A mail order abortion drug for home use which is safer than many non prescription drugs and decades of use after hundreds of FDA clinical trials, has been challenged in our Supreme Court by a radical and fractional shadow organization of anti-abortion radicals who wish to subvert democracy, the equality and rights of bodily autonomy and reproduction of women, the principle that medical decisions are between a doctor and patient, and the institution of the FDA in approving pharmaceuticals as safe for human use; a broad attack across American values and our social and institutional spheres.
This assault on the public good and the citizenship and liberty of all women through multiple legislative and judicial fronts of action foregrounds and hinges on abortion and includes the vote and citizenship of women, but does not end there. Our rights as citizen and as human beings are parallel and interdependent and designed to reinforce each other; if rights of bodily autonomy and reproduction are lost, women become dehumanized chattel slaves, and this is the end goal of the Republican Party as an organization of patriarchal sexual terror and theocratic tyranny.
Abortion is the key issue which will secure the next election for a Democratic Party President, because it is one we can win. The overwhelming majority of Republicans, both women and men, also favor a woman’s right to choose; if well played this will become a lever of change within the Republican Party which may one day liberate it from capture by Christian Identity fundamentalists who seized it in 1980 and from the Fourth Reich who in the Stolen Election of 2016 used it to capture our nation under the figurehead of a rapist President.
What would such a world be like to live in? Margaret Atwood has given us a vision of our future under a patriarchal theocracy in The Handmaid’s Tale.
The Handmaid’s Tale gives a voice to Bilhah, the Biblical Handmaid, revisions Little Red Riding Hood as an extension of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, and tells the story of the Christian disempowerment of the Goddess and the dawn of the age of patriarchal theocracy as presented in the great film The Red Shoes.
Margaret Atwood’s parodies of Grimm operate on three levels; thematic, images and motifs, and narrative structure. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we have themes of family and especially female-female conflict, gender and sexual power asymmetries, and the initiation and heroic journey. Motifs and images include dismemberment, cannibalism, fertility, labyrinths and paths, and all manner of disturbing sexual violence. Plot devices include a variety of character foils, doppelgangers, disguises and trickery of stolen and falsified identity.
Among Margaret Atwood’s Great Books, The Handmaid’s Tale is a universally known reference both because it has been taught for over a generation in every high school in America as a standard text and because of the extraordinary television series, arguably the most important series ever filmed. We teach it for the same reasons the show is popular; a visceral and gripping drama with unforgettable characters, a mesmerizing plot, and an immediate and accessible story which interrogates a universal system of oppression and also empowers resistance and illuminates our autonomy and self-ownership.
It depicts the brooding evil and vicious misogyny of Christianity and Fascism as two sides of the dynamic malaise of authority as patriarchy and tyranny, sexual and racial terror institutionalized as religion and state, as drawn directly from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, but also from contemporary culture as it contains satires of identifiable public figures, organizations, and events. Serena is based on Phyllis Schlafly, and Gideon is the nation of Pat Robertson and the fundamentalists who seized control of the Republican Party in 1980 around the time of the novel’s writing; Margaret Atwood’s motive in part was to sound an alarm at the dawn of the Fourth Reich and its threat to global democracy.
It remains to be seen whether the forces of tyranny or of liberty will prevail in the end. Each of our lives is a contest between these forces, our private struggles reflected in the society and human civilization we share.
And this is the great lesson and insight of Margaret Atwood; each of us is both a Handmaid and a Serena, trapped within the skin of the other. She locates the primary conflict within ourselves, and transposes the Jungian conflict with the Shadow in terms of sex, gender, and power, while interrogating those same universal systems of oppression in our society and political institutions.
Whence comes this madness?
As written by Jordan Smith in The Intercept, in an article entitled The Shadow Medical Community Behind the Attempt to Ban Medication Abortion; THE ALLIANCE FOR HIPPOCRATIC MEDICINE, a new anti-abortion umbrella group that is spearheading a sweeping federal challenge to medication abortion, incorporated in Texas just months before filing suit. The incorporation documents, obtained from the Texas secretary of state, provide further evidence that the plaintiffs cherry-picked a court they believed would be amenable to their arguments, an act of forum shopping that was orchestrated to land the case before Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed darling of the far right.
The Alliance incorporated in Amarillo in August 2022, bringing together five out-of-state anti-abortion groups: the Catholic Medical Association, the Coptic Medical Association of North America, the American College of Pediatricians, the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, and the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Three months later, the lawsuit was filed in the same Texas Panhandle city where Kacsmaryk hears all federal civil cases.
The lawsuit alleges that in 2000, the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, wrongly approved mifepristone, the first of two drugs that make up the standard medication abortion protocol. The groups also argue that sending abortion medications through the mail violates federal criminal law. To advance their argument, the plaintiffs have assembled a raft of dubious evidence to allege that the FDA is anti-science and mifepristone is a wildly dangerous drug, despite decades of scientific research and hundreds of medical studies that demonstrate otherwise. They have dished it all up for a federal judge who, in just a short time on the bench, has developed a reputation for factitious legal opinions. A ruling in their favor could see medication abortion all but banned across the U.S., sparking a new round of chaos after the fall of Roe v. Wade and laying the groundwork for the dispute to land before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Suspect Assertions
Medication abortion is a two-drug protocol designed for use in early pregnancy termination. The first drug, mifepristone, blocks progesterone (a hormone needed to maintain pregnancy) and softens the uterine lining; the second drug, misoprostol, is taken 24 to 48 hours later and causes the uterus to contract, expelling the pregnancy.
The regimen was developed in France in the late 1980s, but it wasn’t until 2000 that the FDA finally approved it for use in the United States. Medication abortion accounted for just 5 percent of abortions in 2001 but has steadily grown in popularity; today, medication abortion accounts for more than half of all pregnancy terminations in the country. The protocol is also commonly used for miscarriage management.
The FDA has enforced a slew of restrictions tied to mifepristone that advocates and providers have long argued are medically unnecessary — including a rule that it must be dispensed in person, even though misoprostol is not taken until later at a place of the patient’s choosing. During the pandemic, the in-person dispensing rule was blocked, and in December 2021, the FDA announced that it was permanently lifting the requirement. The agency has since taken additional steps to expand access to medication abortion by allowing mail-order and brick-and-mortar pharmacies to dispense it to patients with prescriptions in states where abortion is legal.
It was against this backdrop that the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, its partner organizations, and several individual doctors — represented by lawyers with the Christian-right Alliance Defending Freedom — filed suit in Texas, arguing that the FDA never should have approved mifepristone in the first place, let alone expand its use or loosen dispensing requirements.
The filing is a jumbled mess of suspect assertions, cloaked in inflammatory and medically inaccurate language. The filing refers to medication abortion as “chemical” abortion and claims that mifepristone “starves the baby to death.” It alleges that medication abortion is far riskier than procedural abortion or carrying a pregnancy to term, which the plaintiffs argue “rarely” leads to threatening complications. They call mifepristone an “endocrine disrupter” that could threaten the normal development of adolescents who take it. And they assert that individuals suffering complications from medication abortion could “overwhelm” the health care system, leading to a flood of blood transfusions that “exacerbates the current critical national blood shortage.”
These allegations are baseless. An endocrine disrupter is a chemical that mimics or interferes with the body’s hormones, such as PFAS, a class of toxic “forever” chemicals found in dozens of common products that has been linked to cancer and other illnesses. The notion that mifepristone — taken in a single dose — falls into this camp because it “briefly blocks progesterone receptors in the uterus is completely unfounded,” according to an amicus brief filed in the case by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and eight other leading U.S. medical groups. “There is no reason to think, nor is there evidence to show, that preventing the absorption of progesterone for a brief window would have any effects on adolescent development,” the brief states.
The assertion that medication abortion is a risky and understudied endeavor recklessly approved by the FDA is equally spurious. To date, mifepristone has been used in more than 630 published clinical trials, including more than 420 randomized, controlled studies, which the amicus brief notes are the “gold standard of research design.” At less than 1 percent, the risk of serious complications is exceedingly low. The likelihood of any complication at all is about 5 percent; the most common is an incomplete expulsion, which may require a procedural abortion to complete. Meanwhile, the risk of death associated with carrying a pregnancy to term is 14 times higher than the risk associated with abortion.
“Mifepristone’s safety profile is on par with common painkillers like ibuprofen and acetaminophen, which more than 30 million Americans take in any given day,” according to the amicus brief. Procedures like wisdom teeth removal, colonoscopy, and plastic surgery have higher complication and death rates, as does the use of Viagra. “Put simply,” the brief states, “medication abortion is among the safest medical interventions in any category — related to pregnancy or not.”
Behind the Scenes
The fight over abortion has long featured a shadow medical community that exists to promote counterfactual narratives about risks associated with the procedure. To Mary Ziegler, a law professor and legal historian at the University of California, Davis, the fact that the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine was established to go after medication abortion isn’t surprising.
“There’s a tradition of groups like this forming,” Ziegler said. Back in the 1990s, for example, a group called the Physicians Ad Hoc Committee for Truth sprang up for the purposes of advocating for a ban on dilation and extraction abortion, which anti-abortion forces dubbed “partial-birth abortion.” Once Congress passed the ban, the committee disappeared.
While the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine itself is a new entity, presumably incorporated to bolster the pending lawsuit, the groups organized under it have been around for a long time. The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, known as AAPLOG, formed in the wake of the 1973 Roe decision, initially as an affinity group of anti-abortion physicians who belonged to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or ACOG, the country’s leading professional membership organization for OB-GYNs.
Over time, AAPLOG began to push back against the medical and scientific establishment, developing a narrative that abortion was not only immoral, but also dangerous. The group focused more on disputing the “factual premises of things ACOG was saying, rather than just disputing the morality or ethics of those decisions,” Ziegler said. “Medical arguments against abortion bans were effective enough that they needed to be met with medical arguments for abortion bans,” she explained. “There’s an appetite for these organizations to have their own narratives.”
AAPLOG has since split from ACOG and now has roughly 7,000 members compared to ACOG’s more than 60,000 (anyone can join the former, while the latter’s membership is limited to medical professionals). Despite its size, AAPLOG has successfully pressed its counternarrative in legislative and legal crusades to restrict or ban abortion, even when the scientific underpinning for its position is shaky.
Take the work of George Delgado, one of the named plaintiffs in the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine lawsuit. A doctor in Southern California, Delgado developed so-called abortion pill reversal: the notion that a person who changes their mind about going through with a medication abortion after taking mifepristone (but before taking misoprostol) can interrupt the process by taking a large dose of prescription progesterone to reestablish the pregnancy. There is no evidence that the protocol is safe or effective; the only controlled study designed to interrogate it was halted based on “safety concerns” after three of 12 participants hemorrhaged and were taken to the hospital. Still, AAPLOG has deemed medication abortion reversal a “medically sound choice” and supported state efforts to mandate counseling on reversal for anyone seeking abortion.
“When you have arguments about science that are not based that much in evidence, not only is it confusing and obviously can lead to really bad outcomes, but it’s also disenfranchising.”
While the alternate narratives pushed by groups like AAPLOG may be politically powerful, they are also dangerous, offering the imprimatur of science without sound foundational support. “When you have arguments about science that are not based that much in evidence, not only is it confusing and obviously can lead to really bad outcomes, but it’s also disenfranchising,” Ziegler said. “Because normal people don’t know anything about these topics, right? They don’t know about the relative rate of complications of mifepristone. And so if what’s really going on here is a struggle over constitutional values and ethics and so on, we should be telling the truth about that.”
The shadow medical community’s efforts to legitimize various abortion restrictions have been effective — like a requirement that abortion doctors maintain hospital admitting privileges, which groups including AAPLOG claimed was a best practice designed to ensure patient safety. Broadly speaking, such efforts worked in front of state lawmakers but typically failed at the Supreme Court.
Now, with Roe in the rearview mirror and no immediately obvious need to keep pressing such pseudoscience, Ziegler suspects that groups like AAPLOG are still leaning into these arguments because their real aims — like establishing fetal personhood rights — “are still not popular,” she said. Anti-abortion ballot measures have repeatedly failed with voters, and a significant majority of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. “And so they’re having to take their claims to courts and to judges like Judge Kacsmaryk … and they’re having to rely on weird interpretations of FDA regulations.” This is “not a window into what they think is the most important,” she said, but “what they think will work.”
