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.
French
18 Mai 2024 Idéalisations de la beauté masculine et féminine et lutte entre authenticité et identités autorisées : le cas de Chanel Paris-Edimbourg
Chanel Paris-Edimbourg est une nouvelle fougère masculine et un attirail de rasage de luxe qui nous transporte dans une Ecosse fantastique de forêts sombres évoquant la sauvagerie terreuse.
Il est présenté dans une bouteille en forme de gourde de chasseur et dégage une odeur de genévrier piquant et piquant, de scotch fumé tourbé d’Islay et de musc coriace de fourrures.
Edimbourg évoque des souvenirs et des images d’équitation à courre, de chasses au domaine en veste de tweed, de feux de camp de minuit, de voix tristes de cornemuses. Ah, mais les histoires qu’il raconte ; fantômes, sorcières, monstres, vendettas, rébellions, causes perdues et espoirs perdus, et la folie divine de l’amour, comme ceux de l’Écosse elle-même comme illustré dans l’opéra de Donizetti Lucia di Lammermoor.
Plus important encore, Edimbourg s’attache à définir ce qu’est un homme aujourd’hui, et les identités autorisées de sexe et de genre et les idéalisations de la beauté masculine et féminine résident au cœur du devenir humain, le seul problème que nous devons tous résoudre en grandissant et en saisissant notre pouvoir d’appropriation de soi et de création de soi ; qui voulons-nous devenir ?
Dans cette quête pour sculpter une forme de virilité emblématique qui, comme le David de Michel-Ange, peut à la fois inspirer la crainte et inviter à l’intimité, l’auteur de Chanel Olivier Polge a abandonné l’enthousiasme récent pour les parfums unisexes et a réinventé l’art des racines du parfum dans les fougères classiques. Ces références incluent l’aristocratique d’origine Houbigant Fougère Royale et son successeur impérial Guerlain Mouchoir de Monsieur, qui encodent respectivement les valeurs de la restauration conservatrice des Bourbons et du Second Empire révolutionnaire napoléonien, tous deux désormais augustes de tradition.
Polge est un maître de l’équilibre, du clair-obscur, de la suggestion et du geste implicite, et Edimbourg est une évocation de forêts sombres et de chemins éclairés par la lune où les chaperons rouges et leurs loups peuvent se chasser en toute impunité et le délicieux frisson des secrets incandescents et des désirs glorieux. au-delà de toutes les frontières de l’Interdit. Ici, la transgression est distillée dans un parfum empreint de signes de désir en tant que force de la nature intrinsèquement incontrôlable, qui peut nous libérer et nous rendre à nous-mêmes en tant que liberté et authenticité sartriennes.
Chanel nous a offert à Edimbourg un parfum qui fait signe à ceux que l’on désire avec les mots écrits par Franz Kafka à son amant dans Letters to Milena ; « Viens avec moi, Milena. Nous allons nous aimer sans scrupules ni peur ni retenue. Parce que le monde se termine demain.
Comme je l’ai dit un jour à Jean Genet lors de sa première rencontre après une course folle à travers une ruelle de tireurs d’élite pour atteindre un café qui servait les meilleures crêpes aux fraises du monde, en réponse à son observation « Je t’entends faire ça tous les jours, voler le petit-déjeuner de La mort », c’est un pauvre homme qui n’aime rien au-delà de la raison, et n’a aucun plaisir pour lequel il vaut la peine de mourir.
Les parfums racontent des histoires composées de molécules invisibles portées par les vents, évoquées par l’art de la chimie du magicien. Cette histoire particulière réinvente la masculinité et la féminité en termes du film La Belle et la Bête de Jean Cocteau, avec des intertextes et des références secondaires, notamment la version d’Angela Carter du Chaperon rouge dans La Compagnie des loups et son film mettant en vedette Amanda Seyfried comme mythes liés, et le ballet Swan de Tchaïkovski. Lake tel que réinventé en termes d’horreur freudienne dans le film d’Aronofsky Black Swan avec Natalie Portman.
Edimbourg s’ouvre sur un genévrier alpin vivifiant qui porte un caractère mentholé de Fernet-Branca amaro en signe de son héritage de barbier, des nuances acidulées d’agrumes qui chantent son chœur, associées à un cyprès résineux fumé qui rappelle à la fois les feux de camp et la propreté monastique de l’encens, fait belle et étrange par sa fonte de soutien d’encens et de clous de girofle.
Les épices d’apothicaire à distance s’attardent au bord de la conscience à travers la progression du déploiement de l’intention d’Edimbourg structurée dans le temps comme un chant de sauvagerie et d’amour triomphant.
Dépliez ensuite les somptueuses notes moyennes; le cèdre avec ses indices de propreté et l’espoir de trésors cachés à trouver chez son porteur, des associations de malles et de placards de garde-robe, qui prolongent les références forestières du cyprès initial, associées à un vétiver fumé et tourbé d’une sombre obscurité verte qui joue le même rôle pour le genévrier, qui danse sur l’air d’une lavande sèche évanescente, un autre indice de propreté et une référence savonneuse, qui rappelle les landes balayées par le vent surplombant une nature sauvage sans pistes.
Alors que le rideau du troisième acte se lève, on nous offre le spectacle d’un magnifique pas de deux de vanille et de musc, comme les cygnes blancs et noirs libérés des limites de leurs formes en tant qu’idées abstraites de rôles et d’identités performatives dyadiques, qui contiennent chacun l’autre ainsi que définir leurs limites et leurs interfaces, transposition de la dialectique masculin-féminin dans un espace intérieur au sein d’une même chair. La vanille est une chose de lumière, de foyer, de sécurité, de féminité en tant que mère et nourricière, qui rappelle les odeurs d’enfance des confiseries cuites au four ; le musc une chose d’obscurité, de sauvagerie, de transgression, de féminité en tant que chasseur et protecteur comme l’aspect Sekhmet ou lionne de la déesse chat égyptienne qui est aussi une figure maternelle comme Maat, comme l’a brillamment interrogé Margaret Atwood dans son roman Cat’s Eye, mais est également caractérisé par la masculinité figurative en tant que point de convergence des genres. Transposés à la sphère masculine, les cygnes blancs et noirs s’identifient au chasseur et au loup du chaperon rouge ; représentations genrées parallèles de la domesticité et de la sauvagerie.
Derrière le masque de sa délicieuse vanille se cache l’obscurité enivrante et insondable de son musc, riche et épicé, une poignée de truffes fraîches de la terre, dangereuses, interdites et irrésistibles. La vanille d’Edimbourg est un jeu de cache-cache dans un labyrinthe de haies formelles, une beauté ravissante et un désir monstrueux se poursuivant vers un lieu de joies secrètes en son cœur. Le musc d’Edimbourg équilibre les gammes avec une animalité complexe et multicouche qui rappelle à la fois le cuir des selles et le cachemire-soie de la fourrure de vison ; comme inhaler une bête que l’on a poursuivie dans sa grotte ou arracher les vêtements d’un amoureux pour enfouir son visage dans ses secrets.
On remarque qu’avec Edimbourg Polge définit la masculinité par contraste et complémentarité avec la féminité, dans une interrogation des identités de sexe et de genre en termes d’interdépendance jungienne anima-animus utilisant les trois étapes traditionnelles du parfum comme dispositif théâtral pour conduire son public le long d’un rituel. chemin labyrinthique de la thèse à l’antithèse et enfin à la synthèse, et en utilisant des paires d’opposés à chaque étape qui font référence à des figures, images et allégories mythiques et archétypales, dans une dialectique hégélienne des identités de genre comme subversion, réimagination et transformation. Voici un art de la révolution en tant que voyage d’un héros mythique et existentiel vers la plénitude.
Quant au personnage et aux rôles qu’il nous propose de jouer, Edimbourg suggère à la fois Red Hot Riding Hood comme une déesse coquette et rusée filou qui sous sa forme thériomorphe de renard attire ses camarades au-delà de tout espoir de sauvetage dans son royaume d’inconnus où les possibilités de devenir humain attend d’être découvert, et le chasseur farouche et sauvage et sa forme de loup de vastes faims qui se font passer pour l’autre ; des choses sauvages aux désirs effrénés qui peuvent rivaliser avec l’audace de l’autre.
Tout véritable art souille et exalte.
Ici est mis en bouteille la sauvagerie de la nature, et la sauvagerie en nous-mêmes.
On this day we celebrate Breaking the Silence, described on their website as “stories of hope, fear, loss and courage”. Of this I shall merely amplify the voices immortalized in this space, for I am not a member of this community and cannot speak for them nor from within the lived experience of this history; my prefacing statement here is but a general observation.
Our universal human rights are anchored by two which define what is human; our rights of self ownership of identity and of bodily autonomy. So also with those rights we possess as citizens of a free society of equals, which are parallel and interdependent with those derived from our natural condition, for there is no right of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness without our rights to choose who we are and may become and to perform our chosen identities as we prefer.
Let us frighten the horses and perform our identities as a community of brothers, sisters, and others in a free society of equals, including all possibilities of human being as yet undreamed, which raises each other up and opens all doors to the future of our own best selves.
As I wrote in my daily journal of March 8 2021, International Women’s Day: Interrogating the Idea of Woman and Identities of Sex and Gender As Performance Art and Revolutionary Struggle; What is a woman or a man, and how are such identities constructed?
On this International Woman’s Day, I am wondering how we define such a thing, and how our idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty shape our range of choices in the performance of ourselves.
I am thinking of these things in the context of a conversation in which a friend described the primary trauma of realizing they were imprisoned in a body whose sex did not match their gender, and in this vulnerable space was multiply attacked on grounds of falsely identifying as female in order to appropriate female spaces of performance.
It seems to me that trans exclusion reinforces and originates in a narrow definition of gender restricted to biology, and one which privileges signs and forms over hormones and inner experience; this ignores free will and the inviolable principles of freedom of conscience and of self-construal, the social construction of identity as a ground of being, and also perpetuates systemic inequalities and authorized identities of sex and gender.
History, memory, identity; recursive processes of adaptation, change, reimagination, transformation, and metamorphosis whereby we become self-created and self owned beings in struggle with authorized identities and systems of unequal power and oppression.
Gender is always fluid, relational, ambiguous, and a ground of struggle. It is also, like sexual orientation, distinct from biological sex and not a spectrum with endpoint limits but an infinite Moebius Strip where we are born and exist everywhere at once as polymorphosly perverse, to use Freud’s delicious phrase; except where identity is chosen as seizure of power or imposed by other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
To be an outcast is a terrible thing; but to be forced to create your own forms because you fit in no one else’s bottles can be a wonderful thing as well, though never an easy one.
Sartre described this with the phrase; ”We are condemned to be free,” in his 1946 lecture Existentialism Is A Humanism, and what this means is that in a universe empty of all meaning and value other than that which we ourselves create, we must balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of our total freedom.
In such a universe, free of imposed meaning and of purpose, all rules are arbitrary and can be changed, rules which are legacies of our histories and the fictional laws of false and unjust authorities, wherein all normalities are negotiable, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human may be pursued as our uniqueness through the reimagination and transformation of poetic vision and metaphorical truths.
Life is a performance art, and we all have one problem in common; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
This process of becoming human or individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their interdependence.
Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
Our identities, including those of sex and gender, are literally masks; social constructs and artifacts of our process of adaptation and becoming human. Herein the primary shaping, informing, and motivating source is the interface between authority and autonomy as an unknown and unclaimed potential, a blank space of limitless possibilities of the reimagination of humankind, like the places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Let us pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Our performance of identities of sex and gender is a theatre of possibilities, of negotiations and dances with normativity and the transgression of boundaries, of the questioning and reimagination of idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of self-creation as liberation and autonomous total freedom, a quest for our uniqueness and for the human transcendent, and of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
This need not be determinative or prescriptive, but a space of free creative play.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As written by Amy M. Vaughn on the Surrealist site Babou691; “I love genderfuck. I love watching the disruption of enculturated norms, which is what genderfuck does to traditional notions of the male/female, masculine/feminine dichotomy.
While genderfuckery has had a place in both gay culture and, to a lesser extent, punk rock since the ’70s, it remained mostly underground until drag hit mainstream media. I am, of course, referring to RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR).
These days drags serves as an umbrella term for the work of several different types of performance artists. The most well-known of these are drag queens, who perform as women, and drag kings, who perform as men. Sometimes this traditional type of drag is campy, sometimes it’s realistic, but it’s always based on the idea of the gender binary—fucking with the binary, but still within it. Genderfuck rejects the binary, often aggressively, sometimes playfully, always purposefully.
I believe there may be something to gain from looking at these performative manipulations of gender though the ideas of the Surrealists of the early 20th century. The Surrealists saw themselves as a revolutionary cultural movement. Their goal was to free people from false and restrictive conceptions of reality. In other words, they wanted to disrupt enculturated norms. And their method was the juxtaposition of disparate entities with the intention of creating a surprising or startling effect.
I don’t think it’s too far a leap to say performative genderbending fits this approach. Whether we’re talking about overlaying feminine characteristics on a masculine form or vice versa, or combining the genders together in incongruous ways, done well, the effect is literally stunning.”
“And RPDR has provided a platform for genderfuck, but because the goal of the competition is to find the “next drag superstar”—a person who can represent RuPaul’s polished, feminine brand to the world— genderfuck queens rarely excel. “May the best woman win,” has been one of the show’s catchphrases, repeated every episode until the current season. Now RuPaul says, “May the best drag queen win.” We could speculate that this change is due to the casting of the first ever trans contestant, though the point remains the same—RPDR is a safe space for gay males to express themselves through female impersonation.
Which is drag but not genderfuck.
However, something even more subversive has entered through the door that RPDR opened: The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, an “alternative drag competition” based on the principles of horror, filth, and glamour. And the Boulets’ stage is far more welcoming of genderfuck.
While drag has traditionally been dominated by gay men performing as women, genderfuck is not gender specific or sexual-orientation specific. Disasterina, on season two of Dragula, described himself as hetero-fluid and is married to a woman, while season three featured two AFAB contestants: Landon Cider, a lesbian drag king, and Hollow Eve, who identifies as nonbinary.
At this point, spelling out all of these distinctions seems more than a little cumbersome and like a whole lot of nunya bizness, as if these descriptions have no place in the discussion of genderfuck because genderfuck is beyond them. In fact, jabs at traditional drag culture are not rare on Dragula, as can be seen in Evah Destruction’s disposable razor bikini on her hirsute body, a look which would not have a place in RPDR.
The Surrealists believed that art could bring about revolutionary social change through the process of the Hegelian dialectic—thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If we examine the recent history of drag and genderfuck through this lens, while vastly simplified, it might look something like this: the thesis that there are two heteronormative genders was met with the antithesis of an artform superimposing one gender over another to provoke the surreal effect of juxtaposing opposites in order to startled people out of ingrained cultural constructs. The synthesis has been greater acceptance of gay male culture and freedom of expression. Worthy goals, no question.
The dialectic for genderfuck, which I see as following traditional drag to further the same and expanded goals, would also start with the thesis that there are two genders but it would add three sexual identities (gay, straight, and bi). The antithesis is the performance of multiple expressions of gender and sexuality, provoking the surreal effect, and leading to the synthesis of radical freedom of expression and an existence untethered to preconceived cultural definitions—gay, straight, or otherwise.”
“Real progress has been made through queer art in providing a surrealist antithesis to the idea of a gender dichotomy, and the result has been to guide mainstream culture toward not just tolerance or acceptance but celebration of gender differences.”
A map of our uniqueness within a context of community and solidarity in becoming human, and a vision of the Platonic Republic: the great film Paris Is Burning
Idealizations of Feminine Beauty in Performance of Identity: Ru Paul’s Drag Race: LaGanja’s Let’s Get Physical
Subversions of Idealizations of Masculinity and Femininity: The Boulet Brothers Dragula, Season 4 trailer
We celebrate Romani Resistance Day, in which thousands of prisoners in the Gypsy Camp of Auschwitz defied the SS and fought as a brotherhood of liberty, for their lives and one another beyond hope of victory or survival but also for the dignity of humankind and the one freedom which is never lost; to remain unconquered in refusal to submit.
Like the Spartans at Marathon their actions on this day redeemed the chance of liberty for us all, reaffirmed our human meaning and value in the face of dehumanizing tyranny and racist genocide, and along with countless other acts of solidarity and valor among nearly every people on earth in the glorious human struggle against fascism of World War Two helped civilization win time to recognize and meet the threat of atavistic barbarism and the divisions of otherness which remain to be vanquished.
I think of such things in terms of my own Last Stands, which recently include the defense of Mariupol in Ukraine from April 18 to March 22 2022, of Panjshir in Afghanistan from August 24 through September 8 2021, of al Quds or Jerusalem from May 10 to 21 2021 and in the ongoing Third Intifada, and since October of 2023 in the Revolutions of Burma and Haiti and in the Gaza War and the Third Intifada for the Liberation of Palestine including the victorious Red Sea Campaign which counter blockades the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and Romani Resistance Day also coincides with the final day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of which I wrote in my post of April 19.
Herein I remember the Oath of the Resistance as given to me by Jean Genet in 1982 in Beirut, which he repurposed from that of the French Foreign Legion in Paris 1940; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and surrender not our fellows”. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, but I often think of this in terms of a definition of the beauty of human beings; to become Unconquered and free as self created beings in refusal to submit to authority and its instruments of violence, force and control, and the repression of dissent, to refuse our dehumanization and the theft of our souls and autonomy and to do all of this in solidarity and absolute loyalty to each other.
As he once said to me; “Is this not the beauty of men, to resist and never yield, to cede nothing to the enemy, not love nor hope, not our history nor the chance for a future of our own choosing, neither our monstrosity nor our grandeur, nothing of our humanity nor of any human being whose life is in our power to harm or help, to live beyond all limits and all laws and to risk everything to do this for each other?”
Should you ever find it necessary to look for idealizations of masculine beauty as compassion, loyalty, fearlessness, beyond the fetishization of violence or the addiction of power, look to examples of solidarity and our duty of care for each other in the heroism of our mutual defense, in our glorious history of resistance and liberation struggle as a Band of Brothers such as Romani Resistance Day and countless others like it. When everything else is stripped away, this is what remains, and what we truly are.
This our common humanity, this solidarity, this United Humankind. This, this, this.
Our choices and actions in such Defining Moments become a forge of the soul by which we may reinvent ourselves. In the end what determines the quality of our humanity and who we will become among the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value and of becoming human as a seizure of power and self ownership of our identity is a simple thing, but not an easy one; how will you use your power?
We celebrate this, and will soon celebrate Memorial Day which honors our sacred dead in wars of antifascist resistance and revolutionary struggle of liberation, in a context of historical repetition of the conditions which gave rise to the Axis powers, pandemic and economic, political, and civilizational collapse, and in the rising darkness of a global Fourth Reich of authoritarian tyrannies.
The tide of darkness, barbarism, atavisms of instinct, dehumanization, and fear weaponized by authority in service to power has begun to turn here in America with the Restoration of our democratic values and ideals during the Biden Presidency, if a deeply flawed, relative, and highly contingent and imperiled Restoration, but we have only just begun to reclaim our humanity from the jaws of fascist tyranny and terror. Much of our world still lives under its shadow, and Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his Deplorables plot the recapture of the state and the final subversion of democracy in our upcoming election; this we must resist.
This is an evil which moves among us both brazen in the arrogance of power and privilege and unseen, like an ambush predator concealed by the lies and illusions with which it masks itself, and our greatest weapon against racism and fascism is exposure of its true face. By exposure, second of the four primary duties of a citizen among Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, I mean parrhesia which Michel Foucault reimagined as truth telling and of praxis or the action of our values and ideals as a sacred calling to pursue the truth; to write, speak, teach, and organize democracy as freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
There is no better evocation of fascism as the great enemy of humankind, of the origins of evil, the brokenness of the world, and the flaws of our humanity than Jerzy Kosinski’s magisterial novel The Painted Bird and its film. Herein a child wanders in a purgatory of fear and force, perversions and cruelties, a witness of history written by a Polish Catholic who as a child refugee in Eastern Europe was often mistaken for and tortured as a Gypsy, from his childhood therapy journal.
My mother wrote a study of psychosomatic muteness based on his novel, his childhood therapy journal, and Soviet medical records which describe his long struggle from the age to nine at Liberation to regain his power of speech at 14, and the history and stories of The Painted Bird were part of my teenage years as family conversations, which became a major informing and motivating source for my primary interest in the origins of evil and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force. I found my voice at the age he did, the summer before high school in Brazil, and I saw myself in his story.
The Painted Bird is a story of humankind and of the collapse of civilization in the twentieth century during the Second World War, but it also typifies the history of the displaced, vilified, and relentlessly persecuted and abused Romani as an iconic figure of Others, a space they share with Jewish peoples. For the Romani are the Shadow of European civilization, cast as Caliban-like figures to establish and reinforce the tyranny of our normalities and the boundaries of otherness, to whom any atrocity may be done; dehumanized as thieves, beggars, whores, categories of exclusion which serve to legitimize authority and identitarian constructions of nationalism.
All those who are Outcasts occupy this figural space with the Romani; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. And we who would become human must place our lives in the balance with them.
In the legacies of historical inequalities and injustices, the failure of our ideals of diversity and inclusion, and the limits of our universal human rights exposed by our persecution of Outcasts such as the Romani as our unwilling Sin Eaters, we find a measure of the distance we have yet to go to become civilized or even fully human.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that under the weight of centuries of oppression and demonization, the heroes of the Romani Resistance did not go quietly to their deaths, but fought for one another til the end, defiant and free. In the words of Dylan Thomas; “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
May we all find within ourselves the will to refuse to submit to force and control, and to remain Unconquered.
When they come for us, as those who would enslave us always have and will, let them find not a people subjugated by division, learned helplessness, and despair, but a United Humankind in which we are all of us guarantors of each other’s humanity.
