humankind wherein war is no longer possible, a world without emperors and kings or the carceral states and colonialist empires they rule with their silly little flags and terrible divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game.
Joyce was a master of languages and chose this as his instrument for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and for the rebirth of civilization.
And this love of languages as free creative play in which we ourselves are the artifact and product of our art is what caught my attention and created my teenage identification with Joyce. For I love languages and had grown up with three voices; English as my primary and home language, though shaped by immersion in the rhythms and phrases of the King James Bible and the Dutch language of the Reformed Church which surrounded me in the town where I was raised. Languages are a hobby of mine, often grounded in reading books which have immeasurably shaped my own writing and speaking style and turn of phrase.
Chinese is my second language from the age of nine, study which included Traditional Chinese inkbrush calligraphy and conversation with my teacher of martial arts, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and much else, who spoke, in addition to superb British English full of Anglo-Indian and Shanghailander idiom, the Wu dialect of Shanghai and the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, as well as Mandarin, Japanese, and other languages, having served in the Chinese military from 1920 when he joined the Whampoa Military Academy through the Second World War, escaping the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in 1969 when my father arranged for him to teach me. He was a window into other worlds and times to me, was Sifu Dragon.
As my third language I studied French in school rather than English from seventh grade through high school. This Defining Moment bears interrogation; during seventh grade I took the AP English test given to high school seniors for university credit and tested out of English classes through senior year of high school. This was among tests arranged by my parents and teachers who conspired to force me into high school two years early, and had tried with math the previous year, which I absolutely refused but for one class, where I traded seventh grade English for Freshman French literature and language, a chance I fell upon with ravenous delight.
The French teacher was a blonde goddess, and here imagine the reporter Rita Skeeter played by Miranda Richardson who corners Harry Potter in the broom closet in The Goblet of Fire, who motivated her students by offering a trip to Paris, with her, after graduation from high school for the best senior French student each year; competition for this honor was fierce, and I was a very, very good student. Thanks for the soft landing in high school, Miss Starring.
Brazilian Portuguese was my fourth language, though limited to conversational proficiency, legacy of a formative trip in the summer of my fourteenth year just before starting high school.
It was during that summer, my first solo foreign travel, to train as a fencer with a friend from the tournament circuit for the Pan American Games planned to be held there the following year, that I witnessed a crime against humanity, the massacre of street children who had swarmed a food truck, a trauma and disruptive event followed by weeks in which I helped them evade the police bounty hunters who ruled the streets as apex predators.
From the moment I saw what the guards were shooting at beyond the walls of the palace in which I was a guest, I chose my side, and I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
We all seek paths of healing from trauma, and of hope and the redemptive power of love in transforming the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. I found such paths in literature as poetic vision, and in our languages and our stories as instruments with which we can operate directly on our psyche and take control of our adaptation and the evolution of human consciousness as an unfolding of intention. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and for this primary insight I owe the effects of reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions. I had begun my search for meaning and my Freshman year of high school by reading Anthony Burgess’ Napoleon Symphony, a novel which questioned my hero Napoleon and illuminated two of my other heroes Beethoven and Klimt, then turned to the study of language itself; S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, and Wittgenstein’s TLP, before discovering Joyce.
James Joyce’s linguistics scholarship was immense; he took Italian as his third academic language, taught himself Dano-Norwegian as a teenager to read his adored Ibsen in the original, and his modern languages degree cites Latin, Italian, French, German, and Norwegian. He loved languages and studied them as a game, as do I; his adult fluency included Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Russian, Finnish, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Modern Greek.
All of this went into his masterpiece Finnegans Wake, written in a private language filled with games and experiments of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety according to the principle of Wittgenstein that because all rules are arbitrary they can be reimagined and changed at will and ourselves with them, a language densely layered with literary allusions and references, loaned and invented words, and of signs with multiple meanings like the paths of a labyrinth. You need a working knowledge of several languages to get the jokes; no wonder I loved him.
I’m not sure it’s intended to communicate anything, so coded and laden with puzzles is his new language; like the notation for the principles of a system by which to create and order the universe. He spent the rest of his life searching for the lost runes able to break and reforge the oaths and bindings of existence, to renew ourselves and our world; perhaps he found them.
Though I may claim no such realization of a guiding vision of our limitless possibilities of becoming human nor Quixotic quest to create and affirm that which is human in us as he, Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake demonstrated for me a great truth which has illuminated my understanding ever since; we are made of our ideas and of our stories, and forged with our words and our languages.
We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?
Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?
Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2020, The Transformative Power of Art: a Manifesto; The transformative power of art, its ability to reframe our ideas about self and other, to shift boundaries, reassign values, reclaim history and identity from silence, erasure, marginalization, and the authorization of inequalities of power and divisions of exclusionary otherness; these are among the vital functions which make art a primary human and social activity.
Art as poetic vision precedes and parallels politics as a means of changing our civilization and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; it represents a power held by autonomous individuals and communities against the tyranny of state force and control. Politics is a social art which is primary to our interdependent human nature and processes of becoming human. Through our words, images, and performance we can question, mock, expose, and challenge authority and incite, provoke, and disturb others in bringing transformational change to the systems and structures within which we are embedded, and I hope liberate us from them.
Art is life, for it involves us personally and directly in processes of adaptive growth and in renegotiation of our social contracts and relationships with others, both personal and political, and informs and motivates the performance of our identities.
If we are caught in a rigged game, we must change the rules and terms of struggle. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, authority delegitimized, traditional systems and structures interrogated, limits transgressed, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities of becoming human discovered.
We must question, expose, mock, subvert, transgress, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. For there is no just authority.
Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As I wrote in my post of December 30 2021, The Year in Review; In these last days of 2021, my thoughts turn to the year in review; to Defining Moments, both for myself as a witness of history and for the world as informing, motivating, and shaping forces of human being, meaning, and value and of memory, history, and identity, the stories of which we are made, and to the causes I have championed and the threats to our future possibilities of becoming human which remain.
Herein I write as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and in the role Foucault described as a truth teller in reference to parrhesia and the four primary duties of a citizen; to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty proclaims, my intent is to provoke, incite, and disturb, and I hope that you have found my daily journal useful as a resource for international antifascist action and resistance, revolutionary struggle, liberation and democracy movements, forging networks of allyship and solidarity, founding autonomous zones, and seizures of power both personal and political.
During my years as a Forensics teacher and debate coach, I began the first day of each new year with a demonstration of purpose. On my desk I would place a solid base with the words; “This is a fulcrum”. Across it I would set a teeter totter saying; “It balances a lever.” And finally; “When your parents ask you what you’re learning in Forensics, tell them you’re learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.” Such is my hope now for us all.
Truth telling as an ars poetica is about the regenerative and transformational power of truth in the sense that Keats used when he spoke of beauty, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”
But truth telling is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky. On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
Act Five
A benediction
May yours be days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
Act Six
A coda in the form of Modern American and World Literatures reading lists, which like all reading lists that claim to represent a canon of literature is nothing less than a set of authorized identities.
Here I have disambiguated Modern American Poetry from authors who cannot be represented among the six ethnicities to make it easier for people to find authors who speak for them and offer spaces to grow into, as the original purpose of my lists, which eventually included 27 national literatures, was for choice reading for high school students free from state and school board control or any criteria other than quality.
Here also I offer an autobiography in poems, entitled The Grief of Influence, my choices of best poetry of the last couple years, and an explication on my writing process with examples.
The Grief of Influence: an autobiography in poems
We may tell our stories through the works we have cherished and the circumstances we discovered and made them our own, as voices in which we share and which can speak both to and for us; identity is a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation to change across time.
This is especially true regarding works in which the thoughts of others across vast epochs of time, cultural schema, paradigms and topologies of human being, meaning, and value have become our own through reading, described so deliciously in the title of the foundational book by Heather Clark on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Grief of Influence.
First was Gary Snyder’s Smokey the Bear Sutra, a talisman of protective magic sung by my mother and others when police fired on student protestors in the most terrible incident of state terror since the Civil War, Bloody Thursday People’s Park Berkeley 1969. I was nine, holding my mother’s hand, when I was hurled from my body by the concussive force wave of a police grenade and Most Sincerely Dead for moments while I stood outside of time and beheld myriads of possible futures. I returned to the sideral universe from my Awakening in my distraught mother’s arms and said; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but awakening from an illusion.”
Second must be the poem that fired my imagination and anchored how I constructed identity through romantic love with my partner Dolly, The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. I cast us into the roles of the tragic lovers as a past life when I discovered the poem at the age of twelve, as things began to change in my feelings about our relationship during a sixth grade year mostly devoted to reading the classic study of folklore, Frasier’s Golden Bough. We created an elaborate backstory for our romance of shared lives across centuries from shared dreams and historical research to verify them. Above all was the idea that we transcend our moment in time and the limits of our form, grounded in the discovery that we shared the same dreams.
Third was a mysterious book which appeared on our doorstep during my seventh grade year, bound in leather and hand written in strange inks in Chinese, Japanese, and English, of classical Taoist and Zen poetry annotated as a book of strategy for a game I later discovered was Go, almost certainly written by my teacher of martial and other arts whom I called Sifu Dragon. I began studying with him when I was nine until 1986 when he went into seclusion at the age of 84, and though I had many other teachers he was a second father to me and the poetry he introduced me to remains a primary influence; that summer I went to Japan to walk Basho’s Narrow Road and see where he wrote his poems.
Fourth is Nietzsche’s beautiful epic poem of rebellion against authority, Thus Spake Zarathustra, which I adopted in eighth grade as a counter-text to the Bible. It was an unspeakable joy to discover at long last someone who spoke for me, and in my Dutch Reformed Church town lost in time an hour’s drive from San Francisco, ruled by a church allied with the South African Apartheid regime and where I witnessed what I hope was the last witch burning in America as a child, I used to quote Zarathustra to fellow school children who quoted the Bible to me. No gods and no masters, indeed.
Fifth was the poem I recited to my peers at as a Freshman in high school, Invictus by William Ernest Henley. 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. 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.
Sixth is James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, designed as a labyrinth of transformation to forge a new humankind. As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake. In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game. In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions in World War One. Languages are a hobby of mine, and I have tried to inhabit the thoughts of others through their languages wherever I go, though like Joyce I have not yet found the code of meaning which unifies humankind and may be able to help us escape the flags of our skin and the legacies of our history.
If we can call the plain speech of our everyday lives poetry as I learned from my friend Susan Sontag, here I signpost the influence of Shakespeare on my language as I spent most of my Freshman year at university speaking in iambic pentameter, and spent much of the next two summers as an actor at the Renaissance Faire at Blackpoint Forest half an hour from my home in Sonoma; The Tempest remains my favorite, after Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare I regard now as the Humanist half of modern English with the theocratic tyranny of William Tyndale’s beautiful King James Bible in which I was immersed as a child in a town of people whose mouths were full of thees and thous, and its rhythms and curious turns of phrase have stayed with me.
Last among my influences I count the visionary poetry of Blake, and then Rumi as reimagined by Coleman Barks which was my gateway to scholarship of Sufi poetry as I turned thirty. In Srinagar, Kashmir that was, where I sailed on the Lake of Dreams and was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision.
Here follows my very personal lists of best poetry for American and World literatures; but this is an absurd idea, for a poem which is useful to one person may not be useful to another, and will bear a weight of different dreams, meanings, and values.
Any text, including the stories of our lives, history, memory, identity, is a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, ephemeral and in constant and recursive processes of change.
By what possible criteria, then, can we establish normalities and standards which cross the immense boundaries between us to become interfaces?
In this I can speak only to what has been useful to myself in the construction of identity over my lifetime.
Each of us must choose and create such lists of immortal classics and life changing informing and motivating sources.
One might begin such a search from here, with the works which have become truths written into my flesh.
May you discover truths of your own.
How does Beauty Help Us Survive?
When the Abyss looks back at me, Beauty can restore the balance. My thanks to Schopenhauer for solving the riddle Nietzsche posed for us in Beyond Good and Evil.
We cannot know the future, for the possibilities are limitless. But we know this; the universe cares nothing for us, there is no Great Plan, no reward for goodness nor punishment for evil, nor good or evil of any kind, for these are human words and cannot exist without human deeds to make them real.
This is the terror of our nothingness in a universe without imposed meaning or value, no Authority either beneficent or tyrannical to create and order ourselves and our lives. But the reverse is also true; in such a universe of total freedom, wherein the only human being, meaning, and value are those we ourselves create, we hold the only powers that exist and can make us real and true, of poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our choices about how to be human together, of love to transcend the limits of our form, realize the truths of others, and to liberate us from hierarchies of belonging and otherness, of hope to free us from systems of oppression, from tyranny and terror, and from the state as embodied violence in the primary defining human act of refusal to submit and granting us the will to claw our way out of the ruins to make yet another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival, and of faith in each other as solidarity of action and a United Humankind in a free society of equals in which we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights.
On this day and for several months now American patriots gathered in mass action and protest at our capitals and palaces of government throughout the nation, against the capture of the state by a fascist regime of tyranny and terror, the subversion of democracy and destruction of its values and institutions, against vote suppression and the theft of citizenship from Black Americans through gerrymandering, against the ethnic cleansing of Latin Americans by the ICE white supremacist terror force, and against the federal Occupation of our sanctuary cities and bastions of democracy.
This day and for all our days to come, let us reach out to each other and hold fast our line against the darkness. And with each such act of solidarity and refusal to submit to the force and control of an Authority of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, we remain Unconquered.
This is the beauty of human beings; to refuse to submit and cease not, and abandon not our fellows, as the Oath of the Resistance goes which Jean Genet sore me to in Beirut 1982, paraphrased in Paris 1940 from the one he had taken as a Legionnaire in 1918 for such allies as he could gather, and I now offer all of you; he said it was the finest thing he ever stole.
Among the last words we exchanged were my question, Now that I know the world is a lie, how am I to live? To which he replied with a line from his great novel Miracle of the Rose; “Live with grandeur”.
What shall we do with our lives, whatever may remain of them, and how shall we live if we are to become human?
Live with grandeur, my friends.
Susan Sontag, a reading list
Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Susan Sontag
March 22 2025 Creating Spaces of Refuge, Serenity, Beauty, and Reflection To Balance the Trauma, Grief, and Horror of the Criminal Trump Regime of White Supremacist Terror and Theocratic Patriarchal Sexual Terror, His Performances of Tyranny In the White Man’s House As Atrocity Exhibits and Theatre of Cruelties, In This Year of the Fall of America and the Capture of the State As Vichy America Under the Fourth Reich: the Gardens at Dollhouse Park
Epicurean Delights, my Pinterest board of over two thousand recipes; I make one unique meal every day, when I can, and this is my recipe file for ideas which I personalize.
The Novices of Sais, Novalis, Paul Klee (Illustrator)
Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche
The Lost Gold of Exploded Stars: complete poems, Georg Trakl
Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, Paul Celan
Conjurations: poems of Sarah Kirsch
Britain & Ireland
The King James Bible, William Tyndale
The Tempest, Midsummer Nights Dream, Shakespeare
Complete Poems and Selected Letters, John Keats
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Kublai Khan, Coleridge
Complete William Blake
Lord Byron: The Major Works, McGann ed
John Milton: The Major Works, Goldberg & Orgel eds
Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, James Joyce
Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996, Seamus Heaney
Selected Poems & Three Plays, Yeats, Rosenthal ed.