A Slippery Slope
Before being tapped to serve as the federal district court judge in Amarillo, Kacsmaryk worked at the religious-right First Liberty Institute, which, among other things, opposes the separation of church and state. Kacsmaryk has been vocal about his disdain for gay marriage, reproductive rights, and transgender people. In 2016, he signed onto a letter that called being transgender an “irrational … delusion” (the Catholic Medical Association, which is a party in the mifepristone lawsuit, was also a signatory). And he’s written that the sexual revolution was destructive, seeking “public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”
While on the bench, Kacsmaryk has made a string of controversial rulings: He declared Biden administration protections for transgender workers unlawful; twice ordered the administration to enforce the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy; and attacked Title X, the only federal program designed to provide birth control to low-income and uninsured people.
In the Title X case, Deanda v. Becerra, Kacsmaryk sided with Texas father Alexander Deanda, who was challenging the program based on its guarantee of patient confidentiality. Deanda claimed that the program violated his rights as a parent raising his daughters according to “Christian teaching on matters of sexuality.” With Title X in place, he argued, he had no assurance that his daughters would be “unable to access … contraception” and other services that “facilitate sexual promiscuity.”
Among the criticisms leveled at Kacsmaryk in the wake of his ruling in favor of Deanda was that he lacked power to consider the case in the first place. To bring a federal lawsuit, a plaintiff must show they’ve been injured by the law they’re challenging, but Deanda — who never alleged that his children attempted to avail themselves of Title X services — hadn’t been harmed. Deanda had no standing to bring the suit, in other words, and Kacsmaryk had no cause to hear it. Nonetheless, Kacsmaryk ruled that the Title X program as administered violated the “constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.”
In response to the pending mifepristone lawsuit, the federal government has argued that the FDA’s approval of the drug in 2000 was based on years of solid research, that the statute of limitations to challenge that approval has since run out, and that, like Deanda, the plaintiffs have no standing.
The FDA argues that neither the medical associations nor the individual doctors bringing the suit have suffered any injury related to the drug’s approval. And indeed, the plaintiffs’ claims of injury are tenuous. While the doctors who are party to the lawsuit don’t provide medication abortion, they argue that they may one day find themselves in a situation where a person allegedly harmed by mifepristone comes to them for treatment, thus drawing their attention away from existing patients. And they say that these impaired patients may present with an incomplete abortion, which would conscript the doctors into providing services that violate their conscience. Meanwhile, the organizations argue that the approval of mifepristone has forced them to divert time and energy away from other priorities, like advocating for fetal personhood, forcing them to focus instead on “educating” their members about the dangers of medication abortion.
To the FDA, this theory of legal injury is nonsense — and a slippery slope: Allowing the case to go forward would greenlight other baseless legal complaints, it argues in response to the Alliance lawsuit. “If FDA approved a new heart medicine, emergency physicians would have standing to challenge the approval on the theory that some patients would experience adverse events under the new treatment; in contrast, cardiologists would have standing to challenge the approval on the theory that some patients would no longer require their services.”
A Zombie Law
In a response filed in early February, the Alliance Defending Freedom lawyers brushed off the government’s arguments about standing — the doctors and organizations bringing the suit had “standing six ways from Sunday,” they asserted. They doubled down on their fearmongering, arguing that medication abortion had never been studied under “real-world conditions,” and that the doctors bringing the suit actually “treat and care for countless victims of this dangerous drug regimen.”
The plaintiffs also leaned into allegations that allowing medication abortion to be mailed to patients violates the 19th-century law known as the Comstock Act, which outlawed sending anything considered “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” through the mail, including contraceptives and “every article or thing” that could be used for abortion. Over the years, judicial and congressional actions have largely neutered the act, and in late December, the Department of Justice penned an opinion noting that the law does not apply where abortion is legal or when the sender doesn’t intend that the recipient would use the drugs illegally. But the Comstock Act is still on the books, a zombie law that the Alliance plaintiffs are trying to raise from the dead.
The End of Roe
If Kacsmaryk agrees that the Comstock Act applies to medication abortion, the impact could be far-reaching. The act forbids the mailing of any device that may be used for abortion, which would include countless medications and routine gynecological instruments. It could also impact the availability of misoprostol, which absent mifepristone, can be used alone to accomplish an abortion. It is not as effective as the two-drug regimen but has for decades been used safely for that purpose; the Alliance lawsuit does not attack FDA approval of misoprostol.
A hearing in the case has yet to be scheduled. Meanwhile, a coalition of 12 states, led by Washington and Oregon, filed their own lawsuit last week asking another federal judge to rule that mifepristone is safe and effective and that its FDA approval is “lawful and valid.” The states are asking the judge to eliminate all remaining FDA-imposed restrictions on mifepristone, which they argue impermissibly impede access to the drug.
On February 24, Vice President Kamala Harris met with reproductive rights advocates and medical experts, including from ACOG and the American Academy of Family Physicians. The Alliance lawsuit is not just an attack on “women’s fundamental freedoms,” she warned. “It is an attack on the very foundation of our public health system.”
“Those who would attack … the ability of the FDA to make a decision” about approving a drug like mifepristone “ought to look in their own medicine cabinets to figure out whether they’re prepared to say those medications … should no longer be available to them,” she said. “Because that is what we are talking about.”
Where are we in this fight now?
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Even the US supreme court was baffled by conservatives’ attack on abortion pills; “It is a testament to how weak the plaintiffs’ case is that the justices seemed so skeptical. Erin Hawley, a lawyer for the far-right antifeminist litigation shop Alliance Defending Freedom and the spouse of the conservative US senator Josh Hawley, usually gets a much warmer reception at One First Street. But in Tuesday’s oral arguments in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v FDA – a lawsuit which seeks to challenge FDA approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, and specifically to reverse regulatory changes that made the drug more easily accessible – she was on the defensive.
The three Democratic appointees, along with the Republican justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Roberts, all signaled at least some skepticism of her clients’ claims to legal standing. Amy Coney Barrett, the Trump appointee known for her maximalist religious commitments, struggled to help Hawley establish a convincing merits case to restrict access to the drug. And the far-right extremists Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas spent their question time signalling their support for the Comstock Act, a long-obscure and once-forgotten 1871 statute that some anti-choice lawyers say could be used to ban abortion nationwide by executive order.
Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine has always been a strange case, one whose path to the court was marked by controversy, strained argument and dramatically lowered legal standards. For one thing, the plaintiffs, a group of anti-abortion doctors who make outlandish and empirically disproven claims about the supposed dangers of mifepristone, hand-picked their own trial judge. They filed their lawsuit in the northern district of Texas, a federal court in Amarillo that has only one judge: Matthew Kacsmaryk, a young Trump appointee with a history of militant anti-choice activism who has become famous for his extreme deference to anti-abortion litigants.
Kacsmaryk ignored the fact that the physician plaintiffs could not show any injury that would entitle them to sue, and promptly issued a national injunction revoking FDA approval of the drug – an unprecedented judicial intervention that threatened to end access to a medication that is used in more than half of US abortions.
Above him, the far-right fifth circuit, in an opinion authored by the aspiring supreme court nominee James Ho, upheld the FDA’s initial approval of the drug but ruled that interventions in 2016 and 2021 that had made it more accessible were illegal, a move that would have made the pills dramatically more difficult to get in a post-Dobbs world. In his opinion, Ho not only bypassed the case’s initial standing problems, but made bizarre arguments justifying the right of virtually anyone to sue over abortion medication – including for what he called “aesthetic injuries” – that is, the harm allegedly done by abortion medication to people who are deprived of the opportunity to look at more babies.
At the supreme court, it was the FDA’s post-2016 moves to lower barriers of access to mifepristone that were supposedly at issue. And in theory, this should have been catnip to the revanchist supreme court, which has in recent years enthusiastically taken up legal challenges meant to erode abortion access, curtail civil rights, and weaken federal agencies like the FDA. But with the court’s approval at an all-time low in the wake of Dobbs, and with a looming November election to be determined in a large part by public outrage over women’s rights, even the court’s most enthusiastic enemies of abortion access and federal regulation found themselves with limited appetite to allow plaintiffs to limit access to a safe and popular drug nationwide.
And so it was that on Tuesday, the supreme court rediscovered an area of the law that it has recently been content to ignore: standing doctrine. The minor, inconvenient fact that the plaintiffs have experienced no injury and have no legal right to sue had been hand-waved away in the district court and at the fifth circuit, but it became an issue of prolonged attention in the oral arguments at the supreme court.
Elena Kagan noted that the plaintiff’s theory of standing was “highly probabilistic”, meaning that it relied on a series of hypotheticals and contingencies about potential harms that might happen, somehow, at some indeterminate point in the future, to someone, somewhere.
Ketanji Brown Jackson issued some of her most pointed questions since joining the court – a high bar – over the asymmetry between the plaintiff’s stated injury of a hypothetical future conscience harm and their proposed remedy for that injury – a nationwide restriction on the way all American women can use the drug. Jackson was joined in this line of thought by the Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, her sometimes odd-couple ally, who asked the anti-abortion camp why they had filed such a broad petition, instead of a narrow one, in a tone I can only describe as scolding.
Roberts signaled a preoccupation with the standing question; even Kavanaugh, a justice with little skill in making a point, asked a question that seemed aimed at getting a fact of established law on the record: don’t these physicians already have a legal right to decline to perform abortions? Hawley answered in the affirmative.
The court seems poised to throw out the case on standing grounds; if the opinion is written by a conservative, it will likely operate as something of an instruction manual, describing the kind of case that the conservative legal movement could bring that would successfully overturn the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. A future case – just not this one.
But oral arguments on Tuesday did make news: they signaled the first time that the anti-choice movement’s preferred strategy for banning abortion nationwide has cheerleaders on the supreme court. The case that the court heard on Tuesday was specifically not supposed to concern the federal Comstock Act, a long-unenforced law left over from the Victorian era that imposed a ban on sending contraception or abortion implements through the mail or trading them via interstate commerce. But both Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas brought up the act, which plaintiffs mentioned in their briefs and which was the focus of several amici curiae who submitted in the case.
Since Dobbs, anti-abortion litigants have been advancing a novel, never-before-enforced idea that the Comstock Act could be interpreted broadly to functionally ban all abortions nationwide – as well as several kinds of birth control and possibly implements that are also used in other kinds of routine gynecological care, like speculums and curettes. Alito signaled with his questions that he felt the act applied to the FDA, who had failed to heed its prohibitions when they approved the drug; Thomas suggested that mifepristone’s manufacturer had violated it when selling and advertising abortion medication.
These interpretations will likely not be controlling opinion in this lawsuit. But they signal how this court may rule under a future Republican administration. After all, if Republicans want to enforce the Comstock Act as a nationwide total abortion ban, they don’t need to win control of Congress. All they need is the White House.”
Why is this important, and what is this like in the lives of women?
As written by Clea Skopeliti in The Guardian, in an article entitled Women who used abortion pills on US supreme court mifepristone case: ‘It’s maddening’; “Mercy’s periods had always been very regular, so when she missed one in 2016, she immediately took a pregnancy test. It was positive, and she managed to get an appointment at an abortion clinic the next day.
Despite being able to act quickly, she was in her seventh week of pregnancy by the time she could take abortion pills in Ohio – a state that was, at the time, debating banning abortion from the moment embryonic cardiac activity is detected (usually around six weeks). Ohio has since enshrined abortion rights in its state constitution following a referendum.
After the supreme court heard oral arguments this week in its first abortion case since it overturned Roe v Wade almost two years ago, Mercy reflected on her experience of accessing a medical abortion. There have been fears that the case – the US Food and Drug Administration v Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine – could curtail access to medication abortions, though legal experts say it does not appear to be going well for anti-abortion doctors.
When she arrived at the clinic, Mercy, 22 at the time, faced harassment. “There were protesters outside the building. They had signs and a billboard with a chopped-up baby on it. They screamed at me as I entered the building. It felt very threatening and judgmental – I would bundle myself up in hoodies to obscure my identity.”
During a follow-up appointment, she arrived just before the clinic had opened, and hid behind nearby bushes to dodge the protesters. “I was terrified,” she said. “I felt like a sitting duck.”
Despite facing intimidation from protesters, Mercy, now 29, knew she was not ready to be a parent.
“I wanted it, but it wasn’t planned,” she said. “I wasn’t able to have a kid at the time – I was a student and had trouble affording things. There’s no way I could have supported a baby.”