As written by Rain in Counterpunch; “May 16th, 1944, was the day Himmler’s Auschwitz Decree was to be fulfilled. Approximately 6,500 Romani victims confined in the Zigeunerlager, the “Gypsy Camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, were to be “liquidated.” Surrounded by the SS, the Romani refused to exit the barracks that paid mute witness to 17,000 of their relatives who had already been murdered in the gas chambers or Mengele directed “medical” experiments, worked to death as slave laborers, slowly starved, or succumbed to disease. “We’re not coming out! You come in here!” Mano Höllenreiner, then a ten-year old boy, remembered his father shouting.
Constricted as they were by death, on this day they refused to die. Just hours before, they had been warned that after roll call next morning they would be executed. In preparation to resist they fashioned weapons out of slats from bunks, some held rocks, others had secreted away tools from a warehouse in the compound. It wasn’t so much an act of defiance but of love – for each other and those brutally taken from them, for whom they would live at least one more day. It was an extraordinary display of courage and testament to the human spirit.”
As written by Michal Schuster in an article entitled The Romani Uprising in Auschwitz, 16 May 1944; “The year 1944 can simply be called the closing phase of the so-called “Final Solution to the Gypsy question” in Nazi-occupied Europe, including on the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. After transporting most Roma to the Auschwitz complex during 1943, smaller transports there took place during 1944. On 16 May 1944 the first attempt to annihilate all the members of the so-called “Gypsy Camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau took place and was prevented by an uprising of the prisoners there. The most tragic event did finally take place and the camp and its inhabitants were entirely destroyed at the beginning of August 1944.
First attempt to destroy the “Gypsy Camp” and the Romani prisoners’ uprising:
The commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, ordered at the beginning of 1944 the acceleration of the work already underway in one section of Birkenau, primarily the construction of ramps and the rails for the three-rail branch of the Oświęcim-Katowice railway line, which led to Crematorium I and Crematorium II. The commander of all the crematoria, SS Otto Moll, had to ensure, during the course of one week, repairs to all the crematoria, completion of the construction of the buildings, and the start of new construction, as well as the erection of several rooms where the prisoners were stripped near the repaired Bunker II and behind Crematorium V. The prisoners also dug two big pits for burning corpses.
All of the preparations were performed in order to receive a transport of Jews from Hungary. Those new prisoners who were labeled capable of work during the selection would need accommodation, so the highest SS command at the main camp decided on 15 May 1944 to kill everyone in the “Gypsy Family Camp”. That would free up space in all of camp B-II-e for more of the Jews from Hungary.
The final action was to have been performed on the evening of 16 May, when the gong was rung announcing a ban on leaving the camp (the so-called Lagersperre) and it was closed. Trucks drove up and parked in front of the gate to the camp; 50 -60 members of a special SS commando unit jumped out of them and called on the prisoners to quickly leave the residential blocks. Inside the blocks, however, a tense silence prevailed and the prisoners refused to come out, barricading the doors and desperately preparing to defend themselves with rocks and work tools. The members of the SS commando unit were startled by this disobedience and their commander decided to postpone the action.
Romani Holocaust survivor Hugo Höllenreiner (born 1933 in Munich), who was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp with his family in 1943, later recalled those moments of resistance as follows: “There were about seven or eight men, definitely, who came to the gate. Dad shouted out – the whole building trembled when he shouted: ‘We’re not coming out! You come in here! We’re waiting here! If you want something, you have to come inside!’ “
The entire event was described in a report by Tadeusz Joachimowski (1908-1979), a former Polish political prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp who was assigned to be a “scribe” (a writer) in the “Gypsy Camp”, as follows: “The last commander of the Gypsy Camp and the current rapportführer [reporting officer] was Bonigut. He was probably from Yugoslavia. He disagreed with the approaches and tactics of the SS. He was a very good person. On 15 May 1944 he came after me and said things looked bad for the Gypsy Camp. An order had been issued to destroy it and had reportedly already received confirmation from the political department through Dr Mengele. The Gypsy Camp was to be destroyed and its crew killed using gas. There were roughly 500 Gypsies in the camp at that time. Bonigut entrusted me with informing those Gypsies whom I trusted about what was ahead. He asked me to warn them so they would not go like sheep to the slaughter. He also told me that the signal for the beginning of the action would be the Lagersperre and that the Gypsies should not leave their barracks. Bonigut himself warned several Gypsies of the action. I also (secretly) performed this task. The next day at around 7 PM I heard the gong announcing the Lagersperre. Automobiles drove up in front of the Gypsy Camp and 50 – 60 SS men armed with machine guns got out of them. They immediately surrounded the buildings where the Gypsies lived. Some SS members entered this residential area shouting ‘Los, los‘. There was total calm in the barracks. The Gypsies, armed with handcuffs, knives, shovels and stones, waited to see what would happen. They did not leave the barracks. The SS members were appalled and left themselves. After a brief consultation, they went to find the Blockführerstube [the commander of that block] in order to inform the commander of the action. After some time I heard a whistle. The SS men who were surrounding the barracks left their positions, got back in the automobiles, and drove away. The closure of the camp was lifted. On the next day (17 May 1944), Lagerführer Bonigut came to me and said the Gypsies were rescued, for now…”.
While there was no open clash between the Romani prisoners and the SS members, this event played a significant role. It decidedly was not the habit in the concentration camps for the prisoners to resist a planned, prepared action en masse right before it was to be undertaken. There is absolutely no doubt that the armed SS commando could have suppressed this act of resistance, but decided not to go into an open confrontation with the prisoners and preferred to achieve their aims in another way. This event is unequivocally an uprising and occupies a significant place in the tragic history of the Holocaust of the European Roma.
In the so-called “Gypsy Camp” at Birkenau there were approximately 6,500 prisoners, half of whom were subsequently put into quarantine in the main camp, some at the end of May and start of June, others at the start of August 1944. They included prisoners from Bohemia, Germany, and Poland.
The destruction of the “Gypsy Camp” at Birkenau:
About 10,000 women from Hungary then arrived at the “Gypsy Camp” and were accommodated in the odd-numbered blocks, while the Romani prisoners were put on the even-numbered side. They moved a second time into the rear half of the camp when men from Hungary arrived and were put in the front section of the camp. In July 1944, Himmler decided to destroy the rest of the “Gypsy Camp”. On the morning of 1 August, those prisoners fit for work were supposed to report for transport elsewhere, and Antonín Absolon-Růžička (born 30 September 1930 in the Moravian village of Mistřín) took advantage of the opportunity. He later recalled: “One day in summer when I heard on the grounds that a new transport was leaving and lining up at the gate, I ran out there, naked, fleeing the blocks and heading for the canteen. I met my sister Jana on the way. She asked where I was running to and I told her I wanted to leave with the transport. She started to persuade me not to leave, saying we two were the only ones left, that I should stay with her. All I know is that I told her I had to go. I didn’t even say good-bye I was in such a hurry…”.
On the next day, 2 August 1944, the final transports to the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Ravensbrück were put together out of all the female and male prisoners fit for work from the “Gypsy Camp”. There were 918 boys and men sent to Buchenwald, of whom 151 had Protectorate citizenship. At the Buchenwald concentration camp, thanks to these transports from Auschwitz, the number of Romani and Sinti prisoners almost doubled. The Ravensbrück transports included 490 female prisoners. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to determine their state or territorial citizenship. Nevertheless, women from the Protectorate were certainly among them.
Through these six work transports, these female and male prisoners left the camp at Birkenau for good, because at the time the so-called “Gypsy Family Camp” was about to be destroyed and the fate of its remaining prisoners had been decided.
After their departure, only the elderly, mothers with children and the fathers who didn’t want to leave their families, and orphans remained in the “Gypsy Camp”. During the late night of 2 August and the early morning hours of 3 August the block was closed (Blocksperre) and the 2 897 children, elderly people, the infirm and women were taken in trucks to the courtyard of Crematorium V. There their unexpected resistance had to be broken, after which they were herded into the gas chambers.
Those horrible moments were described by a member of the so-called Special Division (Sonderkommando), Filip Müller (born 1922 in the Slovak town of Sered’): “The room for removing clothing was stuffed full of people by midnight. The anxiety was growing minute by minute… desperate cries could be heard from all sides, accusations, lamentations, remorse. The voices called out in chorus: ‘We are Germans of the Reich! We’ve done nothing wrong!’ From elsewhere could be heard: ‘We want to live! Why do you want to kill us?’… The liquidation proceeded as usual. Moll and his aides unlocked the safeties on their pistols and rifles and uncompromisingly called on those who had taken their clothes off to leave the room and go into the three spaces where they would be poisoned with gas. On that final trip many were weeping with desperation… Even from within the gas chambers, for a long time afterward, we heard intermittent calls and cries until the gas performed its work and the last voices were snuffed out.”
The bodies of the murdered, who included many prisoners from the Protectorate, were then burned in the pits near the Crematorium because it was not yet running.
A recollection of the murder of those in the “Gypsy Camp” was also recorded by camp commander Rudolf Höss in his memoirs: “They did not know what awaited them until the final moment; they only realized it when they were brought into Crematorium No.V. It was not easy to lead them into the chamber. I didn’t see it, but Schwarzhuber told me about it, that no liquidation action of the Jews had been as difficult as the liquidation of the Gypsies.”
During this action, camp doctor Josef Mengele personally shot dead the male Romani twins on whom he had been performing experiments in order to subsequently use their bodies for autopsy. The female twins were transferred to the Hindenburg concentration camp. Irma Valdová-Krausová survived with her sisters because of that, and later recalled: “On that day Dr Mengele came to the camp at 18:30 in order to take the remaining twins away, including my two sisters Anna and Alžběta. Of my entire extended family, I was their only relative left, and they did not want to leave me, no matter the cost. During the confusion they put me in the car as well, which saved me from a certain death.”
This mass murder was followed by the brutal killing of the female and male prisoners who, after being transported elsewhere, had been sent back to Auschwitz-Birkenau to die in the gas chambers because they were exhausted and unfit for work. For this purpose, 200 Romani boys were sent from the concentration camp at Buchenwald on 26 September 1944 and 800 Romani men were sent on 10 October 1944. On 11 October 1944 and then on 14 October 1944 a total of 217 Romani girls and women were sent back to Auschwitz from the work commando units at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Some underwent a second selection and were once again transported back to Ravensbrück, while the rest ended up, like all of the boys and men who were returned to Auschwitz, in the gas chambers.”
As I have been immersed in the literature of Auschwitz and its reflections in the Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians for days now, and find myself in need of something joyful to balance the darkness lest it consume me, especially that of Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird which became part of my identity as a teenager who saw himself in its tortured child protagonist, the flaws of my humanity now betray the vision which exalts me; the world does not need my grief nor my absurd desires, yet this too is human. The world needs our rage against the dying of the light, and solidarity of action regardless of the cost; but it also needs our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
I find my thoughts surfacing memories of a vanished age, when I made mischief behind the Iron Curtain with the famous gypsy Bluey, smuggler and kingpin of the East Berlin black market who ran an underground railroad and for-hire intelligence service through the Berlin Wall. The man could hold a crowd spellbound with his stories, and roaring with laughter; in his persona as a circus clown, he made an art of being likeable and built an outlaw empire from trading favors and secrets and making things happen for powerful people, and a Great Game of outwitting authorities, destabilizing tyrannies, championing the powerless, and subverting systems and regimes of force and control.
This was my entrée into the world of the Romani, which I might have married into had events unfolded differently, and the reason my languages include Vlax Romani, the major Romani language and that of its heartland in Transylvania and Eastern Europe, and its origin or relative Vlachs or Aromanian, a Romance language created by the historical migrations and transformations of cultures in the borderlands between the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Venetian Empires, and influenced more by Greek than Slavic as a disambiguating characteristic from modern Romanian, a related language also originating in the Latin of the Roman Empire and its long centuries of disintegration and change. Many Romani whom I knew spoke Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, and Hungarian interchangeably as code switching, and also spoke Hochdeutsch which is the second language of Hungary and the official language of Germany and Austria as Standard German.
Being able to pass as a member of a number of nationalities including multilingualism is a necessity of survival and a defining characteristic of being Romani as a protean and stealth identity among peoples who would kill them for being who they are. Bluey once described it to me like this: “To be Romani is determined by three truths not of our making; first, no one stands with us, so we must stand with each other in everything. Second, we will be killed or driven out if discovered, so we must live within identities of disguise. Third, we are powerless and few, so we must live in the margins and in the shadows; its why they call us crows, scavengers. This is how we have survived more than a thousand years, by these three rules.”
Here I wish to clarify and disambiguate the origin and meaning of the terms Romani, which broadly describes an ethnic identity of former citizens of the Byzantine Roman Empire who assimilated Latin, arriving in the Balkans nine hundred years ago having migrated from India in a single wave some fifteen hundred years ago by DNA evidence, and Gypsy, a far narrower title of profession derived from the Hungarian gyepu which refers to the system of remote forest defenses in Transylvania guarding its frontier and border with the Ottoman Empire, of which Romani warriors were a part as foederati. Romani describes blood and language, Gypsy describes a historical social role as a guardian or ranger and a multigenerational brotherhood of warriors which persists as a pan-European secret society, bound by ancient oaths to defend civilization beyond its borders, wherever law ceases to have meaning and all that remains is the valor and loyalty of men.
To be a Gypsy is to be a guardian of humankind and of civilization against barbarism, and a guarantor of our uniqueness and universal rights in a free society of equals, wherein there are no laws and no limits to our possibilities of becoming human beyond those chosen by ourselves.
That the Empire to which these oaths were sworn has not existed for seven hundred years is irrelevant; my kind of people.
As he grew up in Ireland and when ten years old went alone to live in the streets of London, Bluey spoke English laden with Cockney rhyming slang, 16th century Thieves Cant, and the hybrid Irish Gaelic-Traveller cryptolanguage Shelta, a complex patois he and his crew, who were from everywhere, used as a secret language.
In this company, which operated under cover as a circus throughout Europe, I met the girl whose echoes and reflections live in the images of a doppelganger I chanced upon, dancing with crows.
Images which follow my notes and citations of references are of the Polish corset designer Koseatra, but breathtaking in likeness to the gypsy girl I very nearly married, over three decades ago. Impossible that this is the same girl; she would be over a generation older than Koseatra, where these photographs have frozen her image in amber from before the fall of the Iron Curtain, timeless and beyond the limits of the human.
The eyes are the same; tinged green when laughing and mischevious, and in the darkness fathoms of ice blue with a strange silver reflectivity, when closer to the wolf.
So also her grace of movement, refined and elegant, and the regal stillness of her bearing in repose; like the serenity of a bodhisattva, or the coiled stillness of a lioness about to pounce.
But it’s the eyes that compel.
Who could look into such eyes, and send the unique and marvelous being who looks out through them to destruction and death, as the Nazis did countless times at Auschwitz?
This is among the true horrors of fascism, for men who could do this are dead to beauty, wonder, awe, and love.
Fascism is a disease of possession, which steals the soul. Mere bundles of atavisms of instinct, degenerate and hollow, are fascists, whose zombiefication in service to power is a terror to be hunted relentlessly and purged from among us, no less than the amoral rapacity of those who would enslave us.
Let us give to fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!
Ceija Stojka: Even Death Is Afraid of Auschwitz, Ceija Stojka (artist), Karin Berger (Contributor), Barbara Dankwortt (Contributor), Tímea Junghaus (Contributor), Lith Bahlmann (Editor), Matthias Reichelt (Editor)
While the witness of history of survivors of Auschwitz includes few Romani such as Alexander Ramati and Ceija Stojka, there are many others whose stories can remind us who we are, and what’s worth fighting for.
999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz, by Heather Dune Macadam (Goodreads Author), Caroline Moorehead (Foreword)
Here I wish to include Sologdin’s review in Goodreads of Giogio Agamben’s four essays published as Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, a brilliant problematization of the nature and functions of the literature of witness, an idea central to my own life mission and ars poetica of the witness of history, along with Foucault’s truthtelling a sacred calling in pursuit of truth. With Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia which I attended at UC Berkeley in 1983, and left their stamp of strangeness upon me, here follows one of the finest explications of why I write which I have yet found:
Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, by Giorgio Agamben
“Four essays. Preface opens with the reasonable proposition that the discrepancy regarding Auschwitz “concerns the very structure of testimony” (12): “On the one hand, what happened in the camps appears to the survivors as the only true thing and, as such, absolutely unforgettable; on the other hand, this truth is to the same degree unimaginable, that is, irreducible to the real elements that constitute it” (id.). The discrepancy concerns “facts so real, by comparison, nothing is truer; a reality that necessarily exceeds its factual elements—such is the aporia of Auschwitz” ((id.). One survivor, Lewental, a sonderkommando, wrote that “the complete truth is far more tragic, far more frightening” (id.)—to which author responds: “more tragic, more frightening than what?” We see that the “aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge: a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension” (id.). We also see that
One of the lessons of Auschwitz is that it is infinitely harder to grasp the mind of an ordinary person than to understand the mind of a Spinoza or Dante. (Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the ‘banality of evil,’ so often misunderstood, must also be understood in this sense.) (13)
Though Agamben states that this text has little that can’t be found in the actual testimonials, “it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna: in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to” (id). His task became an interrogation of the lacuna, even though “listening to something absent” may seem counterintuitive: “it made it necessary to clear away almost all of the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, have been advanced in the name of ethics” (id.).
I – “The Witness”
In Auschwitz, one reason to survive was “the idea of becoming a witness” (15). Primo Levi “does not consider himself a writer; he becomes a writer so that he can bear witness” (id.).
Latin has two terms for our ‘witness’: testis (“from which our word ‘testimony’ derives, etymologically signifies the person, who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of a third party (*terstis)” (17)) and superstes (“a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it”) (id.). These latinate concepts problematize the notion of bearing witness to Auschwitz, as we shall see. Levi is interested only in “what makes judgment possible: the gray zone in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims” (17). Judgment can be made, of course, but important that “the law not presume to exhaust the question. A non-juridical element of truth exists such that the quaestio facti can never be reduced to the quaestio iuris” (id.).
Author notes the standard “tacit confusion of ethical and juridical categories” in this connection (18)—all of this is “contaminated by law,” which has the “ultimate aim” of “the production of a res judicata” (id.), quite distinct from the finding of truth or the disposition in justice. Rather, “the sentence becomes the substitute [supplement?] for the true and the just, being held as true despite its falsity and injustice” (id.). Via reference to Kafka, law is reduced to judgment, and judgment to trial: “execution and transgression, innocence and guilt, obedience and disobedience all become indistinct” (19) (the plotinian hoion, of course) and dude concludes that judgment constitutes “the mystery of trial.” Some suggestion that the post-war trials (which involved “only a few hundred people,” an “evident insufficiency” (19)) “are responsible for the conceptual confusion that, for decades, has made it impossible to think through Auschwitz,” as “they helped spread the idea that the problem of Auschwitz had been overcome.” We get now that “law did not exhaust the problem, but rather that the very problem was so enormous as to call into question law itself” (20).
Some discussion here on ‘responsibility’—it has been “irredeemably contaminated by law” (20) (likely we need an archaeology of contamination, considering dude’s reliance thereupon) (cf. also Bakhtin on ‘answerability’). Levi would place certain occurrences in a “zone of irresponsibility,” based on his “unprecedented discovery” at Auschwitz of “an area that is independent of every establishment of responsibility,” wherein “the long chain of conjunction between victim and executioner comes loose” (21). We are not “beyond good and evil” (i.e., with Nietzsche), but “before them”; “before is more important than any beyond—that the ‘underman’ must matter to us more than the ‘overman’” (id.). Again, this “First Circle” of irresponsibility is Arendt’s banality of evil. The sonderkommando is the representative of this zone of irresponsibility (25).
Etymology again tells the story: spondeo “means ‘to become the guarantor of something for someone (or for oneself) with respect to someone’” (id.). For the Romans, the “custom was that a free man could consign himself as a hostage—that is, in a state of imprisonment, from which the term obligatio derives—to guarantee the compensation of a wrong or the fulfillment of an obligation” (22), and the “term sponsor indicated the person who substituted himself for the reus, promising, in the case of a breach of contract, to furnish the requested service” (id.). Responsibility is accordingly “genuinely juridical and not ethical” wherein “the legal bond was considered to inhere in the body of the person responsible” (id.). (We shall recall this when we get around to volume IX.)
Responsibility and guilt thus express simply two aspects of legal imputability; only later were they interiorized and moved outside law. Hence the insufficiency and opacity of every ethical doctrine that claims to be founded on these two concepts. (22)
Eichmann at his trial walked this distinction by claiming meaninglessly that he felt “guilty before God, not the law” (23). The silliness arises after “having raised juridical categories to the status of supreme ethical categories and thereby irredeemably confusing the fields of law and ethics,” secular ethics still wants to be separate (24): “But ethics is the sphere that recognizes neither guilt nor responsibility; it is, as Spinoza knew, the doctrine of the happy life” (id.), which reduces, furthermore, the ethical to the mere aesthetic. One would think that if there were an irreducible core of the ethical, regarding which aesthetics is of no moment, then it should be discoverable at Auschwitz.
The analysis turns to Greek martis, ‘martyr,’ as translation for ‘witness’: though the ante-Nicene fathers regarded martyrdom as witness to the faith, the Auschwitz survivors are unanimous that “what happened in the camps has little to do with martyrdom” (26). Conceptually, however, there is some connection, insofar as the Greek term is derived from the verb ‘to remember,’—“the survivor’s vocation is to remember; he cannot not remember” (id.). More significantly, however, the ante-Nicene fathers “were confronted by heretical groups that rejected martyrdom because, in their eyes, it constituted a wholly senseless death (perire sine causa)” (27). The doctrine of martyrdom was confected to justify “the scandal of a meaningless death, of an execution that could only appear as absurd” (id.): “Confronted with the spectacle of a death that was apparently sine causa, the reference to Luke 12: 8-9 and to Matthew 10: 32-33 [quotations omitted] made it possible to interpret martyrdom as a divine command and, thus, to find reason for the irrational” (id.). Levi does not like the term Holocaust because of the implication of an offering or a punishment for sins (28), noting how Wiesel coined the term “then regretted it and wanted to take it back” (id.).