Selected Poems, Prose Occasions 1951-2006, Thomas Kinsella
Crow, Tales From Ovid, Cave Birds: an Alchemical Romance, Birthday Letters, Howls & Whispers, Gaudette, The Oresteia, Prometheus on his Crag, Ted Hughes
Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, Ali Smith
China
Bright Moon, White Clouds: Selected Poems of Li Po, Li Po, J.P. Seaton
(Translator)
The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, Du Fu, David Hinton (Translator)
Eastern Europe
Chanson Dada: Selected Poems, Tristan Tzara
New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, Czesław Miłosz
France
The Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire
Rimbaud: complete works, Rimbaud, Schmidt ed
Treasures of the Night: collected poems, Jean Genet
Verlaine: Selected Poems
Pierre Reverdy, Caws ed
Selected Writing, Apollonaire
Mallarme: Prose and Poetry, Caws ed
Stone Lyre: Poems of Rene Char, René Char, Nancy Naomi Carlson (Translator), The Word as Archipelago The Word as Archipelago, René Char, Robert Baker (Translator), Selected Poems, René Char, Mary Ann Caws (Editor)
India
Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems, Mīrābāī, Robert Bly & Jane Hirshfield (Translators)
Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, Miller trans
Collected Poems, Jeet Thayil
Golden Gate, Vikram Seth
Islamic Peoples
Concerto al-Quds, Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs, Adonis
Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, Mahmoud Darwish
Rumi: the Big Red Book, Coleman Barks
The Rub’ai yat of Omar Khayyam, Stubb & Avery eds
Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths: Poems, Sholeh Wolpé
The Book of Mansur Hallaj: Selected Poems & The Tawasin, Mansur al-Hallaj,
Paul Smith (Translator)
Iraqi: Selected Poems, Iraqi, Paul Smith (Translator)
Divan of Hafez Shirazi, Hafez, Paul Smith (Translation)
Divan of Sadi, Saadi, Paul Smith (Translator)
Japan
Basho’s Narrow Road, Sato trans
Matsuo Bashō, Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa, The Path of Flowering Thorn: The Life and Poetry of Yosa Buson, Makoto Ueda
The Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda, Sumita Oyama
River of Stars: Selected Poems, Yosano Akiko
I Wait for the Moon: 100 Haiku of Momoko Kuroda, Momoko Kuroda, Abigail Friedman (Translator)
Jewish People
The Fullness of Time: Poems by Gershom Scholem
The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Alter ed
Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch
Poems 1962-2020, Louise Glück
Latin America
Selected Poems, Jorge Borges
Five Decades: 1925-1970, Pablo Neruda
Selected Poems, Octavio Paz
Poems of Cesar Vallejo
Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 – 1972, Alejandra Pizarnik
Russia
Collected Poetry, Alexander Pushkin
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Scandinavia
Journeys in Dream and Imagination: The Hallucinatory Memoir of a Poet in a Coma, Artur Lundkvist, Carlos Fuentes (Introduction)
Selected Poems, Tomas Transtromer
Spain
The Selected Poems, Federico García Lorca
Best American Poetry exclusive of that on lists by ethnicity and region
The Language of Life, Bill Moyers ed.
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself, Jerome Loving
Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, Jim Perlman (Editor)
Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein
Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, Lisa Cole Ruddick
Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, James R. Mellow
The Poetry of Robert Frost, Robert Frost, Latham ed
Robert Frost: A Life, Jay Parini
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (edited by Thomas H. Johnson), Emily Dickinson
The Passion of Emily Dickinson, by Judith Farr
Complete Poems, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition 8 Volume Set (Ronald Schuchard Editor), T.S. Eliot
Dove Descending: A Journey into T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Thomas Howard
T.S. Eliot’s the Waste Land (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations), Harold Bloom
T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Lyndall Gordon
The Complete Poems 1927-1979, Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, Susan McCabe
W.H. Auden; poems selected by John Fuller
W.H. Auden: a commentary, John Fuller
Collected Poems, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (Bloom’s Major Poets) Harold Bloom ed
Opus Posthumus, Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Harold Bloom
Collected Poems, 1912-1944, Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion, Helen in Egypt, Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall and Advent, HERmione, Palimpsest, White Rose and the Red, The Sword Went Out to Sea: Synthesis of a Dream, (as Delia Alton), H.D.
The H.D. Book, Robert Duncan
The Dream Songs, John Berryman
A, Complete Short Poetry, Le Style Apollinaire: The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire, Bottom: On Shakespeare, Prepositions +: the Collected Critical Essays, Louis Zukofsky
Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, Mark Scroggins
The Collected Poems, The Bell Jar, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
(Karen V. Kukil Editor), Sylvia Plath
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Heather Clark
Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Judith Kroll
Selected Poems, 1945–2005, Robert Creely
Collected Poems 1947-1997, Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems, Deliberate Prose – Essays 1952 to 1995, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996, The Fall of America Journals, 1965–1971, Alan Ginsberg
The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, Jason Shinder ed
I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, Bill Morgan
Revolutionary Letters 50th Anniversary Edition, Spring and Autumn Annals, The Poetry Deal, Diane di Prima
Mountains and Rivers Without End, The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, Gary Snyder
A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems, I Praise My Destroyer: Poems, Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire, Diane Ackerman
Selected Poems, Michael McClure
The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton: A Biography, Diane Wood Middlebrook
The Maximus Poems, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems (George F. Butterick Editor), Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews, Charles Olsen
What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson’s “The King-Fishers”, Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography, Ralph Maud
The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition, Stephen Fredman
Ground Work I: Before the War, Ground Work II: In the Dark, Selected Poems, Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan
Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, Bertholf editor
Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness, Peter O’Leary
On Opening the Dreamway, James Hillman
A Poet’s Mind: Collected Interviews with Robert Duncan 1960-1985, Wagstaff
An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle, Michael Duncan
The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, Amy Clampitt
The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons: Volume 1 (1955-1977), Volume 2 (1978-2005), Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues, A.R. Ammons
The Collected Poems, New & Selected Essays, Tesserae: Memories & Suppositions, Denise Levertov
A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov, Donna Hollenberg
The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia
Hypodermic Light: The Poetry of Philip Lamantia and the Question of Surrealism, Steven Frattali
The Dead and the Living, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002, Stag’s Leap: Poems, Arias, Sharon Olds
Selected Poems, Robert Bly
Collected Poems: 1950-2012, Adrienne Rich
The Problem of the Many, Timothy Donnelly
Averno, The Triumph of Achilles, Faithful and Virtuous Night, Proofs and Theories, American Originality, Louise Gluck
The Lost Spells, Robert Macfarlane
Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015, Just Kids, M Train, Year of the Monkey, Devotion, Patti Smith
November 14 2025 Defining Moments: A Confession, and Some Thoughts on My Birthday Regarding Poetic Vision as the Reimagination and Transformation of Ourselves; How Do We Create Human Being, Meaning, and Value?
Heroes hold up a mirror of our best selves; among myriads of future possibilities of becoming human, such figures provide spaces to grow into. Like our friends and lovers, we choose them as instruments of our self creation because they represent who we wish to become. Beyond their usefulness as informing, motivating, and shaping sources, those we have chosen to help us become who we wish to be also reveal to us our values, and the things we wish to make real.
Rosa Luxemburg is a voice from our past, but one which speaks to our future, and to the choices each of us must face in our lives now.
Today we remember the anniversary of her January 15 1919 assassination, who saw what others could not and died for the chance to make it real.
May we one day redeem that hope for a better humankind.
What is the historical significance of her assassination?
Only one year ago this month, America inaugurated the figurehead of the Fourth Reich as our President for the second time, a consequence of both Russian election rigging through propaganda and dark money and of ideological fracture within the Democratic Party which abandoned the whole of its Left elements, universal healthcare, abolition of police, the Green New Deal, and our universal human rights with complicity in the genocide of the Palestinians, to shift center-right in the vain attempt to win Republicans who do not love Trump and all he represents as white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror. I warned of the dangers of ideological fracture and of the uselessness of appeasement and collaboration throughout the election, but America and the Democratic Party did not choose to listen.
While the only force of opposition to the capture of the state by fascists was put in check by ideological fracture and division and the Collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party as represented by Kommandant Kamala’s Great Wall of Silence on Palestine, exactly as the Social Democrats were removed as a blocking force to the rise of Hitler, Republicans voted for a white supremacist Nazi revivalist and sexual terrorist as our Rapist In Chief because they wanted impunity and permission to do the same.
America, there is no accommodation with or appeasement of those who would enslave us and do not regard us as fellow human beings. The crimes of the Second Trump Regime are a result of such flawed strategies.
How is this relevant to the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg?
Because it is exactly what happened in Germany when the Left was divided over the issue of peace and World War One, removing the only blocking force to the rise of fascism.
As Mark Jones, “assistant professor at University College Dublin and a leading expert on the German revolution of 1918-19 that culminated in the murders” is quoted in an article in The Guardian covering the 100th anniversary of her murder by the German state in Berlin; “Of course, the brutal and sudden end to her story raises the question of what would have happened if she had survived,” said Jones. “At its most advanced and powerful, the Rosa Luxemburg myth claims that had she lived, National Socialism may have never taken control of Germany.”
That was a view held by many at the demonstration. “I do believe the Nazis might not have come to power and history might well have taken a different turn had Rosa been able to fulfil her wishes,” said Kit Aastrup, a retired social worker who had taken a bus from Aarhus in Denmark to join the march. She wore a Russian ushanka ear-flap hat, embossed with a hammer and sickle.”
Many and strange are the Rashomon Gate Events of history, and the possible futures which they destroy and create. This event is also an example of the dangers of ideological fracture; like the destruction of the IWW in America, wherein the First World War and the question of peace also divided and brought to ruin the only blocking force to the rise of fascism though here only temporarily, a strategy of counter-revolution later used against many social reform movements during the McCarthy era and the Vietnam War in America including the Students For A Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, the Black Planters, and really anyone who questioned and challenged elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
As I warned in my post on this anniversary two years ago; This process is now repeating itself under the hammer of the Gaza War and the state making us all complicit in ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity; like myself, anyone who cannot vote for such a war criminal is a vote lost to opposing Trump’s recapture of the state in our next election which now seems inevitable.
How can we escape the consequences of this dilemma? If we disavow Israel and use Boycott, Sanction, and Divestiture to end this humanitarian crisis, and with it our pathetic and ruinous abandonment of the ideas of democracy and universal human rights, and our historic role as a guarantor of our humanity and liberty, this future may change, and with it the centuries of war and tyranny to come.
So I wrote two years ago today, and we all know how that worked out as the Democratic Party first removed Biden from the election, not as a war criminal but as an imbecile, then replaced him with overseer of the police state Harris who maintained the Party’s Wall of Silence on the question of Gaza and the genocide of the Palestinians.
One would think Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” would have put the final nail in the coffin of appeasement and collaboration, but here we are, one year past the inauguration of a man who modeled himself on Hitler, literally as he aped his gestures from newsreels of Nazi rallies and according to an ex wife slept with Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible.
Under such imposed conditions of struggle, what can we learn from Rosa Luxemburg?
She taught us something through her actions about how to be human; I refer not to the courage of her resistance to subjugation by authority, nor to the magnificent fearlessness of her role as a truth teller in the questioning, exposure, mocking, and challenge of authority, though these things are also true; but to the selflessness of her compassion in revolutionary struggle for the liberation of humankind and of the redemptive power of love.
This is our path to victory over fascism; let us defend the liberty of each and every one of us as if it were the liberty of all of us, for only love as solidarity of action can free us from the Wahnerian Ring of fear, power, and force.
None of us are too powerless to seize and shake the mighty and cast them down from their thrones, too voiceless to cry havoc and fill the chasms of emptiness with defiance and songs of resistance, too flawed and broken to lift others up.
We humans are beautiful not in spite of our flaws, but because of them. This is the great secret of the power of transformation; it is the flaws of our humanity, the brokenness of the world, and the wounds of our survival which open us to the pain of others and confers transformative vision, reconnection, and change as rebirth.
Each of us who in refusal to submit become Unconquered and free are Autonomous Zones, wherein nothing is Forbidden. We cherish and reverence figures of liberty like Rosa Luxemburg because they show us the way through the gates of our prisons into freedom and the ownership of ourselves; and we become such figures for others in our turn. Thus the tide of our history becomes unstoppable, a chain of lives reaching into the future which changes and liberates whomever it touches.
What does it ask of us, this interdependence and force of history, as agents of Change and Transformation? Here I return to my Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty:
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, normality with transgression, and division with solidarity.
Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.
Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious inclusion and diversity, as a democratic and a free society of equals.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As written by Rosa Luxemburg on the eve of her assassination; “The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built…Order reigns in Berlin! You stupid henchmen! Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already ‘raise itself with a rattle’ and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I shall be!”
As Rosa Luxemburg wrote from prison in a letter to Mathilde Wurm on December 28, 1916; “To be human is the main thing, and that means to be strong and clear and of good cheer in spite and because of everything, for tears are the preoccupation of weakness. To be human means throwing one’s life “on the scales of destiny” if need be, to be joyful for every fine day and every beautiful cloud—oh, I can’t write you any recipes how to be human, I only know how to be human … The world is so beautiful in spite of the misery and would be even more beautiful if there were no half-wits and cowards in it.”
As written by Marcello Musto in Jacobin; “In August 1893, when the chair called on her to speak at a session of the Zurich Congress of the Second International, Rosa Luxemburg made her way without hesitation through the crowd of delegates and activists packed into the hall. She was one of the few women present, still in the flush of youth, slight of build, and with a hip deformity that had forced her to limp since the age of five. The first impression she gave to those who saw her was of a frail creature indeed. But then, standing on a chair to make herself better heard, she soon captivated the whole audience with the skill of her reasoning and the originality of her positions.
In her view, the central demand of the Polish workers’ movement should not be an independent Polish state, as many had maintained. Poland was still under tripartite rule, divided between the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires; its reunification was proving difficult to achieve, and the workers should set their sights on objectives that would generate practical struggles in the name of particular needs.
In a line of argument that she would develop in the years to come, she attacked those who concentrated on national issues and warned that the rhetoric of patriotism would be used to play down class struggle and to push the social question into the background. There was no need to add “subjection to Polish nationality” to all the forms of oppression suffered by the proletariat, she argued.
Against the Current
The intervention at the Zurich Congress symbolized the whole intellectual biography of a woman who should be considered among the most significant exponents of twentieth-century socialism. Born a hundred fifty years ago, on March 5, 1871, in Zamość in Tsarist-occupied Poland, Rosa Luxemburg lived her whole life on the margins, grappling with multiple adversities and always swimming against the current. Of Jewish origin, suffering from a lifelong physical handicap, she moved to Germany at the age of twenty-seven and managed to obtain citizenship there through a marriage of convenience.
Being resolutely pacifist at the outbreak of the First World War, she was imprisoned several times for her ideas. She was a passionate enemy of imperialism during a new and violent period of colonial expansion. She fought against the death penalty in the midst of barbarism. And – a central dimension – she was a woman who lived in worlds inhabited almost exclusively by men.
She was often the only female presence, both at Zurich University, where she obtained a doctorate in 1897 with a thesis entitled The Industrial Development of Poland, and in the leadership of German Social Democracy. The party appointed her as the first woman to teach at its central cadre school — a task she performed in the years between 1907 and 1914, during which she published The Accumulation of Capitalism (1913) and worked on the uncompleted project Introduction to Political Economy (1925).
These difficulties were supplemented by her independent spirit and her autonomy — a virtue that often leads to trouble in left-wing parties too. Displaying a lively intelligence, she had the capacity to develop new ideas and to defend them, without awe and indeed with a disarming candor, before such figures as August Bebel and Karl Kautsky (who had had the formative privilege of direct contact with Engels).
Her aim was not to repeat Marx’s words over again, but to interpret them historically and, when necessary, to build further on them. To voice her own opinion freely and to express critical positions within the party was for her an inalienable right. The party had to be a space where different views could coexist, so long as those who joined it shared its fundamental principles.
Party, Strike, Revolution
Luxemburg successfully overcame the many obstacles facing her, and in the fierce debate following Eduard Bernstein’s reformist turn she became a well-known figure in the foremost organization of the European workers’ movement. Whereas, in his famous text The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy (1897–99), Bernstein had called on the party to burn its bridges with the past and to turn itself into a merely gradualist force, Luxemburg insisted in Social Reform or Revolution? (1898–99) that during every historical period “work for reforms is carried on only in the direction given it by the impetus of the last revolution.”