Amid debates about “heartbeat” bills, Mercy had been aware there were unavoidable delays. At her first appointment, the providers at the abortion clinic were unable to find the embryo with ultrasound and the appointment was rescheduled for a week later. Mercy was then required to wait 24 hours between seeing the ultrasound and obtaining the abortion, but due to her class schedule and clinic opening times, she had to wait another week.
The staff at the clinic were compassionate and non-judgmental, she remembers, saying: “They were fantastic to me. It was one of the most empowering experiences I’ve ever had. They reassured me it wasn’t my fault, I’d taken precautions and things happened.”
Her experience taking abortion pills in her seventh week went smoothly. She took the mifepristone in the clinic, and misoprostol later, along with a single dose of an antibiotic, which the doctor told her might make her drowsy. She said: “I just curled up on my bed and went straight to sleep. I don’t know how bad the cramping might have been, but by the time I woke up the next morning it was like I was having a heavy period.”
She described her experience as being “really straightforward and non-traumatic”.
“I was glad to be in a place that I considered safe, without others’ judgment and to be able to process it,” she said.
Caitlin, 35, underwent a medical abortion at a hospital in California the day after the news leaked that the supreme court would be overturning Roe v Wade in 2022.
“It was a very somber experience, and the doctor prescribing me the medication was clearly incredibly upset,” she remembers.
“My nervousness about the abortion was overshadowed by the leak. In some ways it helped with nervousness – like we were all in this experience together – but it was emotionally painful. I realised that in California, it was going to affect me much less than people in other parts of the country – but depending on who’s in power in the US, it could turn into a country-wide thing. I wondered: is this the last time I have this operation? I may never want or need it again, but I want to have the option,” she said.
Following an ultrasound, which she declined to see, Caitlin took the mifepristone pill in the hospital, and the misoprostol at home. She was nine weeks pregnant. “It was pretty painful,” she said. “It’s a lot for your body to go through. I thought, no one’s doing this because they want to.” But she was glad to be at home with support from her partner and roommate.
She said she had been “manically refreshing” the news for updates on the supreme court mifepristone case.
“I’m really nervous about the outcome. I really appreciate the ingenuity of the providers who send medication to the states where abortion is illegal. We’ve been forced to get creative. I’m not surprised conservatives are trying to reverse the work’s that been done,” she said. “I see the anti-abortion movement here to be another way to subjugate people in poverty.”
Kelly, 46, has had three medication abortions over the years. Her first was in early 2001, shortly after mifepristone had been authorized for use by the FDA in 2000. After unsuccessfully trying to access the morning-after pill in Salem, Oregon, she went to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Portland, where staff confirmed she was pregnant. “It was an accidental pregnancy at 23, I didn’t have a permanent job – and I knew from a young age I didn’t want children,” she said.
Her experience in 2001 – and 2016 and 2017 – of accessing mifepristone at Planned Parenthood in Portland was straightforward, with “very clear instructions” from the clinic. She was prescribed a painkiller to help with the heavy cramping that accompanies the second pill, misoprostol.
Kelly felt that being able to take abortion pills at home made the process easier. “Medical settings give me a lot of anxiety – to do it at home felt more comfortable. My partner made me food, I got to sit on the couch and be in my own bathroom,” she said.
“In my later two abortions, I was very settled in my career, but again didn’t want kids. I’ve never had any regrets, never any mental health issues as a result. I’ve been set on not having children.”
Reflecting on the supreme court case, Kelly said: “As a lifelong feminist, I am shocked that were in this level in the US. We’re just at a point where access to abortion has been turned on its head in the US. Mifepristone is completely safe. Thankfully, it looks like they’re not going to rule in favour [of restricting access] – but the fact it could be [restricted] is maddening.”
The Handmaid’s Tale series trailer
Moments in History That Inspired The Handmaid’s Tale
Women who used abortion pills on US supreme court mifepristone case: ‘It’s maddening’: Three women share their stories of getting medication abortions, and their thoughts on that access being curtailed
The test of a nation or a civilization is how we answer life disruptive events on a mass scale; disasters, plagues, famine, war. The national trauma of the Baltimore Bridge Collapse has posed a question to America, and the ways in which we answer reveal truths of who we are; are we a Band of Brothers still, or lone beasts of prey scavenging the carcasses of a degenerate and fallen union?
Republicans are trying to shift the burden of rebuilding this key infrastructure for our export of coal to those able to bear it least, because it involves a multiethnic and diverse city with a Black mayor, Brandon Scott, and a bridge which falls under the authority of a queer Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg; but also because the objective of the Republican Party is the sabotage of America and our values, systems, and institutions of government.
Here lies revealed the true nature and character of the Party of Treason, a cesspool of corruption and amoral nihilism whose first principle is that no one is his brother’s keeper, and devil take the hindmost.
And this we must Resist.
As written by Charlie Sykes in MSNBC, in an article entitled The MAGA world’s bridge conspiracies highlight an incredibly dark reality: Tuesday’s tragedy was just another horrifying day in the perverse MAGA universe; “Early Tuesday morning, a 948-foot containership plowed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which quickly collapsed. Rescue teams spent much of the day searching for victims and survivors. While the region grappled with the human and economic cost of the catastrophe, President Joe Biden and his Cabinet pledged to help local leaders rebuild.
For most Americans it was a breathtaking disaster and human tragedy. But far-right conspiracy theorists saw it as an opportunity.
In a rapid flood of social media posts, politicians and “pundits” insisted that the disaster could not have simply been an accident. It was somehow Biden’s fault, or the fault of immigrants, or the result of a terrorist attack. Without evidence, they blamed “drug-addled” employees, diversity policies, Israel and even the recent infrastructure bill.
Many of the usual suspects weighed in, moving seamlessly from one big lie to another. Think of this week’s constellation of psychosis as an outgrowth of Bridge Denialism.
Fox News host Maria Bartiromo (whose election lies figured prominently in Dominion’s $787 million defamation lawsuit) tried to link the bridge collapse to what she called “the wide-open border.” Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who voted against the 2021 infrastructure bill, appeared on Newsmax to complain that the Biden administration did not spend more money on bridge infrastructure. (Perhaps more hypocrisy than denial, but I digress.)
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., took to X to muse: “Is this an intentional attack or an accident?” This despite Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley stating unequivocally that “there is absolutely no indication that there’s any terrorism, or that this was done on purpose.”
Readers on X were blessedly quick to add the context. In fact, the ship’s crew had declared a mayday warning that allowed officials to close access to the bridge.
None of this dissuaded the right’s most feculent conspiracist, Alex Jones, from declaring the accident an attack. “Looks deliberate to me,” he posted on X. “A cyber-attack is probable. WW3 has already started.”
Lara Logan, the former CBS correspondent who has drifted to the far edges of the fever swamps, was also quick to weigh in. Logan, who once promoted comparisons between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Nazi physician and murderer Josef Mengele, claimed on X that “Multiple intel sources” were telling her that the bridge collapse “was an ‘absolutely brilliant strategic attack’” on U.S. infrastructure. Striking an apocalyptic tone, she claimed with zero evidence that “our intel agencies know” about the attack and that the U.S. has just been divided “along the Mason Dixon line exactly like the Civil War.”
And she, via her unnamed “sources,” blamed Barack Obama.
One after another they piled on. Former Trump aide Steve Bannon hinted at foul play: “It’s not right, and I think we need to get the full accounting of this until people say it’s not terrorism.” Right-wing media personality Benny Johnson breathlessly asked his audience: “Is this terrorism? How the hell did this happen? Is this incompetence? Who’s allowing this?”
Kandiss Taylor, who ran for Georgia governor in 2022, also suggested a conspiracy behind the collapse. Taylor — who has claimed “Satan wants to use” Taylor Swift “to elect Joe back into the White House to destroy what’s left of America” — offered no evidence for her bridge theory. Instead, she claimed that she had “watched the video several times.”
“What’s the chance that ship hit the bridge in the exact spot to crumple it up like tinfoil?” she asked. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
The tragedy also brought racist and antisemitic trolls out of the woodwork. As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz noted, blue-checked accounts were quick to try to connect the disaster with Israel. How incredibly predictable.
Other X “influencers” blamed Baltimore’s Black mayor for no other reason, it seems, than he happens to be Black. After Mayor Brandon Scott called for prayers for the victims and their families, a popular right-wing user posted to his 276,000 followers: “This is Baltimore’s DEI mayor commenting on the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge. It’s going to get so, so much worse. Prepare accordingly.” It was a revealing comment in more ways than one.
Well-known MAGA conspiracy-monger Jack Posobiec similarly (and mindlessly) seemed to implicate diversity and inclusion, forwarding a “Titanic” meme on Telegram that used Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s sexual identity to mock DEI policies.
And then there were the commenters whom Maryland journalist Brian Griffiths called, simply, “the ghouls” — like Roger Stone.
Their crudity, along with their cruelty, is the point.
In other words, Tuesday was just another day in the perverse MAGA universe. In this world, any event can be used to spread baseless smears, conspiracy theories, evidence-free attacks, fact-free speculation and lies. All while stoking suspicion, distrust and fear.
Meanwhile, the president of the United States was doing his job. “We’re going to stay with you as long as it takes,” he assured Maryland’s residents. The bridge will be rebuilt and the federal government will pay for it.
“We’re not leaving until this job gets done.”
Quite the contrast.”
Beyond the Republican Party doctrine of cruelty and racist division lies the shadow world of falsification and the Wilderness of Mirrors in the echo chamber of the Fourth Reich’s apologists, propagandists, and deniable assets of white supremacist terror, and while Biden and the forces of Liberty, Equality, Truth, Justice, and the American Way were sending massive disaster aid to Baltimore, the Party of Treason and its agents were busy whipping up obfuscation and trying to break the bonds of brotherhood which unite us.
As written by Tess Owen in The Guardian, in an article entitled Online conspiracy circles galvanize to proclaim Baltimore bridge collapse a ‘black swan event’; “Far-right commentators have declared Tuesday’s dramatic collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge a “black swan event”, a niche phrase that has recently captured the imaginations of “deep state” conspiracy theorists.
“Nothing is safe,” wrote “manosphere” influencer Andrew Tate on X, about six hours after a container ship collided with the bridge. “Black Swan Event imminent.”
“This is a BLACK SWAN event,” asserted Gen Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, on X. Others, including Benny Johnson, Laura Loomer and some verified QAnon-affiliated accounts, also latched on to the “black swan event” language, many claiming that the collapse was terrorism related.
“Looks deliberate to me. A cyber-attack is probable. WW3 has already started,” wrote Infowars’ Alex Jones on X.
Officials do not believe that the crash was terrorism-related or intentional; some theorized that the ship “lost propulsion”, causing it to veer off course.
As search-and-rescue teams continued looking for victims on Tuesday morning, “black swan event” trended on X, and Flynn appeared on Infowars to elaborate on his black swan theory.
The phrase “black swan event” was popularized in 2001 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese American statistician and essayist, to describe unforeseen happenings in the financial world with cascading consequences, such as the 2000 dotcom crash. He later extended his metaphor in the context of historical or significant national security events.
In recent months, conspiracy theorists have hijacked the concept and folded it into deep state narratives, which posit that a clandestine network of powerful individuals are secretly running the US government.
“Alex Jones has been talking about ‘engineered black swan events’ since at least 2021, and it’s been in overdrive since the beginning of the year,” said Mike Rothschild, conspiracy theory expert and author of Jewish Space Lasers.
Google Trends reflect growing interest in the phrase, showing several significant spikes in searches for “black swan event” since December.
Rothschild said that, according to conspiracy theorists, the deep state creates “black swan events” to distract the public from nefarious plots, such as disarming citizens en masse, stealing the election from Donald Trump, or enacting martial law. Essentially, black swan event in this context has been rendered meaningless, much like its better-known cousin, “the false flag”.
“If the deep state needs to do something to keep us distracted from something else, they toss out a black swan,” said Rothschild. “The black swan has become part of the cabal’s arsenal, used to advance their evil plan.”
Flynn started talking about black swan events last August, envisioning a scenario that “we don’t have an election in 2024” due to “some other black swan-type event”. He doubled down on this “prediction” earlier this month during an appearance on The Benny Show (hosted by rightwing commentator Benny Johnson).
“These people will decide, there’s no way they can win a legitimate, fair election so let’s not have one, so in order to not have one, how do they create the conditions that they don’t have one?” Flynn said. “They’re going to try and come up with things that are unknowable … they call them black swan events.”
Last week, former Republican congressman Ron Paul went on former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show and warned that Americans needed to prepare for some sort of black swan catastrophe – though he stopped short of claiming that the deep state would be behind such a catastrophe.