As we might have predicted, an etymology follows: holocaustos ultimately as a ‘complete burning,’ “used to translate […] the complex sacrificial doctrine of the Bible” (there’s several different Hebrew terms, and the term that the Vulgate rendered as holocaustum, olah, concerns “the dispatch of the offering to the divinity” (29)). The Ante-Nicene fathers used the term literally against Judaism, to “condemn the uselessness of bloody sacrifices” (id.), but then used it metaphorically to refer to the torture of the Christian martyrs, with the ultimate extension, by Augustine, to se holocaustum obtulerit in cruce Iesus.
The metaphorical usage is not limited to holocaust; the preferred term has been so’ah, which also reveals a metaphorical usage, meaning “‘devastation, catastrophe’ and, in the Bible, often implies the idea of divine punishment (as in Isaiah 10:3)” (31). Unlike holocaust, however, so’ah “contains no mockery”; the former term is an “attempt to establish a connection, however, distant, between Auschwitz and the Biblical olah and between death in the gas chamber and the ‘complete devotion to sacred and superior motives’” (id.). In swearing off the use of the term forever, author notes that “Not only does the term imply an unacceptable equation between crematoria and altars; it also continues a semantic heredity that is from its inception anti-Semitic” (id.).
Agamben had been challenged for trying to “ruin the unique and unsayable character of Auschwitz” (31). ‘Unique’ is conceded, but ‘unsayable’? Works through Chrysostom’s notion that God is unsayable, unspeakable, unwritable (32), such that the angels must merely adore Him in silence. Author translates ‘adore in silence’ as euphemein, and regards it as the proper way to cognize the complaint that he has ruined the unsayable character of Auschwitz.
“Testimony, however, contains,” once more, “a lacuna” (33): as Levi notes, “witnesses are by definition survivors and so all, to some degree, enjoyed a privilege.” This lacuna “calls into question the very meaning of testimony and, along with it, the identity and reliability of witnesses” (id.); Levi: “I must repeat: we the survivors, are not the true witnesses.” Levi makes his testimony essentially a representative capacity: “Weeks and months before being snuffed out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy” (34). Agamben notes that “the value of the testimony lies essentially in what it lacks; at its center it contains something that cannot be borne witness to and that discharges the survivors of authority” (id.). Rather, the survivors speak as “pseudo-witnesses” insofar as “they bear witness to the missing testimony” (id.). Of course, by means of the standard adverse inference under the requisite rules of evidence, disappeared witnesses and concealed evidence compels the presumption that the party procuring the absence fears its disclosure and therefore we should assume the worst—so we should not be troubled by pseudo-witnesses.
This difficulty is explained otherwise as an inside/outside distinction: “The Shoah is an event without witnesses” because “it is impossible to bear witness from the inside” (no one survives to tell) or from the outside “since the ‘outsider’ is by definition excluded from the event” (35). Agamben thinks that the threshold of indistinction (hoion, recall) between inside and outside “could have led to a comprehension of the structure of testimony” (36). Testimony as the “disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness” (39)?
II – “The Muselmann”
Muselmann as the “untestifiable” to which “no one has borne witness” (41). The Muselmann as a “staggering corpse,” “mummy men,” “living dead” (id.), who “became indifferent to everything happening around them” (43). (The designation arises in Auschwitz from “the impression of seeing Arabs praying” (id.), according to one survivor.) No one had sympathy for the muselmanner (id.), and “all the muselmanner who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story” (44). Little agreement on the “origin of the term Muselmann,” but many synonyms (45).
Muselmanner as marking “the moving threshold in which a man passed into non-man and in which clinical diagnosis passed into anthropological analysis” (47); “in Auschwitz ethics begins precisely at the point where the Muselmann, the ‘complete witness,’ makes it forever impossible to distinguish between man and non-man” (id.) (NB: hoion). This particular zone of indistinction is what ties this volume very plainly to volume I (to the extent that “the Muselmann’s ‘third realm’ is the perfect cipher for the camp, the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed” (id.)) and volume II (insofar as the philosopher’s “extreme situation” is the jurist’s “state of exception”). In this latter connection, Karl Barth’s notion that “human beings have the striking capacity to adapt so well to an extreme situation that it can no longer function as a distinguishing criterion” (49), i.e., noting the “incredible tendency of the limit situation to become habit (hexis recall): “Auschwitz is precisely the place in which the state of exception coincides perfectly with the rule and the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of life” (id.) (we shall recall the notion of ‘perfect coincidence with the rule’ in volume VIII).
Muselmanner described with increasing intensity: “witnesses confirm the impossibility of gazing upon the Muselmann” (50); filmmaker who “patiently lingered over naked bodies, over the terrible ‘dolls’ dismembered and stacked one on top of another, could not bear the sight of these half-living beings” (51); Muselmanner as “an absolutely new phenomenon, unbearable to human eyes” (id.); although the Muselmann is noted by most survivors as “a central experience,” the figure is “barely named in the historical studies on the destruction of European Jewry” (52); Levi designates the Muselmann as “he who has seen the Gorgon” (53). Lots on the Gorgon stuff, impossibility of seeing and being seen, &c.
Much on other interpretations of the Muselmann (57 ff): a biological machine, a limit of certain principles, an experiment, a refutation of Apel’s obligatory communication thesis, as Aristotle’s ‘plant man,’ a radical refutation of all refutations (66).
Critique of the doctrine of dignity thereafter (67 ff.): “Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm” (69) insofar as “the bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands not conforms to anything” (id.). Rather, “the atrocious news that the survivors carry from the camp to the land of human beings is precisely that it is possible to lose dignity and decency beyond imagination, that there is still life [zoe] in the most extreme degradation” (id.). The Muselmann is accordingly on the threshold of the new ethics of “a form of life that begins where dignity ends” (id.).
Camps as having the role of “the fabrication of corpses” (as stated by Arendt) (71): “In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced” (72). (Am skipping over all the Heidegger stuff.) Some reflections on Adorno’s well known positions on Auschwitz (80 ff.), as well as on Foucault’s notation of the passage of sovereignty (“to make die and let live”) to biopower (“to make live and let die”) (82 ff). The Third Reich is of course where the “unprecedented absolutization of the biopower to make live intersects with an equally absolute generalization of the sovereign power to make die, such that biopolitics coincides immediately with thanatopolitics” (83). The NSDAP dream of volkloser Raum, “not simply a matter of a desert,” but rather “a fundamental biopolitical intensity” (85), “an absolute biopolitical space, both lebensraum and todesraum” (86).
III – “Shame, or on the Subject”
Upon his liberation by the Red Army, Levi reported a sense of shame, which “becomes the dominant sentiment of survivors” (88), which conflated very soon with guilt. Bettleheim reports it as a survivor’s guilt: “one cannot survive the concentration camp without feeling guilty that one was so incredibly lucky when millions perished” (89).
This leads to a critique of the doctrine of collective responsibility (94 ff), which Levi acknowledges to be bogus insofar as “it makes no sense to speak of a collective guilt (or innocence) and that only ‘metaphorically can one claim to feel guilty for what’s one’s own people or parents did” (95).
Some thoughtful comments on Hegelian theory of tragedy in this connection (96 ff). Also, Nietzsche: “The ethics of the twentieth century opens with Nietzsche’s overcoming of resentment” (99) via the eternal return thesis—but: “Auschwitz also marks a decisive rupture” (id.). (I.e., who wants Auschwitz to return? “One cannot want Auschwitz to return for eternity, since in truth it has never ceased to take place; it is always already repeating itself” (101).)
Levinas on shame: it does not derive from “the consciousness of an imperfection or a lack in our being from which we take distance” (104), but rather “shame is grounded in our being’s incapacity to move away and break from itself” (id.). Shame as “the subject thus has no other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness [sic] to its own disorder” (106). Shame as “the fundamental sentiment of being a subject, in the two apparently opposed senses of this phrase: to be subjected and to be sovereign. Shame is what is produced in the absolute concomitance of subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty” (107).
In Levi, we find “the impossible dialectic between the survivor and the Muselmann” (120): “Who is the subject of testimony?” A zone of indistinction “in which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the ‘imagined substance’ of the ‘I’ and, along with it, the true witness” (id.).
We see that “life bears with it a caesura that can transform all life into survival and all survival into life. […] survival designates the pure and simple continuation of bare life [cf. volume I]” (133).
IIII – “The Archive and Testimony”
Lotsa linguistics stuff: Benveniste, Foucault, &c. “Auschwitz represents the historical point in which these processes collapse, the devastating experience in which the impossible is forced into the real” (148). We see that the Muselmann is the “absolutely unwitnessable, invisible ark of biopower. Invisible because empty, because the Muselmann is nothing other than volkloser Raum, the empty space of people at the center of the camp” (156).
Ultimately, “the subject of testimony” is “a remnant” (158). This is a “theologico-messianic concept” (162). Regarding the remnant, “the aporia of testimony coincides with the aporia of messianism” (163).
“Let us indeed posit Auschwitz, that to which it is not possible to bear witness; and let us also posit the Muselmann as the absolute impossibility of bearing witness” (164).
Recommended for those who examine the incomparable; phenomenology of heteronymic depersonalization, degree zero pseudonyms, and readers in secret solidarity with the Arcanum Imperii. ”
Portraits of Our Lost Humanity; may the seas of time return us to ourselves and those we love.
Fragments of myself, lost long ago, look back at me in these images, and I no longer know which of us is which, nor how love transposes us with others and transcends the limits of our form.
But I know these things are true, for in such images I re-enact as mimesis the shattering of myself under love’s hammer; broken open to Otherness and a larger universe into which one may grow as exaltation, rapture, adaptation, change, reimagination and transformation, and metamorphosis.
Never be afraid to be destroyed and recreated.
Thus saith the Caterpillar. Of the redemptive power of love as the only means of escape from the recursive forces of fear, power, and force I have written often; so also with the primary and defining struggle of becoming human between those truths written in our flesh and the falsification of authorized identities.
We were lost to each other when fate trapped us on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall during a firefight with the KGB, though we triumphed in the end when we brought down the Wall to set her and all its captive peoples free.
A note in a bottle, then, cast upon unknown seas, to Dances With Crows: Should you chance upon this, against impossible odds like so much of our adventures, whomever you now may be; I hope your life has belonged to you alone, to find joy as you so wish, and so for all of us.
In this time of melting glaciers and dying seas, of drought and scarcity of drinking water, of burning rainforests and species extinctions, of acid rain and clouds of poison gas, of humankind drowning in our own wastes of greed and vanity and taking everything else with us, of fascist tyranny and state terror, of the horrors of imperial conquest and wars of dominion which threaten us with nuclear annihilation, I find myself reflecting not on the inevitability of our failure but instead on the hope of our defiance of those who would sell us into oblivion.
And so I write to offer you a fragment of protective magic from my childhood and family history; but first the truth of the peril and existential crisis we face today.
As I wrote of biodiversity and extinction in my post of May 13 2019; Earth is an Ark hurtling through space, filled with precious life among chasms of emptiness.
How shall we answer this nothingness? Will it be with wisdom in maintaining the balance of life in all its subtle and glorious interconnectedness, diversity, and beauty, a dance of joy and of love?
Or will we be defeated and consumed by our own vanity and greed, surrendering to the dark and to despair and turning all we have or ever will into profit until there is nothing left, not water to drink nor air to breathe, and the last of us die with inarticulate brute cries, bloated in toadlike satiation and trumpeting our splendid dominance and rulership of the world?
We must choose who we are to become, we humans; stewards of our homeworld and of one another, or destroyers. Can we find a path forward in coexistence, or will we allow our appetites and desires to drive us to suicidal ruin? For we have but two choices of futures in this; we will be Lightbringers, or we will annihilate ourselves.
So I wrote among my celebrations of May Day and the coming of spring. I write today not to prophecy apocalypse, but to hold before us hope of redemption. Of Extinction Rebellion and the Green New Deal, of the abolition of police and carceral states, and of solidarity which bridges authorized identities and divisions in seizures of power and revolutionary struggle against those who would enslave us I have written much and will do so again; but I promised magic, and you shall have it.
As recounted in Lions Roar; ‘In 1969, poet Gary Snyder wrote his “Smokey the Bear Sutra,” imagining Smokey as the Great Sun Buddha giving a discourse, in the style of a Buddhist sutra. Fifty years later, the message of the sutra continues to resonate.”
I first heard it, a song of shining truth and the incorruptible redemptive power of love, sung by my mother and the women who joined hands in a circle of protection between the protestors holding signs and flowers and the guns of the riot police during the summer of my Awakening to political awareness.
Gary Snyder had distributed copies of his poem at the February 1969 Sierra Club Wilderness Conference, which were in the hands of the protesters who occupied People’s Park in Berkeley to rally in support of the people of Palestine and demand divestiture of investment in Israeli injustices by the University of California system and our government, just in time for Bloody Thursday on May 15, when his words were the only shield against the shotgun blasts- lethal rounds with multiple shot the size of 38 caliber bullets which had been loaded with intent to kill- fired at random into the crowd by the police.
Of the six thousand protesters at the scene of what has been called the most violent incident of state terror in American history, only 111 of the victims reached the safety of hospitals. There has never been a full accounting of Bloody Thursday.
I remember my mother smiling and reaching out to a policeman offering a handful of flowers, and he pumped and aimed a shotgun at her in reply. Is it truly so threatening, a bouquet of flowers, to our systems of unequal power, to patriarchy, to white supremacy, to capitalism, to the carceral state? I have no explanation for how we survived the next few moments. I’d like to think he hesitated to murder for no reason a beautiful woman, with flaming red hair and skin pale as rice powder, fearless and kind and with imperious hazel eyes and a boy less than ten years old at her side, even that she had been identified and orders issued not to shoot a notable academic, surely the greatest scholar of Coleridge and symbolism in medieval religious art of her time and a psychologist and biologist as well as an author of children’s books. But no; chance intervened in the form of a policeman who at that moment threw a grenade into the crowd. There was a flash of light and thunder, like God’s head being split open with a hammer, and all devolved into chaos and death. Time resumed as the crowd fled and policemen fired at our backs; still we escaped harm.
The moment of my true birth was that in which I stood outside of time, beyond death, and held the universe within me.
The force wave of the detonations cast my consciousness from my body, like the shadows etched on the walls of Hiroshima, momentarily dead and in a vision of our possible alternate futures become a vessel of fate, bearer of a terrible awareness that we live on the cusp of decision of an age of tyranny, six to eight centuries of fascist and theocratic prison-states, wars and genocides, ending with the extinction of humankind.
I returned from death in my mother’s arms, and said; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but Awakening from an illusion.”
This is why I have learned to read our futures in current events as civilizational choices we make, as adaptations to threats and to change, through the methods of literary criticism, history, psychology, and philosophy; because ours is a time of Rashomon Gate Events which can doom or save us, for our actions have consequences globally and for all of us, and if we are to escape the fall of civilization and our extinction we must reimagine and transform ourselves.
What happened next? Governor Ronald Reagan unleashed 2,700 soldiers of the National Guard, who joined the Alameda County Sheriffs, in effect a mercenary force who had donned Halloween masks and discarded their badges, in a two week campaign of repression that included bombing the entire city from helicopters with tear gas. When informed of the elementary school children who were hospitalized as a result, he said; “Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, you must expect things will happen, and that people, being human, will make mistakes on both sides.”
In all of this, I remembered the great spell of love and nonviolence which heralded my Awakening and may have saved the lives of my mother and myself among others.
As to family history and the origins of Smokey the Bear as a protective spirit, my aunt Betty invented Smokey the Bear as a character to represent our duty of stewardship of nature during her career in the U.S. Forest Service, named for an actual bear cub raised by herself among other forest rangers and Native Americans together because its mother had died in a forest fire. As the USFS mascot and spokesman, he became the image of one of most successful marketing campaigns in history and a universal symbol which belongs to us all.
I hope that he will continue to protect all of us and our planet, and to remind us to live in harmony with each other and our fellow beings as companions on a great journey. So, here follows the Smokey the Bear Sutra:
“Once in the Jurassic, about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a great Discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings—even grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, were assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.
“In some future time, there will be a continent called America. It will have great centers of power called such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur, Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon. The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature.”
“The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings of great volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that future American Era I shall enter a new form: to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger; and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it.”
And he showed himself in his true form of
SMOKEY THE BEAR.
A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.
Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;
His left paw in the Mudra of Comradely Display—indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma;
Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but only destroys;
Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the West, symbolic of the forces that guard the Wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharrna and the True Path of man on earth: all true paths lead through mountains—
With a halo of smoke and flame behind, the forest fires of the Kali-yuga, fires caused by the stupidity of those who think things can be gained and lost whereas in truth all is contained vast and free in the Blue Sky and Green Earth of One Mind;
Round-bellied to show his kind nature and that the great earth has food enough for everyone who loves her and trusts her;
Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs; smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;
Indicating the Task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned food, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country America and then burn the leftover trash.
Wrathful but Calm, Austere but Comic, Smokey the Bear will Illuminate those who would help him; but for those who would hinder or slander him,
HE WILL PUT THEM OUT.
Thus his great Mantra:
Namah samanta vajranam chanda maharoshana Sphataya hum traka ham mam
“I DEDICATE MYSELF TO THE UNIVERSAL DIAMOND BE THIS RAGING FURY DESTROYED”
And he will protect those who love woods and rivers, Gods and animals, hobos and madmen, prisoners and sick people, musicians, playful women, and hopeful children;
And if anyone is threatened by advertising, air pollution, or the police, they should chant SMOKEY THE BEAR’S WAR SPELL
DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS
DROWN THEIR BUTTS
CRUSH THEIR BUTTS
And SMOKEY THE BEAR will surely appear to put the enemy out with his vajra-shovel,
Now those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada,
Will help save the planet Earth from total oil slick,
Will enter the age of harmony of man and nature,
Will win the tender love and caresses of men, women, and beasts
Will always have ripe blackberries to eat and a sunny spot under a pine to sit at,
AND IN THE END WILL WIN HIGHEST PERFECT ENLIGHTENMENT.
thus have we heard.”
A sovereign and independent Palestine, as imagined by its people only, with the UN as guarantor; for this dream I have struggled for fifty five years now since my first death, of moments only from the concussive pressure wave of a police grenade when I was nine as Reagan ordered the police to open fire on the student divestiture from Israel protests, Bloody Thursday May 15 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley; and as my consciousness was hurled out of my body I stood beyond time and lived myriads of possible futures extending through millennia.
I hope that we choose love over fear, power, and force, now in this moment when the fate of humankind balances between liberty and tyranny, and that we are not still merely hoping that solidarity may one day triumph over division fifty years from now, or fifty thousand, but now begin its realization, here in this Holocaust which is Gaza. May peace be upon us all.
Students across Europe hold Gaza war protests in run-up to UN vote on Palestinian statehood
With last year’s United Nations declaration of Nakba Day, the historic trauma of the Palestinians and Israel’s kleptocratic imperial conquest and dominion and wars of ethnic cleansing and genocide belong not only to both sides of a divided people, but to all humankind.
Herein we bear witness and I hope heed its warning, for fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are universal to humans as failures of solidarity and interdependence driven by fear, especially when generalized and overwhelming fear and existential threats are shaped by authority in service to power and the carceral state of force and control through division and falsification.
No matter where you begin with hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Why recreate a hell you have escaped from?
Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis. Seizure of power as autonomy and self-determination, yes; but why not change the systems of unequal power, instead of trading places as tyrants rather than prisoners?
Why has the state of Israel reconstructed not the dream of Sepharad in which all are equal regardless of faith, race, or national identity, but the nightmare of its destroyer the Spanish Empire and its ideology of limpieza enforced by Conquest and Inquisition?
With the Inquisition and the Holocaust as the twin poles of its historical identity, and as imposed conditions of struggle, Israel has achieved a space of relative safety at the cost of becoming a wholly militarized society united by blood and faith. But security is an illusion, because state terror and fear beyond hope create their own counterforce as resistance and revolution.
Fear is not the only means of exchange, nor power the only thing which has meaning.
Palestine and Israel are one people divided by history. Of memory, history, and the struggle between the masks that others make for us as authorized identities in service to power by those who would enslave us and those we make for ourselves, of falsification versus truths written in our flesh, this I say; only the redemptive power of love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force.
There are no Israelis, no Palestinians; only people like ourselves and the choices we make about how to be human together.
On this Nakba Day, let us mourn the collapse of moral vision and the brotherhood of all humankind which unleashed it as the Defining Moment of both Palestinian and Israeli identity, dream a better future than we have the past, and act as a United Humankind to make it real.
Let us choose love over hate and solidarity over division.
As written by Hamas last year, before the October 7 events engineered by Israel through IDF infiltration and subversion agent networks within Hamas disrupted the Israel-Palestinian peace and unification movement and provided Netanyahu and his criminal settler regime a casus belli for the genocide of the Palestinians now ongoing and the imperial conquest and dominion of the whole region in a generalized conflict with Iran; “The 75th anniversary of the al-Nakba (the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people) anniversary, which comes in the aftermath of the Israeli occupation forces’ most recent aggression against the besieged Gaza strip, brings back painful memories.
Seventy-five years have passed since the Israeli occupation of Palestine, during which the occupation forces perpetrated the most horrific crimes and massacres against the Palestinian people, who have been holding on to their land and rights.
On this anniversary, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas salutes the Palestinian heroic martyrs, who fell in their quest for freedom, wishes the injured speedy recovery, and hails the detainees in Israeli occupation jails. The movement states the following:
First: The Joint Operations Chamber has consolidated the unity of the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation against the Israeli occupation.