Those who sought to achieve in the “chicken coop of bourgeois parliamentarism” the changes that the revolutionary conquest of political power would make possible were not choosing “a more tranquil, surer and slower road to the same goal,” but rather “a different goal.” They had accepted the bourgeois world and its ideology.
Her aim was not to repeat Marx’s words over again, but to interpret them historically and, when necessary, to build further on them.
The point was not to improve the existing social order, but to build a completely different one. The role of the labor unions — which could wrest from the bosses only more favorable conditions within the capitalist mode of production — and the Russian Revolution of 1905 prompted some thoughts on the possible subjects and actions that might bring about a radical transformation of society.
In the book The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Union (1906), which analyzed the main events in vast areas of the Russian Empire, Luxemburg highlighted the key role of the broadest, mostly unorganized, layers of the proletariat. In her eyes, the masses were the true protagonists of history. In Russia the “element of spontaneity” — a concept that led some to accuse her of overestimating the class consciousness of the masses — had been important, and consequently the role of the party should not be to prepare the mass strike but to place itself “at the helm of the movement as a whole.”
For Luxemburg, the mass strike was “the living pulse-beat of the revolution” and, at the same time, “its most powerful driving wheel.” It was the true “mode of movement of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in the revolution.” It was not a single isolated action but the summation of a long period of class struggle.
Moreover, it could not be overlooked that “in the storm of the revolutionary period,” the proletariat was transformed in such a way that “even the highest good, life — not to speak of material well-being — ha[d] little value in comparison with the ideals of the struggle.” The workers gained in consciousness and maturity. The mass strikes in Russia had shown how, in such a period, the “ceaseless reciprocal action of the political and economic struggles” was such that the one could pass immediately into the other.
Communism Means Freedom and Democracy
On the question of organizational forms and, more specifically, the role of the party, Luxemburg was involved in another heated dispute during those years, this time with Lenin. In One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904), the Bolshevik leader defended the positions adopted at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, putting forward a conception of the party as a compact nucleus of professional revolutionaries, a vanguard whose task it was to lead the masses.
Luxemburg, by contrast, in Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy (1904), argued that an extremely centralized party set up a very dangerous dynamic of “blind obedience to the central authority.” The party should not stifle but develop the involvement of society, in order to achieve “the correct historical evaluation of forms of struggle.” Marx once wrote that “every step of the real movement is more important than dozens of programs.” And Luxemburg extended this into the claim that “errors made by a truly revolutionary labor movement are historically infinitely more fruitful and more valuable than the infallibility of the best of all possible central committees.”
This clash acquired still greater importance after the Soviet revolution of 1917, to which she offered her unconditional support. Worried by the events unfolding in Russia (beginning with the ways of tackling the land reform), she was the first in the communist camp to observe that “a prolonged state of emergency” would have a “degrading influence on society.”
In the posthumous text The Russian Revolution (1922 [1918]), she emphasized that the historical mission of the proletariat, in conquering political power, was “to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy — not to eliminate democracy altogether.” Communism meant “the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, unlimited democracy,” which did not look to infallible leaders to guide it. A truly different political and social horizon would be reached only through a complex process of this kind, and not if the exercise of freedom was reserved “only for supporters of the government, only for the members of one party.”
Luxemburg was firmly convinced that “socialism, by its nature, cannot be bestowed from above”; it has to expand democracy, not diminish it. She wrote that “the negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the positive, the building up, cannot.” That was “new territory,” and only “experience” would be “capable of correcting and opening new ways.” The Spartacist League, founded in 1914 after a break with the SPD and later to become the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), explicitly stated that it would never take over governmental power “except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany.”
Though making opposite political choices, both Social Democrats and Bolsheviks wrongly conceived of democracy and revolution as two alternative processes. For Rosa Luxemburg, on the contrary, the core of her political theory was an indissoluble unity of the two. Her legacy has been squeezed on both sides: Social Democrats, complicit in her brutal murder at the age of forty-seven at the hands of right-wing paramilitaries, fought her over the years, with no holds barred for the revolutionary accents of her thought, while Stalinists steered clear of making her ideas better known because of their critical, free-spirited character.
Against Militarism, War, and Imperialism
The other pivotal point of Luxemburg’s political convictions and activism was her twin opposition to war and agitation against militarism. Here she proved capable of updating the theoretical approach of the Left and winning support for clear-sighted resolutions at congresses of the Second International, which, though disregarded, were a thorn in the side of supporters of the First World War.
In her analysis, the function of armies, the nonstop rearmament and the repeated outbreak of wars were not to be understood only in the classical terms of nineteenth-century political thinking. Rather, they were bound up with forces seeking to repress workers’ struggles and served as useful tools for reactionary interests to divide the working class. They also corresponded to a precise economic objective of the age.
Capitalism needed imperialism and war, even in peacetime, in order to increase production, as well as to capture new markets as soon as they presented themselves in the colonial periphery outside Europe. As she wrote in The Accumulation of Capital, “political violence is nothing but a vehicle for the economic process” — a judgment that she followed up with one of the most controversial theses in the book, that rearmament was indispensable to the productive expansion of capitalism.
Communism meant ‘the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, unlimited democracy,’ which did not look to infallible leaders to guide it.
This picture was a long way from optimistic reformist scenarios, and to sum it up Luxemburg used a formula that would resonate widely in the twentieth century: “socialism or barbarism.” She explained that the second term could be avoided only through self-aware mass struggle and, since anti-militarism required a high level of political consciousness, she was one of the greatest champions of a general strike against war — a weapon that many others, including Marx, underestimated.
She argued that the theme of national defense should be used against new war scenarios and that the “War on War!” slogan should become “the cornerstone of working-class politics.” As she wrote in The Crisis of Social Democracy (1916), also known as The Junius Pamphlet, the Second International had imploded because it failed “to achieve a common tactic and action by the proletariat in all countries.” From then on, the “main goal” of the proletariat should therefore be “fighting imperialism and preventing wars, in peace as in war.”
Without Losing Her Tenderness
A cosmopolitan citizen of “what is to come,” Rosa Luxemburg said she felt at home “all over the world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” She was passionate about botany and loved animals, and we can see from her letters that she was a woman of great sensitivity, who remained at one with herself despite the bitter experiences that life held for her.
For the cofounder of the Spartacist League, the class struggle was not just a question of wage increases. She did not wish to be a mere epigone and her socialism was never economistic. Immersed in the dramas of her time, she sought to modernize Marxism without calling its foundations into question. Her efforts in this direction are a constant warning to the Left that it should not limit its political activity to bland palliatives and give up trying to change the existing state of things.
The way in which she lived, and her success in wedding theoretical elaboration with social agitation, still stands as a beacon to the new generation of militants who have chosen to take up the many battles she waged.”
The Revolutionary Ideas of Rosa Luxemburg
Understanding Rosa Luxemburg’s Life and Work; An interview with Peter Hudis, editor of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, published by Verso Books in cooperation with the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
Germany remembers Rosa Luxemburg 100 years after her murder
As the American Fourth Reich tests Europe’s resolve with threats to invade, conquer, and loot Greenland’s mineral resources, Europe mobilizes to resist and conducts multinational wargames.
Let us fight them on the beaches, friends.
To fascist tyranny and state terror and to imperial conquest and colonial dominion by the white supremacist theocracy which has captured America, let us offer no quarter.
For ours is a fight for democracy, civilization, and our universal human rights, and all Resistance is War to the Knife. War to the Knife, krig pa kniven, among the few phrases which comes into English direct from Old Norse, and for us it means liberation struggle without pity, fear, or remorse, for those who respect no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
While Europe prepares for a war which may leave both America and Europe in ruins, we here within the belly of the beast must do what we can to avert one of the most terrible tragedies in history.
Such a nightmare future of smoking wastelands where cities now stand can still be nimbly sidestepped, if we withdraw our consent to be governed by a mad idiot Nazi revivalist and his criminal regime of perverts, grifters, and terrorists.
We must take back our power from deceivers who have stolen it from us, and bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us.
As written by Katherine Butler in The Guardian in an article entitled How far will Europe go to defend Greenland from Trump?; “Donald Trump’s threat to take control of Greenland “one way or the other” has left the territory and its sovereign power Denmark reeling and the rest of Europe scrambling for ways to stop him.
After the shock of the US’s military raid on Venezuela Trump’s ambition to put Greenland next on his hitlist is no longer being seen in Europe as bluster or fantasy, but a serious intention, driven by ideology, neo-imperial expansionism, US thirst for critical minerals, or all of the above.
Trump’s self-confessed disregard for international law is again exposing the painful dilemma caused by Europe’s crippling dependence on the US for military security: do they confront him or appease him, even as his rogue-state actions mirror the Russian invasion of Ukraine they say is illegal?
Soon after the Venezuela raid – which was met with a deafening silence from Europe – the Trump aide Stephen Miller gloated in a CNN interview that “nobody is going to fight the United States” for Greenland.
Is Miller right? In recent days there has been a tonal shift. The leaders of six European powers – France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland and the UK – issued a rare joint statement, reaffirming their support for Danish sovereignty and, in effect, warning Trump to keep his hands off Greenland. Greenland belongs to its people, they said: “It is for Denmark and Greenland and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland.”
But what kind of “fight” these European powers are prepared to mount for Greenland if diplomacy fails is unclear.
At a high-stakes meeting in Washington today, Denmark was seeking to de-escalate the crisis with security promises, while insisting that Greenland is not for sale. Many Greenlanders are ambivalent about Denmark due to its colonial legacy, but the two governments are, for now, in lockstep. The US vice-president, JD Vance, was expected to revive more 19th-century ideas, such as “purchasing” the territory’s secession.
Trump’s justification for sabre-rattling against a faithful Nato ally, supposedly to shield Greenland from alleged future aggression by Russia or China, does not add up, say analysts. US security concerns could be met without annexing Greenland.
Greenland has been a semiautonomous territory since 1979, but as part of Denmark, it is defended by Nato. Trump could demand that the US’s Nato allies tighten protection of the strategically located territory’s external borders.
Existing cold war-era treaties between Denmark and the US for the joint defence of Greenland give Washington a free hand to deploy more troops. It could reopen 16 of the 17 US military bases it previously operated, but then shut down.
A modus vivendi?
As alarm mounts in Denmark, and in Greenland itself – from where Miranda Bryant’s vivid dispatch describes a fearful mood, with many people wondering whether to flee – we may see the UK play a more active role to defuse this crisis. Keir Starmer’s government hopes to broker a “modus vivendi” with Washington, the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, tells me. Having kept a low profile on Venezuela, Starmer hopes that American security concerns about the entire Arctic region can be addressed under existing treaties, while allaying Denmark’s fears about “ownership”.
Starmer and Trump have spoken twice in the last week about doing more to protect the “high north” from potential Russian incursion. “The view in London is that there is a deal to be done on Greenland,” Patrick said. “The difficulty with this US administration, however, is in identifying precisely what the president’s motives are when he talks about ‘ownership’.”
“Greenland seems to hold some mystical quality for Trump, but does this mean he wants to be able to point at the US map and show that its territory has expanded to take in Greenland? This is what remains unclear.”
Starmer has dispatched his foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, to Finland and Norway. Ahead of her visit, she made no direct mention of Greenland or the need to repel Trump’s threats but called on “Nato to step up its work in the Arctic to protect Euro-Atlantic interests in the region”. Cooper’s statement also said: “As climate change opens the Arctic, the region will become an ever more critical frontier for Nato.”
“By referencing climate change, melting Arctic ice and the consequent deepening of the threat posed by Russia,” Patrick says, “the UK is acknowledging the validity of Trump’s concerns, but of course not his solution of US occupation.”
However, with Trump apparently ready to destroy Nato for the sake of controlling Greenland, whatever his motives, Europe’s options seem fraught with risk.
But there are strategic cards Europe could play. Robert Habeck, the former vice-chancellor of Germany, argued in the Guardian on Monday that Europe should assert a bit of its own machtpolitik (power politics) and offer Greenland a return to EU membership, along with a massive investment package, to fend off US threats. Greenland left the then European Communities in 1985, to regain control of its fisheries. But if the EU matched Denmark’s annual block grant with billions in new investment, the calculus could change in a radically altered world.
Fabian Zuleeg, chief executive of the European Policy Centre in Brussels, said that Europe could, if it stuck together, show Trump that his dog-eat-dog coercion comes at a cost. He said that Europe must make “not symbolic gestures, but measures that resonate domestically in the US and hurt Trump and his policy choices where it matters most: with his political base. Trade, market access, regulatory cooperation and industrial partnerships all provide leverage.”
For Paris-based columnist Alexander Hurst, Europe’s best course of action is to force “a rupture” with the US, including telling the US to leave its European military bases. “Everything short of actual combat should be considered,” Hurst wrote, “because ‘annexing Greenland’ is a symptom of American fascism, and others will follow.”
What does this mean?
Among the many origins, consequences, designs, and moving parts of the Putin-Trump plan to break the power of NATO and open the door for the Russian conquest of Europe and the British Isles through the North Atlantic route long tested with incursions into the Baltic but met in September and October of 2025 with stalwart defiance and confrontation by the nations of Scandinavia, this tag team assault on the independence and sovereignty of Denmark is both a test of European resolve in the face of invasion and an attack on the global order of international law.
As written by Timothy Garton Ashin the Guardian, in an article entitled Whether or not Trump invades Greenland, this much is clear: the western order we once knew is history: The EU must be more robust in order to stem the tide of international disorder, or it risks falling to authoritarian imperialism; “ Donald Trump is threatening to take over Greenland, the territory of a Nato ally, possibly by military force, as Vladimir Putin is trying to take over Ukraine. Even if he doesn’t actually do it, this is a new era: a post-western world of illiberal international disorder.
The task now for liberal democracies in general, and Europe in particular, is twofold: to see this world as it is and to work out what the hell we’re going to do about it.
A global public opinion poll published today is a useful starting point. It was conducted last November in 21 countries for the European Council on Foreign Relations, in partnership with our Europe in a Changing World research project at the University of Oxford (and do please read the full report, which I have written with Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard). This is the fourth in a series of polls we’ve done every year since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, so we can see how things have evolved from very bad then to critical now.
Back in 2022, we found a transatlantic west united in outrage at the full-scale invasion of Ukraine but divided from other great and middle powers, such as China, India and Turkey, who were quite happy to go on doing business as usual with Russia. The Russian economy was surviving unprecedented western sanctions because those other states now had sufficient wealth and power between them to counterbalance even a united west. So this was already a post-western world, but still with a west acting in it.
Trump 2.0 has changed all that. Now we have a post-western world, but with no coherent geopolitical west acting in it. To the extent that any strategic coherence should be attributed to the erratic narcissism of Trump, his approach is closer to that of Putin than it is to that of any US president since 1945. As his right-hand man Stephen Miller frankly explains, they believe the world is “governed by strength … by force … by power”.
Europeans have understood this. Astonishingly, less than one in five continental Europeans (taking an average of the 10 EU countries we surveyed) and just one in four Britons now see the US as an ally. In Ukraine, the figure is down to 18%. We Europeans do still see the US as “a necessary partner”, but not as an ally.
The rest of the world is also waking up to this. While in our first poll, 60% of Chinese respondents saw American and European approaches as the same or similar (ie there’s a single west), now just 43% say that, while a clear majority thinks they are different. As of now, the west is history.
So what should we do about it? The worst thing we could do is to go on bleating about the lost “rules-based international system”, making selective invocations of international law (Ukraine but not Gaza) while continuing the sycophantic appeasement of Trump. At the same time, we obviously don’t want to behave like him or Putin.