“I believe in the theory of the black swan. It’s going to pop up and it’s not going to be controllable,” Paul told Carlson. “You have to understand what’s happening, you have to know what’s coming, it’s very, very dangerous, and that’s why I love to see smaller units of government.”
Paul and Flynn’s comments galvanized online conspiracy circles. “Within the last 48 hours, both Ron Paul and General Flynn have warned of a coming ‘Black Swan event’,” wrote Jacob Creech, an influential figure in the QAnon community, on X. “The enemy will not roll over and allow Trump to win. They have something planned.”
The growing popularity of the black swan event concept among conspiracy theorists coincides with an uptick of the phrase’s usage in mainstream vernacular. Some security experts have name-checked it while discussing the possibility of a destabilizing national event creating additional turmoil during a contentious election year.
On CBS’s Face the Nation in December, veteran investigative reporter Catherine Herridge suggested that 2024 could see a black swan event, citing ongoing national security threat levels, conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, and continued polarization in the US. In January, Politico asked an array of experts, including technologists, historians and foreign policy analysts, to speculate on possible black swan events for the coming year.
Black swan event was just one conspiracy narrative that formed online on Tuesday. Fox host Maria Bartiromo tried to link the bridge collapse to “wide open borders”. A Republican candidate for Congress from Florida suggested that DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion hiring policies at the shipping company – was to blame.
On Wednesday, as wild speculation swirled online, officials continued to investigate possible failures that may have led to the collapse of the bridge, which Brandon M Scott, the mayor of Baltimore, has deemed “an unthinkable tragedy”. Pete Buttigieg, the US transportation secretary, said in a press conference Tuesday that the incident will have major impacts on supply chains and the road to rebuilding will be expensive and complex. Six people, all construction workers from Latin America, are feared dead.”
Once again we are confronted with an example of Benjamin Franklin’s principle of unity and the costs of division, which he demonstrated so ably with his bundle of arrows, paraphrasing the founder of the Iroquois Confederacy Tadadaho Canasetoga the Peacemaker, “One arrow can easily be broken; many arrows together are unbreakable”.
Henry V – Speech – Eve of Saint Crispin’s Day
The MAGA world’s bridge conspiracies highlight an incredibly dark reality:
Tuesday’s tragedy was just another horrifying day in the perverse MAGA universe
In Texas, as always America’s Heart of Darkness, a border law authorizing the arrest and abduction to Mexico of anyone suspected of not being a citizen has itself become a ground of liberation struggle. Court orders, legislative actions, and electoral politics have cohered into a point of ideological fracture and division in America, polarizing loyalties among our citizens as the groundwork for the 2024 Presidential election.
If we are to adapt and survive as a democracy, we must use solidarity of action and a humankind united as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights to discover new ways to better futures. If we cannot, the Restoration of America will fail, and we will once again be captives of the Fourth Reich.
Issues of identity, belonging, membership, and otherness coalesce in immigration policy as questions about what is human and who decides, have emerged as motive forces behind global fascism, nationalism, and tyranny, and will be primary among those which decide our future between Trump and Biden in our next election and between tyranny and liberty throughout the world for the next several centuries, with fear, power, and identities of race, gender, faith, and nationality as driving forces in ongoing question and change, as defined by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
If we can bring change now, we may escape enslavement later.
For many of us who came here fleeing a world on fire throughout our history, America was and shall always be the last chance of refuge, a shining dream of freedom, equality, truth, and justice floating on the clouds, an illusion which awaits the champions who will make it real.
America, is this the best we can do?
As written by in The Guardian, in an article entitled Texas troops clash with migrants over barbed-wire breach at US border; “A group of migrants clashed with Texas national guard troops over a breach of barbed wire fencing in El Paso on Thursday as they waited to turn themselves in to federal border agents – underscoring the power struggle between the state and federal government over immigration law enforcement.
Video posted on social media showed migrants dragging away a temporary concertina wire barrier which was installed as part of Texas governor Greg Abbott’s controversial Operation Lone Star publicly-funded state border security program.
Speaking to the El Paso Times, migrants said Texas national guard soldiers were forcefully pushing them back behind the fencing in US territory. In a caption accompanying a video of the border unrest, the Mexican journalist J Omar Ornelas wrote: “Hundreds of migrants were pushed south of the concertina wire in the middle of the night by Texas national guard. Hours later they again breached the concertina and made a rush for the border wall in El Paso, Texas.”
During the unrest, some migrants appeared to raise their hands in surrender while others ran to the federal border wall.
According to an official from the department of homeland security, between 400 and 600 migrants passed through the breached fencing, KERA news in North Texas reports.
In a statement released by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the federal agency said: “As of 3pm local time, all migrants from this group have been moved from the site. Additional personnel have been deployed to the scene, and the situation is under control. The US Border Patrol continues to monitor the situation and has increased patrols in the area.”
Following the incident, Abbott, who is currently engaged in a power struggle with the federal government over his claiming the state has the right to take immigration enforcement into its own hands, said in a post: “The TX National Guard and Department of Public Safety quickly regained control and are redoubling the razor wire barriers.”
He went on to add: “DPS is instructed to arrest every illegal immigrant involved for criminal trespass and destruction of property.”
Earlier this week, Texas was thrust into a state of confusion after an appeals court blocked a controversial new state law that would allow local police to arrest anyone they believe entered the US illegally – a jurisdiction typically granted to federal immigration authorities, not local police. The freeze came just hours after the US supreme court allowed the law to go into effect, while another appeal is heard.
The law, known as Senate Bill 4 (SB4), has prompted criticisms from the White House, with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre saying: “We fundamentally disagree with the supreme court’s order allowing Texas’s harmful and unconstitutional law to go into effect. SB4 will not only make communities in Texas less safe, it will also burden law enforcement and sow chaos and confusion at our southern border.”
It has also sparked anger from opponents in communities at the border.
With border problems becoming an increasingly contentious issue as the country prepares for the 2024 presidential elections, Abbott, a rightwing Republican, has come under fire over Operation Lone Star. In recent years, it has faced repeated federal scrutiny amid deadly buoys, allegations of migrant mistreatment by authorities and deaths of national guard soldiers.”
Security is an illusion, as I have often written, but it can also become an existential threat when fear of otherness is weaponized by the state as a casus belli in service to the centralization of power to carceral institutions of force and control as tyranny and terror, especially in the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison bond labor, in creating a vast migrant quasi-slave labor force which creates our national wealth but who do not share in it, and who as illegal immigrants without the rights of citizens are invisible and exploitable on a mass scale and without the protections of our laws, and the when police are used as authorized white supremacist terror, repression of dissent, and the enforcement of hierarchies of elite belong and exclusionary otherness.
This happened to America with the Patriot Act after 911, when the counterinsurgency model of policing and the militarization of police subverted and made monstrous many of our security and public safety services as forces of domestic occupation.
Security is really about who will do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us, and at what cost.
As written by Michael Gonzalez in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Havoc and harm’: prospect of migrant law sows fear in Texas border town: Residents and activists say no one is safe if law allowing police to arrest people for suspected illegal entry goes into effect; “At the Sweet Co coffee shop in downtown Brownsville, the last city at the eastern end of the Texas border before you reach the ocean and Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket base or cross into Mexico, the vibe was chill but the mood was chilly.
Customers were as downcast as the wet weather outside on Wednesday, the day of a court hearing after contrasting legal rulings were made about a new law that will affect people in Brownsville, whether new migrants, US citizens, undocumented residents or others.
Local drag queen and activist Kween Beatrix, also known as Joe Colon-Uvalles, happened to be there, out of drag and sipping coffee. The exuberance of her shows was absent, but her defiance against encroachments on civil and human rights was as present as ever.
“My role has been to inform other drag queens about this law. Oftentimes, these are not the things normal drag queens do, but that’s just part of my commitment to the community,” she told the Guardian.
“People are going to misinterpret this law because of the constant changes both at the police level and the community level. All it takes is one bad cop and one person within law enforcement to misinterpret the law to cause havoc and harm in communities,” she added.
The new state law, known as SB4, would allow local police and judges throughout Texas to arrest and deport anyone they suspect of entering the country illegally. Consequences could include jailing them or expelling them to Mexico, or both, no matter what country they originated from – much to the chagrin of, among others, the Mexican president.
SB4 is at the center of a constitutional power struggle between Texas and the federal government, with the state’s hard-right leaders claiming there is “an invasion” of migrants tantamount to putting the state on a war footing and vying to take the power to enforce immigration law – the jurisdiction of the federal government, which is battling to stop them.
The law was frozen by an appeals court late on Tuesday night, just hours after the US supreme court had decided it could come into force while the appeals process played out, having previously been blocked last month. The judge in the appeals hearing on Wednesday has yet to rule. As one Texas county judge pointed out, even legal experts are feeling “whiplash”.
Kween B, whose TikTok bio says: “Quirky dragtivist from the 956”, the area code for that part of the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) on the US-Mexico border, warned that if SB4 went ahead, no one was secure. She also lamented that when Joe Biden came to Brownsville last month, the US president only met politicians and senior law-enforcement officers, not community groups deeply involved in advocacy and aid services for migrants and asylum seekers, many of which oppose the expensive Operation Lone Star border security program of Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott.
Elsewhere in the city, Michelle Serrano, a local activist and co-director at Voces Unidas RGV, said that if SB4 goes into effect, she expects “a lot of civil rights violations”.
Migrants who have made their way to the southern border and crossed without authorization, hoping to turn themselves in to federal border patrol agents and enter the asylum system or bypass the authorities altogether will be vulnerable to arrest by local law enforcement, such as police, state troopers or Texas national guard troops. But so will any members of the public that law enforcement deems suspect.
“It’s very disordered lawmaking to focus on taking down community members. These are people who are providing resources to the rest of the community. To put them at risk and in a position where they don’t feel safe here any longer undermines the fabric of our society,” Serrano said.
She fears a “new reality” where locals are jailed and drained of their resources fighting a case even if they are citizens and especially if exercising their right to remain silent and request an attorney.
Whether and how to enforce the law, if it is given the green light again after an expected trip all the way back to the US supreme court, would involve choice. Some sheriffs and police departments are eager to take the power from the feds, others wary.
A Brownsville police department spokeswoman, Abril Luna, said that whether SB4 goes into effect or not, it would not change the department’s daily operations.
“It’s going to be enforced like any other Texas law, but at the end of the day, it comes down to officer discretion, just like an officer has the right to either give you a citation for a broken tail-light or let you off with a warning,” she told the Guardian.
Luna said the department would not create a special team designated for that specific type of enforcement.
Border patrol agents, under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security, are specially trained.
Jenn Budd, a former senior border patrol agent in California turned immigration and enforcement accountability activist, is concerned.
“I would want Texans to know, regardless of the color of their skin, that this allows their local peace officers and their state peace officers to pull you over when they haven’t even seen you commit, or suspect you have committed, a crime,” Budd said, using a common term for law enforcement officials.
“In immigration law, it is not upon me to prove that you’re guilty. It is upon you to prove that you are a citizen, which can take hours,” she added.
Budd said “due process is guaranteed to persons and people, not [just]citizens” and “when you label somebody as illegal, they technically have zero rights and that is actually not what our constitution states”.
She also fears that laws like SB4 offer a multitude of powers and questions whether they would open the door to police setting up checkpoints anywhere to ask people for their documents or even ask someone who appears pregnant if they are trying to leave the state for an abortion, amid a virtual state ban.
The majority of residents in the Rio Grande Valley along the US-Mexico border are Hispanic, many bilingual, some only speaking Spanish.
Examples of what can arise from racial profiling under the guise of a law like SB4 can be found in different instances around the US. In 2019, two American citizens from Texas and California were detained by a border patrol agent because they were speaking Spanish in the checkout line at a convenience store.
Back at the Sweet Co cafe as the rain continued to keep the downtown streets quiet on Wednesday, Kween Beatrix had a warning.
“Last year, Latinos became the majority in the state of Texas for the first time,” she said. “The fact that our elected officials in Texas don’t look like Latinos is a huge red flag. If you don’t think that this law is going to come for you, then you’re kidding yourself.”
What is to be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with diametrically opposite results, Gandhi’s nonviolent revolution which overthrew the British Empire in India and the Russian Revolution which totalized the entire aristocratic class? Of these two paths of revolutionary struggle, which will best liberate America from systems of oppression and enslavement by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege?