Second: The Israeli occupation will never have any legitimacy or sovereignty over historic Palestine and the occupation’s endeavours to obliterate the historic features and identity of Palestine are bound to fail.
Third: We will remain loyal to the Palestinians languishing in Israeli occupation jails and we will continue to work towards releasing them by all available means.
Fourth: The main reason behind the great suffering of the millions of Palestinian refugees is the Israeli occupation. The Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their land, from which they were forcibly evicted, is inalienable.
Fifth: The 75-year-long Israeli occupation of Palestine is a stain on those who remained silent and have not lifted a finger to expose the occupation’s crimes and put an end to its aggression against our people, land, and holy places.
Sixth: We call on the international community, Arab and Muslim Ummah, and the free peoples of the world to side with the just Palestinian cause and take swift action to end all forms of aggression against the Palestinian people until they regain their rights.”
As written by Armani Syed in Time, in an article entitled Why the U.N. Is Commemorating Palestinian Displacement This Year; “For the first time ever, the U.N. will commemorate the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, in which at least 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forcibly expelled from their homes during the creation of Israel in 1948.
On May 15, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will deliver a keynote speech at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, as part of a high-level special meeting to mark Nakba Day. In a statement outlining the event, the U.N. said the occasion aims to “highlight that the noble goals of justice and peace require recognizing the reality and history of the Palestinian people’s plight and ensuring the fulfillment of their inalienable rights.”
As the 75th anniversary of the Nakba approached, the 193-member General Assembly voted in November on whether to host a commemoration event; the plan was approved by a vote of 90-30 with 47 abstentions. The U.S., a longtime military and financial supporter of Israel, voted against the event and confirmed that no American diplomats would be present.
For many others, the U.N.’s decision is an acknowledgement of the central role played by the intergovernmental organization in the partition of the Mandate for Palestine.
“It’s acknowledging the responsibility of the U.N. of not being able to resolve this catastrophe for the Palestinian people for 75 years,” said Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. ambassador, according to the Associated Press.
Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, described the commemoration as “abominable” and called it a “blatant attempt to distort history.”
From the early 1900s, a growing number of Zionist settlers escaping antisemitism in Europe arrived in the Mandate for Palestine. During the 1920s and 1930s, Palestinians resisted displacement that had been enabled by the British colonial presence. British forces eventually tasked the U.N. with finding a solution.
In 1947, the U.N. General Assembly, formed of 57 member states at the time, passed a resolution to divide the Mandate for Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian one. The plan allocated more than half the country to the Jewish state at a time when Jews formed around one-third of the population. The plan would also have left around 500,000 Palestinians living in a future Jewish state with a drastic choice: remain a minority in a Jewish state or leave.
Palestinians rejected the proposal and when the British mandate expired in 1948, Israel declared its independence.
Fighting broke out and 5 Arab countries—Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria—deployed forces to stem the flow of Palestinian refugees. The aftermath of the fighting saw Israel conquer additional land that the U.N. plan had earmarked for a Palestinian state, while Egypt and Jordan each retained control over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, respectively.
Over time, the Israel took control of more land that was formerly designated by the U.N. as part of a future Palestinian state. After the June 1967 War between Israel and a coalition of Arab states, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
In recent decades, Israeli settlements in the West Bank have expanded under successive governments, with the settler population surpassing half a million people earlier this year. The settlements are considered illegal under international law, and much of the international community see them as an obstacle to peace and a future Palestinian state.
This year, Nakba Day is being observed on the heels of a round of violence between Israel and Palestinian militant groups. Israeli airstrikes which intended to target key figures from Islamic Jihad, the second-largest Palestinian armed group in Gaza, claimed at least 33 Palestinian lives. Meanwhile, Palestinian militant groups fired as many as 800 rockets toward Israel, leading to the death of two people in Israel.
“The catastrophe to the Palestinian people is still ongoing,” Mansour said, adding that Palestinians are still being “forcibly removed” from their homes.”
Arabic
15 مايو 2024 يوم النكبة
مع إعلان الأمم المتحدة يوم النكبة ، فإن الصدمة التاريخية للفلسطينيين وغزو إسرائيل للتطهير العرقي لا تخص كلا الجانبين من الشعب المنقسم فحسب ، بل للبشرية جمعاء.
هنا نشهد وآمل أن ألتفت إلى تحذيره ، لأن فاشية الدم والإيمان والتربة عالمية للبشر كفشل في التضامن والاعتماد المتبادل مدفوعًا بالخوف ، خاصةً عندما يتشكل الخوف المعمم والشامل والتهديدات الوجودية من خلال السلطة في خدمة القوة والحالة الجسدية للقوة والسيطرة من خلال الانقسام والتزوير.
بغض النظر عن المكان الذي تبدأ فيه التسلسلات الهرمية من الانتماء النخبوي والآخر الإقصائي ، ينتهي بك الأمر دائمًا عند أبواب أوشفيتز.
لماذا تعيد خلق الجحيم الذي هربت منه؟
لقد تعلمت إسرائيل الدروس الخاطئة من النازيين. نعم ، الاستيلاء على السلطة باعتباره استقلالية وتقرير مصير ؛ ولكن لماذا لا نغير أنظمة القوة غير المتكافئة ، بدلاً من تداول الأماكن على أنها طاغية لا أسرى؟
لماذا لم تعيد دولة إسرائيل بناء حلم سيفاراد الذي يتساوى فيه الجميع بغض النظر عن العقيدة أو العرق أو الهوية الوطنية ، ولكن كابوس مدمرها الإمبراطورية الإسبانية وأيديولوجية ليمبيزا التي فرضها الفتح ومحاكم التفتيش؟
مع محاكم التفتيش والهولوكوست كقطبين مزدوجين لهويتها التاريخية ، وكشروط كفاح مفروضة ، حققت إسرائيل مساحة من الأمان النسبي على حساب أن تصبح مجتمعًا عسكريًا بالكامل متحدًا بالدم والإيمان. لكن الأمن وهم ، لأن إرهاب الدولة والخوف الذي يفوق الأمل يخلقان قوتهما المضادة كمقاومة وثورة.
ليس الخوف هو الوسيلة الوحيدة للتبادل ، ولا القوة الشيء الوحيد الذي له معنى.
في يوم النكبة هذا ، دعونا نحزن على انهيار الرؤية الأخلاقية والأخوة بين البشرية جمعاء ، الأمر الذي أطلق العنان لها باعتبارها اللحظة المحددة للهوية الفلسطينية والإسرائيلية ، ونحلم بمستقبل أفضل مما كان لدينا في الماضي ، ونتصرف كإنسان موحد. لجعلها حقيقية.
Hebrew
15 במאי 2024 יום הנכבה
עם הכרזת יום הנכבה של האו”ם, הטראומה ההיסטורית של הפלסטינים וכיבוש הטיהור האתני של ישראל שייכים לא רק לשני הצדדים של עם מפולג, אלא לכל המין האנושי.
כאן אנו מעידים ואני מקווה להקשיב לאזהרתה, שכן פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה הם אוניברסליים לבני אדם ככישלונות של סולידריות ותלות הדדית המונעים על ידי פחד, במיוחד כאשר פחד מוכלל ומכריע ואיומים קיומיים מעוצבים על ידי סמכות בשירות למען כוח ומצב קרסראלי של כוח ושליטה באמצעות חלוקה וזיוף.
לא משנה היכן אתה מתחיל עם היררכיות של השתייכות עילית ואחרות מדריגה, אתה תמיד מגיע בשערי אושוויץ.
למה לשחזר גיהנום שממנו נמלטת?
ישראל למדה את הלקחים הלא נכונים מהנאצים. תפיסת השלטון כאוטונומיה והגדרה עצמית, כן; אבל למה לא לשנות את מערכות הכוח הלא שוויוניות, במקום לסחור במקומות כרודן ולא שבוי?
מדוע מדינת ישראל לא שיחזרה את החלום של ספרד שבו כולם שווים ללא הבדל אמונה, גזע או זהות לאומית, אלא את הסיוט של ההורסת שלה את האימפריה הספרדית ואת האידיאולוגיה של לימפיזה שנאכפת על ידי הכיבוש והאינקוויזיציה?
עם האינקוויזיציה והשואה כצמד הקטבים התאומים לזהותה ההיסטורית, וכתנאי מאבק מוטלים, ישראל השיגה מרחב של ביטחון יחסי במחיר של הפיכתה לחברה צבאית לחלוטין המאוחדת בדם ואמונה. אבל ביטחון הוא אשליה, כי טרור המדינה ופחד מעבר לתקווה יוצרים כוח נגדי משלהם כהתנגדות ומהפכה.
פחד אינו האמצעי היחיד להחלפה, ולא כוח הדבר היחיד שיש לו משמעות.
ביום הנכבה הזה, הבה נתאבל על קריסת החזון המוסרי ואחוות האנושות כולה ששחררו אותו כרגע המכונן של הזהות הפלסטינית והישראלית כאחד, ונחלום עתיד טוב יותר ממה שהיה לנו בעבר, ונפעל כמין אנושי מאוחד. כדי שזה יהיה אמיתי.
The continuous Nakba’: Palestinians decry perpetual suffering
Farha film trailer/Netflix
Nakba Day: What happened in Palestine in 1948? | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera
Genocide Joe has sent his billion dollar arms gift to Israel back to congress for review, having admitted the true purpose of the two thousand pound city destroying bombs, but seems to imagine the tanks as defensive weapons, having forgotten the Blitzkrieg.
This as Israel invades Rafah in defiance of his Red Line against sending aid for the mass murders of the Palestinian refugees Israel has herded there, while in America the brutal repression of dissent on universities by student peace and divestiture protesters unfolds as state terror in recapitulation of the Vietnam War, though as yet we have no parallel with the Kent State Massacre.
If nothing else, the atrocities of the Gaza War have exposed the truths and monstrosities behind America’s historical role as patron of Israel’s imperial conquest and dominion of Palestine and its seventy years of genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and the unchecked power of a rapacious and kleptocratic state of theocracy and racism which we have authorized.
America Falls with our failure of empathy, abandonment of our universal human rights, cowardice in confronting evil, and complicity in genocide.
As Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such very different results, What is to be done?
As written by Osita Nwanevu in The Guardian, in an article entitled US students, once again, have led the way. Now we must all stand up for Palestinians: Campus protests in solidarity with the people of Gaza have braved abuse and police raids but history will be kinder; “he student left is the most reliably correct constituency in America. Over the past 60 years, it has passed every great moral test American foreign policy has forced upon the public, including the Vietnam war, the question of relations with apartheid South Africa, and the Iraq war. Student activists were at the heart of the black civil rights movement from the very beginning. To much derision and abuse, they pushed for more rights, protections and respect for women and queer people on their campuses than the wider world was long willing to provide. And over the past 20 years in particular, policymakers have arrived belatedly to stances on economic inequality, climate change, drug policy and criminal justice that putative radicals on campus took up long before them.
They have not always been right; even when right, their prescriptions for the problems they’ve identified and their means of directing attention to them have not always been prudent. But time and time and time again, the student left in America has squarely faced and expressed truths our politicians and all the eminent and eloquent voices of moderation in the press, in all of their supposed wisdom and good sense, have been unable or unwilling to see. Straining against an ancient and immortal prejudice against youth, it has made a habit of telling the American people, in tones that discomfit, what they need to hear before they are ready to hear it.
Only later, after the teargas clears and the leering and laughter subside, do we sit puzzled, in the filth of our own entirely avoidable mistakes, and look regretfully backward. Books are written. Documentaries are made. Plaques are installed. At Kent State, a plaza overlooking the university’s commons was constructed to honor the four students the Ohio national guard killed there in 1970. It’s bounded, the university’s website says, by “a jagged, abstract border symbolic of disruptions and the conflict of ideas.” There are daffodils. “Inquire, Learn, Reflect,” an inscription reads. One thing visitors might reflect on is that a Gallup poll taken not long after the shootings found that 58% of Americans believed that anti-war activists had, perhaps in the unrest of the preceding days, brought the deaths at Kent State upon themselves. Today, more than half a century after the fact, we mourn them. We have regrets.
What will we regret the most about the last few weeks? Which responses to the Gaza protests will linger the longest in our minds? CNN’s comparison of the campus protests to the persecution of Jews “during the 1930s in Europe”, perhaps? The University of Virginia changing its policy on tents to justify the deployment of more force against its students than it called for against the actual Nazis who marched on its campus and killed a woman seven years ago? The New York police department presenting to the press, as proof that outside agitators had organized the occupation of a building at Columbia, a book about the causes of terrorism written by a historian and a bike chain Columbia had been selling to its students? The outside funding actually raised by pro-Israel counter-protesters at UCLA who beat up and threw fireworks at students and faculty as campus and LAPD officers stood by?
Whenever all of this ends – whenever we find ourselves ready to survey what’s left of Gaza and its people and ask whether we could have done more to prevent the use of our weapons and our money in their destruction – what will we have to say for ourselves? When the talking heads are assembled to offer voiceovers atop footage of police grappling and tackling students and faculty whose voices, it will be painfully obvious to most by then, should have been heeded, what words of useless contrition will be offered?
There have been real instances of antisemitism on campuses since the protests began; here and there we’ve seen real instances of malevolence and idiocy. But to believe, on the basis of anecdata, that hatred and ignorance have motivated the vast majority of students who’ve set up encampments and other pro-Palestinian protests over the last month – in their many thousands at well over 100 colleges and universities in all but four states – is to believe what can only be described as an extraordinary propaganda campaign, one pushed by critics in the press and in office who can’t seem to agree on what the protesters are like. These students, we’ve been told, are both popular and unpopular among their peers. They are both ugly and chic. They are fragile and cold-blooded, pathetically soft and remarkably violent. They hate Jews. They are Jews who hate themselves. They’ve exercised both too little message discipline and too much caution with the press at demonstrations that are both laughably chaotic and suspiciously organized. And whoever they are and whatever’s spurred them into action, the students are, clearly, in need of either a good sock to the mouth or a good lay – the better to focus their attention away from politics and on their studies, on political matters close to home rather than halfway across the world, or political matters halfway across the world more deserving of their attention, like the plight of the suffering in China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Iran or Azerbaijan.
No one with their eyes on Gaza denies that there are many bad things happening in the world at any given time. None of those who’ve troubled law- and opinion-makers so with their insistence that the Palestinians are people would argue that the Palestinians are the only suffering people on the globe. But they are suffering largely as a consequence of American foreign policy. On Wednesday, President Biden announced that the United States will freeze the supply of offensive weaponry to Israel if it continues with the full invasion of Rafah, an announcement that follows admissions that the campaign being waged in Gaza, with our bombs, has thus far been waged with dubious military objectives and with insufficient regard for civilian life.
The guilty parties here include not only our political leaders but our private institutions, our colleges among them
What the White House has yet to admit, though, is that the nearly 35,000 Palestinians who have been killed and the 1.9 million Palestinians who have been displaced over the last seven months are the victims not only of this particular war and the logic of collective responsibility for the massacres of 7 October being deployed by Israeli leaders, but the willingness of this country to sanction Israel’s denial of Palestinian human rights for decades. And the guilty parties here include not only our political leaders but our private institutions, our colleges among them, which, through the investments they have sustained in Israel and the arms manufacturers supplying its war, have rendered themselves complicit in wrongs that should trouble us as deeply as apartheid in South Africa now does. Nothing should surprise us about the fact that Israel now faces similar divestment campaigns; after weeks of moaning and groaning that the demands of student protesters have been unexpressed, unclear or impossible to meet, multiple colleges have, in fact, made certain concessions to them and announced plans to take further demands into consideration. Encampments at Brown, Northwestern, Rutgers and the University of Minnesota were voluntarily disbanded on that basis.
But it should also be unsurprising that far more colleges have responded to student demonstrators by calling in the authorities – an authorization of force prefigured by the remarkable crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech we’ve seen at institutions across the country since October. One of the perversities of the situation is that despite all this, we probably haven’t heard the last about our “woke universities” – as they have for more than a hundred years, the right and centrists who share their contempt for college students will, against all available evidence, continue insisting that American campuses have been ideologically captured by the very people we’ve just witnessed campus administrators go to war against. They will do all they can to obscure it, but it should be plain now that all the shallow representation most visible to pundits – the diversity and equity teams, the minorities in high positions – hasn’t changed the fact that the majority of American universities are largely beholden to donors, trustees and, increasingly, politicians, well to the right of the most progressive voices on campus.
In the months ahead, many on the left will surely call upon universities to hold true to their commitments to open discourse and redress the censorship and harassment of Israel’s critics. They should. But we should also resist the flight to abstraction – dishwatery invocations of free speech, murky and lukewarm, that no one ever seems to really mean and that function chiefly as bulwarks against substantive debate. The dignity of the Palestinian people and their right to resist their oppression plainly aren’t chief among the dangerous and controversial ideas we’ve heard so much about protecting over the last decade; we cannot rely upon the putatively neutral authorities and institutions that have done so much to suppress them to act now in their defense on abstract grounds. So it goes. The job now, as the Israelis press into Rafah, is to change public opinion on the actual matter at hand – to make urgent arguments to the American public not about the plight of Palestine’s defenders on campus but the plight of the Palestinians. The students have done their part; they will be recognized in time. Now it’s up to the rest of us.”
US students, once again, have led the way. Now we must all stand up for Palestinians
14 مايو 2024 أمريكا تسقط بفشلنا في التعاطف، والتخلي عن حقوقنا الإنسانية العالمية، والجبن في مواجهة الشر، والتواطؤ في الإبادة الجماعية: بدء الهجوم الإسرائيلي على رفح
أرسل جو هدية الأسلحة التي تبلغ قيمتها مليار دولار إلى إسرائيل إلى الكونجرس لمراجعتها، بعد أن اعترف بالغرض الحقيقي لتدمير القنابل في المدينة التي يبلغ وزنها ألفي رطل، ولكن يبدو أنه يتخيل الدبابات كأسلحة دفاعية، بعد أن نسي الحرب الخاطفة.
يأتي هذا في الوقت الذي تغزو فيه إسرائيل رفح في تحدٍ لخطه الأحمر ضد إرسال المساعدات لعمليات القتل الجماعي للاجئين الفلسطينيين الذين تحشدهم إسرائيل هناك، بينما يتكشف في أمريكا القمع الوحشي للمعارضة في الجامعات من خلال السلام الطلابي والمتظاهرين على سحب الاستثمارات باعتباره إرهاب دولة في تلخيص لإسرائيل. حرب فيتنام، على الرغم من أنه ليس لدينا حتى الآن أي تشابه مع مذبحة ولاية كينت.
إذا لم يكن هناك شيء آخر، فقد كشفت الفظائع التي ارتكبت في حرب غزة عن الحقائق والفظائع الكامنة وراء الدور التاريخي الذي لعبته أمريكا كراعية للغزو الإمبريالي الإسرائيلي لفلسطين وهيمنتها وسبعين عامًا من الإبادة الجماعية والتطهير العرقي والجرائم ضد الإنسانية، والقوة غير المقيدة لإسرائيل. حالة الثيوقراطية والعنصرية الجشعة والكلبتوقراطية التي سمحنا بها.
إن أميركا تسقط بفشلنا في التعاطف، والتخلي عن حقوقنا الإنسانية العالمية، والجبن في مواجهة الشر، والتواطؤ في الإبادة الجماعية.
وكما تساءل تولستوي ولينين بنتائج مختلفة تمامًا، ما الذي يجب فعله؟
Hebrew
14 במאי 2024 אמריקה נופלת עם כישלוננו באמפתיה, נטישת זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, פחדנות בהתמודדות עם הרוע ושותפות ברצח עם: התקפת ישראל ברפיח מתחילה
רצח העם ג’ו שלח את מתנת הנשק שלו של מיליארד דולר לישראל בחזרה לביקורת בקונגרס, לאחר שהודה במטרה האמיתית של עיריית אלפיים לירות השמדת פצצות, אבל נראה שהוא מדמיין את הטנקים כנשק הגנתי, לאחר ששכח את הבליצקריג.
זאת כאשר ישראל פולשת לרפיח בהתרסה לקו האדום שלו נגד שליחת סיוע לרציחות ההמוניות של הפליטים הפלסטינים שישראל עדרה שם, בעוד שבאמריקה הדיכוי האכזרי של מחלוקות על האוניברסיטאות על ידי מפגיני שלום סטודנטים ומפגיני ביטול ביטול מתגלה כטרור ממלכתי בסיכום של מלחמת וייטנאם, אם כי עדיין אין לנו מקבילה לטבח במדינת קנט.
אם שום דבר אחר, הזוועות של מלחמת עזה חשפו את האמיתות והמפלצות שמאחורי תפקידה ההיסטורי של אמריקה כפטרונית של הכיבוש הקיסרי והשליטה של ישראל על פלסטין ושבעים שנות רצח עם, טיהור אתני, פשעים נגד האנושות והכוח הבלתי מבוקש של מצב דורס וקלפטוקרטי של תיאוקרטיה וגזענות שאישרנו.
אמריקה נופלת עם כישלון האמפתיה שלנו, נטישת זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, פחדנות בהתמודדות עם הרוע ושותפות ברצח עם. כפי ששאלו טולסטוי ולנין בתוצאות כה שונות, מה יש לעשו
Among the most outrageous and horrific incidents of police terror and racially motivated crimes against humanity in American history is the bombing of the Move commune of Philadelphia on this day thirty-nine years ago.
Our endemic and pervasive racism as a nation and a society combines horrifically with authoritarianism and a militarized police state of force and control according to the counterinsurgency model, force multipliers which serve to dehumanize our nonwhite population, devalue the idea of citizenship, and enforce their subjugation and re enslavement as bond prison labor.
While racism and submission to authority are complex and as social and psychological issues beyond the scope of structural change alone, racist police violence has a simple cure; disarm and demilitarize the police. Without weapons they are rendered harmless.