What we need is a new internationalism: faster, more flexible, harder-edged. Reject the use of force but embrace the use of power. Don’t fixate on existing structures and alliances but seek a wider range of partners, pragmatically, from issue to issue. Worry less about rules, more about results; less process, more progress. This is a challenge particularly to the institutional EU, the ultimate slow-moving, rules-based, process-heavy instantiation of 1990s-style liberal international order.
Yet we are already beginning to do it for Ukraine, with the novel combination of a coalition of the willing and the EU itself moving at what, for Brussels, is warp speed. As I argued last month, we should urgently prepare to sustain an independent Ukraine even without US support.
What about Greenland? First, we should be guided in everything we do by the elected governments of Greenland and Denmark. That, after all, is what distinguishes liberal democrats from authoritarian imperialists.
On Wednesday, Denmark and some of its European Nato allies announced the sending of further troops to Greenland. The foreign ministers of Greenland and Denmark then met in Washington with the vice-president, JD Vance, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and agreed to set up a high-level working group. It’s quite clear the fundamental disagreement has not been resolved. All the signs are that Trump is going to get more extreme and unpredictable as time goes by and his domestic difficulties increase.
So here are a few suggestions. To highlight the European commitment, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, French president Emmanuel Macron and British prime minister Keir Starmer should visit Greenland, along with Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen. They should be joined by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, since Canada is the Nato ally that is Greenland’s actual western neighbour and directly impacted by Arctic insecurity.
If they can take a train to Kyiv, they can take a plane to Nuuk. Oddly enough, this visit may be as important as the substance of the security commitment, for President Trump’s second language is television. He’ll get the message from the pictures. A number of highly visible, vividly uniformed European and Canadian liaison officers should be stationed in Greenland for the foreseeable future.
On Tuesday, Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said if they have to choose, “we choose Denmark … we choose the EU”. So the EU should rapidly find a way to increase its currently tiny financial support to Greenland – and not just, as apparently planned, in the new budget period starting in 2028. This will be a good occasion for European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and European council president António Costa to get on the plane to Nuuk.
While they are there, they should start a strategic discussion about a possible future close relationship between an independent Greenland and the EU. It’s quite clear that the EU of tomorrow is going to have a range of customised relationships with key neighbours, including the UK, Ukraine, Turkey and Canada. Why not also with Greenland?
Meanwhile, Europe – the US’s biggest single economic partner – should privately review the full range of economic responses (including, for example, selling off US Treasury bonds) it could make in the still unlikely event of Trump ordering a Putin-style military takeover of Greenland. The outline of these contingency plans could be discreetly conveyed to the White House via US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent or presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner.
There are doubtless other possible moves, but the general thrust is clear: a Europe (and Canada, and other liberal democracies) projecting quiet strength, power and resolve.
One of the most depressing findings in our poll is that Europeans lead the world in pessimism. Almost half of them don’t think the EU can deal on equal terms with global powers such as the US and China. If we start practising this new, faster, harder-nosed internationalism, maybe more Europeans will believe in Europe again.”
Winston Churchill Speech We Shall Fight On The Beaches
text of the whole speech, The International Churchill Society
Greenland: new shipping routes, hidden minerals – and a frontline between the US and Russia? Key maps show the growing strategic importance of Greenland as Arctic ice melts under global heating
We seize our power and restore America in our upcoming elections not by abandoning social issues in favor of economic ones as Elizabeth Warren suggests, but by championing what binds us together and makes us human; our universal human rights and the parallel and interdependent rights of citizens which founded and define America.
A diverse and inclusive free society of equals, who are guarantors of each other’s humanity and act together in solidarity and mutual aid; such is the idea behind democracy, from which all the values of the Enlightenment encoded into our institutions of state emerge; the equality of all human beings, the necessity of freedom of conscience and of action from coercion or control, impartial justice for all based on testable truth versus the claims of authority.
All of this is now in question and at risk in the streets of America as the ICE white supremacist terror force perpetrates a campaign of ethnic cleansing and is met with mass action by our citizens throughout the nation, yet Elizabeth Warren, who runs the policy shop of the Democratic Party, has chosen not to ride this wave to victory in our elections but to focus narrowly on the cost of living for the underclasses, something which of course must be fought on but not I think to the exclusion of our universal human rights and meaningful citizenship.
Only building networks of solidarity across all spectrum of possible ways of being human and inclusive of all marginalized constituencies can win us back control of Congress this November, everybody in and no one out or left behind.
This, this, this.
And the Democratic Party has chosen to announce this electoral strategy through its policy wonk and shadow general at the moment the Supreme Court is deliberating whether or not trans people are people and citizens like any other, with all the legal protections regarding self determination and the pursuit of happiness that implies regardless how different their choices in these matters may be from our own, and the decision will be determinative of the legal status and rights of all gender nonconforming, LGBT, or queer people both as American citizens and as human beings.
Who has the right and the vested power to say who we are or can become, ourselves or the state?
The Trump Fourth Reich has chosen to begin criminalizing identity beyond race with transgender youth as a gateway target, and the Democratic Party has stepped out of the way.
The pink triangle; it may start here, but it will not end here. No matter where they begin with divisions of belonging and otherness, it always ends at the gates of Auschwitz.
I have lived thousands of lifetimes and worn the masks of many identities, and through vision explored the consequences of every possible way of becoming human and of every human future history which may unfold from our choices about how to be human together, and there is only one way to avoid the coming Age of Tyrants; abandon no one.
I am human; nothing human is alien to me”, as the Roman playwright Terence wrote in the comedy Heauton Timorumenos or The Self-Tormentor, in the original Latin “Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto”.
As the great Jean Genet said to me when he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance and set me on my life path in liberation struggle, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of darkness, as we were about to be burned alive by rampaging Israeli soldiers in Beirut 1982; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
When those who would enslave us, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us, come for us and our families, our neighbors, our brothers, sisters, and others, as they always have and will, let them find not subjects but citizens, not a population subjugated through learned helplessness, abjection, despair, and the loss of hope and faith in each other, but a free and unconquerable people united in solidarity and our duty of care for each other.
As written by Sam Levin in The Guardian, in an article entitled The trans youth athletes in the US fighting for their rights: ‘Playing is an act of resistance’:
As the US supreme court weighs bans on trans athletes, five students speak about the joy of sports and toll of exclusion; “The US supreme court on Tuesday is considering state laws banning transgender athletes from school sports.
The cases were brought by trans students who challenged bans in West Virginia and Idaho barring trans girls from girls teams. The outcome could have wide-ranging implications for LGBTQ+ rights. A total of 27 states have passed sports bans targeting trans youth while more than 20 states have maintained pro-LGBTQ+ policies.
As the highest court in the US debates their rights to participate in school sports, five trans youth and their families spoke to the Guardian about the role athletics has played in their lives. The students are based in California, a state that has long had trans-inclusive policies.
The youth described the joy sports brings them and how meaningful it has been to play on teams that match their gender identity. They said sports were about community, team-building, socializing and exercising, like they are for so many youth in the US. Some expressed frustration and anxiety about the national debates focused on “fairness” in competition, saying the legal battle was about fighting for their place in society and their fundamental rights to access the same opportunities as their peers.
Here are some excerpts of their reflections.
‘Sports is my escape’
Lina Haaga, a 14-year-old Pasadena student, has played sports since age four, starting with soccer: “My entire family is very athletic,” she says. “I wasn’t particularly good at soccer, but it helped me realize what an asset sports is in my life – as a release and an escape, but also a way to connect with other people and make new friends.” A trans girl who transitioned at a young age, Lina always played on girls’ teams, eventually doing basketball, swimming, water polo, lacrosse, tennis and track.
When she has faced stressors, “sports was always a place where I could find a reprieve and just think about the ball that was ahead of me or the next step in the race,” she says.
The attacks on trans girls in athletics have taken a toll, says Lina: “The political climate has put into question my relationship with sports. Instead of it being something innocent I can just enjoy without fear of being discriminated against, I’ve had to now worry every time I step on the track or the court that somebody might disagree with my participation. That’s been really scary, because it’s started to steal something that’s precious for me – that moment of bliss.”
There are times, she says, when she has avoided games out of fear someone might object.
Her message to the supreme court? “We’re still human. We’re just kids. We’re just trying to have fun … We’re not trying to be monsters or predators or anything malevolent. We’re just trying to find connection and community.”
Lina hopes other trans kids continue to pursue athletics: “Playing sports and loving being out there on the field is in its own beautiful way an act of resistance.”
‘I defied the president’
In May, AB Hernandez, a 17-year-old track and field athlete, won first place in the high jump, first place in the triple jump, and silver in the long jump in the California state finals. It should have been a moment of pure celebration for the high schooler from Jurupa Valley, a city east of Los Angeles, but she and her mom had to worry about something else: Donald Trump’s attacks.
The US president turned AB into a media spectacle, targeting her in a social media post and claiming he was “ordering local authorities, if necessary, to not allow” her to compete, writing her participation was “TOTALLY DEMEANING TO WOMEN”.
Now a senior, AB says she has learned to brush aside her detractors: “People are always gonna have negative thoughts to say about you … I just had to realize I need to be comfortable with who I know I am and be comfortable in my own skin and not let anyone get under it.”
“Victory,” she adds, “meant a lot, especially after all the internet drama. To come out on top and be number one. You can’t say anything besides argue with a wall. I’m still competing … Sports is my everything.”
She was touched that standing up inspired others: “People DM’d me to say: ‘I’m so happy you’re fighting. You’re making a really big impact for our community.’ … I thought I just went out and competed, but to others, it was like a movement. I defied the president, in a way. I was like, oh my God, I did do something.”
Her mom, Nereyda Hernandez, says she won’t stop defending her daughter’s rights and hopes other parents will be moved to embrace their trans kids. “My message to other parents is: support your kids and be louder. We’re unaware of how much support we have within this community until you’re actually put in a position like we were. We’re not alone.”
‘We’d have to leave the country’
While anti-trans rhetoric has generally focused on restricting trans girls, the toxic climate has also been distressing for trans boys, some parents said. Several states with bans against trans girls have included restrictions affecting trans boys, too.
One 13-year-old trans boy in the Bay Area, whose name the Guardian is withholding to protect his identity, started playing soccer at age two and now also plays basketball and baseball. “Sports is how I made friends. It’s nice you have people to lean on who have your back,” he says.
Jennifer, his mother, says her son struggled to fit in on girls’ teams before he came out as a boy at age nine, but now is embraced by the boys’ teams and coaches. If he were barred from athletics due to being trans, “we would have to leave the country,” she says. “The message the country is sending deeply and negatively impacts his feeling of belonging in his own country.”
Jennifer, who asked to go by a pseudonym to protect her son’s identity, says the supreme court case “terrifies” her: “The sports issue is so important, because it fundamentally tells us whether people believe trans people exist. Trans girls are girls and belong on girls’ teams. Trans boys are boys and they belong on boys’ teams. Full stop. Once you take the position that trans girls are not girls for the purposes of sports, you have now dehumanized them. It’s a slippery slope to taking away rights after rights after rights.”
Her son says he didn’t understand why some people were so focused on stopping children from playing on teams: “I’m just a kid that wants to play sports with my friends. I’m not special. I just want to be left alone and hopefully be successful in sports. We’re not a threat. We’re not gonna tear down the world … If the Trump administration wouldn’t let me play sports, they would basically be taking away part of me.”
‘I’m used to slurs, but I’ll keep speaking up’
Lily Norcross, a 17-year-old track athlete from California’s central coast, says she has grown accustomed to negative news articles about her participation on the girls’ team, which sometimes lead to death threats and other harassment.
“I know this sounds really sad, but I’ve grown used to people calling me slurs. The news itself doesn’t bother me as much as what it causes. After Trump was inaugurated, people were far more comfortable openly being transphobic and hating minorities,” she says. “For me, it’s important to defend the rights of trans kids … because compared to others, I’m extremely lucky. Practically my entire family is supportive. I live in California, which is very liberal. My school board and most of my teachers support me. Most people aren’t in that situation … I’m speaking up for people in places like Texas, Ohio or Florida who don’t have these opportunities.”
Lily says she also wishes Democratic leaders would do more to stand up for her rights, noting it felt like their stance was: “Let trans people fight for themselves.” She urges lawmakers to have more empathy: “Put yourself in [our] shoes. Imagine if somebody said your people aren’t allowed to use bathrooms or play sports. How would you feel if you were segregated from everybody else?”
‘I feel hopeless’
Leonard, a 17-year-old swimmer in the Bay Area, says it was hard to be optimistic that his rights would remain protected, even in a state like California.
“I feel hopeless. I don’t like this supreme court and I don’t think they’re going to support trans people’s ability to play sports,” says Leonard, a trans boy who is also a fencer and asked to go by a pseudonym to protect his identity. “I’m scared of the precedent it’s going to set, maybe countrywide. I’m scared of what could happen to me and my friends.”
Leonard wishes people understood how meaningful it can be for trans youth to play on teams where they belong: “It made me really, really, really, really happy to be on the boys’ team affirming my gender identity, affirming I was as good as any cis boy. I know that I’m a boy, but being on a boys’ team proves to everyone and myself that I am, in fact, a boy and this is where I’m supposed to be.”
As written by Sam Levin in The Guardian, in an article entitled How the US supreme court case on trans athletes could unravel LGBTQ+ rights; “ The US supreme court will consider state bans on transgender athletes on Tuesday in a major LGBTQ+ rights legal battle that could have far-reaching consequences beyond youth sports.
The court is hearing oral arguments in two cases brought by trans students who challenged Republican-backed laws in West Virginia and Idaho prohibiting trans girls from participating in girls’ athletic programs.
Those bans were both previously blocked by federal courts, but the states appealed to the supreme court, which is hearing a case on trans people’s access to sports for the first time. If the court’s conservative supermajority sides with the states and upholds the bans, the rulings could have significant ripple effects, paving the way for the enforcement of a range of anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
If the rulings are broad, civil rights advocates warn, the supreme court could make it easier for lawmakers and school officials to ban trans students’ access to appropriate bathrooms and facilities, restrict LGBTQ+ youth’s ability to use chosen names and pronouns, enforce strict dress codes, limit protections against anti-LGBTQ+ harassment, and further deny access to accurate identification documents.
“It’s really scary. The supreme court is poised to tell us whether dislike and moral disapproval of a specific group can be a real basis to make law,” said Cathryn Oakley, senior director of legal policy for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ rights group.
‘This isn’t just about me’
In Little v Hecox, Lindsay Hecox, a trans college student, challenged Idaho’s first-in-the-nation law categorically banning trans women and girls from women’s sports teams, which passed in 2020, blocking her from track at age 19. She has since sought to have the case dismissed, arguing she is no longer pursuing sports and doesn’t want to be subjected to ongoing harassment. But the court decided to hear the case, anyway.
In the second case, West Virginia v BPJ, 15-year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson has challenged her state’s law banning her track participation, saying in a recent statement: “This case isn’t just about me, or even just about sports. It’s just one part of a plan to push transgender people like me out of public life entirely.”
In the last five years, 27 states have restricted trans children and teens’ access to school sports – most targeting trans girls, but some applying to all trans youth.
The anti-LGBTQ+ legal movement shifted its focus to trans athletes after the supreme court legalized marriage equality in 2015. Supporters of bans on trans athletes, including the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the major Christian legal group defending the state laws this week, argue they are promoting fairness and safety in women’s sports.
LGBTQ+ rights advocates counter there is no credible evidence that inclusive sports policies have endangered cis girls and women, and the controversy is manufactured by anti-trans activists; one conservative group, for example, acknowledged in 2019 that its polling suggested people could be swayed to support Republicans with ads raising fears about trans girls in sports.
The GOP’s escalating campaign against trans youth athletes is directed at a minuscule fraction of the population. The National Collegiate Athletic Association president testified in 2024 he was aware of fewer than 10 trans college athletes, and Republican legislators have at times struggled to identify any trans girls playing sports in their states.
Meanwhile, states such as California have long allowed trans youth to play on teams that match their gender with little pushback – until the issue became subject to national debate.