In the case of the Border Patrol and Homeland Security, for years I have argued that we must abolish such institutions of terror and replace them with those of true public safety, under a new mission of providing safe conduct to our shores to all, that borders of all kinds and throughout the world are an inherent evil, that we must abandon the social use of force for guarantorship of each other’s universal human rights, and that a moral and just form of citizenship would be by declaration and freely available to all humankind. Make a notarized sworn declaration of citizenship at any US Consulate and you are a citizen.
Like our goals of abolishing police and abandoning guns, there are many interim solutions which might help us toward our goals and lessen vast suffering immediately.
As written by Andrew Gawthorpe in May of last year in The Guardian, in an article entitled Republicans aren’t fixing the migrant border plight. In fact they’re making it worse: Republicans seem gleeful at the possibility of ‘chaos’ and ‘disaster’ – and their policies make the humanitarian crisis worse; “Last week saw the end of Title 42, the Trump-era border restriction which was technically introduced as a health measure during the coronavirus pandemic. The policy allowed the Trump and then Biden administrations to expel without due process the vast majority of people seeking asylum at the United States-Mexico border. Given that the acute phase of the pandemic has passed, the end of the policy – which has been used about 2.7m times – was inevitable.
But the end of Title 42 has also reignited the political firestorm over the US immigration and refugee system. Republicans have seemed to gleefully anticipate “chaos” and “disaster” at the border after the policy is lifted. Less biased observers are also concerned that the US refugee processing system will be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of people now expected to seek asylum. The Biden administration has come under fierce criticism from the left for a tough new policy of questionable legality which requires most refugees to seek asylum from abroad using a glitchy cellphone app called CBP One.
Not to be outdone, Republicans have responded to the situation by promising to return to the failed and cruel policies of the past. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has passed a bill which would order the resumption of Trump’s border wall and eviscerate the right to asylum for those who reach the US. Meanwhile, speaking at a CNN town hall last week, Trump defended his policy of family separation and indicated that he would consider reinstating it if he became president again.
All of these proposals show that even though there are many reasons to be concerned about the humanitarian situation at the southern border, Republicans have no solutions to it. Migration is driven by human suffering and the desire for a better and safer life, rooted in structural factors like the climate crisis, human rights violations and economic inequality. US government policies have some impact, but they’re not determinative. If people could be prevented from seeking asylum through angry posturing or cruel policies like family separation, then it’s hard to explain why 2019 – a year when Trump was president – saw the largest number of arrivals in 12 years.
What’s even worse is that the policies that Republicans want to pursue in other areas of life only make the structural factors underlying migration more severe. The party is opposed to serious efforts to tackle the climate crisis, and it cut foreign aid to Central America under Trump – in some cases actually as punishment for the arrival of migrants at the border. Furthermore, the weak US gun laws which Republicans back create an “iron river” of firearms flowing into Mexico and Central America, where 70% and 50% of guns used in crimes are traced back to the US.
The party also has a long history of promoting US military intervention in Latin America, which has caused instability and propped up the regimes that fuel the inequality and violence of today. Republicans are busy right now proposing that the US invade Mexico to take out its drug cartels, an action that would contribute to the country’s insecurity and undoubtedly fuel an increase in migration northwards.
If Republicans wanted to actually help deal with the refugee crisis, there are many things they could do. They could join with Democrats to properly fund the system of refugee centers, in which the number of detainees is already exceeding capacity, and immigration courts, where some refugees have been waiting more than a decade for a hearing. They could try to advance proposals to work constructively with the nations with which the United States shares a hemisphere to tackle common problems like the climate crisis, economic inequality and gun violence. And they could work to expand, rather than contract, legal pathways to citizenship and asylum.
The Biden administration is now working to do just that, announcing plans to set up immigration processing centers throughout Latin America, with the first to open in Guatemala and Colombia in the coming weeks. Eventually, the administration hopes to reduce the need for desperate people to arrive at the border by offering them an opportunity to apply for asylum from elsewhere. This should not only dial down the political heat at home, but much more importantly mean that would-be migrants don’t have to suffer the harrowing journey north, which for many ends in abuse or death.
But these plans can only be effective and sustainable over the long term with the cooperation of Republicans, both in Congress and in future administrations. For that to happen, the party would need to start seeing immigrants and refugees as fellow human beings in need of assistance rather than as enemies to be quashed. Only then can America really make progress in tackling this problem and escaping the cycle of cruelty in which it is currently trapped.”
Living Undocumented series trailer/Netflix
From Executive Producer Selena Gomez
Texas troops clash with migrants over barbed-wire breach at US border
28 de marzo de 2024 Armando la disparidad como trabajo esclavo y terrorismo supremacista blanco a través de la crueldad institucional y crímenes contra la humanidad: el caso de la Ley Fronteriza de Texas
En Texas, como siempre el Corazón de las Tinieblas de Estados Unidos, una ley fronteriza que autoriza el arresto y el secuestro a México de cualquier persona sospechosa de no ser ciudadano se ha convertido en sí misma en un terreno de lucha por la liberación. Las órdenes judiciales, las acciones legislativas y la política electoral se han unido en un punto de fractura ideológica y división en Estados Unidos, polarizando las lealtades entre nuestros ciudadanos como base para las elecciones presidenciales de 2024.
Si queremos adaptarnos y sobrevivir como democracia, debemos utilizar la solidaridad de acción y una humanidad unida como garantes de los derechos humanos universales de cada uno para descubrir nuevas formas de mejorar el futuro. Si no podemos, la Restauración de Estados Unidos fracasará y una vez más seremos cautivos del Cuarto Reich.
Las cuestiones de identidad, pertenencia, membresía y alteridad se fusionan en la política de inmigración a medida que las preguntas sobre qué es humano y quién decide, han surgido como fuerzas motrices detrás del fascismo, el nacionalismo y la tiranía globales, y serán las principales entre las que deciden nuestro futuro entre Trump y Trump. y Biden en nuestras próximas elecciones y entre la tiranía y la libertad en todo el mundo durante los próximos siglos, con el miedo, el poder y las identidades de raza, género, fe y nacionalidad como fuerzas impulsoras del cuestionamiento y el cambio continuos, tal como lo definen los fascismos de sangre, fe y tierra.
Si podemos generar cambios ahora, es posible que escapemos de la esclavitud en el futuro.
La seguridad es una ilusión, como he escrito a menudo, pero también puede convertirse en una amenaza existencial cuando el Estado convierte el miedo a la alteridad en un arma como un casus belli al servicio de la centralización del poder en instituciones carcelarias de fuerza y control como tiranía y terror. , especialmente en la nueva esclavización de los ciudadanos negros como trabajadores en régimen de servidumbre en prisión, en la creación de una vasta fuerza laboral migrante cuasi-esclava que crea nuestra riqueza nacional pero que no comparte ella, y que como inmigrantes ilegales sin los derechos de los ciudadanos son invisibles. y explotable a escala masiva y sin la protección de nuestras leyes, y cuando la policía se utiliza como terror supremacista blanco autorizado, represión de la disidencia y aplicación de jerarquías de pertenencia a la élite y alteridad excluyente.
Esto le sucedió a Estados Unidos con la Ley Patriota después del 11 de septiembre, cuando el modelo policial contrainsurgente y la militarización de la policía subvirtieron y convirtieron en monstruosos muchos de nuestros servicios de seguridad y protección pública como fuerzas de ocupación interna.
La seguridad realmente se trata de quién hará el trabajo duro y sucio por el resto de nosotros, y a qué costo.
Para muchos de nosotros que llegamos aquí huyendo de un mundo en llamas a lo largo de nuestra historia, Estados Unidos fue y será siempre la última oportunidad de refugio, un sueño brillante de libertad, igualdad, verdad y justicia flotando en las nubes, una ilusión que aguarda al campeones que lo harán realidad.
Estados Unidos, ¿es esto lo mejor que podemos hacer?
On Immigration, a retrospective of my writing in Torch of Liberty
December 18 2023 International Migrants Day: “There Is No Migration Crisis; There Is a Crisis of Solidarity”
September 4 2019 lies and secret power: the link between the white replacement conspiracy theory that motivates racist terror, America’s immigration crisis, and the exodus of former Nazis from the fall of the French colony of Algeria
On this day which commemorates the resistance of the peoples of Burma to the Japanese Occupation during World War Two, while the military junta which has seized the nation as a vassal state of the Chinese Communist Party, much like that of Pol Pot and other tyrants of genocide and war crimes, instrumentalizes the occasion to glorify itself while changing its meaning in service to its own authority as a carceral state of force and control, the peoples it has enslaved rise up in resistance and reclaim its original meaning.
The world’s tenth largest military has failed utterly to consolidate power and repress dissent, despite massive brutal and genocidal war crimes. In the four days before the annual Resistance Day, renamed by the regime as Armed Forces Day, the actual Resistance emerged victorious in battles across the nation.
There is a calculus of fear by which tyrannies seize power or fall; while a little may enforce order and obedience for a time, fear beyond hope of survival and horror beyond the limits of the human creates resistance. Those who would enslave us should have learned the hollowness of power and the Newtonian recursion of the use of force from the example of Nanking.
Politics is about fear as the basis of human exchange, as my father once told me, as a ten year old boy who in reaction to the insult of someone putting a piece of bubble gum on my chair at school mixed up everything with a skull and crossbones on the bottle from my chemistry set during recess and poured it down the spigot of the classroom drinking faucet in revenge. When several boys ran outside to throw up, I was horrified because I realized I could have killed everyone, and I told my father the story that night. He said; “You have discovered politics. Politics is the art of fear. Fear is a terrible master and a dangerous and untrustworthy servant; the question is, whose servant will it be?”
As the principle by which I have lived since it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in Beirut 1982 goes; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
So may we find the will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. In Burma, to use her pre-regime name, a whole nation has found such a will, a nation forged under the terrible hammer of tyranny and state terror, but one which begins to emerge from the legacies of its history as a free society of equals united in diversity and solidarity.
May we dream better futures than we have the past.
As I wrote in my post of March 28 2022, Tyranny Throws Itself a Party, But No One Comes To the Ball: Burma/Myanmar; Tyranny throws itself a party in Burma, but no one comes to the ball. Nor am I surprised, for the fascist military junta that has imprisoned a nation, plunders the public wealth in partnership with criminal syndicates protected under the patronage of the Chinese Communist Party, and attempts to annihilate all differences of ethnicity and faith in campaigns of genocide against tribal peoples; the apex predators of Myanmar and I know each other well.
Over thirty years ago now we first met in battle, the circumstances of which I shall once again recount here; I have been thinking of this today, as I go about my work making mischief for tyrants and those who would enslave us in the tunnels beneath Mariupol. If I must be a tunnel rat, I remain a rat who comes back no matter how many times you try to flush him.
The Mayor of Mariupol has today ordered the total evacuation of the city, as it is in enemy hands; I however am in no one’s chain of command, recognize no authority, and obey no orders as things beneath my contempt. I shall fight on, when and where and in the manner I choose, and I will bet my refusal to submit against any force of subjugation.
It’s always worked for me before; thank you for that Jean Genet, who set me on my life’s path in 1982 Beirut, with the Oath of the Resistance; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows”, and the strategic principle by which I have lived for nearly forty years; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
As my intermittent and questionable satellite link permits, news of the junta’s celebration and of Min Aung Hlaing’s declaration of his regime’s intent to “annihilate them to (the) end” regarding his brutal repression of the tribal peoples and the democracy movement now united in the liberation of Burma, has captivated my attention because the moment the world now faces in Ukraine parallels that of Burma. Sadly, there is nothing unique in this.
The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is portrayed to the world as an anomaly, a vast crime against humanity of racist and sectarian hate which happened in 2017 and is unrelated to Myanmar’s current apartheid ethnic and religious policies. But this is a lie.
Here is how I came by accident to be fighting with indigenous peoples in the Shan States of northern Burma against a campaign of slave raiding and genocide by the Burmese government; I awoke on the veranda of my stilt house one morning to what was later tallied as eight hundred rounds of one hundred millimeter Russian mortar fire, and mounted my elephant to escape, who panicked and went the wrong way, uphill to the enemy positions on the reverse side of the ridge. I was yelling “Run away!” when one of the Karen tribesmen handed me a spear as I rode past and shouted in S’gaw; “The American is charging the enemy! Take the mortars! Charge!” and we became more than a dozen elephants leading a human wave assault.