We must return to our public safety and security services their primary role as guarantors of our universal human rights and providers of public well being.
The bombing of the Move Commune gives the lie to our idea of policing as a public safety service; we must dismantle the carceral state to free ourselves from the legacies of slavery and historical inequalities and injustices, abandon the use of social force, and begin to forge a free society of equals.
As written by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian in an article entitled A siege. A bomb. 48 dogs. And the black commune that would not surrender; “For 40 years, Janine Phillips Africa had a technique for coping with being cooped up in a prison cell for a crime she says she did not commit. She would avoid birthdays, Christmas, New Year and any other events that emphasized time passing while she was not free.
“The years are not my focus,” she wrote in a letter to the Guardian. “I keep my mind on my health and the things I need to do day by day.”
On Saturday she could finally begin accepting the passage of time. She and her cellmate and sister in the black liberation struggle, Janet Holloway Africa, were released from SCI Cambridge Springs in Pennsylvania, after a long struggle for parole.
The release of Janine, 63, and Janet, 68, marks a key moment in the history of the Move 9, the group of African American black power and environmental campaigners who were imprisoned after a police siege of their home in August 1978. The pair were the last of four women in the group either to be paroled or to die behind bars.
The saga of Move was one of the most dramatic and surreal of the 1970s black liberation struggle. Along with their peers, the women lived in a communal house in Philadelphia under group founder John Africa, AKA Vincent Leaphart. All members took the last name Africa to show they considered themselves a family.
A cross between the Black Panthers and west coast hippies, Move campaigned not only for equal treatment for African Americans but also for respect for animals and nature, caring for 48 stray dogs in the house.
Such unconventional attitudes brought them into conflict with neighbours and the Philadelphia police, a notoriously brutal force even by American standards. After a siege lasting several months, on 8 August 1978 officers went in to clear the group from the property. In the melee, officer James Ramp was shot and killed with a single bullet.
Despite the single shooter, and despite the fact that the group always protested that they were unarmed and that Ramp was killed by fire from fellow officers, the five men and four women were each sentenced to 30 years to life.
Janine Africa’s release was bittersweet. While she was in prison, she corresponded over two years with the Guardian. In her letters she talked about the double tragedy of her life.
Two years before the 1978 siege, police turned up at the Move house in Powelton Village and began harassing the group. A scuffle ensued and Janine was knocked over as she held her three-week-old baby, Life, in her arms.
The baby appeared to have been trampled, his skull shattered. He died later that day.
Then on 13 May 1985, by which time Janine Africa had been in prison for seven years, she was told the terrible news that the remaining members of the Move “family” had been assaulted a second time. On this occasion police didn’t just go in guns blazing – they dropped an incendiary bomb from a helicopter.
It caused a fire that destroyed the Move house and 60 other homes in a largely African American neighborhood. Eleven Move members burned to death. They included founder John Africa and five children, one of whom was Janine’s other son, Little Phil, aged 12.
The Guardian asked Janine how she came to terms with having seen two children killed by police brutality.
“There are times when I think about Life and my son Phil,” she wrote, “but I don’t keep those thoughts in my mind long because they hurt. The murder of my children, my family, will always affect me, but not in a bad way. When I think about what this system has done to me and my family, it makes me even more committed to my belief.”
The parole of the two women follows the release last June of Debbie Sims Africa, who was arrested in the 1978 siege when she was eight months pregnant and who went on to give birth to her son, Michael Davis Jr, in a prison cell. A fourth woman, Merle Austin Africa, died in prison in March 1998.
Of the men, three remain in prison: Eddie Goodman Africa, who has recently gone before a parole panel, and Chuck Sims Africa and Delbert Orr Africa. Michael Davis Africa Sr, the father of the boy born in a cell and husband of Debbie, was released in October. Phil Africa died in prison in January 2015.
The attorney for the two released women, Brad Thomson of People’s Law Office, said their parole was a victory not only for them and their loved ones but also for the Move organization and the “movement to free all political prisoners”.
As written by former Mayor W Wilson Goode in The Guardian; “When I was mayor, Philadelphia bombed civilians. It’s time for the city to apologise
Thiry-five years ago, we did something inexcusable. A formal apology is crucial for the healing process, and overdue.
The date 13 May will be forever etched in my mind.
Thirty-five years ago, members of Move, a black liberation and back-to-nature group, barricaded themselves in a row house in west Philadelphia. The situation escalated into an armed standoff with the Philadelphia police. On 13 May 1985, the police dropped an explosive device from a helicopter on to the house. The decision to drop explosives on a house filled with people was indefensible. The bombs ignited a fire which killed 11 people, including five children, and razed 61 homes to the ground.
The event will remain on my conscience for the rest of my life. I was the mayor of Philadelphia at the time. Although I was not personally involved in all the decisions that resulted in 11 deaths, I was chief executive of the city. I would not intentionally harm anyone, but it happened on my watch. I am ultimately responsible for those I appointed. I accept that responsibility and I apologize for their reckless actions that brought about this horrific outcome, even though I knew nothing about their specific plan of action.
This is the fourth time I’ve publicly apologized. My first official apology on behalf of the city came on 14 May 1985 in a televised address to the citizens of Philadelphia, to the Move family and to their neighbors. Today I would like to apologize again and extend that apology to all who experienced, and in many cases continue to experience, pain and distress from the government actions that day. They include the Move family, their neighbors, the police officers, firefighters and other public servants as well as all the citizens of Philadelphia.
There can never be an excuse for dropping an explosive from a helicopter on to a house with men, women and children inside
But there’s something more I want to suggest on this important anniversary. After 35 years it would be helpful for the healing of all involved, especially the victims of this terrible event, if there was a formal apology made by the City of Philadelphia. That way we can begin to build a bridge that spans from the tragic events of the past into our future. Many in the city still feel the pain of that day. I know I will always feel the pain.
There can never be an excuse for dropping an explosive from a helicopter on to a house with men, women and children inside and then letting the fire burn. I will never accept one. Some want me to blame the Move family or their neighbors; that is absolutely wrong thinking and I will never do so. We will never know exactly what happened on 13 May 1985 on Osage Avenue, but I do know there are some things beyond excusing.
I know I can’t change the past by apologizing, but I can express my deep and sincere regrets and call upon other former and current elected officials to do so. I believe this action can be a small step toward healing. I apologize and encourage others do the same. We will be a better city for it.
The Rev Dr W Wilson Goode, Sr served as mayor of Philadelphia from 1984-1992”.
On this anniversary of the assassination of beloved journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, possibly as our devils whisper by a sniper belonging to a rogue black ops unit of IDF Reconnaissance in Gaza, Sayaret Haruv, refounded under the command of Lt. Col. Yaniv Barut, Kfir Brigade, and operating in coordination with elements of the infamous Duvdevan, Counter Terrorism Unit 217 of the 89th Commando Brigade, whose history has been fictionalized in the Israeli telenovela Fauda available on Netflix, other special operations agents and most importantly the deniable paramilitary assets and settler militias which now threaten to wag the dog and seize power from the civilian government of Israel, let us bring a Reckoning.
For many years teaching high school my mother would hold up the crooked finger broken by a nun with a ruler to silence her questions as a child, whereupon she walked out of the school and the Catholic Church and never looked back, and announce to the class her first principle of action and of education; “We are not silent.”
Our best reply to the murder of a journalist by any state is to ask questions and speak in witness, and to do so together as mass action and solidarity across all divisions of faith, race, gender, and national identity as liberation struggle. This is how we set each other free; by truths which delegitimize authority, by solidarity of action which forges a United Humankind, and by seizures of power.
In the context of the Israeli Occupation and the campaign of terror against the people of Palestine, a friend has offered her witness of history as to why she no longer wears the Star of David in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, and wrote of the 1995 assassination of Rabin, who like Gandhi was killed by an ultranationalist in the first action of the capture of the state by a totalitarian and imperial colonialist regime, as a lost hope of democracy in Israel.
To this I have replied; Yes, but remember always my friend, that though the state of Israel now unfolds from its unique history, its failures are not those of Jewish identity or faith but universal to humankind. Tyranny is a predictable phase of anticolonial struggle, and determined by its imposed conditions. So seductive, to be the arbiter of virtue in pursuit of security. But security is an illusion, and use of social force subversive to democracy and the values and goals of a society in which we are each other’s guarantors of universal human rights, and not our jailors.
My friends and I fought for a long time for the freedom to wear the Star of David without fear; seize and own it as a power paid for in blood. One day the citizens of Israel will liberate themselves; until then all I can do is try to buy time for that future to unfold, and shield those I can from its costs as tyranny and terror. I offer for your consideration the premise that Rabin was among the 36 Good Men upon whom the fate of the world depends, and the hope that we may live up to his example.
Cede nothing to the enemy; not symbols or histories, nor abandon anything to capture and subversion of meaning in service to power and authorized identities as falsification. Identity is a ground of struggle, where liberty or tyranny begin.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the seizure of power as ownership of ourselves.
As written by Bethan McKernan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Shireen Abu Akleh: friends and family call for justice on anniversary of killing:
Israeli forces admit ‘high possibility’ Al Jazeera reporter was shot by sniper at West Bank refugee camp; “Family members, friends and colleagues of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was almost certainly fatally shot by an Israeli sniper, have renewed calls for justice on the first anniversary of her killing, during a week of memorials and events celebrating her life.
Abu Akleh, a household name in the Arab world who worked for Qatar-based Al Jazeera, was shot in the head in the slumlike refugee camp on the outskirts of the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on 11 May last year while covering an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) raid. International outrage at the reporter’s death was fuelled by scenes of violence at her funeral in Jerusalem, when Israeli police attacked pallbearers, almost causing them to drop the coffin.
The IDF eventually admitted there was a “high possibility” Abu Akleh was killed by a soldier, but maintains the shooting was accidental and a criminal investigation is not warranted.
In the year since, international efforts at accountability have moved painfully slowly. But at a concert honouring the Jerusalemite in Ramallah earlier this week, hundreds of people gathered to remember a remarkable trailblazer and her legacy.
“Years of seeing justice not being served for Palestinians tells me we shouldn’t expect much [from officials]. But if we focus on whatever silver lining there is, I’d never seen anything like the turnout at her funeral … It showed how loved and respected she was,” said Dalia Hatuqa, Abu Akleh’s friend and former colleague.
“Shireen has inspired a whole generation of young women and men who admire her and her work and want to follow in her footsteps.”
Tributes from Abu Akleh’s family and colleagues at Tuesday’s concert spoke of her dedication to showing the world the harsh realities of Israeli occupation, as well as moments of happiness and resilience. A Jerusalem girls’ choir, and young women from the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, performed several pieces composed in her memory.
A raft of universities have announced awards and scholarships in Abu Akleh’s name, a street in Ramallah has been renamed after her, and her name will also live on in the form of a media museum scheduled to open in the city in 2025.
For Palestinians, and much of the rest of the world, it is clear who bears responsibility for Abu Akleh’s death. Several journalistic investigations as well as a UN probe have concluded that Israeli forces killed the well-known journalist. Some findings suggest the small group of journalists she was with were deliberately targeted, even though they were wearing helmets and protective vests clearly marked “Press”.
While the Biden administration has largely embraced Israel’s version of events, and resisted launching an independent investigation into the killing of a US citizen, pressure from Congress forced it to agree to an FBI inquiry last November, which for now appears to be the most promising avenue for justice – although Israel has said it will not cooperate. Abu Akleh’s family and Al Jazeera have also referred the case to the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, but proceedings typically take years, and Israel is not a member.
Abu Akleh is far from the only Palestinian journalist killed in recent years whose death has gone unpunished. A new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), released this week to coincide with the anniversary of Abu Akleh’s death, found that Israel has never charged or found any soldier accountable for the killings of at least 20 journalists, 18 of whom were Palestinian, since 2001.
“Israeli officials discount evidence and witness claims, often appearing to clear soldiers for the killings while inquiries are still in progress … When probes do take place, the Israeli military often takes months or years to investigate killings and families of the mostly Palestinian journalists have little recourse inside Israel to pursue justice,” the report said.
In the year that has passed since the reporter’s death, violence in the region has risen substantially. Tensions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have soared over the past year: more than 116 Palestinians and at least 19 Israelis and foreigners have been killed in 2023 so far, leading to fears of a return to full-scale fighting.
About half of this year’s Palestinian death toll are civilians, according to media tallies. But according to army data analysed by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organisation, the IDF has near-total impunity from prosecution in cases in which Palestinians and their property were harmed by soldiers.
Between 2017 and 2021, only 21.4% of complaints led to an investigation – and of the 248 investigations, just 11 resulted in an indictment, making the rate 0.87%.
The IDF says it opens initial operational investigations in all cases in the West Bank in which a Palestinian is killed, unless the death occurred in a combat environment. Based on those findings, the military advocate decides whether a criminal investigation is merited.
“I thought when they killed Shireen, if they can kill her, then they can kill any of us,” said Amira, a 20-year-old student at the Ramallah concert. “But we need to continue resisting and we need to have hope.”
On this day two years ago I wrote; May 12 2022, Reflections of the Third Intifada Part 3: In the Shadow of the Israeli Assassination of Truthteller and Journalist Shireen Abu Aqla; During a military raid on the Jenin Palestinian refugee camp in which Israeli provocateurs created confusion and pretexts for the use of deadly force by the state, an Israeli sniper assassinated iconic and beloved Palestinian journalist and American citizen Shireen Abu Aqla, who was wearing her unmistakable blue press jacket, in order to silence her witness of history. Hers was a fearless and heroic life of truth telling, and she was a role model for a generation of women who grew up with the implicit understanding that silence is complicity.
Our world is a Wilderness of Mirrors, distorted funhouse images, rewritten histories, filled with surfaces which capture and reflect, in which the witness of history and the sacred calling to pursue the truth must be beyond the power of the state, the elite, or of anyone to silence and erase, or we become simulacra, forgeries of ourselves and shadow puppets of authority. Our authenticity and uniqueness, our ownership of ourselves, is put at risk and in question by propaganda and thought control, repression of dissent, dehumanization, and subjugation.
We need what Foucault called truth tellers, not merely as guarantors of our liberty, but also of our humanity and the inviolability of our souls.
Al Jazeera has written of this; “In a blatant murder, violating international laws and norms, the Israeli Occupation Forces assassinated in cold blood Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Palestine, Shireen Abu Aqla, targeting her with live fire early this morning… while conducting her journalistic duty.”
The network called on the international community to hold the Israeli government and military accountable for the “intentional targeting and killing” of a journalist.
Qatar – which funds Al Jazeera – said it considered the killing a “heinous crime and a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and a blatant infringement on freedom of media and expression”.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the shooting of Abu Aqla and Samoudi and alleged that it was “part of the occupation’s policy of targeting journalists to obscure the truth and commit crimes silently”.
As I wrote in my post of January 16 2021, Silence Is Complicity: No One Gets to Sit This One Out; A post in which I quote Adam Parkhomenko elicited an interesting reaction from someone, one which makes me question how the rhetoric of fascist and racist privilege creates complicity; the quote is in reference to the massive responsibility avoidance and denial on the part of the Republican lawmakers who refuse to join the call impeach our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his rabble of murderous barbarians.
Here is the quotation; “I have a very simple message for Republicans calling for unity without accountability: the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.”
This was the reaction; first, repetition of the very call for unity without accountability, which I would characterize as granting permission through failure to consequent behaviors, which the quote calls out; “These words are just creating more divisions!”
Second, an attempt at silencing dissent; “Please Stop!”
Third, an attempt at blame shifting; “Whenever one person thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong you are the problem!”
And Fourth, the very worst of the apologetics of historical fascism, a claim of moral equivalence; “Everyone just needs to stop all of these posts because there are good people on both sides!”
And this last I cannot let pass, for on the last occasion of its general use this propagandistic lie and rhetorical device led directly to the Holocaust and the global devastation of total war.
I am unclear which good people she could be referring to; the ones who were going to capture and hang or guillotine members of Congress, the ones who murdered a police officer and attempted to bomb both the Democratic and Republican offices, the white supremacist terrorists who have rallied to the cause of treason and armed sedition, or the mad tyrant who commanded them?
To this I replied; You are wrong. Treason, terror, and the murder of police officers has no excuse. You are either with us as American patriots or against us; no one gets to sit this one out and be counted among the honorable, the moral, and the loyal.
Silence is complicity.
Such is the Talmudic principle, “Shtika Kehoda”, famously paraphrased by Einstein in his 1954 speech to the Chicago Decalogue Society as “If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity”, and referenced by Eli Weisel as “the opposite of love is not only hate, it is also indifference.”
Martin Luther King said it this way in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story; “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
John Stuart Mill expressed a related idea in his 1867 Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews; “Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
Leonardo da Vinci formulated it as resistance to tyranny, with which he was very familiar in the wars of dominion between the princes of Renaissance Italy; “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
Silence is complicity.
Should this concept require further clarification, please refer to the following recording and transcript of Elie Wiesel’s Millennium Lecture at the White House, on April 12 1999, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton:
Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President — Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others — and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people.
Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary — or Mrs. Clinton — for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations — Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin — bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting — more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.
Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner,” as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.
Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God — not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps — and I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance — but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.
And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader — and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death — Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us.
No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history — I must say it — his image in Jewish history is flawed.
The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo — maybe 1,000 Jews — was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back.
I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people — in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?
But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the “Righteous Gentiles,” whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war?
Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.
Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?
What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them — so many of them — could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.
Elie Wiesel – April 12, 1999”
As I wrote in my post of May 12 2021, Day Three of the Third Intifada: Israel Launches its Final Solution in a General Campaign Against the People of Palestine; As Hamas defends the people of Palestine in an exchange of rocket fire with Israel, Israel launches a general campaign of state terror in its Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem, unleashing the deniable assets of militarized hate groups with which it provoked this conflict in coordination with military conquest. This is a program of ethnic cleansing which echoes that of the Nakba, the 1948 expulsion and genocide of the Palestinians.
Fire, explosions, screams; the night is filled with the horror of erasure and annihilation, mass murder and the wailing of the families of the dead. Here is a hellscape out of Dante but for one thing; the victims are innocents, caught in the jaws of a fascist tyranny which denies their humanity.
And in America, President Joe Biden responds to the news of Israeli Blitzkrieg and Kristallnacht against Palestine, in which hundreds of civilian noncombatants are now dead including children, with the words; “Israel has the right to defend itself.”
Tell that to the dead children, America. Their blood is on your hands.
And the judgement of history will hold you responsible.
What of the right of Palestine to defend itself from Israeli terror and war?
There is no right of defense against a people you are Occupying.
Why does America subsidize a fascist tyranny of blood, faith, and soil in the state of Israel? This is about wealth and power, and oil as a strategic resource which confers it.
If the nations who own the oil unite in solidarity with the people of Palestine against the Israeli conquest and Occupation, America will have no choice but to disavow and abandon our colony and proxy state.
If we can expose the monster behind the Israeli mask of virtue conferred by its historical legacies of victimization, and hold America and its other sponsors and partner states complicit in its crimes against humanity as a rogue state, the community of nations will abandon their policies of collaboration.
Let us dream a new world, wherein all humankind are equal and the guarantee of universal human rights is real and not an illusion of lies which serve power.
In America we need only ask, do we really hold that all human beings are created equal, and endowed with equal and inalienable rights? If we answer yes, then we must repudiate and renounce the state of Israel, until it can be reimagined and transformed as a free society of equals.
We must pursue a policy of exposure of the state of Israel’s crimes against humanity, and unite as an international community in the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of Israel and in political action in our respective nations.
And it is crucial to do so in partnership with the citizens of Israel who welcome their Palestinian brothers and sisters in a free society of equals, wherein divisions of faith, blood, language, and history are without meaning under the law.
We must forge a new Israel free of tyrannies of force and control and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, free of its toxic military culture and carceral state, for along with the Palestinians who are enslaved under its Apartheid regime, its own citizens are also slaves of an unjust and unequal system.
Let us liberate Palestine and Israel, and let us liberate America from her complicity in evil.
12 במאי 2023 שירין אבו עקל’ה, שהיד בעדות ובעיתונות כקריאה קדושה במרדף אחר האמת
ביום השנה לרצח העיתונאית האהובה שירין אבו עקל’ה, אולי כשהשדים שלנו לוחשים על ידי צלף השייך ליחידת מבצעים שחורים נוכלים של סיירת צה”ל בעזה, סיירת חרוב, בפיקודו של סא”ל יניב בארות, כפיר. החטיבה, ופועלת בתיאום עם גורמי דובדבן הידועה לשמצה, יחידה 217 ללוחמה בטרור של חטיבת הקומנדו 89, שההיסטוריה שלה הומצאה בטלנובלה הישראלית “פאודה” הזמינה בנטפליקס, סוכני מבצעים מיוחדים אחרים והכי חשוב הנכסים החצי-צבאיים הניתנים להכחשה שכיום. לאיים לכשכש בכלב ולתפוס את השלטון מהממשלה האזרחית של ישראל, בואו נביא חשבון נפש.
במשך שנים רבות מלמדת תיכון אמי הייתה מרימה את האצבע העקומה שנשברה על ידי נזירה עם סרגל כדי להשתיק את שאלותיה בילדותה, ואז היא יצאה מבית הספר ומהכנסייה הקתולית ולא הביטה לאחור, והודיעה לכיתה עקרון הפעולה והחינוך הראשון שלה; “אנחנו לא שותקים.”
התשובה הטובה ביותר שלנו לרצח של עיתונאי על ידי כל מדינה היא לשאול שאלות ולדבר לעדות, ולעשות זאת יחד כפעולה המונית וסולידריות על פני כל חטיבות האמונה, הגזע, המגדר והזהות הלאומית כמאבק שחרור. כך אנו משחררים אחד את השני; על ידי אמיתות המוציאות דה-לגיטימציה לסמכות ולא בכוח.