While there are few out trans youth on sports teams at all levels, advocates note the bans have been devastating for those directly affected and LGBTQ+ youth who may be avoiding athletics due to the climate.
Potential outcomes
Lawyers for Hecox and Pepper-Jackson argue the bans violate the equal protection clause of the constitution, and in the West Virginia case, attorneys also argue the ban violates Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in schools.
One crucial question the court will consider is whether the laws are discriminatory against trans people and merit what’s known as “heightened scrutiny” – a more rigorous review, meaning the government has a higher burden to justify the bans. The court has never issued a ruling addressing whether it considers trans people a class that deserves this protection.
If the court were to use the sports cases to rule that laws targeting trans people do not warrant heightened scrutiny, then “any type of law discriminating against trans people is going to be presumptively constitutional”, said Joshua Block, senior counsel for the LGBTQ and HIV projects at the ACLU, which is representing both students.
“These laws were passed to establish a legal principle that transgender girls and women shouldn’t be treated like other girls and women, and then to use that principle as a jumping-off point for rolling back protections for transgender people more generally,” said Block, who is presenting oral arguments.
At least one prominent campaigner for trans sports bans has made this point explicitly, saying last year: “The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it’s lying on that sports issue. This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.”
Scott Skinner-Thompson, a Colorado law school professor, said he feared the ruling could leave trans people with “minimal constitutional protections” from laws explicitly targeting them: “That would further embolden legislators to continue to pass laws that exclude transgender people from public life.”
In addition to bolstering laws banning trans people from bathrooms, that outcome could also make it even harder for incarcerated trans people to access critical healthcare and safe housing, said Skinner-Thompson, who signed an amicus brief arguing the bans should remain blocked.
“The broad question in these cases is: are we a society that’s interested in recognizing people’s common humanity, or are we more interested in excluding people for the purpose of a particular version of what counts as ‘fair’?”
The ruling could also establish that trans people are not protected under Title IX, which could be catastrophic, said Block. A school could deny admission to or expel a student on the basis of them being trans and it wouldn’t be considered a Title IX violation, he said.
In one particularly damaging outcome, which he hoped was unlikely, Block said the court could support the Trump administration’s assertions that Title IX requires that schools ban trans girls from sports. That would potentially invalidate policies in Democratic-run states that allow or mandate trans inclusion in youth athletics.
“West Virginia’s law is not discriminatory – it treats all students equally and represents a common-sense approach to a complex issue,” a spokesperson for the state’s attorney general said in an email. “It advances Title IX’s core mission to ensure that women and girls have access to athletic and academic opportunities that were long reserved for men.” The law, the spokesperson continued, “does not ban anyone from playing sports based on gender identity” and addresses “legitimate questions about competitive fairness and safety”.
A spokesperson for Idaho’s attorney general did not respond to an inquiry.
An ADF spokesperson said in an email: “Men and women are different, and those differences matter in sports. When you let males into women’s sports, it harms women … causing women to lose their dignity, privacy, and equal opportunities.” The spokesperson said the harm was “undeniable” and it was “vital to make sure our laws can acknowledge reality and protect women”.
‘The bans endanger all girls’
Advocates are not optimistic the court will block the sports bans, but hope the decision will be narrow. Last year, the court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors. The ruling was a devastating blow for access to vital medical treatments, but was limited to healthcare and did not, as some had feared, establish a broader precedent supporting anti-trans legislation.
“BPJ is about a 15-year-old kid that the entire state of West Virginia has brought to the supreme court to continue to fight to exclude her from the track-and-field team,” said Karen Loewy, interim deputy legal director for litigation at Lambda Legal, a rights group also representing Pepper-Jackson. “The question before the court is narrow … and there are ways to answer that question narrowly.”
Shayna Medley, senior staff attorney at Advocates for Trans Equality, noted that sports bans have a record of harming both trans and cisgender girls. To enforce restrictions, some states allow invasive forms of sex testing, which invite community members to scrutinize individual girls if they have any suspicions about their identities.
“These bans endanger all girls by empowering adults, parents, politicians, coaches to investigate anyone who they suspect to be trans on the basis of how they look and subject them to invasive sex-testing procedures,” they said. “We’ve seen cis girls with short hair be accused of being trans and asked to turn over medical records. It really creates a climate of gender policing of anyone who doesn’t conform to stereotypes. These cases are part of a broader project to erode bodily autonomy principles that are supposed to be embedded in our constitution.”
The trans youth athletes in the US fighting for their rights: ‘Playing is an act of resistance
July 24 2025 Plan 2028 A Platform For Change Part Two: Abolish Police, Dismantle the Carceral State and Its Prisons, and Abandon the Social Use of Force
July 31 2025 Plan 2028 A Platform For Change Part Five: No Human Bodies Are Property of the State, and No Women Are the Property of Men; On Women’s Rights of Bodily Autonomy
Parallel and interdependent mass protests against state tyranny and terror are unfolding in America and Iran, and both may now have passed the point of no return for the regimes they challenge, wherein the Calculus of Fear by which all states maintain and enforce the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which they serve as embodied violence can no longer effectively repress dissent by brutality and the Theatre of Cruelty; protests which are the bleeding edge of democracy movements versus theocracy and the police state and have become or verge on becoming true revolutions.
Take Their Power; this is the goal of all revolution, and it is won by delegitimation of the state. Through Disbelief in the lies and propaganda of authority and Disobedience of its laws and enforcers we seize our power and become Unconquered and free.
Even with a social media blackout we are doing this in Iran, and in America the Trump regime cannot silence us nor conceal its crimes when the human trafficking and blackmail syndicate on which Trump’s wealth and power is based is exposed with the Epstein Files, nor can the blood of Renee Good and the other victims of Trump’s ICE white supremacist terror force and campaign of ethnic cleansing be hidden from a population who all carry cameras and publishing tools in their pockets.
Iran’s theocracy of patriarchal sexual terror and political force and control approaches that of the aberrant criminal fascist Trump regime and the American Fourth Reich in its crimes against humanity, in kind though clearly not in global scale. No one else other than Trump in partnership with the troll king Elon Musk has murdered eight hundred thousand strangers by withholding food aid in a politically manufactured famine, not since Mao and Stalin; and theirs were not racially motivated hate crimes.
I dream of a future wherein we study glorious mirror revolutions in Iran versus the theocracy of the mullahs and in America versus the Christian Identity theocracy of the white supremacist and Nazi revivalist Fourth Reich, as a cautionary tale of the fragile nature of democracy and our universal human rights which it is designed to serve and empower.
We have only our solidarity as guarantors of each other’s humanity to hold the line between citizens and subjects, and define the limits of the human.
Let us stand with our brothers, sisters, and others regardless of our differences of race, gender, faith, or national identity, and 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. In America and Iran, now linked in liberation struggle, and where ever men hunger to be free.
May we all purge our destroyers, betrayers, and those who would enslave us from among us, and bring a Reckoning for our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and to all who would steal our souls.
As written by Deepa Parent and William Christou in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘The streets are full of blood’: Iranian protests gather momentum as regime cracks down: Demonstrators recount experiences on the frontlines as protest movement rapidly moves beyond government’s control; “Sarah felt she had little left to lose. A 50-year-old entrepreneur in Tehran, she watched as prices soared higher while her freedoms shrank each year.
So, when protesters started gathering in the high-end Andarzgoo neighbourhood of Tehran on Saturday night, she was quick to join them. In a video sent to the Guardian via her cousin who lives abroad, people walk through the street, joyous, despite a halo of teargas hanging over their heads.
The crowd was mixed, with families, elderly people and men walking side by side. The mood was calm, until security forces approached, raised their assault rifles and began to shoot at the unarmed protesters at close range.
The next video she sent was hurried. “Shameless!” she repeated again and again as she drove away, the crackle of gunshots audible as people hurry past.
On Thursday, Iran went dark. Authorities shut down the internet and the ability to call abroad, cutting the country off from the rest of the world. The government’s rhetoric, initially conciliatory, quickly changed. Gone were the offers of dialogue, replaced by threats of death sentences for protesters, who the government accused of being backed by Israel and the US.
What happened next was documented in grainy videos and panicked messages ferried out of the country by activists who managed to grab a momentary Starlink connection before GPS scrambling shut their line down.
Crowds of thousands have marched across the country each night, chanting “death to the dictator”, a reference to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and for the return of the Pahlavi dynasty, which ruled Iran before the 1979 revolution.
A 19-year-old student activist said on Friday: “We are marching in thousands tonight. I saw children on the shoulders of their parents, a grandmother chanting ‘Death to Khamenei’ while she’s decked up in a chador [black robe]. Do you realise how significant this is?”
The protest movement, which started as a modest demonstration by shopkeepers in Tehran against a sudden depreciation of the country’s currency on 28 December, rapidly moved beyond the government’s control.
As the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, called for dialogue, cautioning that government action could cause inflation to rise even further, signs of a crackdown by security forces started to appear.
Video emerged of riot police breaking into a hospital treating wounded protesters in the western province of Ilam on 4 January, shocking Iranians, who were outraged at the beating of patients and doctors.
At least 538 people have been killed in the violence surrounding demonstrations, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, including 490 protesters. The group reported that more than 10,600 people had been arrested by Iranian authorities.
Earlier, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented at least 28 people killed by authorities between 31 December and 3 January, with some shot with rifles and shotguns loaded with metal pellets.
Pezeshkian called for an investigation into the hospital raid and other alleged ill-treatment by security forces and, unlike other Iranian officials, said that the Iranian government bore responsibility for demonstrators’ grievances, not foreign powers.
His promises of accountability was not enough to satisfy Iranians, and crowds grew. They were incensed by the blatant use of force against demonstrations, a pattern they saw in previous protest movements in 2009, 2019 and 2022.
Soran, a protester from the western city of Kermanshah, said on Wednesday: “We have seen for decades how government forces use maximum violence towards us during crackdowns and this time is no different. They are shooting at anyone and everyone.”
Watching from outside Iran, diaspora and opposition figures began to think the protests held real promise for toppling the Iranian regime.
On Thursday, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah of Iran who was expelled during the 1979 revolution, called for unified protests in the country. At 8pm on Thursday, Iranians across the country should chant from their windows and rooftops, Pahvlavi said, adding that he would announce next steps depending on the on-the-ground response to his call.
Iranian authorities heard the call. At about 8pm on Thursday, they shut down the internet. Despite the blackout, a few videos showed massive crowds in the streets, many of them chanting in support of Pahlavi.
There on the streets, they found security forces waiting for them. With the information flow out of Iran slowing to a trickle, authorities began to use force drastically.
Mahsa, a 28-year-old journalist from Mashhad, said on Thursday before her phone connection disappeared: “They’re charging at crowds in vans and bikes. I have seen them slowing down and deliberately shooting at people’s faces. Many have been injured. The streets are full of blood. I fear I am about to witness a sea of dead people.”
As the streets of Iran erupted into protest, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, visited Beirut. On Friday night he sat in the Crowne Plaza hotel for a discussion and a signing of his recently published memoir, The Power of Negotiation.
During the discussion, he brushed off concerns that the protests were of great significance, saying that like in any other country, grievances around prices are sometimes aired in public.
“Trump has deployed the national guard in his own country. We saw how border police [ICE] killed a woman. But if Iran does this, if even a single bullet is fired, that people want to come rescue them,” the foreign minister said, ending the discussion to sign copies of his book.
Back in Iran, protesters reported otherwise. A demonstrator who gathered in the Tajrish Arg neighbourhood detailed how snipers were firing at crowds, saying that he saw “hundreds of bodies” in the streets.
A picture of two Irans began to emerge.
During the day, state TV and official government bodies projected an air of normalcy, airing pro-government demonstrations and footage of people going about their business in neighbourhoods that were free of any protest actions.
At night, videos of protests raging through the streets leaked to the rest of the world, brought out at great effort by activists and shared with the Iranian diaspora abroad. Videos showed protesters braving the crackdown, with thousands marching through the streets across the country despite facing what appeared to be live fire from authorities.
The true picture of the scale of protests was hard to discern, as only a few people could evade the internet blackout in Iran. Diaspora and opposition figures abroad amplified the few videos that emerged from the country, proclaiming that the end of the regime was near.
What little testimony came out of the country was harrowing. A protester from Tehran dashed off a message on Friday, saying that they had been beaten with sticks and watched as authorities fired live ammunition into crowds. The number of killed was “very high”, they said, before going offline again.
Video of bodies lying on a hospital floor in Tehran emerged on Friday, as human rights groups said that though they could not properly document each death, they feared massacres had been committed.
On Sunday, a video of a large medical warehouse outside a makeshift morgue in the Kahrizak area of Tehran made its way to social media, bodybags stacked inside and lining an adjacent courtyard.
Families gathered around a television screen, waiting with grim anticipation as a slideshow of brutalised faces appeared on their screen. The wailing of women could be heard in the background as people lifted the black plastic sheeting covering the dead.
State TV insisted the bodybags contained people killed by protesters, claiming autopsies had shown bodies with stab wounds, not bullets.
Emerging reports of bloodshed made its way to Washington, where Donald Trump doubled down on his threat to intervene militarily in Iran if the government killed protesters.
The US president said on his Truth Social platform on Saturday night: “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!” He was reportedly mulling over military options for a strike on Iran.
The external threat only seemed to harden Iranian authorities’ stance against protesters, and fed into their narrative that the west was behind the protests. Iran’s police carried out arrests of protest figures; while its speaker of the parliament said it might strike the US or Israel in the case of US military intervention.
Protests continued despite the crackdown, settling into a rhythm by Sunday, demonstrators gathering in the streets and rallying under the cover of night. The world watched as the Iranian people protested, unable to send their support to the demonstrators who were cut off from outside contact.
A protester from Tehran said: “With great difficulty, thousands of us managed to get online so I could get the news to you. We’re standing up for a revolution, but we need help.”
Also written by the same journalists a few days earlier, in an article entitled Iran protesters tell of brutal police response as regime lashes out: Videos emerging despite internet and mobile phone blackout show demonstrations continuing despite reports of escalating crackdown; “
Demonstrators have continued to take to the streets of Iran, defying an escalating crackdown by authorities against the growing protest movement.
An internet shutdown imposed by the authorities on Thursday has largely cut the protesters off from the rest of the world, but videos that trickled out of the country showed thousands of people demonstrating in Tehran overnight into Saturday morning. They chanted: “Death to Khamenei,” in reference to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and: “Long live the shah.”
New protests broke out late on Saturday with people rallying in a northern district of Tehran, according to a video verified by AFP.
Fireworks were set off over Tehran’s Punak Square as demonstrators banged pots and shouted slogans in support of the Pahlavi rulers ousted after the 1979 Islamic revolution, the video showed.
Crowds of protesters also marched through the streets of Mashhad as fires burned around them, a show of defiance in the home town of Khamenei, who has condemned the protesters as “vandals” and blamed the US for fanning the flames of dissent.
More than 570 protests have taken place across all of Iran’s 31 provinces, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reported early Sunday.
Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to intervene if Iranian authorities kill protesters, earning angry rebukes from Tehran. He said on Friday that the Iranian authorities were “in big trouble”, adding: “You better not start shooting, because we’ll start shooting too.”
On Saturday night he said the US is “ready to help” as protesters in Iran faced an intensifying crackdown by authorities of the Islamic republic.
“Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!!” Trump said in a social post on Truth Social, without elaborating.
Iran’s parliament speaker on Sunday warned that the US military and Israel will be “legitimate targets” if America strikes the Islamic Republic, as threatened by president Donald Trump.
The comments by Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf represent the first to add Israel into the mix of possible targets for an Iranian strike.
Qalibaf, a hard-liner, made the threat as lawmakers rushed the dais in the Iranian parliament, shouting: “Death to America!”
Authorities warned people to not take part in protests on Saturday. The country’s attorney general, Mohammad Mahvadi Azad, said anyone who did so would be considered an “enemy of god”, a charge which carries the death penalty. State TV later clarified that anyone who even assisted protesters could face the charge.