After participating in a cavalry charge on the back of an elephant carrying a spear and our capture of the mortars, I discovered we were behind the lines of the advancing Myanmar Army in one of their annual campaigns of slave raiding and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous tribes including those with whom I had been living; exactly where I belong and prefer to be if there is no escape from conflict, and ideally positioned to disrupt their advance. To run amok and make mischief in the enemy’s rear area of operations is a special joy, and an opportunity not to be wasted.
The policy of genocide and its periodic campaigns of death and fear have been part of the fascist tyranny of the Burmese state since the liberation from Japan, one designed to provide a pretext for military rule through the creation of a national identity of religious and racial purity. The junta’s partner in this is the same Buddhist nationalist organization which also co-rules Sri Lanka, and this wedding of military and theocratic monastic rule in the cause of nationalism and ethnic purity is crucial to the strategy of power of modern fascism as it now encircles the globe. In the case of the Karen, a Christian ethnic minority and former British allies, as with the Islamic Rohingya who immigrated from India, all three fascist boxes of exclusionary otherness are checked; blood, faith, and nationality.
Its possible this bears the force and authority of tradition, and has for centuries been a key strategy of state power in Burma as it has to a degree in virtually all human civilizations. As George Washington once said; “Government is about force; only force.”
Fear, power, force; it is a universal circle of dehumanization and subjugation by authoritarian elites. So pervasive and endemic is the Ring of Power that it seems a human constant.
But it need not be so. From all that I have seen and all that I have learned, from all that I am and for all that we may become, I tell you this one true thing; our addiction to and captivity by the Ring of Power is not a flaw of our natural condition or of an evil impulse, but a sum of our history and of choices we have made over time about how to be human together.
As Wagner illustrates with his great theme of renunciation of wealth and power and abandonment of force in Der Ring des Nibelungen, only those who foreswear love can seize dominion over others. This principle has a negative space which is also true; love can liberate us from systems of oppression and redeem the flaws of our humanity, beauty can balance the brokenness of the world, hope can empower us to emerge victorious against overwhelming force, and faith can answer the terror of our nothingness.
I hope that one day humankind will discover that such things as love, compassion, mercy, loyalty, trust, and faith in one another are not weaknesses but strengths, and awaken to the beauty of our diversity and the necessity of our interdependence.
As I wrote in my post of February 1 2022, Anniversary of the Military Coup in Myanmar; A Day of Silence and national strike made silent the cities of Burma today, in the face of threats of death and arrest by the regime of tyranny and state terror which has captured the state for a year now, after a morning of mass protests and defiant marches, and while these performances of liberty and guerrilla street theatre valorized resistance and democracy and unified the peoples of Burma in solidarity against those who would enslave them, liberation forces took the fight to the enemy in direct actions against police and military targets as demonstrations of the powerlessness of carceral states of force and control against a people not divided by sectarian and ethnic hierarchies of otherness and belonging or driven in to submission by learned helplessness and brutal repression, but united in the cause of liberty and refusal to submit.
Last night the enforcers of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the beneficiaries of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil could sleep secure from the will of the people and the reckoning of their victims, confronted by a protest movement of limited political goals and no true threats to the cabal of monarchists, oligarchs, and militarists which have ruled Burma since the fall of the colonial empire of Britain in 1948; today they awake to a new day in which all of this has changed forever, for the Revolution has come to Burma.
Democracy fell one year ago in Myanmar to a military coup by tyrants of brutal repression and theft of citizenship and perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing in an ongoing campaign against ethnic and religious minorities, often tribal peoples living in areas the junta wishes to plunder of natural resources.
Here is a litany of woes repeated endlessly throughout history and the world, of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the inquisitions and holocausts of those whom divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite belonging dehumanize as monsters to be cast out.
Gathering forces of change have swept the nation this last year, mobilizing not only tribal armies of the Chin, Karen, Shan, Arakan, and other peoples but also mass protests in every major city organized by the Civil Disobedience Movement, national strikes- especially that of hospitals and doctors, a boycott of the military, the emergence of a National Unity Government, pressure from both Catholic and Buddhist organizations, actions of international solidarity by President Biden and Pope Francis, and the resurgence of the Communist Party of Burma’s People’s Liberation Army after thirty years.
This in resistance to state terror and tyranny, in which about 12,000 democracy activists have been arrested and about 1400 killed by the military and police since the coup, and a campaign of ethnic cleansing which in 2021 alone created 400,000 refugees and killed several thousand. We have seen death and state terror on this scale in Burma during the Rohingya Genocide in 2017, which in a few months killed 25,000 and drove a million refugees to Bangladesh and another million to North Africa.
But the use of social force obeys the Third Law of Motion, and for every act of oppression there are equal and opposite forces of resistance.
A regional democracy movement, the Milk Tea Alliance, has emerged to unify action in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Burma, and has now become a global liberation movement in the Philippine Islands, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, with important networks and organizations in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and allied movements in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Iran.
The three finger salute from The Hunger Games adopted by the Thai democracy revolution in 2014 was embraced a year ago in Burma, and one week after the coup was seen among the mass protests in Yangon. As the Thai democracy leader Sirawith Seritiwat described it in The Guardian; “We knew that it would be easily understood to represent concepts of freedom, equality, solidarity.”
This is what we must offer the peoples of Burma now, and wherever men hunger to be free, all those throughout the world whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and to whom our Statue of Liberty offers a beacon of hope to the world with the words of a poem written by a Jewish girl, Emma Lazarus, in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes;
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Freedom, Equality, Solidarity; let us reclaim America as a guarantor of liberty and redeem our promise to the world and to the future of humankind.
The Hunger Games Salute of the Revolution
Myanmar Civil War: What Will Be Left When The War Is Over? | Insight | Full Episode” on YouTube
‘Fighting spirit’: How Myanmar’s armed resistance is taking new ground | Conflict News | Al Jazeera
Joy explodes in puffs of colored powder and the exaltation of rainbow delights, masses of human bodies dance and writhe like a vast colony organism or the murmuration of birds ascending to the heavens, as the Festival of Holi unfolds across the Hindu diaspora in psychedelic surrealism and ecstatic trance.
Herein a festival of love and ecstasy emerges from a more ancient one of spring and fertility, embedded in a historical psychodrama and mythic narrative of Krishna and Radha, who share the same blue skin through exaltation and the magic of his marking her with colored powder, a ritual of transformation enacted during this wild street party of colors cast upon the winds.
Wary as I am of institutions of faith as enforcers of authorized truths, especially those which field armies, Krishna is just love without boundaries, and explicitly transgressive love as the gods are blind to whatever we do during this liminal amok time. In a society bound with laws still rooted in divisions of caste and hierarchies of virtue as karmic action, Holi is the free pass festival, wherein Nothing Is Forbidden.
Let us embrace those truths written in our flesh and love which liberates us from the limits of our form.
As I wrote in my post of March 19 2022, On the Conjunction of the Hindu Festival of Triumph Over Evil Holi and the Islamic Festival of Atonement and Liberation From Sin Shab-e-Barat; Tonight a strange conjunction of the heavens unites Islamic and Hindu peoples, and in this we rejoice for it is a sign of hope for our common future.
Shab-e-Barat, which means “night of innocence” though shab also means luck, and signposts the belief that on this night the Infinite decides the life, death, wealth, health, and future for the coming year of our lives, a liminal time of absolution and atonement, deliverance and salvation in the liberation from sin.
Holi, a celebration of the triumph over evil through the sacrifice of oneself, and also a festival of the divine madness of love.
Both are spring festivals; which begin as the first crocuses bloom here at Dollhouse Park, and the unfolding of the earth’s renewal begins again; soon tulips will follow, the cherry trees will blossom, and the rose gardens emerge from winter.
This on the first day of the end of the mask mandate, with the stores full of people again; as the world’s first state Quarantine imposed by the Republic of Venice lasted from 1423 to 1797 when Napoleon conquered it, we have been lucky. But also as the world slides with glacial slowness and inevitability into a Third World War which will bring either the nuclear extinction of humankind or centuries of war and an age of tyrants in which all books now written, all music composed, all films created, all that our civilization has achieved and all that we have dreamed and done, all human meaning and value we now possess, will become ashes and be lost.
From this fate we have created and damned ourselves to I can see no possible escape; but none of us can contain all possibilities of becoming human, nor comprehend the Infinite. Here is my first principle of epistemology, the Conservation of Ignorance, a primary insight of my time as a graduate student historically developed from the thought experiment of the Spear of Archytus, who asked the question; “What happens to a spear when it is hurled across the outer boundary of the universe? Does the spear rebound, or vanish from this world?”, then by Nicholas of Cusa, and finally by Kurt Godel whose work is brilliantly interrogated in Rudy Rucker’s book Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite.
And yet our calendrical reckoning of our place in the universe has aligned these two festivals of hope and renewal by happy chance, and reminds us that to live as a human being is to practice the art of the impossible.
So to you all I say Shab-e-Barat Mubarak, and Holi ki shubhkamnayein; as a reminder to us all of the power of poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and of the redemptive power of love. As Jean Genet taught me during our Last Stand while we were about to be burned alive; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
Let us practice the art of the impossible, wherever we may be, as living Autonomous Zones.
As I wrote in my post of January 28 2022, I Sing of Madness, Vision, and Love: Lewis Carroll, on his birthday January 27, which I celebrate on the 28th because the 27th is also Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Liberation of Auschwitz, and the 26th is Australia’s Indigenous Mourning Day, and I need something wonderful to balance the darkness; I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; this is possibly a confession of faith, though if asked directly I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation.
Without question and absolutely it is a declaration of allegiance to poetic vision and to poetic and metaphorical truth, as identity and the terms of struggle for its ownership; for after language itself the ideas by which we organize ourselves are our most fundamental ground of being.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Poetic vision and truth allow us to escape the limits of our form and the flags of our skin; to create ourselves anew as a primary human act and the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human.
To Lewis Carroll, Surrealist and philosopher of poetic vision, we are indebted for his primary insight which reconciles the transcendent truth of Keats and Romantic Idealism as developments of the western mystery tradition from Plato with the immanent truths written in our flesh.
His great book Alice in Wonderland, like Mozart’s Magic Flute, encodes this mystery tradition, for which his primary sources are Plato, the Biblical Book of John the Evangelist which forges a faith of the Logos, and Coleridge’s Primary Imagination; but he also attempted to write a Summa Theologiae which can unfold itself within the mind of its readers as transformation and transcendence.
Dense with word games of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety and mathematical-philosophical puzzles which are satirical metacommentary on the great thinkers of his time, Alice in Wonderland is intended to transmit the whole of a classical education, but is also a Socratic dialog which questions the premises of our civilization. Few such total reimaginations have ever been attempted.
I discovered Wonderland through the brilliant work of the mathematician Martin Gardner, which has been updated as The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, when as a sophomore in high school I joined a reading group at the local university, carried along in the wake of my best friend, four years older than myself and a former Forensics student of my father, Doc (given name Brad) Hannink.
This occurred during my teenage James Joyce-Ludwig Wittgenstein fandom and immersion in medieval magic, both related to a love of languages, logic, and math as hidden systems of meaning. These enthusiasms of my youth foundered before my senior year of high school on my failure to learn Kabbalah, as I discovered it is written not in Hebrew which I was attempting to teach myself but in Aramaic and Andalusi Romance.
But as a fifteen year old steeped in the iconography of Surrealist film and the esotericism of Finnegan’s Wake and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, I loved that Alice always questioned authority and regarded her as an anarchist hero and a figure of Socrates, and this remains the primary meaning of the work for me. Alice enacts parrhesia, what Foucault called truth telling, and I saw in her someone I wished to become.
As I wrote in my post of January 8 2022, Let Us Bring A Reckoning; Politics is the art of fear as the basis of exchange and the origin of authority and unequal power as systemic evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as balanced with the desire to belong, but it is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Washington did in crossing the Delaware to create America and as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
Here follows some things I have written for Mad Hatter Day, which I celebrate as a three day Orphic vision quest which begins the month of Halloween.
As I wrote in my post of October 7 2021, Love as a Divine Madness: a Celebration of Mad Hatter Day; We celebrate the beginning of the Halloween season, wherein we let our demons out to play, a time of masquerades, the performance of secret identities, violations of normality and transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, reversals of order, the embrace of our monstrosity, of the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, and the pursuit of new truths through ecstatic trance and poetic vision, with our new national holiday of amok time, Mad Hatter Day.