רצח רבין ב-1995, שכמו גנדי נהרג על ידי אולטרה-לאומי בפעולה הראשונה של כיבוש המדינה על ידי משטר קולוניאליסטי טוטליטרי ואימפריאלי, כתקווה אבודה לדמוקרטיה בישראל.
על כך השבתי; כן, אבל זכור תמיד ידידי, שלמרות שמדינת ישראל מתגלה כעת מההיסטוריה הייחודית שלה, כישלונותיה אינם של זהות יהודית אלא אוניברסליים למין האנושי. עריצות היא שלב צפוי של מאבק אנטי-קולוניאלי, ונקבע על פי התנאים המוטלים עליו. כל כך מפתה, להיות פוסק המידות במרדף אחר הביטחון. אבל ביטחון הוא אשליה, ושימוש בכוח חברתי החתרן לדמוקרטיה ולערכים ולמטרות של חברה שבה אנחנו ערבים זה לזה לזכויות האדם האוניברסליות, ולא הסוהרים שלנו.
אני וחברי נלחמנו זמן רב למען החופש לענוד מגן דוד ללא חשש; לתפוס ולהחזיק בו ככוח ששולם בדם. יום אחד אזרחי ישראל ישחררו את עצמם; עד אז כל מה שאני יכול לעשות הוא לנסות לקנות זמן כדי שהעתיד הזה יתפתח, ולגונן על אלה שאני יכול מפני העלויות שלו כעריצות ואימה. אני מציע לשיקולך את הנחת היסוד שרבין היה בין 36 האנשים הטובים שגורל העולם תלוי בהם, ואת התקווה שנוכל לעמוד בדוגמה שלו.
לא לוותר דבר לאויב; לא סמלים או היסטוריות, ולא לנטוש שום דבר כדי ללכוד ולחתר את המשמעות בשירות לשלטון וזהויות מורשות כזיוף. זהות היא קרקע של מאבק, שבו מתחילות חירות או עריצות.
תמיד נשאר המאבק בין המסכות שאחרים עושים לנו לבין אלה שאנחנו עושים לעצמנו. זו המהפכה הראשונה שבה כולנו חייבים להילחם; תפיסת השלטון כבעלות על עצמנו.
Arabic
في هذه الذكرى السنوية لاغتيال الصحفية المحبوبة شيرين أبو عقله ، ربما بينما يهمس شياطيننا على يد قناص تابع لوحدة العمليات السوداء المارقة التابعة لوحدة الاستطلاع التابعة للجيش الإسرائيلي في غزة ، سيارت حاروف ، التي أعيد تأسيسها تحت قيادة المقدم يانيف باروت ، كفير. اللواء ، ويعمل بالتنسيق مع عناصر من Duvdevan سيئ السمعة ، وحدة مكافحة الإرهاب 217 من لواء الكوماندوز 89 ، الذي تم تخيل تاريخه في Telenovela Fauda الإسرائيلي المتاح على Netflix ، وعملاء العمليات الخاصة الآخرين ، والأهم من ذلك الأصول شبه العسكرية التي يمكن إنكارها والتي أصبحت الآن يهددون بهز الكلب والاستيلاء على السلطة من الحكومة المدنية لإسرائيل ، دعونا نجلب الحساب.
لسنوات عديدة أثناء التدريس في المدرسة الثانوية ، كانت والدتي ترفع إصبعها الملتوي المكسور بواسطة راهبة مع حاكم لإسكات أسئلتها عندما كانت طفلة ، وعندها خرجت من المدرسة والكنيسة الكاثوليكية ولم تنظر إلى الوراء أبدًا ، وتعلن للصف. مبدأها الأول في العمل والتعليم ؛ “نحن لسنا صامتين.”
أفضل رد لدينا على مقتل صحفي على يد أي دولة هو طرح الأسئلة والتحدث بشهادة ، والقيام بذلك معًا كعمل جماهيري وتضامن عبر جميع الانقسامات الدينية والعرقية والجنس والهوية الوطنية كنضال من أجل التحرر. هذه هي الطريقة التي نحرر بها بعضنا البعض. بالحقائق التي تنزع الشرعية عن السلطة وليس بالقوة.
في سياق الاحتلال الإسرائيلي وحملة الإرهاب ضد الشعب الفلسطيني ، قدّمت صديقة لها شهادتها في التاريخ حول سبب عدم ارتدائها لنجمة داود في أعقاب حرب الأيام الستة عام 1967 ، وكتبت عن اغتيال رابين عام 1995 ، الذي قُتل مثل غاندي على يد قوميين متطرفين في أول عمل للاستيلاء على الدولة من قبل نظام استعماري شمولي واستعماري ، كأمل ضائع في الديمقراطية في إسرائيل.
لقد أجبت على هذا. نعم ، لكن تذكر دائمًا يا صديقي ، أنه على الرغم من أن دولة إسرائيل تتكشف الآن من تاريخها الفريد ، فإن إخفاقاتها ليست فشل الهوية اليهودية بل عالمية للبشرية. الاستبداد هو مرحلة متوقعة من النضال المناهض للاستعمار ، وتحدده شروطه المفروضة. من المغري أن أكون حكم الفضيلة في السعي وراء الأمن. لكن الأمن وهم ، واستخدام القوة الاجتماعية المخربة للديمقراطية وقيم وأهداف مجتمع نكون فيه ضامنين لبعضنا البعض لحقوق الإنسان العالمية ، وليس سجناءنا.
كافحنا أنا وأصدقائي لفترة طويلة من أجل حرية ارتداء نجمة داود دون خوف. الاستيلاء عليها وامتلاكها كسلطة مدفوعة بالدم. في يوم من الأيام سيحرر مواطنو إسرائيل أنفسهم. حتى ذلك الحين ، كل ما يمكنني فعله هو محاولة كسب الوقت حتى يتكشف هذا المستقبل ، وحماية أولئك الذين أستطيع من تكاليفه مثل الاستبداد والرعب. أعرض عليكم فرضية أن رابين كان من بين 36 رجلاً صالحًا يعتمد عليهم مصير العالم ، ونأمل أن نرتقي إلى قدوته.
لا تتنازل عن أي شيء للعدو. لا رموز أو تواريخ ، ولا تتخلى عن أي شيء لالتقاط وتخريب المعنى في خدمة السلطة والهويات المصرح بها كتزوير. الهوية هي أرض الصراع ، حيث تبدأ الحرية أو الاستبداد.
لا يزال هناك دائمًا صراع بين الأقنعة التي يصنعها الآخرون لنا وتلك التي نصنعها لأنفسنا. هذه هي الثورة الأولى التي يجب أن نقاتل فيها جميعًا. الاستيلاء على السلطة كملكية لأنفسنا.
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, Written in 2020:
As to form, my intention is to present the afore displayed poem on the left column in the dialectical journal format of a traditional Jesuit report, side by side with the interpretive and narrative material which follows on the right, an old habit of mine when writing with a pen. 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, as I have throughout my life when the realm of the senses and that of meaning and value seen incongruent and discontiguous, 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 and predecessors solved problems of adaptation and growth over vast epochs of 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 of 2020, with my partner Theresa and her dad Gene for whom I cooked 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.
2024 Update
Its just the two of us now, Dolly and I, her father lost to the Pandemic in 2021, though his dog Mala stays at our side like a shadow, and our cats Amok, Rimbaud, Bunny, and Bobo also remain. Much of our joy lives now in the shadows in similar ways, and to reflect and dream is to fall through a well of infinite pasts and futures like a kaleidoscope of mimesis and reification.
Last night we watched the magnificent aurora borealis together, from the fathomless darkness of the massif on which the old monastery of Mount St. Michaels broods over Spokane, a few minutes drive from our home on a nearby hill, and on the opposite side of the monastery from which we watched the lights of the city fifty years ago during Expo 74. Stunning displays in the red spectrum of the far upper atmosphere dominated the aurora borealis show, like a window opening in the celestial forever, letting angels through, or devils.
And which is which is impossible to tell.
Like most men, my ideas of women and of identities of sex and gender are defined by the chiaroscuro of two primary figures in my history, my mother and my life partner; but that is a story for another time.
In this moment, what is most important is that all women, including those we love, are now under multiple threats to bodily autonomy, agency, citizenship, and the ownership of identity by systems of oppression and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror.
What is to be done, as Lenin asked? All women face enormous forces of historical, social, and often institutional oppression as well as the limits of our form as imposed conditions of struggle, and we can act in solidarity and allyship both with women in general and with those in our lives as partners, sisters, daughters, ancestors and descendants, and mothers.
Of all the many strategies focused on gendered liberation struggle, the first and among the most important is simply listening to women’s voices and making space for them to be heard.
As I wrote in my post of May 14 2023, This Mother’s Day, the Citizenship and Autonomy of Women Are In Question: the Case of E. Jean Carroll and CNN’s Town Hall; On this Mother’s Day, when the citizenship and autonomy of women are in question and the fate of our nation yet hangs in the balance, I think of my mother who carried me on her shoulders when we seized the Hall of Justice in San Francisco in 1968, of her life of liberation struggle and the championing of others, and against systems and forces of unequal power and the idea of biology as destiny, as imposed conditions of struggle both as the limits of our form- fourteen miscarriages and nearly forty years of recurring cancer since her first surgery- and institutional Patriarchy as she changed fields at university because all the posted science jobs said “no women need apply” right out in print for all the world to see.
I think now of what remains to be achieved in seizures of power from those who would enslave us in the shadow of CNN’s Town Hall and the vindication of E. Jean Carroll of which the Republicans made a joke.
Behind the Republican Party’s mask of macho glorification of violence and our right to kill each other en masse with military firearms, of centralization of power to the state in the militarization of police as enforcers of theocratic Gideonite sexual terror and virtue as defined by authority, of capitalist war on nature as limitless need for control of our wildness which is driving our species to extinction, of systems of unequal power and the need for force and control itself, lies a simple motive; fear.
Fear of Otherness, of loss of power and elite hegemonies of wealth, privilege, and the use of social force, and of the inchoate and chaotic forces of desire which are life itself and topple all structures of social control as unanswerable tides of being and truths written in our flesh.
Fear is the forge of power, especially in the context of identitarian politics, tyrannical regimes, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and fear shaped by authority in service to power through division and narratives of victimization. Politics is the Art of Fear, as my father once taught me, and the power of authority rests on the Calculus of Fear, how much fear is used in its primary mission of social control, and how it is used; too little fear and order collapses, too much and it creates its own counterforce as resistance and revolution.
I have thought of resistance and revolution much in days of study of the Party of Treason’s reaction to the vindication in court of the heroic truthteller E. Jean Carroll as performed in CNN’s Town Hall, wherein the Third Primary Duty of a Citizen, Mock Authority, has been deployed by authority itself as a strategy of reaction and counter-revolution.
This is pathetic, Absurd which I capitalize in reference to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty from which Republican propaganda is derived, politics as spectacle which induces horror and revulsion, and a typical performance by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, but I cannot overstate its peril. The purpose of such propaganda is to unify group identity and mobilize its forces; and we see how well it works in the January 6 Insurrection.
The American Fourth Reich and its captured glove the Republican Party demonstrates in the CNN Town Hall the flag it rallies round, Patriarchy and sexual terror, the silencing, commodification, and dehumanization of women and the theft of women’s citizenship as vote suppression and repression of dissent and public witness, and the disempowerment and theft of autonomy of women in legal and political actions to keep control of women’s bodies and reproductive rights in male hands. In this key mission, the Grabber is a figure of predation who grants permission and immunity to his followers as loaned power, and it is the power of sexual terror Republicans want most of all.
Thanks for showing us all what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
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 and other marginalized communities.
The degree to which we are trusted and believed, our authority, and the reach of our voices in witness are excellent and reliable measures of our power and our position in social hierarchies. As a measure of societies themselves, this will tell you about the relative democracy or tyranny of a culture.
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 mistrust and failure of solidarity, points directly to the cathartic function of art, its ability to hold up a mirror to our darkness.
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.
As I reflect on the events of the Third Intifada as I lived them, it occurs to me that among the things which are important here is the process of storytelling as self-reflective memory, history, and identity; for when we tell the story of a thing history looks back on itself, and through its author and readers becomes embodied and self aware. There is no telling nor hearing of stories without participation and interpretation; they bear liminal force as a principle of change.
Here I write in the special form of social media, wherein all truths are relative, ephemeral, impermanent; but also extend infinitely in all directions free of the limits of form and of time as artifacts of consciousness and abstract information by which the real organizes itself, and collide with other truths in a Brownian motion which transforms them and ourselves as informing, motivating, and shaping sources. We have forged a network of ideas which is a mirror of the network of ourselves.
How if this social construction of identity through narrative is both metaphorical or poetic truth and an instrument with which we may seize control of our own evolution?
Jung reimagined the Platonic Ideal as the Collective Unconscious, and referenced its previous forms as the Logos in the Biblical Book of John the Evangelist, Ibn Arabi’s alam al-mythal, Coleridge’s Primary Imagination, and the Bardo in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. But in the context of the usefulness of stories in the creation of ourselves, it is not the function of dreams and poetic vision as a gate of the soul to the Infinite, as rapture, exaltation, and transcendence, of which I speak now, but of the power of reimagination and transformation in healing the brokenness of the world.
Such a unitary field of human being, meaning, and value which co-evolves with us as its individual expressions and manifestations, this sea of consciousness which connects us below the surface of our awareness and beyond the limits of our individuality, and in which we participate as its creators in recursive process, is a primary ground of struggle.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For if we are to free ourselves of those who would enslave us and steal our souls through falsification, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, and captured narratives, we must perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and live, write, speak, teach, and organize as what Foucault called truthtellers in the sacred calling to pursue the truth.
Thus may we enact solidarity and place our lives in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
Such is my hope that love as solidarity may redeem the flaws of our humanity and that its praxis as liberation struggle may bring healing to the brokenness of the world, and that through poetic vision as reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and the limitless possibilities of becoming human we may dream a better future than we have the past.
As I wrote in my post of October 5 2021, Seizure of Power, Self-Creation and Self-Ownership, Authenticity and Autonomy, Self Representation as Construction of Identity, and Ourselves as Living Memoirs: the Case of Social Media; Something crucial we ignore about social media; though its pitched as connectedness, its primary function is to construct identity through ordering and prioritizing our experience in time. Our social media publications are a form of memoir, and this is a ground of struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and those which others tell about us.
As with the public negotiations of national identity and conflicted histories in the competing narratives of the 1619 Project and the Mayflower origin story, and of the authorized identities of Israelis and Palestinians, the first question we must ask of our stories is simple and direct; whose story is this?
This is the great test of disambiguation between falsification and authenticity, and between autonomy and subjugation; not whether a statement is a lie or an objective and testable truth, though this is also important, but whose truth is it?
As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Critical Race Theory; History becomes a Wilderness of Mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.
Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming our most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.
As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This?; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
The Atlantic questions yesterday’s Facebook Down event;
“Caroline Mimbs Nyce: What does today’s outage say about the state of Facebook, the company? About the fragility of our social web?
Adrienne LaFrance: The web isn’t just fragile; it’s wholly ephemeral. We get a false sense of permanence from these tech giants with their walled-garden platforms. But the truth is that nothing lasts online, and it’s all decaying all the time. Still, an outage this severe is almost unheard-of.
Caroline: What are the typical consequences of an outage like this?
Adrienne: The ripple effects can be profound. A massive, if temporary, shift in the attention of billions of people has cultural consequences—like people taking note of their own reflexive habits, their relationships to these sites.”
In this reflectivity of our stories and ourselves we see metaphors of change, reimagination, and transformation; like the Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror, our memories and dreams, ephemeral and protean, fragments of truths and illusions, Defining Moments and Baudrillard’s simulacra, each a Rashomon Gate Event of relative truths.
Of our histories I have written; there are those which must be kept and remembered, and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
As written by Helena de Bresis, author of Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir, in Aeon; “I wrote a memoir recently, and sometimes I ask myself why on earth I did. It was difficult and time-consuming, it involved some rather unpleasant self-examination, and it raised suspicions of self-involvement, exhibitionism and insufferable earnestness that I’d so far mainly avoided in life. If I publish it, I risk being accused by friends of betrayal, by readers of lying, and by critics of any number of literary flaws. Since selling a memoir is hard, all of that would represent things going well. When I complain to my sister about this, she suggests that ‘maybe’ I should have – ‘I don’t know’ – considered these points two years ago, before embarking on this thing that she would ‘never, like, ever do’.
When asked why they bother, memoirists offer a range of reasons. Saint Teresa did it for the glory of God; Jean-Jacques Rousseau to express his inner self; Vladimir Nabokov to recreate his vanished childhood; Frederick Douglass to advance the cause of abolition. But maybe the deepest reason for writing a memoir, intertwined with all the rest, is the desire to find meaning in one’s past experience. Whatever else they’re up to, memoirists are in the business of locating some form or order in their personal history: setting it down as an intelligible shape, not a hot mess. Finding this form is both a necessary part of memoir and one of its key rewards. That was what I was after, anyway. Life moves so fast. Stuff had gone down. I wanted to slow the passage of events, grasp what the past had meant, before picking up the pace once again.
You can search for form in life through philosophy, science, religion and any kind of art. The memoirist’s distinctive move is to do it via autobiographical narrative: the construction of an organised sequence of personally experienced events, along with an implied evaluative response to them. Life stories have three things going for them when it comes to making experience intelligible. They’re selective, highlighting particular agents, settings and episodes out of the mass of material that life provides. They’re also unifying, drawing connections between their disparate parts and situating them in context. And they’re isomorphic: they share deep structural and thematic features with other stories, which we use as a shortcut when interpreting them. Psychologists report that most autobiographical narratives follow the classical story arc: steady state, complication, rising action, crisis, resolution, then coda. And they involve quests, comings-of-age, fatal errors, comeuppances and returns recognisable from myths, parables and fairy tales. Most, though maybe not all, humans tell such life stories. Memoirists recount them at length, in writing, with literary ambitions. We’re trying to do it, but make it art.
What are memoirists doing exactly, when we claim to ‘find’ this form and meaning in our past experience? Are we genuinely discovering it back there or just making it up? For the past century or so, the wind has been behind the latter interpretation. Many take the existentialist line that seeing your life in narrative terms is a form of mauvaise foi, or bad faith. We urgently want there to be order and meaning in the world, independently of us. But there isn’t, and our attempts to impose coherence and significance where none exist are self-deceiving and absurd. Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938), describes the ‘disgust’ and ‘nausea’ produced by our meaningless universe, alongside its ineffective narrative remedy:
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
What exactly is wrong with construing your past as a story? In his memoir The Words (1963), Sartre suggests that storytelling distorts our understanding of life, by confusing it with literature. We can tell autobiographical narratives if we like but, if so, we should be clear about what we’re doing: producing fiction. This take suggests that memoir, which calls itself nonfiction, is a fundamentally suspect enterprise.
A similar critique of narrative emerged in the philosophy of history in the 1970s. In his book Metahistory (1973), Hayden White argued that historical writing is a constructive process, in which the historian selects a subset of past events, imaginatively fills in the gaps, and orders the lot into a unified story. These historical stories, like the life stories of individuals, take conventional literary forms – tragedy, romance, comedy and satire – and employ poetic devices, including metaphor, synecdoche and irony. All of this is a creative act on the part of the historian, an imposition on the historical record. As a result, different historians can and do provide different narrative interpretations of the same events, none of which can be said to uniquely fit the facts. White concludes that historical writing, despite its scientific pretensions, reduces to fiction.
The philosopher Noël Carroll offered two main lines of response to White that transfer nicely to memoir. The first points to a set of faulty inferences in the argument. White assumes that each of the following features of an interpretation transforms it into fiction: inventiveness, selectivity, multiplicity, conventionality and literary quality. But a quick run-through shows that each can be present without an immediate diagnosis of fictionalising. Photos are invented rather than found, but that doesn’t make them inaccurate representations of the past. My telling you only some things about my spring break doesn’t mean that what I do tell you is made up. The availability of multiple good stories about the Loretta Lynn fan convention doesn’t demonstrate that one or all of them are fiction: each can just highlight a distinct aspect of the same complex course of events. And your description of what you’ve been up to recently might be Homeric, but some weekends genuinely are epic, and nonfigurative, nonliterary language might not be enough to capture the truth about them.
Carroll’s second reply to White questions the assertion that the world isn’t story-shaped. Humans act for reasons, and those actions have consequences, including the imprint of certain patterns on the world. We can describe all this in terms of atoms moving in the void, sure. But there’s an equally legitimate form of explanation that appeals to the values and goals driving the action, and therefore to the purpose and significance that human life genuinely contains. A story that offers such an explanation is picking up on real aspects of the world, not confabulating. Similarly, since humans think and act symbolically, narratives that incorporate metaphor and myth can serve to reflect, rather than distort, reality.
That said, there’s some truth in the claim that narrative is created, not found. Successful nonfictional storytellers both discover and construct. They do the difficult work of pruning and unifying experience into a shape they and others can understand. As the writer Lorrie Moore puts it: ‘Life is a cornfield, but literature is that shot of whiskey that’s been distilled down.’ And when nonfictional storytellers succeed, the shape they create tracks genuine features in the life described.
To defend nonfictional narrative isn’t, of course, to defend all particular life stories. At one early point in writing my memoir, I announced: ‘OMG, I think my life tracks the history of Western philosophy!’ ‘That’s wonderful!’ my long-suffering sister replied, but the angle of her eyebrow effectively consigned that one to the trash. There are also some general narrative conventions we’re better off without. No literary memoirist would be caught dead these days writing a traditional autobiography: a strictly chronological tracing of events, from infancy on, in a tone of untroubled authority. The contemporary memoir zooms in on a specific period or theme, and moves back and forth in time. Modern memoirists tend to be less certain than autobiographers, more alert to the seductions of narrative closure. As a result, their books are more complex, searching, and truer to life.