Despite the crackdown, more protests were planned for the weekend. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the former shah of Iran, called for protesters to take to the streets on Saturday and Sunday and seize control of their towns. Pahlavi, who has emerged as an increasingly popular figure in the current round of protests, asked people to hoist the pre-1979 “lion and sun” flag that was used during his father’s rule.
“Our goal is no longer merely to come into the streets. The goal is to prepare to seize city centres and hold them,” he said, promising he would return to Iran soon.
The continuing block on the internet and mobile networks means it is hard for international media to estimate the size of the demonstrations, the largest in Iran in recent years, which pose a serious challenge to the regime’s rule.
But the few videos coming out of the country, as well as activists who managed to evade the blackout via the Starlink satellite system, spoke of angry protesters and a heavy-handed police response.
“We’re standing up for a revolution, but we need help. Snipers have been stationed behind the Tajrish Arg area [a wealthy neighbourhood in Tehran],” a protester in Tehran told the Guardian via sporadic text messages sent via Starlink. The protester said many people had been shot at across the city, adding: “We saw hundreds of bodies.”
The Guardian was not able to independently verify the protesters’ claims and human rights activists have also said verification of reported human rights violations is difficult.
However, another activist in Tehran told the Guardian they had witnessed security forces firing live ammunition at protesters and saw a “very high” number killed, while human rights activists said the claims of police brutality were consistent with testimony they had been given.
The US-based Human Rights Activist news agency has said that at least 116 people had been killed in the violence surrounding the protests and more than 2,600 others detained. Rights groups and Iranian authorities have also documented casualties among security forces, which the latter blame on foreign-backed saboteurs.
The Iranian Nobel peace prize-winner Shirin Ebadi warned on Friday that security forces could be preparing to commit a “massacre under the cover of a sweeping communications blackout”, and said she had already received reports of hundreds of people being treated for eye injuries at a single Tehran hospital.
Protesters were brought to the streets on 28 December by a deteriorating economy, but quickly began chanting anti-government slogans and demanding political reform.
Though Iran has experienced mass protests before, analysts have said the battering of the regime during the 12-day war with Israel and the loss of Iranian-backed forces across the region have made it more vulnerable.
Iranian authorities have become increasingly confrontational in their rhetoric towards protesters, casting them as being infiltrated and backed by Israeli, or US saboteurs. The Iranian army vowed in a statement on Saturday to foil “the enemy’s plots”, warning that undermining the country’s security was a “red line”.
State TV tried to portray an air of normality as protests continued, describing them as small aberrations from an otherwise peaceful country. A state television anchor warned protesters not to go out, telling parents to stop their children from demonstrating. “If something happens, if someone is injured, if a bullet is fired and something happens to them, do not complain,” they said.
The international community has rallied around the protesters, with EU states and the US posting messages of support. “The United States supports the brave people of Iran,” Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said on X on Saturday.
Iranian authorities have tried a carrot-and-stick approach, distinguishing between what they called “legitimate” protesters expressing economic grievances and “rioters” backed by foreign powers trying to destablise Iran. The government has said it is engaging in dialogue with the former, but human rights groups have described increasing generalised violence directed at protesters at the hands of security officials.
A video verified by Iran Human Rights group showed distressed family members looking through a pile of bodies in Ghadir hospital in Tehran on Thursday. The rights group said that the bodies were of protesters killed by authorities.
Fars news agency, a news agency close to the Iranian security services, aired video of what appeared to be forced confessions of protesters. Human rights activists warned that forced confessions, while in themselves a human rights violation, were often used as evidence for executions in Iran.
The continuing internet blackout made documenting both the momentum of protests and the violations committed against demonstrators difficult, and activists were trying to create workarounds. They implored media to continue covering the situation in Iran as they described worsening brutality.
“Please make sure to state clearly that they are killing people with live ammunition,” an Iranian activist said.”
As written in The Guardian Editorial entitled The Guardian view on Iran’s protests: old tactics of repression face new pressures: A brutal regime has failed to safeguard either the country’s physical security or basic living standards. But Donald Trump’s threats to intervene won’t help civilians; “he internet blackout across Iran is meant to prevent protests from spreading, and observers from witnessing the crackdown on them. But it’s also emblematic of the deep uncertainty surrounding this unrest and the response of a regime under growing pressure.
Rocketing inflation and a tanking currency sparked the protests in late December. They have since broadened and spread. Videos showed thousands marching in Tehran on Thursday night and people setting fire to vehicles and state-owned buildings.
Regime opponents – not least in the diaspora – have often predicted its demise. The politically‑focused Green movement of 2009 was brutally suppressed. Ten years later, a harsh crackdown ended economically-prompted unrest. The current protests are smaller than those of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement at its 2022 peak. But they began in parts of society that have been more supportive of the regime, and have quickly escalated, with some participants explicitly demanding its fall.
NGOs say dozens of people – including children – have already been killed. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, initially acknowledged “legitimate” economic demands. Now he is hardening his attack upon “saboteurs” who he says are seeking to please Donald Trump, after the US president threatened to intervene and “hit hard” if more protesters died. The head of the judiciary said the consequences for demonstrators would be “decisive, maximum and without any legal leniency”.
Yet while authorities have always managed to crush protests, they have not succeeded in addressing the causes – and they now face simultaneous internal and external threats. Their economic room for manoeuvre is more limited than ever. The supreme leader is 86 years old and has suffered poor health. Iran’s axis of resistance is severely degraded and June’s 12-day war with Israel – plus the US attack on nuclear facilities – shattered the belief that the regime could provide physical security for its people even though it failed them economically. It no longer looks impregnable.
Following his reckless and illegal seizure of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Mr Trump’s threats may give the leadership some pause for thought. But they have also allowed it to delegitimise Iranian citizens with genuine, deeply held grievances as the pawns of foreign aggressors.
Flush with victory from the Venezuela decapitation, Mr Trump seems to believe that there are easy wins from foreign intervention. Benjamin Netanyahu has talked up the possibility that “Iranian people are taking their fate into their own hands” and has a history of persuading the US president into reckless and dangerous ventures. An Iran embroiled in domestic chaos would suit the Israeli prime minister well. But Iranian civilians and others in the region would pay the price.
Destabilisation might lead to an entrenchment, not weakening, of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s power. Iran’s defence council this weeksignalled that it could take preemptive military action if it saw “objective signs of threat” from the US and Israel. That attempt to restore deterrence might be bluster – but shows that the region is entering a riskier era. Whether the regime persists or is gradually approaching the end of the road, there can be no easy exit. Those who claim they want to help, while cynically seeking to exploit the legitimate grievances of Iranian citizens for their own ends, only risk more bloodshed and suffering.”
As I wrote in my post of September 16 2025, Revolt Against Theocracy and Institutionalized Patriarchal Sexual Terror in Iran: Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Mahsa Ahmini; Mass Protests in Iran and throughout the world on this anniversary of the martyrdom of Mahsa Ahmini in the cause of liberty and women’s rights of bodily autonomy.
The key question now is whether Iran is on the edge of real change, or yet another bloody cycle of executions and mass arrests.
After more than three years of revolutionary struggle in Iran against the rule of the mullahs, larger than anything seen since the 1979 overthrow of the Shah over forty years ago which brought the Shiite theocracy into power and includes massacres of hundreds of protestors but also open battle in Shiraz and other major cities between the government’s forces of repression and the people of Iran united in the cause of liberty, that no government may stand between man and God nor enforce compulsion in matters of faith, a re-energized democracy revolution brings the theocracy near its fall.
Massa Ahmini is all of us, and we may read our future in her fate should we fail to act in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights. In Iran and in America and throughout the world, forces of change are gathering as we refuse to abandon each other.
Comes the whirlwind, and with it escape from the legacies of our history and a reimagination and transformation of the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of September 20 2022, Revolt Against Patriarchy and Theocracy, Not In America This Time But In Iran; In glorious defiance of state sexual terror and patriarchal theocracy, the women of Iran have seized the streets in mass protests throughout the nation and challenged the fearsome and brutal Revolutionary Guards and morality police in several direct actions, a protest movement which may become a general revolt.
Iran is still shaken and destabilized by the echoes and reflections of the near-revolution in its vassal state of Iraq, and as in the chaos of the Battle of Shiraz in December of 2019 in which I fought, mass action provides windows of opportunity in which to bring a reckoning to police and other enforcers of tyranny and to the hegemonic elites whose wealth, power, and privilege they serve, but while we failed to cast those who would enslave us down from their thrones on that occasion three years ago, this time may be different.
For this time we have a martyr, and one who was a member of the Kurdish people, a semi-autonomous nation with vast oil wealth, American and other international support, a dream of independence and a modern army to win it with, and famous for her women warriors and the social equality of genders.
I hope this will be enough to tip the balance; from the moment of Mahsa Amini’s death, the democracy movement against theocracy and patriarchy in Iran has become linked with the independence struggle of Kurdistan as parallel and interdependent forms of liberation struggle.
Patriarchy cannot survive if half of humankind refuses to be unequal to and subjugated by the other half.
The secret of force and control is that it is hollow and brittle; authority loses its legitimacy simply by being disbelieved, and force finds its limit in disobedience and refusal to submit.
As I wrote on the occasion of a previous visit to Iran to make mischief for tyrants in my post of December 2 2019, Battle of Shiraz: the democratic revolution against theocracy in Iran is now an open war; For two weeks beginning Friday November 15 through Monday December 2, Iran’s major city of Shiraz was engulfed in open war as the democracy revolution against the theocratic rule of the mullahs moves into the stage of direct challenge of its military and other tools of state control.
By the count of the neighborhood militia leaders who have now organized themselves into a kind of rebel government, there are 52 or 53 dead among the citizens killed by the police and military throughout Shiraz, plus nine killed in the intense fighting in the Sadra district in which an elite revolutionary unit, myself embedded among them, directly attacked the fortress of the region’s chief mullah on Sunday November 17.
What began as a peaceful protest and a shutdown of the city by abandoning cars in the streets turned quickly to open battle after police shot and killed Mehdi Nekouyee, a 20 year old activist, without cause. Soon armed bands of laborers stormed the police station he was killed in front of, leaving it in flames and marching on other government strongpoints as their ranks swelled.
Throughout the next three days the luxury shopping district on Maliabad Boulevard was largely destroyed, some 80 bank branches and several gas stations set on fire. The Qashqai minority of Turkic nomads and weavers who in Shiraz are an important mercantile polity declared independence and repelled successive waves of attacks by heavy weapons units and helicopter assault cavalry against their outlying district of Golshan.
But the most important revolutionary action of November in Iran was the seizure of the chief mullah of Shiraz and his palace-fortress, of which I am a witness and participant. An action whose meaning is central to the motives and binding purpose of the secularists who are fighting for democracy and to liberate Iran from the autocratic regime of the mullahs, this was a glorious victory which exposes the hollowness of theocratic rule.
Widely regarded as corrupt, nepotistic, and xenophobic patriarchs, the mullahs, like Catholic priests, were once sacrosanct from personal responsibility and protected by a perceived mantle of piety; so a primary mission of the Revolution in Iran now as in France over two centuries ago is to expose their venality and the perversion and injustice of their rule. A task made hideously easy in this case by the pervasive network of pedophile sex trafficking authorized by the mullahs and a major source of trackable income in the form of licenses they sell for temporary “pleasure marriages” in which consent is an imprecise concept. And that’s just one visible part of the vast iceberg of greed and immorality of their regime.
In Iran, the fight for democracy and freedom is also a fight against the patriarchy.
As I wrote in my post of October 13 2022 Embrace What You Fear and Be Free: Case of the Resistance Against Patriarchy in Iran and America; A glorious resistance has swept the world as half of humankind refuses to submit to the authority and power of the other half, a revolt against Patriarchy and an evolutionary shift in consciousness which will transform our possibilities of becoming human; two stunning examples are the mass protests in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the face of brutal repression, murder, torture, and mind control in Soviet-model psychiatric prisons, and the electoral fight for bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and gender equality here in America.
The women of Iran and other theocratic patriarchies are fighting to free themselves from the same kinds of systemic dehumanization the Republicans are attempting to impose in America as subversion of democracy. We need only look to Iran and Afghanistan to see the fate which awaits us all if we do nothing to resist the weaponization of faith in service to power by those who would enslave us.
Here I question the use of fear by authority and how we may resist subjugation in revolutionary struggle through embrace of our fear as seizure of power.
Marina Warner explores the uses of fear in our topologies of authorized identities and their transgression as revolutionary struggle against internalized Patriarchal oppression in her marvelous and insightful No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock, which maps our Animus while its companion volume, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, does the same for our Anima; together some of the finest writing on the dyadic masculine and feminine forces of which human being is made.
Patriarchy is a system and structure of institutionalized sexual terror, one which authorizes identities of sex and gender. The intricacies and diabolical mechanisms of its operations and processes have been described in exhausting detail in the decades since Simone de Beauvoir’s founding work of 1949 The Second Sex; here I wish only to reference it as a system of fear with which all humankind must struggle for self-ownership, autonomy, and authenticity.
Our fears are signposts and anchorages of our shadow self, that which we must swallow but are loath to do, as Nietzsche said of the Toad which embodied his darkness, and which William S. Burroughs was cursed to bear as the avatar of a monstrous god. Feelings of disgust, revulsion, terror, violation, and seizure by the alien and the unclean; these are signs not of warning but of welcome to the secret truths of ourselves which we must discover and embrace.
Sometimes we must let our demons out to play.
As I wrote in my post of March 30 2020, Embracing Fear as Liberation from Authority and Control: Anarchy as a Path of Psychological and Social Freedom; Even more terrible than blaming the victim is when no one believes the victim; it is an erasure and silencing which is the particular horror of women, as the dread that no one is coming to help is that of the LGBT community.
What Matthew Jacobs calls The Ubiquity of Disbelief in his insightful criticism in Huffpost of The Invisible Man starring Elizabeth Moss, entitled Why Does No One In Horror Movies Believe The Female Protagonist?, and examines disbelief and the horror of disconnectedness as a disease of the rupture of trust and the fracture of social cohesion, points directly to the cathartic function of art, its ability to hold up a mirror to our darkness.
In her classic essay Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva brilliantly interrogates the uses of fear to authority and power as Patriarchy in the control and manufacture of our identities of sex and gender, the uses of normality, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, and ideas of virtue in the falsification, dehumanization, and commodification of humans into slaves by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and all of these processes interdependent with the weaponization of overwhelming and generalized fear in service to power through submission to authority, who by lies and illusions subjugate us with divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging, including those of race, faith as encoded Patriarchal authority, and nationality as a figment conjured by all of these.
For the mechanism and pathology of fear is what drives patriarchy, unequal power, and inauthentic relationships, abstracts us from ourselves and one another as simulacra and creates aberrations of violence and sexual terror.
From fear are monsters born; yet it is our fear we must embrace to free ourselves of the tyranny of others and the spectre of authoritarian force and control.
We must not let fear define us; it is the degree to which we can embrace, learn from, and free ourselves from our fear which measures our freedom and enacts our liberation from the control of others.
For when we cannot be driven into submission by authority through fear and learned helplessness the use of force becomes meaningless as does its scale; thus do we reclaim our power and agency to define ourselves, and ownership of the performances of our identities.
Who cannot be compelled is free, autonomous, self-created and defined, and becomes Unconquered as a Living Autonomous Zone bearing forces of change which can set others free.
Order appropriates, law serves power, and there is no just authority.
How do we wage resistance and revolutionary struggle against authority, elite hegemonies of unequal power, and the carceral states which enforce their tyrannies as law and order?
First by refusal to submit, second by solidarity of action, and third by delegitimation through disbelief and disobedience.
By these three principles of action tyrants are cast down from their thrones and systems of unequal power are transformed, for the secret of power is that it is hollow and brittle and collapses into ruin when met with disbelief and disobedience.