The Mad Hatter acts as a psychopomp or guide of the soul in Alice in Wonderland, and Alice is a Holy Fool like Parsifal, but he and Alice are also figures of a single whole person and the story one of hierosgamos or heavenly marriage; like Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, a myth into which Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes cast themselves so disastrously.
Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast interrogates this myth of idealizations of authorized masculinity and femininity as Freudian horror and Sadeian transgression. But it is also a primary myth of reimagination and transformation which signposts the inherent fluidity of identities of sex and gender.
What does love do? Love sublimes us into a unitary being, erases our limits as individuals defined by our form and liberates us from the event horizon of our flesh.
Love also reveals to us our true selves; a lover has the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves. To love is to transform others by the power of our vision to see who they truly are and set them free.
A lover is both a Pythian seer of truths who like Michelangelo can free us as images captive within the stone of our bodies and our material and social context, who in naming us like Adam naming the beasts defines our truth, and an inverted figure of Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze and transforms it into the power to see others true selves and release them to be free, and to mutually assimilate the qualities of the other and transform them both.
Love is a divine madness which defiles and exalts, reveals truths and confers authenticity, and the redemptive power of love can make glorious and beautiful the flaws of our humanity and bring healing to the brokenness of the world and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
What is to be done? Alice Slays the Jabberwocky:
Jefferson Airplane – Go ask Alice
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition
(Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland #1-2), by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner (Introduction and notes), John Tenniel (Illustrator)
On this night of the Worm Moon, sacred to serpents and dragons, especially those of water as turbulent systems of primal chaos from which all things are born and arise, we rejoice and celebrate death and chaos in their positive forms as regeneration and metamorphosis, rebirth and transformation, as the Conqueror Worm liberates us from the limits of our form.
Of the destabilization and destruction of order, law, and authority as revolutionary struggle and seizures of power I have written often and will again, for the songs of liberty are sung throughout all of history and the world and among all humankind; herein I wish to say to my comrades now dying in such struggles without number or simply of being human and the limits of our flesh as an imposed condition of struggle, there is nothing to fear in being destroyed and recreated, for death is nothing but freedom from the limits of our form.
As I said to my mother when I awakened in her arms at the age of nine from being cast out of my body by the force wave of a police grenade at Bloody Thursday 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley, and a moment of awareness beyond time wherein I contained myriads of possible futures, Most Sincerely Dead and then returned to the sideral universe for reasons I can not understand; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing, nothing but awakening from an illusion.”
So many echoes and reflections of that moment of illumination and Awakening under the light of the Worm Moon now fill my thoughts, seize and shake me with wonder and terror as Rudolph Otto described immersion in the Infinite, of stories which take form in us and unfold as motivating, informing, and shaping sources; Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, Beowulf, and Poe’s The Conqueror Worm, which together form a manual of Rituals of the Worm.
This is also the night of the Hindu fire festival of dancing and ecstatic trance which precedes Holi, Holika Dahan which like the Festival of the Worm Moon celebrates transformation and rebirth, and curiously in India also the triumph of good over evil in the cannibalistic eating of a wicked king by a hero were-lion, which resonates with the diasporic cult of the Rakshasa demons whose role as a warrior brotherhood is to punish transgression by the mighty beyond the reach of the law, a form of revolution as justice which I call bringing a Reckoning.
First among my intertexts and references here is Poe’s beautiful allegory of death as liberation from a fallen world of madness, sin, and horror. Here human history is a theatrical performance for utterly alien and cruel tyrant gods whose designs for us must be resisted, a poem which founded the Absurdist-Surrealist universe within which H.P. Lovecraft lives, and the Worm a heroic liberator.
The Conqueror Worm
by Edgar Allan Poe
Lo! ’t is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly—
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Wo!
That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Out—out are the lights—out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
Here is the Project Gutenberg archive of Beowulf. As Jean Genet said to me in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival; “When there is no hope, one may do impossible things, glorious things.”
And last of three parts of this liturgical assemblage of texts, is Carroll’s glorious Jabberwocky, in which the hero takes the place of the Conqueror Worm as a liberator in a battle with his shadow as a dragon which must be embraced and subsumed, completing the exchange of qualities and transpositions of symbols and metaphors which occur throughout Beowulf as a manual of shapechanging magic.
Jabberwocky
by Lewis Carroll
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
On the reverse face of this time of spring and rebirth with its many rituals from the vernal equinox to the Worm Moon to Easter, I have written in my post of June 1 2021, Death is a Secret Twin; Death is a secret twin which shares our face but not our dreams which lift and exalt us beyond the limits of our flesh, so Death must steal the echoes and reflections of ours, a thing of shadows filled with secret histories, unspoken truths, unsworn oaths, thousands of myriads of loyalties to private loves and desires betrayed by our failures to make them live and become real by action.
Death is the terror of all that we may have been but did not become, the loss of our disconnectedness and the emptiness of meaning in a world where love cannot redeem us, the grief for beauty which loses context when it is no longer shared and is lost with the fragments of memories which like the genie of perfume escape their bottle to trigger moments out of time and then evanesce like the ghost of a beloved hand which no longer grasps ours back.
We are tattered and broken things, our secret shadows and ourselves, who live in the incandescent now with these repositories of our beautiful dreams and our terrible nightmares, bearing them on into eternity; for this is the great secret of being, that our best selves are formed of all we would deny and keep hidden, and which live beyond us as figures of our glorious sins.
Death is an ambush predator made of our histories, memories, and identities, which must steal these things to become real in the moment of our awakening into its realm of beautiful and terrible dreams, a realm of true being beyond the illusions of our lives which bears names including the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism and the alam al mythal in Islam, called by Coleridge the Primary Imagination, the Logos in neo-Platonic philosophy and the Gospel of John, and by Jung the Collective Unconscious, and waits to seize us unawares and carry us off to eternity while it replaces us like a faery changeling with the image of our unrealized hopes and unexpressed desires.
Death is a unique and personal demon created by our denial of ourselves, such denial acting as a parasite which destroys its host and operates through a process of falsification like the distorted and captured images in a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, but it can become instead a symbiote, a terrible and monstrous guardian spirit and a guide of the soul which speaks from within our greatest darkness with Forbidden wisdom, like a remora borne by a shark on its journeys through chasms of the unknown not as its nemesis and conqueror but as a servant which grooms from us that which we must cast down from the thrones of our hearts; we humans and our silent and unseen partners the angels of our deaths whom we must wrestle not for victory, for everything in life is more powerful than we are, but to become Unconquered in resistance and free.
Thus may we bear without breaking the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, become greater and more real and alive than we were born, transcend the limits of our form, and become sublimed as figures of our truths in Sartrean total freedom and authenticity as an art of life, for all true art defiles and exalts.
Here is a faith which asks us to renounce nothing and embrace our true selves, to reimagine and transform ourselves; and offers a path of working with grief process and death transcendence not of control of our passions and dominion of nature, but as seizure of power and autonomy, of the embrace and celebration of our wildness as beings of nature and of those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
Let us embrace our monstrosity and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
How shall we answer death and the terror of our nothingness? Let us challenge and defy such death, and while it waits to claim us with its cold hand of entropy and unraveled time we must seize and shake our shadow and secret twin of longing to become, transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and perform our best selves, our hopes and our desires, as a guerilla theatre of identities upon the stage of the world in fearless grandeur, and let nothing be lost or remain untested among the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us answer death as Bringers of Chaos and Transformation, and make of our world and humankind a thing of beautiful, terrible truths written in our flesh, and of our dreams and nightmares a brave new world.
As I wrote in reflection on my mother’s death, now years ago; Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
As wrote in my post of As I wrote in my post of May 28 2023, The True and False Crows: a Fable; A crow confronts his image in a pool of water, and as Nietzsche warned the darkness looks back. Of this I have written a paragraph on the Nietzschean idea of the Abyss, and of tragedy as failure to embrace our monstrosity and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh; the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
As Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil goes.; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
It is also an origin of evil as the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; written in the tyrannies and systems of unequal power which hold humankind in their iron grip of force and control as Kristevan abjection and learned helplessness, and the ecological catastrophe which threatens our species extinction as disconnection from nature, control of nature as capitalist exploitation of resources and theft of the commons, carceral states of force and control as embodied violence, and our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the Wilderness of Mirrors.
All of this requires the renouncement of love, as Wagner’s figure of tyranny Alberich the Dwarf must do to seize the Ring of power and dominion, a story more familiar to us as Tolkien’s retelling of the Nibelungenlied in his trilogy of novels which recast World War Two as an allegory of the abandonment of addiction to power. This has a corollary; the redemptive power of love, like the power of poetic vision to reimagine and transform ourselves, can free us from the Ring of Power and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Jean Genet in Miracle of the Rose; “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”
Here follows the paragraph of my thoughts on seeing this image, which if considered as a poem I now think of as the True and False Crows: a fable.
Who is this imposter? If he is me, where now am I? Avaunt, my nemesis, for I shall pursue retribution for this theft of myself beyond all wrath now remembered, through death and hell and the terrors of our nightmares. Come and let us grapple for the truth of ourselves in this place where angels fear, and end not in silence but in exaltation and fire, with roars of defiance hurled against the chasms of our nothingness, supernal and magnificent as the Morningstar, and illuminate for all humankind the path of escape from this prison of illusions and lies.
To this my sister replied, Such poetry!
This is as direct as I can be, o my sister. Should I merit some kind of monument one day, an absurd fantasy as I mean nothing to history and will vanish from the world without a trace, and nothing to anyone beyond yourself as the remnants of family, Dolly as my partner, and those few friends and allies who know my true identity, inscribe this therein.
I have tried to salvage something of our humanity and to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world these past forty years since I was sworn to the oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet, and often failed, but this is not what is important.
What is important is to refuse to submit.
And one thing more; to act with solidarity in revolutionary struggle. As the Oath of the Resistance created in Paris 1940 by Jean Genet from the oath of the Foreign Legion in which he once served, and given to me in Beirut 1982 in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and which I offer to all of you as a tradition to bear forward into the future; “We swear ourselves to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
In this my chosen life mission I have held true, for if each and every one of us stands in solidarity with others regardless of how different they may be from ourselves, we will become liberators and guarantors of each other’s uniqueness, and in refusal to submit will be victorious and free.
He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, the Oath of the Resistance, but I often think of this in terms of a definition of the beauty of human beings; to become Unconquered and free as self created beings in refusal to submit to authority and its instruments of violence, force and control, and the repression of dissent, to refuse our dehumanization and the theft of our souls and autonomy and to do all of this in solidarity and absolute loyalty to each other.
As he once said to me; “Is this not the beauty of men, to resist and never yield, to cede nothing to the enemy, not love nor hope, not our history nor the chance for a future of our own choosing, neither our monstrosity nor our grandeur, nothing of our humanity nor of any human being whose life is in our power to harm or help, to live beyond all limits and all laws and to risk everything to do this for each other?”
I dream of a future something like the future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations; the idea first put forth in the episode Is There In Truth No Beauty?, described in the first issue of the fanzine Inside Star Trek as; “that beauty, growth, progress — all result from the union of the unlike. Concord, as much as discord, requires the presence of at least two different notes. The brotherhood of man is an ideal based on learning to delight in our essential differences, as well as learning to recognize our similarities.” As stated in the episode The Savage Curtain; “I am pleased to see that we have differences. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us.”
Liberty as freedom from authorized identities and truths, and equality and its corollary solidarity; these are the personal and social preconditions of democracy as a free society of equals.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did last spring in Mariupol and in the year of the fall of Afghanistan, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must embrace our darkness and claim our truths, and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Love is crucial both to poetic vision and as solidarity in action as processes of self-construal and becoming human; Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling; plus it contains a marvelous re-enactment of the myth of Persephone.
Let us always take the risks of our humanity, and place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
My friends, please feel free to perform and enact this spell with me; A Hymn to Chaos and Transgression:
I invoke Chaos, freedom, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human against Order, Authority, and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
I perform acts of transgression by which to break the chains of law and illusion woven by those who would enslave us, to seize our power and our autonomy from hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege, from authorized identities and divisions of exclusionary otherness, to create myself in the image of my own imagination and no other, and to shape human being, meaning, and value to the forms of my desires.
In this time of the turning of the tides I refuse and resist subjugation by force and control, I become Unconquered and free, I run amok and am ungovernable, and to Authority I reply with the Four Sacred Acts in pursuit of Liberty and Truth; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
By these invocations of Chaos and Transgression (Herein be free to make wishes, and to consecrate acts of defiance of tyranny, disruptions and subversions of good order and discipline, violations of normality, seizures of power, and celebrations of autonomy and living beyond all limits in the glorious embrace of our monstrosity, of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves) I curse all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, patriarchy, state terror and tyranny, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and inequalities of power.