But we can welcome these salutary effects of 20th-century narrative scepticism while keeping the baby in the bath. Old-fashioned storytelling has real virtues when making sense of the world. (I once lunched with a literary magazine editor after he’d gone through the latest set of submissions. ‘Oh god,’ he exclaimed, like a frustrated police chief, ‘just tell me what happened in order!’) Those virtues are so great that even narrative sceptics make use of them. Joan Didion ends her essay ‘The White Album’ (1968-78) with an admission of defeat: ‘Writing has not yet helped me to see what [experience] means.’ But sometimes the pattern just is chaos, and Didion’s use of personal narrative in this essay deftly captures that truth about 1960s California.
Cynics about narrative often give off an air of expecting more from stories than memoirists themselves do. No memoir can reveal an underlying grand narrative in the universe as a whole, or give its writer anything more than a partial and provisional grip on their personal past. But it can sometimes provide that grip, which is no small thing. When I look at my own memoir, I can clearly see its fictive qualities. The stage is set, the action rises, the protagonist falls apart, then lurches out of the abyss. There’s a coda, written in a tone of battered hope. Sartre would give it one star on Goodreads. That would be mean (I gave his five!), but I’m not too troubled by it. The book reads to me like my life, a life that makes better sense to me now that I’ve written it down.”
As I wrote in my post of May 11 2021, Tangled in the Nets of History: Day Two of the Third Intifada; Here follows the Witness of History given by myself as Zafir abd ul Muntaqim, Servant of the Avenger, regarding the Defense of al Aqsa and the advent of the Third Intifada.
Before all else must be the true names of things; I have many, for countless roles which I perform in many languages, times, and places as a maker of mischief, a bringer of Chaos, a truthteller and a witness of history, but the name I awaken to here in al Quds in the wake of a night of terror has nuances I shall describe for you; Zafir which means Victorious, one of many variants I have used of the name of the great rebel Victor Frankenstein and also referential to Invictus in the poem by William Ernest Henley, part of my identity since the day I began high school and recited it before the student assembly to set the terms of struggle between us, and to the primary human act of self-creation in refusal to submit to authority; Muntaqim which defines me as an avenger of wrongs in reference to the mission statement given me by the Matadors in Sao Paulo the summer before high school when they rescued me from execution by police death squad and welcomed me into their fearsome brotherhood with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge,” and as this is a Name of the Infinite as Retribution and cannot be used without the preface servant of or abd ul, I become now Zafir abd ul Muntaqim, for the part we must play defines our identity as a persona, and through this mask I must here speak.
This morning I reflect on the words written in my journal the night before, awakening not to the miasma of smoke and death but to incense and songs of mourning, resistance, and strangely joyful thankfulness for the mercy and compassion of the Infinite; someone is playing love songs in all of this, duets of Lebanese divas Nancy Ajram with Cheb Khaled and Marita Nader with Mario Karam resounding through the twisted alleyways below my window, and I marvel at the resilience of the human spirit.
I have no idea where I am or how I got here; a situation with which I am far too familiar and absurdly happy to find myself in, for I have fallen down the rabbit hole once more.
I begin to explore my new world. No smells of coffee greet me; the sun is up and the Ramadan fast has begun. Light pours through the open wooden latticework of an arched window into a room of stone with few but very fine furnishings; some old tribal pillows, framed calligraphy, a prayer rug oriented to Mecca, a magnificent pierced silver lantern, the blanket I was sleeping on; I am possibly no longer in the squalid tenements of Sheikh Jarrah.
My comrades have brought me to a place of refuge and safety; I must have lost consciousness in the course of rescuing the families trapped by the Israeli assault on al Aqsa and the confused street fighting which followed as they hunted fleeing women and children through the labyrinth of darkness that is Jerusalem.
For such it is under the iron hammer of tyranny and state terror, a nightmare of walls and concentration camps, razor wire and the brutal arrogance of power, though some of us may seek the City of Light which it has consumed and hidden behind its mask, a city of fables and dreams which I call al Quds.
Someone has left a silver bowl of water for ritual ablutions before morning prayers and exquisite formal white robes to replace my tattered khakis, along with a Palestinian keffiyah and a Bisht or cloak worn by dignitaries such as royalty or holy men, an honor I do not merit but cannot refuse; it is probably a cherished family heirloom.
While washing and changing I read the tale of the night’s events in the superficial marks on my flesh; I have been shot, bayoneted, blown up, and set on fire yet again, all without any injuries of consequence. I wonder what stories my comrades have told of these events.
What is it with the Israel Defense Forces and setting people on fire? It’s like they have a standing order; if it runs, shoot it, if it stands its ground, set it on fire.
Fragments of memories surface during this assessment; a long abdominal surface cut from barely evading a disembowling thrust, bruises, cuts, and a bit of shrapnel along the arm and shoulder from a grenade that dropped a wall on me from the far side and a piece that came through the crumbling mortar, a fist sized bruise of backface deformation, the mark of a well placed chest shot from a rifle stopped by a flak jacket I had seized from the first soldier who tried to kill me. And at some point I had been on fire, with nothing burned other than the left side of my clothes from being too close to something that was firebombed; though I recall only thunder, light, and a flash of heat.
My old clothes, however, looked like they had been savaged by wild dogs and then thrown in a bonfire, and I had undoubtedly looked to be in worse shape than I was to whomever carried me here. I begin to wonder whether the robes I now wear were intended for my burial. But no, that’s three white shrouds, tied head and foot; so I was deemed to be alive.
Now properly clean and dressed, I say the morning prayers, and then recite three times the Request for Forgiveness from the Holy Quran, sūrat l-baqarah The Cow verse 2:286, thus following the translation of Yusuf Ali, Peace Be Upon Him; “O Lord! Lay not on us a burden greater than we have strength to bear. Blot out our sins, and grant us forgiveness. Have mercy on us. You are our Protector; help us against those who stand against faith.”
This seems reflexive though this is a dua or personal recitation and not part of the five daily prayers; I get the feeling that I often need forgiveness.
In the serenity which follows, I submerge myself in the role into which I have been cast in the game which is about to unfold.
I have many names in many languages, but my name in this place and time is Zafir abd ul Muntaqim; it is a name to conjure with, for I have used it in other struggles of liberation and reckoning, across decades and throughout the world in places where I may be remembered, as have others before me and as will others after I am gone.
I came to Jerusalem for the liminal time of five days between two anniversaries of tragedy, an Occupation now in its fifty fourth year since the June 7 1967 Conquest of Old Jerusalem, which the State of Israel celebrated according to the Hebrew calendar as Jerusalem Day yesterday on May 10 by attacking al Aqsa, the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and the Palestinian community, and a Catastrophe ongoing now for seventy three years since Nakba Day May 15 1948.
Last night I attended a protest in defense of al Aqsa Mosque that was met with the iron fist of tyranny and state terror as Israel attacked the families at worship in the mosque, a protest that may become a revolution. If America and the world can intercede to stay the Israeli hand of fear and force, we may yet avoid that fate, but in the meanwhile I have decided to record this in my journal as Day Two of the Third Intifada.
In this moment we are to be tested, we humans; are we no longer moved by mercy or compassion, have we lost the quality of our humanity in the modern pathology of our disconnectedness and become brute things, mere atavisms of instinct, brother to the ox? Have we no horizons beyond self interest and the vortex of wickedness which is greed and dominion? Are we no longer owners of ourselves, but images captured and distorted by authority, falsifications, lies and illusions by which those who would enslave us have stolen our souls?
I have chosen the name of abd ul Muntaqim in this arena of the struggle, a name which means Servant of The Avenger as an aspect of the Infinite or Bringer of Retribution, but my struggle is against no people but an unjust system which dehumanizes and enslaves both the peoples of Israel and of Palestine.
Such is my hope for and faith in the limitless possibilities of becoming human; but in the streets below fighters are gathering, and I hear a dozen languages in their conversations, varieties of Arabic but also Farsi and Turkish. Within days we will be joined not only by local factions including Hamas, Fatah,
and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but also by Hezbollah and governments throughout the world.
When the fight began at al Aqsa and in all the screaming and running away I moved against the tide and toward the sounds of violence, a man said to me “What are you doing? The Israelis will kill you to get to them”, pointing at the women and children. To this I replied; “And die on the steps of God’s house, defending his people? I’ll take it.” This was being portrayed in discussion beneath my window as a call for fedayeen, and by morning had already reached beyond Palestine.
In attacking al Aqsa, Netanyahu and his cabal have exposed the monster behind the Israeli mask of virtue conferred by its historical legacies of victimhood, and triggered the one issue capable of unifying the Islamic world and of destabilizing the Arab-American Alliance whose member nations only recently recognized the legitimacy of the state of Israel.
This city seethes with resentment and ancient vendettas, and the attack on al Aqsa has provided a focus. Janus like, Jerusalem and al Quds are a dual identity which traps alien paradigms into the same physical spaces in a titanic struggle of dominion, victim and abuser confused in one ambiguous and discontiguous flesh like a Frankenstein’s monster of unnaturally joined parts, a struggle from which I hope will emerge something new.
Is war the only reckoning humankind can offer, or will accept? I pray that we are better than this, that hope and love can triumph over fear and hate, and we will choose to be bearers of life and not of death.
Thus I am praying when my host finds me, and the curtain begins to rise on our performance. We are about to challenge a world order of amoral nihilism and the psychopathy of power in which only force and power are real and have meaning, in which hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege enforce systems of oppression which divide, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us, wherein fear and belonging are the sole means of exchange and arbiters of power, and in which authorized identities of exclusionary otherness and divisions of faith and race, nationality and historical narratives of victimization, have been weaponized in the service of our subjugation and in repression of our solidarity and unity of purpose in liberation and revolutionary struggle.
To restore to us our possibilities of human being, meaning, and value we must free ourselves from our histories, for we are tangled in its nets.
A Quixotic quest, but not one without hope; not if the world stands with us.
It is time to bring the chaos; to make mischief and let the games of reimagination and transformation begin.
“God does not burden a soul beyond its scope. It shall have what it has earned and it shall be liable for what it has earned. Our Lord, do not hold us accountable if we forget or Our Lord, do not place on us a burden as You laid on those before us. Our Lord, do not place on us what is not. Power for us with it, and pardon us, and forgive us, and have mercy on us.”
١١ مايو ٢٠٢٢ تذكر الانتفاضة الثالثة ، الجزء الثاني
بينما أفكر في أحداث الانتفاضة الثالثة العام الماضي كما عشتها ، يخطر ببالي أن من بين الأشياء المهمة هنا عملية سرد القصص كذاكرة ذاتية التأمل ، وتاريخ ، وهوية. لأنه عندما نحكي قصة شيء ما ، فإن التاريخ ينظر إلى نفسه مرة أخرى ، ومن خلال مؤلفه وقراءه يصبح متجسدًا ومدركًا لذاته. ليس هناك رواية ولا سماع للقصص بدون مشاركة وتفسير. إنهم يتحملون القوة الحدية كمبدأ للتغيير.
أكتب هنا في شكل خاص من وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي ، حيث تكون جميع الحقائق نسبية وعابرة وغير دائمة ؛ بل يمتد أيضًا إلى ما لا نهاية في جميع الاتجاهات الخالية من حدود الشكل والوقت كأدوات للوعي والمعلومات المجردة التي من خلالها ينظم الواقعي نفسه ، ويصطدم بالحقائق الأخرى في حركة براونية تحوّلها نحن وأنفسنا كمعلمين ومحفزين و مصادر التشكيل. لقد أنشأنا شبكة من الأفكار التي هي مرآة لشبكة أنفسنا.
كيف إذا كان هذا البناء الاجتماعي للهوية من خلال السرد حقيقة مجازية أو شعرية وأداة يمكننا من خلالها السيطرة على تطورنا؟
أعاد يونغ تصور المثل الأفلاطوني باعتباره اللاوعي الجماعي ، وأشار إلى أشكاله السابقة على أنها الشعارات الموجودة في الكتاب التوراتي ليوحنا الإنجيلي ، وعلم الميثال لابن عربي ، وتصور كوليردج الأساسي ، وباردو في الفلسفة الهندوسية والبوذية. لكن في سياق فائدة القصص في خلق أنفسنا ، فإن وظيفة الأحلام والرؤية الشعرية ليست بوابة الروح إلى اللانهائي ، مثل نشوة الطرب ، والتمجيد ، والتعالي ، التي أتحدث عنها الآن ، ولكن لقوة إعادة التخيل والتحول في شفاء كسر العالم.
مثل هذا المجال الوحدوي للإنسان والمعنى والقيمة التي تتطور معنا باعتبارها تعبيرات ومظاهر فردية ، بحر الوعي هذا الذي يربطنا تحت سطح وعينا والذي نشارك فيه كمبدعين في عملية تكرارية ، هو أساس النضال.
كما نتعلم من جون كيج في الموسيقى ، وهارولد بينتر في المسرح ، وبيت موندريان في الفن ، فإن المساحات الفارغة هي التي تحدد المعنى وترتبها ؛ وفي التاريخ ، يجب أن نستمع إلى الأصوات التي تم إسكاتها ومحوها بعناية ، لأن الفراغ هنا يتحدث إلينا عن القوة السرية والوظائف والعلاقات الرئيسية التي يجب أن تخفيها السلطة للحفاظ على هيمنتها علينا.
انتبه دائمًا للرجل خلف الستارة. لأنه إذا أردنا أن نحرر أنفسنا من أولئك الذين يستعبدوننا ويسرقون أرواحنا من خلال التزييف والأكاذيب والأوهام وإعادة كتابة التواريخ والروايات التي تم التقاطها ، فيجب علينا أداء الواجبات الأساسية الأربعة للمواطن ؛ سلطة السؤال ، وفضح السلطة ، والسلطة الوهمية ، وسلطة التحدي ، والعيش والكتابة والتحدث والتدريس والتنظيم كما أطلق عليها فوكو صانعي الحقيقة في الدعوة المقدسة لمتابعة الحقيقة.
وهكذا يمكننا أن نتضامن ونضع حياتنا في الميزان مع أولئك الذين أسماهم فرانتس فانون “معذبو الأرض” ؛ الضعيف والمحروم ، الصامت والمحو.
هذا هو أملي في أن الحب كتضامن قد يصلح عيوب إنسانيتنا وأن التطبيق العملي له كنضال من أجل التحرر قد يجلب الشفاء إلى انكسار العالم ، وذلك من خلال الرؤية الشعرية كإعادة تخيل وتحويل للإنسان والمعنى والقيمة و الاحتمالات اللامحدودة في أن نصبح بشر قد نحلم بمستقبل أفضل مما كان لدينا في الماضي.
11 مايو 2021 متشابك في شبكات التاريخ: اليوم الثاني من الانتفاضة الثالثة
قبل كل شيء يجب أن تكون الأسماء الحقيقية للأشياء ؛ لدي العديد من الأدوار التي لا حصر لها والتي أؤديها في العديد من اللغات والأماكن كصانع للفوضى ، وجالب للفوضى ، وصاحب الحقيقة وشاهد على التاريخ ، لكن الاسم الذي أيقظته هنا في القدس في أعقاب ليلة الإرهاب له فروق دقيقة سأصفها لك ؛ Zafir الذي يعني فيكتوريوس ، أحد المتغيرات العديدة التي استخدمتها لاسم المتمرد العظيم فيكتور فرانكشتاين وأيضًا مرجعيًا إلى Invictus في قصيدة ويليام إرنست هينلي ، وهي جزء من هويتي منذ اليوم الذي بدأت فيه المدرسة الثانوية وتلاوتها قبل تجمع الطلاب لتحديد شروط الصراع بيننا ، والفعل الإنساني الأساسي لخلق الذات في رفض الخضوع للسلطة ؛ منتقم الذي يعرّفني بأنني منتقم للخطأ في إشارة إلى بيان المهمة الذي أعطاني إياه الماتادور في ساو باولو في الصيف قبل المدرسة الثانوية عندما أنقذوني من الإعدام على يد الشرطة ورحبوا بي في مجتمعهم بالكلمات ؛ “لا يمكننا إنقاذ الجميع ، لكن يمكننا الانتقام” ، وبما أن هذا اسم اللانهائي كعقاب ولا يمكن استخدامه بدون مقدمة خادم أو عبد المجيد ، فقد أصبحت الآن ظافر عبد المنتقم ، من جانبنا يجب أن يلعب يحدد هويتنا.
فيما يلي شاهد التاريخ الذي قدمه ظافر منتقم بشأن الدفاع عن الأقصى وظهور الانتفاضة الثالثة:
هذا الصباح أتأمل في الكلمات التي كتبت في يومياتي الليلة السابقة ، مستيقظًا ليس على مستنقع الدخان والموت بل على البخور وأغاني الحداد والمقاومة والشكر الغريب المبتهج لرحمة اللامتناهي وحنانه ؛ كل هذا يعزف اغاني حب ، ديو للمغنيات اللبنانية نانسي عجرم مع الشاب خالد وماريتا نادر مع ماريو كرم في الأزقة الملتوية أسفل نافذتي ، وأتعجب من صمود الروح الإنسانية.
ليس لدي أي فكرة عن مكاني أو كيف وصلت إلى هنا ؛ وضع أكون مألوفًا جدًا به وسعداء بشكل سخيف أن أجد نفسي فيه ، لأنني سقطت في حفرة الأرانب مرة أخرى.
بدأت في استكشاف عالمي الجديد. لا روائح القهوة ترحب بي. أشرقت الشمس وبدأ صيام رمضان. يتدفق الضوء من خلال التشبيك الخشبي المفتوح لنافذة مقوسة إلى غرفة من الحجر بها عدد قليل من المفروشات الجيدة ولكن جيدة جدًا ؛ بعض الوسائد القبلية القديمة ، خط مؤطر ، سجادة صلاة موجهة إلى مكة ، فانوس فضي رائع مثقوب ، البطانية التي كنت أنام عليها ؛ ربما لم أعد في مساكن الشيخ جراح المزرية.
لقد أوصلني رفاقي إلى ملجأ وآمن ؛ لا بد أنني فقدت وعيي أثناء عملية إنقاذ العائلات المحاصرة بالهجوم الإسرائيلي على الأقصى والقتال المرتبك الذي تلا ذلك أثناء مطاردة النساء والأطفال الهاربين عبر متاهة الظلام التي هي القدس.
فهي تحت المطرقة الحديدية للاستبداد وإرهاب الدولة ، كابوس الجدران ومعسكرات الاعتقال والأسلاك الشائكة والغطرسة الوحشية للسلطة ، رغم أن البعض منا قد يبحث عن مدينة النور التي استهلكتها وأخفتها وراء قناعها. مدينة الخرافات والأحلام التي أسميها القدس.
لقد ترك شخص ما وعاءً فضيًا من الماء للوضوء قبل صلاة الفجر ، وأردية بيضاء رسمية رائعة لتحل محل الكوفية الممزقة ، جنبًا إلى جنب مع كوفية فلسطينية وبشت أو عباءة يرتديها كبار الشخصيات مثل الملوك أو الرجال المقدسين ، وهذا شرف لا أفعله. الجدارة ولكن لا يمكن أن ترفض ؛ من المحتمل أنه إرث عائلي عزيز.
أثناء الاغتسال والتغيير ، قرأت حكاية أحداث الليل في العلامات السطحية على جسدي ؛ لقد تم إطلاق النار عليّ ، ورمي بالحراب ، والتفجير ، وإشعال النيران مرة أخرى ، وكل ذلك دون أي إصابات.
ما مصير جيش الدفاع الإسرائيلي وإضرام النار في الناس؟ يبدو الأمر كما لو كان لديهم أمر دائم. إذا ركض ، أطلق عليه النار ، وإذا وقفت على الأرض ، أشعل النار فيه.
تظهر أجزاء من الذكريات خلال هذا التقييم ؛ سطح بطني طويل مقطوع بالكاد من التملص من قوة الدفع ، والكدمات ، والجروح ، وقليل من الشظايا على طول الذراع والكتف من قنبلة يدوية أسقطت جدارًا من الجانب البعيد وقطعة مرت عبر الهاون المتهالك ، كدمة بحجم قبضة اليد من تشوه في الظهر ، وهي علامة على لقطة صدر في وضع جيد من بندقية أوقفتها سترة واقية من الرصاص. وفي وقت ما كنت مشتعلًا ، ولم يحترق شيء سوى الجانب الأيسر من ملابسي من كونه قريبًا جدًا من شيء تم إلقاء قنابل حارقة عليه ؛ على الرغم من أنني أتذكر فقط الرعد والضوء وميض الحرارة.
ومع ذلك ، بدت ملابسي القديمة وكأنها تعرضت للوحشية من قبل الكلاب البرية ثم ألقيت في النار ، وكنت بلا شك في حالة أسوأ مما كنت عليه لمن كان يحملني إلى هنا. بدأت أتساءل عما إذا كان الجلباب الذي أرتديه الآن مخصصًا لدفني. لكن لا ، هذه ثلاثة أكفان بيضاء ، رأسها وقدمها مقيدتان ؛ لذلك اعتبرت على قيد الحياة.
الآن أنا نظيف ومرتدي بشكل صحيح ، أقول صلاة الصبح ، ثم أقرأ ثلاث مرات طلب الاستغفار من القرآن الكريم ، سورة البقرة البقرة الآية 2: 286 ، وبالتالي اتباع ترجمة يوسف علي عليه السلام ؛ “يا إلهي! لا تضع على عاتقنا عبئًا أعظم مما لدينا قوة نتحمله. امسح خطايانا وامنحنا الغفران. ارحمنا. أنت حامينا. ساعدونا ضد أولئك الذين يقفون ضد الإيمان “.
يبدو هذا انعكاسيًا على الرغم من أن هذا دعاء أو تلاوة شخصية وليس جزءًا من الصلوات الخمس اليومية ؛ لدي شعور بأنني غالبًا ما أحتاج إلى التسامح.