In defiance of authority the women of Iran, America, and elsewhere have become free and in that moment victorious, for refusal to submit, to believe, and to obey is a victory within us which cannot be taken from us. Nor can the tide of change be stopped once it has begun.
As I wrote in my post of October 27 2022, Triumph of the Mahabad Autonomous Zone and the Free State of Kurdistan Over the State Terror of Iran’s Regime of Mullahs: the Iranian Revolution Against Theocracy and Patriarchy; We celebrate the triumph of the Mahabad Autonomous Zone and the Free State of Kurdistan, where the women of Kurdistan, Iran, and Iraq have together in solidarity against the Patriarchy and the state terror of theocracy won an island of liberty in a vast sea of darkness.
It is a darkness now being challenged in street fighting and open mass protests throughout Iran to overthrow the brutal regime and sexual terror of the mullahs in the restoration of a free society of equals, but also in Iraq and Afghanistan, a revolution of women as a slave caste which like America’s #metoo movement and the historic struggle for women’s rights of reproduction and bodily autonomy now being waged in our elections finds echoes and reflections worldwide as a tide of change.
It falls to each of us in this moment to choose a future for ourselves and for humankind, and stand in solidarity with the half of humanity enslaved and dehumanized by the other half; for men to abandon unequal power and the subjugation of women and to join their loved ones, mothers, sisters, partners, daughters, and friends in liberation struggle for a better future and a free society of equals, for the women of America and the women of Iran to unite in common cause and action with women everywhere, and for us all, wherever human beings hunger to be free, to act in solidarity as a United Humankind to free ourselves from the legacies of our history and from systems of oppression and unequal wealth, power, and privilege.
If we do this simple thing, act in solidarity for the liberty of us all, those who would enslave us will fail. Force and control are fragile when authority has no legitimacy and is disbelieved, and when orders are disobeyed. Disbelieve, disobey, and refuse to submit, and we become Unconquered and free.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
The Circle film trailer
How Iran’s protest movement has gained increasing momentum – a visual guide
‘The streets are full of blood’: Iranian protests gather momentum as regime cracks down: Demonstrators recount experiences on the frontlines as protest movement rapidly moves beyond government’s control
The Guardian view on Iran’s protests: old tactics of repression face new pressures: A brutal regime has failed to safeguard either the country’s physical security or basic living standards. But Donald Trump’s threats to intervene won’t help civilians
۱۲ ژانویه ۲۰۲۶ انقلابهای دموکراسی ایران و آمریکا در سال ۲۰۲۶
اعتراضات تودهای موازی و وابسته به هم علیه استبداد و ترور دولتی در آمریکا و ایران در حال وقوع است و هر دو ممکن است اکنون از نقطه بیبازگشت برای رژیمهایی که آنها را به چالش میکشند، عبور کرده باشند، جایی که محاسبه ترس که توسط آن همه دولتها هژمونیهای نخبگان ثروت، قدرت و امتیاز را حفظ و اجرا میکنند و به عنوان خشونت تجسم یافته به آن خدمت میکنند، دیگر نمیتواند به طور مؤثر مخالفت را با وحشیگری و تئاتر ظلم سرکوب کند؛ اعتراضاتی که لبه تیز جنبشهای دموکراسی در برابر حکومت دینی و دولت پلیسی هستند و به انقلابهای واقعی تبدیل شدهاند یا در شرف تبدیل شدن به آنها هستند.
قدرت خود را به دست بگیرید؛ این هدف همه انقلابهاست و با مشروعیتزدایی از دولت به دست میآید. از طریق ناباوری به دروغها و تبلیغات اقتدار و نافرمانی از قوانین و مجریان آن، قدرت خود را به دست میآوریم و شکستناپذیر و آزاد میشویم.
حتی با خاموشی رسانههای اجتماعی، ما این کار را در ایران انجام میدهیم و در آمریکا، رژیم ترامپ نمیتواند ما را ساکت کند یا جنایات خود را پنهان کند، زمانی که سندیکای قاچاق انسان و باجگیری که ثروت و قدرت ترامپ بر آن استوار است، با پروندههای اپستین افشا میشود، و همچنین نمیتوان خون رنه گود و دیگر قربانیان نیروی تروریستی برتریطلب سفیدپوست ICE ترامپ و کمپین پاکسازی قومی را از جمعیتی که همگی دوربین و ابزار انتشار در جیب خود دارند، پنهان کرد.
تئوکراسی ایران با ترور جنسی مردسالارانه و زور و کنترل سیاسی، در جنایات خود علیه بشریت، به رژیم فاشیست جنایتکار و منحرف ترامپ و رایش چهارم آمریکا نزدیک میشود، هرچند به وضوح در مقیاس جهانی نیست. هیچ کس دیگری جز ترامپ در همکاری با سلطان ترول، ایلان ماسک، با خودداری از کمکهای غذایی در یک قحطی سیاسی، هشتصد هزار غریبه را به قتل نرسانده است، که از زمان مائو و استالین چنین نبوده است؛ و جنایات آنها جنایات نفرت با انگیزه نژادی نبوده است. من رویای آیندهای را در سر دارم که در آن انقلابهای باشکوه آینهای را در ایران در مقابل حکومت دینی ملاها و در آمریکا در مقابل حکومت دینی هویت مسیحیِ رایش چهارمِ برتریطلبان سفیدپوست و احیاگران نازی مطالعه کنیم، به عنوان داستانی هشداردهنده از ماهیت شکننده دموکراسی و حقوق بشر جهانی ما که برای خدمت و توانمندسازی طراحی شده است.
ما تنها همبستگی خود را به عنوان ضامن انسانیت یکدیگر داریم تا مرز بین شهروندان و رعایا را حفظ کنیم و مرزهای انسانیت را تعریف کنیم.
بیایید صرف نظر از تفاوتهای نژاد، جنسیت، ایمان یا هویت ملی، در کنار برادران، خواهران و دیگران بایستیم و زندگی خود را در تعادل با زندگی بیقدرتان و محرومان، ساکتان و محوشدگان، همه کسانی که فرانتس فانون آنها را دوزخیان زمین مینامید، قرار دهیم. در آمریکا و ایران، اکنون در مبارزه رهاییبخش به هم پیوستهایم، و هر کجا که مردان تشنه آزادی هستند. باشد که همه ما نابودگران، خائنان و کسانی را که میخواهند ما را به بردگی بکشند، از میان خود پاک کنیم و برای تحریف، کالاییسازی و غیرانسانیسازی خود و برای همه کسانی که میخواهند روح ما را بدزدند، حساب پس بدهیم.
Iran, a retrospective of my writing
September 16 2025 Revolt Against Theocracy and Institutionalized Patriarchal Sexual Terror in Iran: Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Mahsa Ahmini
July 11 2024 Victory Iran: Why Does Iran Have a New President, and What Does This Mean? At the Edge of Total War With America and Israel, Iran Realigns and De-Escalates
January 3 2024 On the Manufacture of Just Causes For War: Case of the Bombing of the Anniversary Ceremony For Qassem Suleimani In Iran, America’s Greatest Ally in the Fight Against ISIS Assassinated By Order of Traitor Trump To Sabotage Iran’s Democracy Movement
January 29 2024 Where Do We Go From Here? As the Gaza War Becomes A Great Powers Proxy War and a Theatre of World War Three, and the Arab-American Alliance With Our Colony Israel Versus the Iranian Dominion of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen With Their Key Ally Russia Make A Wishbone of the Holy Land
October 27 2022 Triumph of the Mahabad Autonomous Zone and the Free State of Kurdistan Over the State Terror of Iran’s Regime of Mullahs: the Iranian Revolution Against Theocracy and Patriarchy
January 12 2020 A re energized democracy revolution throughout Iran brings the theocracy of the mullahs near its fall in the wake of the government’s mistaken destruction of a civilian aircraft and its lies about its responsibility for the tragedy
Why does the state use police to enforce its authority and laws, and train and arm them not to render aid but to kill, not to redress unequal power and injustices but to perpetrate them as institutional hate crime?
Such questions thunder through the streets of Memphis, America, and the world as brutal repression and state terror is met with resistance, as it did during the historic Black Lives Matter mass protests for racial justice.
The constellation of antifascist movements and mass action protests against the Trump regime like the No Kings Days had already reached the levels of the Black Lives Matter marches for a free and equal America before the ICE murder of Renee Good, involving over fifty cities in around seven months of sustained action; today this trigger event has mobilized the whole of our nation and of a wide political spectrum in Resistance to Trump’s Fourth Reich of tyranny and state terror.
Today we reflect on the origins of our liberation struggle, and the legacy of the police murder of Tyre Nichols.
On January 10 2023, Tyre Nichols died from being beaten by five police officers on the seventh. That the policemen who murdered him simply because they could were black signposts issues of internalized oppression and systemic white supremacist terror, as elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege require enforcers to keep the slave castes at their work; the phenomenon of the overseer is a symptom of these inequalities and a strategy of loaned power and assimilation on the part of carceral states and colonial regimes, both of which America remains long after the Civil War. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is an exemplar of the overseer, one who has joined an elite who does not regard him or any of his people as fellow human beings; Kamala Harris whom I named Kommandant Kamala for her Great Wall of Silence on American complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and here rise to power on the use of stop and frisk and other strategies of the re-enslavement of Black people as prison bond labor, represented both my hopes and my fears for our future, and may possibly be another such overseer of the carceral and white supremacist state and social system. The emergence of overseers among slave populations is entirely due to the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle, as a symptom of systemic oppression.
Internalized oppression has major forms in America of Black on Black violence and of female on female violence; for brilliant interrogations of the latter one may read the luminous works of Margaret Atwood. My point here is that this is about systems of oppression, and not an evil impulse or moral failing; but the corruption and subversion, fracture and division of our solidarity and duty of care for each other by those who would enslave us.
We Americans still have armed police to enforce our subjugation of nonwhite others, through the whole of our history since the Civil War including both the Obama and Biden administrations. Obama did not challenge the counter insurgency model of policing nor the militarization of police which 911 opened the door for, nor did Biden whom we elected on the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement and our seizure of over fifty American cities for several months of battle against a secret army of Homeland Security terror troops working with deniable fascist assets like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
In this we were victorious, we Antifa being the only force to defeat the federal government of the United States in open battle on continental American soil since Little Bighorn. The articles of surrender declared by the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf which designated Portland, Seattle, and New York as Anarchist Zones beyond state control is unparalleled in our history. Of this I am immensely proud as a triumph equal to our defeat of the Apartheid regime of South Africa and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, yet the Pandemic was weaponized as a national Quarantine by our betrayers to stop the protests without changing anything.
Why have we not abandoned the use of state terror and abolished the police?
Is it because in creating terror and learned helplessness through the random murders of nonwhite citizens the police are doing exactly what they are chosen and trained to do?
Police are evil because they enforce unjust systems of white supremacist terror and patriarchal sexual terror; police forces are designed and intended as enforcers of unequal power and overseers of carceral states of force and control, states whose purpose is to institutionalize elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness through which caste systems are perpetuated, citizenship made conditional, and those who create the wealth of elites commodified and dehumanized as de facto slaves. Police began as slavecatchers and overseers, and remain so today.
In the murder of Tyre Nichols we have a special unit of overseers who beat a fellow Black man to death simply because they could, but this obscures the central fact of the case that this horrific crime is fully aligned with the purpose of the special unit of which they were members and of the institution of policing in general; to criminalize Black identity and act as a force of state terror in the repression of dissent and the theft of citizenship.
Police are evil when states are evil, and all states are inherently evil, for the state is embodied violence.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
As written by Arianna Coghill in Mother Jones, in an article entitled It’s Been Two Years Since Cops Killed Tyre Nichols. Here’s What You Need to Know; “anuary 10, 2025, marks the second anniversary of the death of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who was restrained and fatally beaten by five now-former Memphis police officers during a traffic stop. After countless marches, talks with politicians, and pending court cases, his family are still fighting for justice for their loved one.
“This year has been unbearable,” said his mother, RowVaughn Wells, at a vigil on Tuesday. “I had to listen to a cop tell people that they just stopped my son for nothing, that he was not a threat. We had to hear all of this. But what made it so difficult is the fact that it finally sank in that I would never see my son again.”
Released three weeks after his death, the video of Nichols’ brutal beating shook the nation, with then-President Biden calling Wells to express his condolences. Attorney Anthony Romanucci described Nichols as “a human piñata for those police officers.”
One of the most high-profile cases of police brutality of 2023, the widespread coverage of his death helped shine a light on the long history of misconduct by the Memphis Police Deparment, and reignited the nation’s long-held conversation about police brutality.
As we approach the two-year anniversary of Nichols’ passing, here’s what you need to know about the case.
Three Officers Were Found Guilty on Federal Charges Related to Nichols’ Death
Nichols was beaten by five members of Memphis PD’s SCORPION Unit, a police task force that was hastily disbanded after footage of the attack was released to the public.
In January 0f 2023, Emmitt Martin, Desmond Mills Jr., Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, and Justin Smith were all arrested and hit with several state felony charges. A federal court indicted them eight months later.
In October 2024, a judge found Bean, Haley and Smith guilty on federal charges of witness tampering; however, they dodged the most serious charge levied against them: violating Nichols’ civil rights, causing his death.
Avoiding the trial, Martin and Mills both pleaded guilty and testified against their former colleagues. But these aren’t the only charges they’re facing.
On April 28, 2025, the ex-officers will go on trial for second-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated assault, official misconduct, and official oppression.
Four of the Five Officers Had Histories of Reprimand and Suspension
A public records request by The Commercial Appeal found that police department had either suspended or reprimanded four out of the five officers before they’d beaten Nichols. Records show that the officers were reprimanded for allegedly failing to report domestic violence, causing multiple car accidents with squad vehicles, and not documenting forceful arrests.
The Memphis Commercial Appeal reports that the men “faced little-to-no consequences.”
Some of These Officers Beat Another Man Days Prior
Some of these same officers allegedly beat another man just three days before Nichols. Monterrious Harris, a 22-year-old, was grabbed, kicked and punched by four of the officers involved in the Tyre Nichols attack. And the accusations didn’t stop there.
As my colleague Samantha Michaels wrote last year:
As prosecutors review cases, other victims continue to come forward. Darick Lane, 32, alleges that two of the officers who killed Nichols, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith, pulled him out of a car window in June and threatened to shoot him if he moved, according to the Washington Post. Another officer, Demetrius Haley, is meanwhile accused of beating Cordarlrius Sledge while Sledge was incarcerated in the Shelby County jail in 2015, according to another lawsuit that was dismissed on technical grounds. Sledge said he was trying to hide a cellphone when Haley and two other officers attacked him, slamming his head into a sink until he blacked out.
The beating was so brutal that a large group of prisoners on the cellblock wrote a letter to the corrections director to complain: “We are truly asking that this matter gets looked into before someone gets hurt really bad or lose their life because of some unprofessional officers,” they wrote.
DOJ Calls for Serious Reform of Memphis Police
The alleged wrongdoing was not limited to just the indicted officers. Nichols’ death kickstarted a 17-month federal investigation into the Memphis Police Department. In December 2024, the Department of Justice released a jaw-dropping, 73-page report detailing the department’s long pattern of misconduct, discrimination, and excessive force.
“Our investigation found that officers use force to punish and retaliate against people who do not immediately do as they say,” the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke wrote in the report. Here’s a quick run-down of some of the egregious actions the Memphis PD stands accused of:
Failing to deescalate encounters including traffic stops
Using excessive force even when people were already restrained
Handcuffing kids as young as eight years old, “even when they posed no safety risk”
Escalating confrontations with children, including tasing a thirteen year old twice and threatening and throwing an eight-year-old boy
Mocking disabled people
Using to intimidation and threats
Unlawfully firing at moving cars
Accidentally pepper spraying and firing Tasers at each other
Higher-ups reportedly failed to hold their officers accountable and didn’t conduct thorough investigations into many of these incidents. The report concludes with a serious call for reform, recommending 18 remedial measures.