في الهدوء الذي يلي ذلك ، أغوص في الدور الذي ألقيت فيه في اللعبة التي على وشك أن تتكشف.
لدي العديد من الأسماء في العديد من اللغات ، لكن اسمي في هذا المكان والزمان هو ظافر منتقم. إنه اسم يستحضره ، لأنني استخدمته في أماكن أخرى قد أتذكرها.
لقد أتيت إلى القدس لمدة خمسة أيام بين ذكرى سنوية للمأساة ، احتلال الآن في عامه الرابع والخمسين منذ احتلال القدس القديمة في 7 يونيو 1967 ، والذي احتفلت به دولة إسرائيل وفقًا للتقويم العبري بيوم القدس أمس. في 10 مايو بمهاجمة الأقصى وحي الشيخ جراح وص
المجتمع الفلسطيني ، وكارثة مستمرة الآن منذ ثلاثة وسبعين عامًا منذ يوم النكبة في 15 مايو 1948.
شاركت الليلة الماضية في مظاهرة دفاعا عن المسجد الأقصى قوبلت بقبضة حديدية للاستبداد وإرهاب الدولة ، وهي احتجاج قد يتحول إلى ثورة. إذا استطاعت أمريكا والعالم أن يتوسطوا لإبقاء يد إسرائيل الخائفة والقوة ، فربما نتجنب هذا المصير ، لكنني قررت في الوقت نفسه تسجيل ذلك في مجلتي على أنه اليوم الثاني من الانتفاضة الثالثة.
في هذه اللحظة علينا أن نختبر ، نحن البشر. ألم نعد نتحرك بالرحمة أو الرحمة ، هل فقدنا صفة إنسانيتنا في علم الأمراض الحديث لانفصالنا وأصبحنا أشياء قاسية ، مجرد نزعة غريزية ، أخ للثور؟ أليس لدينا آفاق تتجاوز المصلحة الذاتية ودوامة الشر الذي هو الجشع والسيطرة؟ هل لم نعد أصحاب أنفسنا ، بل صور تم التقاطها وتشويهها بالسلطة والتزييف والأكاذيب والأوهام التي بها سرق من استعبدنا أرواحنا؟
لقد اخترت اسم منتقم في ساحة النضال هذه ، وهو اسم يعني المنتقم أو جالب القصاص ، لكن كفاحي ليس ضد أي شعب سوى نظام جائر يجرد من إنسانيته ويستعبد كلا من شعب إسرائيل وفلسطين.
هذا هو أملي وإيماني بالإمكانيات اللامحدودة لأصبح إنسانًا ؛ لكن في الشوارع أسفل المقاتلين يتجمعون ، وأسمع عشرات اللغات في محادثاتهم ، أنواع مختلفة من العربية ولكن أيضًا الفارسية والتركية. في غضون أيام ، ستنضم إلينا ليس فقط الفصائل المحلية بما في ذلك حماس وفتح والجهاد الإسلامي الفلسطيني ، ولكن أيضًا حزب الله والحكومات في جميع أنحاء العالم. بمهاجمة الأقصى كشف نتنياهو وعصابته الوحش وراء القناع الإسرائيلي للفضيلة التي تجلت في إرثها التاريخي من الضحية ، وأثار القضية الوحيدة القادرة على توحيد العالم الإسلامي وزعزعة استقرار التحالف العربي الأمريكي الذي تضم دوله الأعضاء فقط. اعترف مؤخرا بشرعية دولة إسرائيل.
هذه المدينة مليئة بالاستياء والثأر القديم ، وكان الهجوم على الأقصى محط تركيز. يانوس مثل ، القدس والقدس هي هوية مزدوجة تحبس النماذج الفضائية في نفس المساحات المادية في صراع عملاق للسيطرة ، والضحية والمسيء مرتبكون في جسد واحد غامض وغير مترابط مثل وحش فرانكشتاين المكون من أجزاء مرتبطة بشكل غير طبيعي ، وهو صراع من خلاله آمل أن يظهر شيء جديد.
هل الحرب هي الحساب الوحيد الذي يمكن للبشرية أن تقدمه أم ستقبله؟ أدعو الله أن نكون أفضل من هذا ، وأن ينتصر الأمل والحب على الخوف والكراهية ، وسنختار أن نكون حاملين للحياة لا للموت.
وهكذا أصلي عندما يجدني مضيفي ، ويبدأ الستار في الارتفاع على أدائنا. نحن على وشك تحدي نظام عالمي من العدمية اللاأخلاقية حيث القوة والسلطة فقط هي الحقيقية ولها معنى ، حيث الثروة والتسلسل الهرمي لامتياز النخبة والانتماء هي الوسيلة الوحيدة للتبادل والتحكم في السلطة ، والتي فيها الهويات المصرح بها لـ تم تسليح الآخر الإقصائي وانقسامات الإيمان والعرق والجنسية والروايات التاريخية عن الضحية ، في خدمة إخضاعنا وقمع تضامننا ووحدة الهدف في التحرير والنضال الثوري.
لاستعادة إمكانياتنا للإنسان والمعنى والقيمة علينا أن نحرر أنفسنا من تاريخنا ، لأننا متشابكون في شباكه.
بحث خيالي ، لكن ليس بلا أمل ؛ ليس إذا كان العالم يقف معنا.
حان الوقت لجلب الفوضى. لإحداث الأذى وترك ألعاب إعادة التخيل والتحول تبدأ.
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11 במאי 2022 לזכור את האינתיפאדה השלישית, חלק 2
כשאני מהרהר על אירועי האינתיפאדה השלישית בשנה שעברה בזמן שחייתי אותם, עולה בדעתי שבין הדברים החשובים כאן הוא תהליך הסיפור כזיכרון, היסטוריה וזהות המשקפת את עצמי; שכן כאשר אנו מספרים את סיפורו של דבר, ההיסטוריה מסתכלת על עצמה לאחור, ודרך מחברה וקוראיה מתגלמת ומודעת לעצמה. אין לספר או לשמוע סיפורים ללא השתתפות ופרשנות; הם נושאים כוח לימינלי כעיקרון של שינוי.
כאן אני כותב בצורה המיוחדת של מדיה חברתית, שבה כל האמיתות הן יחסיות, ארעיות, ארעיות; אלא גם משתרעים עד אין קץ לכל הכיוונים משוחררים ממגבלות הצורה והזמן כחפצים של תודעה ומידע מופשט שבאמצעותם הממשי מארגן את עצמו, ומתנגש עם אמיתות אחרות בתנועה בראונית ההופכת אותם ואת עצמנו כמודיעים, מניעים ו עיצוב מקורות. יצרנו רשת של רעיונות שהיא מראה של הרשת של עצמנו.
מה אם הבנייה החברתית הזו של זהות באמצעות נרטיב היא אמת מטפורית או פואטית וגם מכשיר שבעזרתו נוכל להשתלט על האבולוציה שלנו?
יונג דמיין מחדש את האידיאל האפלטוני בתור הלא-מודע הקולקטיבי, והתייחס לצורותיו הקודמות כאללוגוס בספר התנ”כי של יוחנן האוונגליסט, עלאם אל-מיתאל של אבן ערבי, הדמיון הראשוני של קולרידג’ והבארדו בפילוסופיה ההינדית והבודהיסטית. אבל בהקשר של התועלת של סיפורים ביצירת עצמנו, אין זה תפקידם של החלומות והראייה הפואטית כשער הנשמה אל האינסוף, כהתלהבות, התעלות והתעלות, שעליהם אני מדבר כעת, אלא של כוח הדמיון מחדש והשינוי בריפוי השבר של העולם.
שדה אחד כזה של הוויה אנושית, משמעות וערך המתפתח יחד איתנו כביטוייו וביטוייו האינדיבידואליים, ים התודעה הזה שמחבר אותנו מתחת לפני השטח של המודעות שלנו ובו אנו משתתפים כיוצריו בתהליך רקורסיבי, מהווה בסיס עיקרי למאבק.
כפי שאנו לומדים מג’ון קייג’ במוזיקה, מהרולד פינטר בתיאטרון ומפיט מונדריאן באמנות, החללים הריקים הם שמגדירים ומסדרים משמעות; ובהיסטוריה אלו הקולות המושתקים והמחוקים שעלינו להקשיב להם בקפידה רבה, שכן כאן הריק מדבר אלינו על כוח סודי ועל הפונקציות והיחסים המרכזיים שעל הסמכות להסתיר כדי לשמור על ההגמוניה שלה עלינו.
תמיד שימו לב לאיש שמאחורי הווילון. שכן אם ברצוננו להשתחרר מאלה שישעבדו אותנו ויגנבו את נשמתנו באמצעות זיוף, שקרים ואשליות, היסטוריות משוכתבות ונרטיבים כלואים, עלינו לבצע את ארבע החובות העיקריות של אזרח; תשאלו את הסמכות, הסמכות לחשוף, הסמכות המדומה וסמכות האתגר, וחיו, כתבו, דברו, ללמדו והתארגנו כמו מה שפוקו כינה דוברי אמת בקריאה הקדושה לרדוף אחר האמת.
כך נוכל לחוקק סולידריות ולהציב את חיינו באיזון עם אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי כדור הארץ; חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והמחוקים.
כזו היא תקוותי שאהבה כסולידריות עשויה לגאול את פגמי האנושות שלנו ושהפרקסיס שלה כמאבק שחרור עשוי להביא ריפוי לשברונו של העולם, וכי באמצעות חזון פואטי כדמיון מחדש והפיכת האדם, המשמעות והערך. את האפשרויות הבלתי מוגבלות של להיות אנושיים אנו עשויים לחלום עתיד טוב יותר ממה שהיה לנו בעבר.
כפי שכתבתי בפוסט שלי מ-11 במאי 2021, הסתבכות ברשתות ההיסטוריה: היום השני של האינתיפאדה השלישית; להלן עד ההיסטוריה שניתנו על ידי כזפיר עבד אל מונטאקים, בנוגע להגנת אל אקצא והופעת האינתיפאדה השלישית.
לפני כל השאר חייבים להיות השמות האמיתיים של הדברים; יש לי הרבה, על אינספור תפקידים שאני מבצע בשפות ובמקומות רבים כיוצר שובבות, מביא תוהו ובוהו, דובר אמת ועד להיסטוריה, אבל השם אני מתעורר אליו כאן באל קודס בעקבות לילה לאימה יש ניואנסים שאתאר לך; זפיר שפירושו מנצח, אחת מיני גרסאות רבות שהשתמשתי בהן לשמו של המורד הגדול ויקטור פרנקנשטיין וגם מתייחסת לאינוויקטוס בשירו של ויליאם ארנסט הנלי, חלק מהזהות שלי מאז היום שהתחלתי בתיכון ודיקלמתי אותו לפני אסיפת תלמידים לקביעת תנאי המאבק בינינו, ולמעשה האנושי העיקרי של יצירה עצמית בסירוב להיכנע לסמכות; מונטאקים שמגדיר אותי כנוקם עוולות בהתייחס להצהרת המשימה שנתנו לי המטאדורים בסאו פאולו בקיץ שלפני התיכון כאשר חילצו אותי מהוצאה להורג על ידי המשטרה וקיבלו אותי בברכה בחברה שלהם במילים; “אנחנו לא יכולים להציל את כולם, אבל אנחנו יכולים לנקום”, ומכיוון שזהו שם האינסופי כגמול ולא ניתן להשתמש בו ללא משרת ההקדמה של או עבד אול, אני הופך כעת לצפיר עבד אול מונטקים, עבור החלק שאנו חייב לשחק מגדיר את הזהות שלנו כפרסונה.
הבוקר אני מהרהר במילים שנכתבו ביומן שלי בלילה הקודם, מתעורר לא למיאזמה של עשן ומוות אלא לקטורת ושירי אבל, התנגדות והכרת תודה משמחת באופן מוזר על הרחמים והחמלה של האינסופי; מישהו מנגן שירי אהבה בכל זה, דואטים של הדיוות הלבנוניות ננסי עג’רם עם צ’ב חאלד ומריטה נאדר עם מריו קאראם מהדהדים בסמטאות המעוותות מתחת לחלון שלי, ואני מתפלא על חוסנה של הרוח האנושית.
אין לי מושג איפה אני או איך הגעתי לכאן; סיטואציה שאני יותר מדי מכירה ושמחה באופן אבסורדי למצוא את עצמי בה, כי נפלתי לחור הארנב פעם נוספת.
אני מתחיל לחקור את העולם החדש שלי. שום ריחות של קפה לא מקבלים את פניי; השמש זורחת וצום הרמדאן החל. אור נשפך מבעד לרשת העץ הפתוחה של חלון מקושת אל חדר מאבן עם ריהוט מועט אך משובח מאוד; כמה כריות שבטיות ישנות, קליגרפיה ממוסגרת, שטיח תפילה בכיוון מכה, עששית כסף מפוארת מחוררת, השמיכה שישנתי עליה; אולי אני כבר לא במעונות העלובים של שייח ג’ראח.
חבריי הביאו אותי למקום מקלט ובטחון; כנראה איבדתי את ההכרה במהלך חילוץ המשפחות שנלכדו מההסתערות הישראלית על אל אקצא וקרבות הרחוב המבולבלים שבאו לאחר מכן כשהם צדו נשים וילדים בורחים דרך מבוך האפלה שהוא ירושלים.
עבור כאלה היא נמצאת תחת פטיש הברזל של עריצות וטרור ממלכתי, סיוט של חומות ומחנות ריכוז, תיל ויהירות אכזרית של הכוח, אם כי חלקנו עשויים לחפש את עיר האור שהיא כילה והסתירה מאחורי מסכתה. , עיר של אגדות וחלומות שאני קורא לה אל קודס.
מישהו השאיר קערת כסף עם מים לניקוי טקסים לפני תפילת שחרית וגלימות לבנות רשמיות מעולות כדי להחליף את נעלי החאקי המרופטות שלי, יחד עם קפה פלסטינית ובישט או גלימה שלובשים מכובדים כמו מלוכה או גברים קדושים, כבוד שאני לא עושה ראוי אך אינו יכול לסרב; זה כנראה ירושה משפחתית אהובה.
תוך כדי כביסה והחלפה קראתי את סיפור אירועי הלילה בסימנים השטחיים על בשרי; ירו בי, כידון, פוצצתי והוצתי שוב, והכל ללא כל פציעות בעלות משמעות.
מה הקשר לצבא ההגנה לישראל ולהצתת אנשים? זה כאילו יש להם הוראת קבע; אם הוא רץ, ירה בו, אם הוא עומד על שלו, הצית אותו.
שברי זיכרונות צפים במהלך הערכה זו; משטח בטן ארוך שנחתך בקושי להתחמק מדחף מתפרק, חבורות, חתכים ומעט רסיסים לאורך הזרוע והכתף מרימון שהפיל עליי קיר מהצד הרחוק ומחתיכה שהגיעה דרך המרגמה המתפוררת, חבורה בגודל אגרוף של דפורמציה בפנים האחורית, סימן של יריית חזה ממוקמת היטב מרובה שנעצרה על ידי ז’קט קלוש שתפסתי מהחייל הראשון שניסה להרוג אותי. ובשלב מסוים עליתי באש, שום דבר לא נשרף מלבד הצד השמאלי של הבגדים שלי בגלל שהוא קרוב מדי למשהו שהופצץ; למרות שאני זוכר רק רעמים, אור והבזק של חום.
הבגדים הישנים שלי, לעומת זאת, נראו כאילו ניצלו אותם על ידי כלבי פרא ואז הושלכו למדורה, וללא ספק נראיתי במצב גרוע יותר ממה שהייתי למי שנשא אותי לכאן. אני מתחיל לתהות אם הגלימות שאני לובש עכשיו נועדו לקבורה שלי. אבל לא, זה שלושה שרו לבנים
אודס, ראש ורגל קשורים; אז נחשבתי כחיה.
עכשיו נקי ולבוש כהלכה, אני אומר את תפילת שחרית, ואז קורא שלוש פעמים את בקשת הסליחה מהקוראן הקדוש, sūrat l-baqarah הפרה פסוק 2:286, ובכך עוקב אחר התרגום של יוסף עלי, עליו השלום; “הו אלוהים! אל תטיל עלינו משא גדול מכפי שיש לנו כוח לשאת. למחוק את חטאינו, ולהעניק לנו מחילה. רחם עלינו. אתה המגן שלנו; עזור לנו נגד אלה שמתנגדים לאמונה”.
זה נראה רפלקסיבי למרות שזהו דואה או דקלום אישי ולא חלק מחמש התפילות היומיות; יש לי הרגשה שלעתים קרובות אני זקוק לסליחה.
בשלווה שלאחר מכן, אני שוקע בתפקיד אליו לוהקתי במשחק שעומד להתפתח.
יש לי הרבה שמות בשפות רבות, אבל שמי במקום ובזמן הזה הוא צפיר עבד אל מונטאקים; זה שם שצריך להעלות על הדעת, כי השתמשתי בו במקומות אחרים שבהם אני עשוי להיזכר, כמו אחרים לפניי וכפי שיעשו אחרים אחרי שעזבתי.
הגעתי לירושלים לזמן המינימלי של חמישה ימים בין שני ימי נישואין לטרגדיה, כיבוש שנמצא כעת בשנתו החמישים וארבע מאז כיבוש ירושלים העתיקה ב-7 ביוני 1967, שמדינת ישראל חגגה אתמול לפי הלוח העברי כיום ירושלים. ב-10 במאי על ידי תקיפת אל אקצא, שכונת שייח’ ג’ראח והקהילה הפלסטינית, ואסון הנמשך כבר שבעים ושלוש שנים מאז יום הנכבה ה-15 במאי 1948.
אמש השתתפתי במחאה להגנת מסגד אל אקצא שנפגשה ביד ברזל של עריצות וטרור מדינה, מחאה שעשויה להפוך למהפכה. אם אמריקה והעולם יוכלו להתערב כדי להישאר ביד הישראלית של הפחד והכוח, אולי עוד נמנע מהגורל הזה, אבל בינתיים החלטתי לרשום את זה ביומן שלי בתור היום השני של האינתיפאדה השלישית.
ברגע זה עלינו להיבחן, אנו בני האדם; האם איננו מתרגשים עוד מרחמים או חמלה, האם איבדנו את איכות האנושיות שלנו בפתולוגיה המודרנית של הניתוק שלנו והפכנו לדברים אכזריים, סתם אטאביסטים של אינסטינקט, אח לשור? האם אין לנו אופקים מעבר לאינטרס העצמי ולמערבולת הרשע שהיא חמדנות ושליטה? האם אנחנו כבר לא הבעלים של עצמנו, אלא דימויים שנלכדו ומעוותים על ידי סמכות, זיופים, שקרים ואשליות שבאמצעותם גנבו את נשמתנו מי שהיו משעבדים אותנו?
בחרתי את שמו של מונטאקים בזירת המאבק הזו,
שם שפירושו הנוקם או מביא הגמול והנקמה,
אבל המאבק שלי לא נגד אנשים
אלא מערכת לא צודקת
כזו היא תקוותי ואמונתי באפשרויות הבלתי מוגבלות של הפיכתי לאדם; אבל ברחובות למטה מתאספים לוחמים, ואני שומע תריסר שפות בשיחות שלהם, סוגים של ערבית אבל גם פרסית וטורקית. בתוך ימים יצטרפו אלינו לא רק פלגים מקומיים, כולל חמאס, פת”ח והג’יהאד האסלאמי הפלסטיני, אלא גם חיזבאללה וממשלות ברחבי העולם. בתקיפת אל-אקצא, נתניהו וחבורתו חשפו את המפלצת שמאחורי מסכת הסגולות הישראלית המוענקת על ידי מורשת הקורבנות ההיסטורית שלה, והפעילו את הנושא האחד המסוגל לאחד את העולם האסלאמי ולערער את יציבות הברית הערבית-אמריקאית שרק המדינות החברות בה. הכיר לאחרונה בלגיטימציה של מדינת ישראל.
העיר הזו גועשת טינה ומעשי נקמה עתיקים, וההתקפה על אל אקצא סיפקה מוקד. כמו יאנוס, ירושלים ואל קודס הם זהות כפולה אשר לוכדת פרדיגמות זרות באותם מרחבים פיזיים במאבק טיטאני של שליטה, קורבן ומתעלל המבולבלים בבשר אחד מעורפל ולא רציף כמו מפלצת פרנקנשטיין של חלקים משולבים באופן לא טבעי, מאבק שממנו אני מקווה שיצא משהו חדש.
האם מלחמה היא ההתחשבנות היחידה שהמין האנושי יכול להציע או לקבל? אני מתפלל שאנחנו טובים מזה, שהתקווה והאהבה יוכלו לנצח את הפחד והשנאה, ונבחר להיות נושאי חיים ולא של מוות.
כך אני מתפלל כשהמארח שלי מוצא אותי, והמסך מתחיל להתרומם על ההופעה שלנו. אנו עומדים לקרוא תיגר על סדר עולמי של ניהיליזם מוסרי שבו רק כוח וכוח הם אמיתיים ובעלי משמעות, שבו עושר והיררכיות של פריבילגיות ושייכות עילית הם האמצעי היחיד להחלפה ופוסקי כוח, ובהם זהויות מורשות של האחרות המהדרת וחלוקות של אמונה וגזע, לאום ונרטיבים היסטוריים של קורבנות, נוצלו בשירות הכפפה שלנו ובהדחקה של הסולידריות שלנו ואחדות התכלית שלנו בשחרור ובמאבק מהפכני.
כדי להחזיר לנו את האפשרויות האנושיות, המשמעות והערך שלנו, עלינו להשתחרר מההיסטוריה שלנו, כי אנחנו סבוכים ברשתותיה.
מסע קישוט, אבל לא אחד ללא תקווה; לא אם העולם יעמוד איתנו.
Torch of Liberty 