“This process and these findings uncovered that our city has a lot of work to do,” said Reagan Fondren, Acting US Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, in a statement. “Memphians are rightly concerned with gun violence and violent crime. They are also rightly concerned about the collective approach that we must take to tackle these issues.”
In response to the report, the city plans to hire former Judge Bernice Donald, Tennessee’s first Black woman to hold a judgeship, to supervise the department. According to ABC 24, Donald will lead nine-person task force to come up with a plan for reform.
What Happens Next?
Tyre Nichols’ family is suing the city of Memphis, several current and former Memphis PD officials, and all the officers involved for $550 million. The complaint states that Memphis police lied to Nichols’ mother about his arrest, claiming that he was driving under the influence.
The suit, like the Justice Department report, also claims that officials turned a “blind eye” to the SCORPION unit’s violent policing.
“How does this horrific and unconstitutional treatment of Black men and women by law enforcement continue to happen?” said attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Nichols’ family, in a statement that likened the Memphis officers to the lynch mob that murdered Emmett Till. “Tyre’s lynch mob was dressed in department sweatshirts and vests,” Crump wrote,” sanctioned by the entities that supplied them.”
On January 3, Judge Mark Norris pushed the trial to July 2026—the second such delay—citing several reasons, including that officials would prefer proceedings to start after the separate murder trial begins.”
As written by Simon Balto in The Guardian, in an article entitled The killing of Tyre Nichols was heinous and shocking. It was also not an aberration. The majority of Americans have resigned themselves to accepting policing as it currently exists. This must change; “On 7 January, police in Memphis beat Tyre Nichols so badly as to send him into a days-long death to which he ultimately succumbed on 10 January. The beating of Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was so brutal that even law enforcement officials at both the city and state level – usually reliable sources for blaming the victims of police violence for the violence done to them – have declared it a heinous act. The five officers who beat Nichols, all of whom happen to also be Black, are currently on second-degree murder charges for what they did to him. Nichols is at least the 80th person killed by police in the US so far this year.
Nearly two years ago, the Guardian asked me to write about the trial of Derek Chauvin for his murder of George Floyd. At the time, my estimation of the trial’s significance – and of the conviction that seemed likely at the time and that ultimately came to pass – is that it would be minimal. After all, I more or less argued at the time, you can send Derek Chauvin to prison for being violent, but doing so doesn’t change the institution that trained him to be violent, paid him to be violent, and paid him to train others to be violent.
It would be too charitable to Chauvin to call him a scapegoat, but it also wouldn’t be far from the truth. As I wrote at the time, within the context of the trial and as Chauvin’s peers and bosses lined up to testify against him, during that trial “the fact of police violence – elemental and central to the institution, the first language of police and the structuring logic of policing” was never up for interrogation.
A similar denial, a determined refusal to believe that what police did to Tyre Nichols is squarely on the continuum of violence that defines policing, is already at work in Memphis. On Thursday, as attention to the case mounted in advance of the Friday-evening-release of video footage of the officers beating Nichols, the director of the Tennessee bureau of investigation, David Rausch, claimed that what was contained therein was “criminal” and “not at all proper policing”.
Such is the wizardry, the sleight of hand, by which incidents of police violence that are caught on camera and understood to reflect poorly upon the institution of policing are cast beyond the pale, to be read as aberrations to whatever “proper policing” can possibly entail. Violence, coercive force, the carry and use of deadly weapons – all of these are central to “proper policing” as the institution of policing in this country currently exists.
When a law enforcement official like David Rausch claims that what those officers in Memphis did to Tyre Nichols was not proper policing, one wonders what intellectual alchemy he’s engaged in. Police are trained to be violent, are trained to use coercive force, are trained to use deadly weapons.
There must be, then, a place on the police continuum of violence at which people like Rausch would say the violence was “proper”. Where is that place? One punch? Five nightstick blows? One minute of a merciless five-on-one beating rather than the three minutes it took officers to deliver the killing blows to Nichols? These are the questions in need of asking when the proprietors of violence – those granted by law with a unique monopoly on violence – condemn their own not for being violent, but for not doing violence correctly.
And then there is the matter of race. There will be people who point to the fact that all five officers who killed Tyre Nichols are Black, and use the fact to argue that it disproves a racist angle to his death. This is false. Just as catastrophic violence is not aberrational to policing but rather part of it because it is the institution not the individual that is the problem, so is it true that Black police officers can be just as implicated in the violent white supremacy of policing as can officers who are not Black.
Indeed, for more than 100 years at this point, reformers (some of them Black, some of them not) have argued that one key to resolving this country’s generations-deep crisis of racist policing is to hire more Black and brown officers. And for nearly as long, Black intellectuals from Langston Hughes to members of the Black Panther party have noted that that way lies madness, understanding well that the problem is not the individual who dons the uniform. The problem is the institution that the uniform embodies.
When I wrote about Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd and what the trial outcome could mean, I expressed skepticism that it could mean anything major, but also hope that Floyd’s family would find some measure of comfort in a guilty verdict, if that was what they sought. I hold the same thoughts close for Tyre Nichols’s loved ones, and hope for them whatever comforts they can harness in the wake of such atrocity.
And yet I remain saddened by the public conversations that unfold in the wake of these murders. I am maddened by the questions journalists ask and more importantly do not ask of law enforcement officials in their wake, and infuriated by the responses those officials give. A majority of Americans have resigned themselves to accepting policing as it currently exists, and thus irretrievably accepting police violence as it currently exists; one cannot accept the former without the latter. And that is a sad comment on our national political imaginary, collective will, and commitments to one another.”
As written by Shruti Rajkumar in Huffpost, in an article entitled Protests Erupt Nationwide After Video Footage Shows Memphis Police Beating Tyre Nichols; “Protests broke out in cities all across the country following the release of body camera footage of five Tennesee police officers brutally assaulting motorist Tyre Nichols during a traffic stop.
Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was pulled over earlier this month and arrested for alleged reckless driving. The body camera footage released Friday by officials shows the Memphis police officers beating and pepper-spraying Nichols as he lay on the ground during the Jan. 7 encounter. He sustained severe injuries from the assault and died three days later from cardiac arrest and kidney failure.
The release of the videos depicting Nichol’s fatal beating resulted in public grief and unrest nationwide. Traffic in New York City’s Times Square came to a standstill on Friday evening as people took to the streets protesting Nichols’ death, with some chanting, “All cops are bastards.” In Boston, demonstrators carried a banner through the street chanting, “Brick by brick, wall by wall, these racist systems got to fall.”
The five police officers involved in Nichols’ death were arrested and charged with second-degree murder on Thursday. Two were released on bond, and all five were fired from the Memphis Police Department. The Department of Justice and FBI announced last week that they would investigate Nichols’ death.
Earlier this month, a photo of Nichols in an “unrecognizable” state in his hospital bed was released. In a CNN interview, Nichols’ parents said seeing their son in the hospital in such horrific condition was reminiscent of Emmitt Till, a Black 14-year-old who was abducted and lynched in 1955. (Till’s body was displayed in an open casket at his mother’s request, who wanted people to see the brutality, injustice and racism that led to her son’s death. This served as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement).
Police brutality and misconduct, which has been protested for decades, garnered widespread attention in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd as protests spread worldwide in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Do you know how much force it takes to beat somebody with your bare hands, how much violence that takes, how much anger that takes, how much hate that has to take?” McKayla Wilkes, the founder of the grassroots organization Schools Not Jails, said while attending a rally in Washington, D.C., on Friday. “I think we need to break the system, shut it the fuck down and reimagine what it’s like for our communities to actually be safe.”
President Joe Biden called for peaceful protests in a statement released on Thursday.
“As Americans grieve, the Department of Justice conducts its investigation, and state authorities continue their work, I join Tyre’s family in calling for peaceful protest,” Biden said. “Outrage is understandable, but violence is never acceptable. Violence is destructive and against the law. It has no place in peaceful protests seeking justice.”
He added: “Public trust is the foundation of public safety, and there are still too many places in America today where the bonds of trust are frayed or broken. Tyre’s death is a painful reminder that we must do more to ensure that our criminal justice system lives up to the promise of fair and impartial justice, equal treatment, and dignity for all.”
Most protests appeared peaceful in videos circulating online. However, in New York City, a protester was dragged off of the hood of a police car after kicking the windshield. According to NBC New York, three people were reportedly arrested for vandalism of a New York Police Department vehicle.
The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were perceived by some as being largely violent. But reports show that 93% of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were peaceful. In addition, some activists point out that no one should dictate how people protest in the face of oppression.
“You can not dictate to people how to protest and resist the violent state oppression we are all experiencing,” grassroots organizer Bree Newsome Bass said in a tweet.
Nichols’ mother started a GoFundMe on Friday. More rallies and marches are expected to continue Saturday evening in cities across the U.S., including Memphis, Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and more.”
As written by Edwin Rios in The Guardian, in an article entitled Calls to ‘demolish and rebuild’ police as Memphis mourns Tyre Nichols; “As Nyliayh Stewart marched along Interstate 55 alongside protesters on Friday night, the moment of sorrow and anger felt familiar. Nearly a decade ago, in 2015, Stewart had been a teenager in Mississippi when she received word in the middle of the night that her cousin Darrius had been killed by a white Memphis police officer during a traffic stop while he was running away, according to witnesses at the time.
They had grown up like siblings. Stewart, now 24, heard the chants calling for justice for Tyre Nichols, the latest Black man killed by police in America, and felt the anger and anguish for his family. Unlike the five Black Memphis officers charged with Nichols’s killing, the cop who shot and killed Darrius, who retired from Memphis police, was never indicted.
“This should not have happened,” Stewart says. “This family should not have to bury him. My family should not have had to bury my cousin.”
Months after Stewart’s killing, amid the national outcry over police violence, Memphis police received body cameras. And now, as the city reels yet again from the beating death of a 29-year-old FedEx worker and skater, Tyre Nichols, at the hands of police, calls for further police reform have erupted again.
On Friday night, hours after city officials released video footage described by the police chief, Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, as “heinous, reckless and inhumane”, Memphis residents descended on the highway bridge that divided West Memphis, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee, cutting off traffic for hours. In this historically Black city, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated at a motel when he was in town supporting the strike of sanitation workers.
Nearly seven years earlier, more than 1,000 Memphis residents took over the same bridge in the largest act of civil disobedience in the city’s history following the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
Residents on Friday night described how the police “terrorized” citizens through their policing practices that target impoverished neighborhoods in the city.
Outside Martyrs Park, where protests first began, community organizers called for continued rallying in the coming days as city officials wrestle with how to move forward following charges against five Memphis officers and the relieving of duty of two Memphis firefighters, and in light of civil rights investigations.
Stewart says the police need to be “demolished and rebuilt” and reform their practices and training, as well as stop “unnecessary traffic stops”. That echoed what other community organizers who spoke to the Guardian demanded.
Amber Sherman, a community activist in Memphis, said that the city’s previous reform efforts, known as 8 Can Wait, a model taken by other police departments across the country, contributed to how swiftly the officers were fired but argued that more needed to be done.
She called for city officials to listen to the demands of Nichols’s family, which include the dismantling of the so-called Scorpion (Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods) unit, one of several specialized units launched in 2022 and dispatched to neighborhoods for “crime suppression”. The unit was involved in Nichols’s stop but it’s unclear how many.
Sherman described the units as there to “just torture and be violent toward citizens”. She decried the city’s investment in police while they refuse to “the actual causes of poverty” such as improving job opportunities and eliminating food deserts. “Instead of offering support, we offer more police and make more taskforces,” she says.
Sherman also called for releasing the names of all the people involved in Nichols’s death and an end to pretextual traffic stops such as for broken lights, tinted windows and loud music.
Community organizer Antonio Cathey, who grew up in Memphis, hoped that the city could work toward healing and rebuilding a broken trust in the police. Cathey, who started as an organizer for Fight for 15, described how police had harassed him and installed cameras outside his house. Community members needed to continue pressuring officials and reorganize. “There’s no trust right now,” he says. “We know that the police will put more resources into Black neighborhoods than white neighborhoods to oppress the oppressed.”
In Memphis, city data compiled by the TV station WREG showed that cops are seven times as likely to use force on Black men as white men in Memphis, a troubling yet consistent disparity seen throughout the US. In Nichols’s case, police claimed that Nichols had driven recklessly but the police chief said she couldn’t substantiate that cause based on the video footage.
For Stewart, it didn’t matter that the officers were Black, noting that they were part of a system with its roots in slave-catching patrols and were a “racist organization that needs to be demolished and rebuilt”. “Once you put that uniform on, you chose that,” she says.
“We got to stand up for what’s right,” she added. “We’re having kids now. And it’s like our kids could be next.”
As written by Gloria Oladipo in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘We’re tired of being beaten’: protesters across US call for justice for Tyre Nichols:
After video of the brutal beating was released, people gathered to decry the violence and abuse of power; “Protests took place in multiple US cities late Friday after police released footage of Tyre Nichols’ fatal beating at the hands of Memphis police.
The video released late Friday shows several Memphis officers kicking Nichols repeatedly in the head, punching him in the face, and hitting him with a baton.
Officers and medical personnel failed to intervene after the attacks left Nichols unable to sit upright. Five of the involved officers have been fired and charged with second-degree murder.
Protestors in Memphis, where the fatal beating took place, poured onto Interstate 55, a highway that connects Tennessee and Arkansas, on Friday night to express their outrage at the video and ongoing excessive force used by Memphis police.
Nyliayh Stewart, 24, joined protestors and discussed the killing of her cousin by a white Memphis police officer during a traffic stop.
“This should not have happened,” said Stewart. “This family should not have to bury him. My family should not have had to bury my cousin.”
In New York, dozens of protestors gathered in Times Square after the video’s release, decrying the brutal beating and police brutality at large. “What’s his name? Tyre! Say his name. Tyre!” the demonstrators chanted while holding up signs.
At least one person was arrested for allegedly attempting to smash a police car’s windshield. Two more were arrested during the demonstrations, but official charges are still pending, according to a report from ABC News 7.
A man, his fist raised in the air, walks along a busy street filled with cars and other people.
In New York City, people demonstrated in Times Square after video of the fatal police beating was released. Demonstrators also met in the city’s Union Square and Grand Central terminal, which police limited access to given the expected protests.
Several smaller groups in Chicago hosted rallies and vigils in response to the brutal video, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Groups of 10 to 20 people held peaceful demonstrations in front of the Chicago police department headquarters in the Bronzeville neighborhood and in several other communities. “We’re tired of being murdered, tired of being beaten, tired of being chased,” said Rabbi Michael Ben Yosef, who joined demonstrators in front of the department headquarters, according to ABC 7 Chicago.
Nearly 100 people rallied in Washington DC’s Lafayette Square in response to the video.
Dozens of protestors also marched in Philadelphia’s Center City, as organizers spoke out against the video and police violence.
“It’s absolutely disgusting,” said Talia Giles, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, during a speech at Friday’s demonstration.
“It shows the complete and utter disregard for human life. It shows the fact that police, no matter what their race is, are going to terrorize people because that’s what the system is meant to do. It’s meant to abuse its power against citizens.”
Civil rights leaders have spoken about the footage, calling out repeated instances of police brutality against Black people.
In a statement shared Saturday, Reverend Al Sharpton spoke about yet another example of police brutality against a Black man.
“Once again, we are forced to watch another horrific video of cops using brutal force to kill a Black man,” said Sharpton, who will be speaking at a rally on Saturday.
“Nearly three years after the murder of George Floyd shook the world, here we are.”
Here we are; how long shall we so remain? How long can we so survive?
It’s Been Two Years Since Cops Killed Tyre Nichols. Here’s What You Need to Know.
Torch of Liberty 