On this night of the renewal of the world in which the old order is consumed in fire and the spirit world moves among us and is unified with our own in its reimagination and transformation, I name to my brothers and sisters of Chaos these enemies of humankind as rightful prey; first, upon all tyrants and their forces of repression of dissent and enforcement of the Law, for order appropriates, law serves power, and there is no just authority; second upon Donald Trump (herein please feel free to name tyrants whom you oppose and seek to cast down from their thrones; mine include Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and many others) and all who serve and support him and the cause of fascism, and all those who in voting for him in the Presidential election of November 3 2020 have signed the confession of their treason and allegiance to white supremacist terror, theocratic- patriarchal sexual terror, and to the tyranny and terror of a police state.
So upon Trump, his puppetmaster Vladimir Putin, and all who claim him as their own do I place my curse and invoke ruin upon their fortunes and their lives and destruction upon their cause. May they be forgotten and become nothing.
This I balance with equal blessing, protection, and good luck upon the lives, fortunes, and causes of liberty and equality upon all who are powerless and dispossessed, marginalized by exclusionary otherness, falsified, commodified, dehumanized, silenced and erased, and those who place their lives in the balance with them in solidarity as champions and bearers of the Torch of Liberty and a free society of equals.
Tonight our wildness will eat the moon and set it free.
Final Thoughts
Bury me at sea, for I belong to no nation but to the world
Send me out in flames, for this is how I have lived
Not silent but incandescent in the night
An agent of change and illumination, like fire itself
Argentina’s new President Javier Milei has begun the rewriting of history, the whitewashing of the crimes against humanity of his brutal and depraved role model during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, and the erasure of its victims.
Like all fascist tyrants, Milei attempts to capture us in a killing jar of echoes and reflections, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use former CIA Chief of Counter Intelligence Angleton’s iconic metaphor of falsification through propaganda and thought control.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I disambiguate in comparison with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, racism, and capitalism, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was also true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
The Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat uses the phrase, in a story about the creation of a fictitious officer bearing documents designed to trick the Nazis into preparing for the invasion of Europe somewhere other than Sicily, a series I watched with rapt attention because each of us is created by our stories exactly like this false identity attached to the body of a derelict. Within each of us, a team of authors create our personae through stories, a network of memories, histories, and identity; and they do so for their own purposes, which we do not always understand.
As T. S. Eliot has written in Gerontin, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities”
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as Shakespeare teaches us in Act IV, Scene 1 of The Tempest, a line spoken by Ariel. For if we are ephemeral and insubstantial beings, constructions of our stories, this also means that the ontological nature of human being is a ground of struggle which can be claimed by seizures of power.
The first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
Our goal in revolutionary struggle is to seize the legitimacy and authority of the enemy, to take their power, by claiming the moral high ground, shaping opinion through control of the narratives and building solidarity by championing the people against those who would enslave us.
For who stands alone, dies alone; and who stands in solidarity and abandons not his fellows becomes unstoppable as the tides.
When tyrants come to steal our souls with their web of lies, let them find a humankind not divided by fear or abject in despair and learned helplessness, but united in our solidarity and guarantorship of each other’s universal human rights and Unconquered in refusal to submit.
As written by Facundo Iglesia in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Justification of dictatorship’: outcry as Milei rewrites Argentina’s history; “Human rights groups in Argentina have raised the alarm over President Javier Milei’s attempts to rewrite history on the eve of the annual day of remembrance for the thousands of victims of the country’s brutal 1976-1983 dictatorship.
Thousands of protesters will take to the streets on Sunday to mark the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice in Argentina, a holiday commemorating the 30,000 victims of the dictatorship, called “desaparecidos”. The date usually sees Argentina’s largest demonstrations of the year, with millions of citizens flooding the country’s streets to declare: “Nunca más” (never again).
However, this 24 March will be different as it will be the first under Milei, a far-right libertarian who has consistently denied Argentinians’ long-standing consensus over the dictatorship’s crimes.
“There were no 30,000,” Milei said provocatively during a presidential debate ahead of his election triumph last November. “For us, during the 70s, there was a war where excesses were committed.”
Numerous Argentinian media outlets have reported that the government plans to release a video with its “official version” of what happened during the dictatorship before the 24 March mobilizations. The video will allegedly include an interview with Luis Labraña, a former member of the Montoneros Peronist organization, who has claimed he “made up” the 30,000 number. Some journalists have also claimed that the government plans to pardon incarcerated regime officials, although both Milei and his vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, have denied this.
Lucía García Itzigsohn, the daughter of two desaparecidos, said: “We are very worried. Beyond our political positioning and the fact that history crosses us personally, this implies breaking the democratic pact.”
“President Javier Milei and the highest authorities of the country repeat forms of denialism and relativism of state terrorism,” the Center of Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a human rights organization founded in 1979, said in a statement.
Villarruel has been even more outspoken in her defense of Argentina’s former military rulers. She is the niece of Ernesto Guillermo Villarruel, who was in charge of the Vesubio clandestine detention center during the dictatorship. Like Milei, she has said that the dictatorship was “a war” between “terrorists” and the armed forces.
Ezequiel Adamovsky said such ideas were fringe in the 1990s, when only small far-right groups put the crimes of the guerrillas on the same level as those committed by the military regime, but became somewhat normalized under president Mauricio Macri. But he warned that the Argentinian right wing has further radicalized its discourse regarding the dictatorship. “What we are talking about now is no longer denialism, it is directly a justification of the dictatorship,” Adamovsky said.
Analysts and human rights groups warn that this discourse has consequences: CELS said tributes were now being paid in military barracks to regime officials convicted of crimes against humanity with the endorsement of the political authorities.
On Wednesday, the organization Hijos – which was founded by the children of desaparecidos – reported that one of its activists had been tied, beaten and sexually assaulted in her home, in what they called a “politically motivated attack”.
The attackers painted “VLLC” on one of the walls, the acronym for Milei’s catchphrase “Viva la libertad, carajo” (“Long live freedom, dammit”). “We are here to kill you,” they reportedly told her.
“Hate speech is the breeding ground for violent actions and crimes,” tweeted the campaign group Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, which was created in 1977 by grandmothers seeking their grandchildren, born in captivity and kidnapped by the dictatorship, and often raised within military families.
García Itzigsohn, a member of Hijos, said Milei had not called the victim or the organization to condemn the attack. Nor has he done so publicly.
Moreover, Milei’s head digital strategist during his presidential campaign, Fernando Cerimedo, claimed on X that the attack was a fabrication. “People want the truth,” Cerimedo said in an interview. “And [the fact that there were] 30,000 is a lie.”
Adamovsky said questioning the number was “an act of bad faith”. “The number is an estimation that was made with the very little information available at that moment,” he said, adding that military documents that were declassified in 2006 revealed that the military had disappeared or killed close to 22,000 people between 1975 and 1978, a whole five years before the end of the dictatorship.
Due to the illegal nature of the repression and the fact that there was a pact of silence in the military, the exact number cannot be attained, Adamovsky said. “The right wing exploits the seeming gap between the reported cases and the symbolic number to imply human rights groups are lying,” he added.
This week Milei’s defense minister, Luis Petri, appeared in a photograph with the wives of imprisoned dictatorship officials, who are demanding their husbands be freed. Argentina held its first trial against such criminals in 1985, and they are still taking place to this day. A spokesperson for the minister claimed Petri appeared in the picture “by chance” and had spoken with them for “less than two seconds”.
García Itzigsohn said that Argentinians would not back down despite the government’s provocations. “There are 40 years of democratic tradition in our country that cannot be thrown away only because these people have a provocative style,” she said. “There are regulations, there are laws, and there will also be a people marching on 24 March who will make it very clear to them.”
As I wrote in my post of November 27 2023, A Fascist Shadow Captures Argentina: Javier Milei; Tyranny now speaks to us through a new mask, as El Loco takes center stage in Argentina. The maelstrom of fear, power, and force which creates tyrannies of force and control, births wars of imperial conquest and dominion, and finds its final form in genocides and dehumanization are universal systems of oppression, legacies of our history from which we must emerge.
Evil originates in fear, often overwhelming and generalized fear given form and a target by authorities in service to power. The centralization of power to carceral states is inherent in human societies because its causes are; hence the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which rely on hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness and the subjugation of slave castes.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
Politics is the Art of Fear, as my father taught me, and in Argentina our fear speaks to us as an echo and reflection of our own, and reveals the parasitism of America’s relationships with the world throughout our history.
Herein I speak of the Red Scare, the Hollywood Blacklist, and other nationalist forms of social force which used fear to manufacture consent, centralize power, and legitimize authority in the wake of the Second World War.
This was our Second Imperial Period, from the end of World War Two to the Fall of the Soviet Union, influenced by our assimilation of the Nazi elite into our intelligence and special forces communities at their founding, as the OSS became the CIA and the Jedburg teams became the Green Berets.
The First American Empire being the Conquest and policies of Manifest Destiny which began with the genocide of the Native Americans, become global with the war against the Barbary Pirates of North Africa which founded the Marines, reached apogee in our 1898 conquest of the Spanish Empire which gave us The Philippine Islands, Cuba, and Guam while we stole the Hawaiian Islands because we could, and ended with the fall of civilization in The War to End All Wars.
The Third Empire or Imperial Period of American history begins with Nine Eleven and the antidemocratic Patriot Act, and possibly ends with our abandonment of Afghanistan; this remains unwritten, and rests now in our hands.
How has the anticommunist hysteria of the post World War Two era, which I call the Second Empire, reshaped America and the world?
First a cultural total war waged by the state against its own citizens which gave us reversals of our values like In God We Trust on our money which asks us not to believe in the Infinite but in the authority of the state to speak in His name, the Pledge of Allegiance which substitutes the state for ourselves as its co-owners as the source of authority in a free society of equals and for our loyalty to one another as solidarity and a band of brothers, sisters, and others.
Second a war of imperial dominion which enforces elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege throughout the world, sometimes focused on seizures of oil as a strategic resource but also simply occupying spaces as in a game of go. Examples of America’s global campaign of terror and tyranny through proxy states proliferates quickly from the codification of the Jakarta Method by the CIA in 1965 versus Sukarno, and become an endless litany of woes, atrocities, depravities, genocides and slave labor; the Mayan Genocide in Guatemala and the covert Central American wars which resulted in the Iran-Contra Scandal, America’s ferocious and depraved alliance with the Apartheid regime of South Africa, the Thousand Day War in Vietnam, a whole Gordian Knot of nastiness and interventions including our mad assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and other heroes of liberation struggle whom an America true to our founding ideals would have hailed as brothers in anticolonial revolution and stood with rather than against.
In Argentina, the echoes and reflections of our history confront us with the consequences of failure of empathy as the subversion of democracy, and we should all pay attention to the man behind the curtain as the lights of liberty wink out and fall into darkness one by one across the world.
For as George Santayana teaches us in The Life of Reason; “Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”
As written by Tom Phillips in The Guardian, in an article entitled Who is Javier Milei? Argentina’s new far-right president ‘El Loco’ takes the stage
Likened to Wolverine and Trump and nicknamed ‘the madman’, the former TV pundit is known for his prolific swearing and pledge to take a chainsaw to the machinery of state; “Friends and foes of Argentina’s next president compare him to his fellow right-wing populists Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. Others have called the wild-haired economist a mix of Boris Johnson and the killer doll Chucky.
But when Javier Milei’s image consultant conceived his unorthodox hairdo, she had two different men in mind: Elvis Presley and Wolverine.
“He looks like Wolverine. He acts like Wolverine. He’s like an anti-hero,” Lilia Lemoine, a professional cosplayer turned congresswoman-elect, said of her anti-establishment ally during a recent interview in Buenos Aires.
Lemoine, whose stage name is Lady Lemon, said she saw striking similarities between Argentina’s president-elect and the volatile Marvel character.
“[Wolverine] is very loyal and brave … He can get really mad and be aggressive with his enemies – but only when he’s attacked. He will never ever kill someone or attack someone for no reason,” the 43-year-old said, insisting Milei also had a softer side.
“He’s adorable,” Lemoine claimed in a pre-election interview, calling the far-right libertarian “the most wanted man in Argentina right now”.
That has not always been the case. An unauthorised biography of Milei – who on Sunday trounced his Peronist rival in Argentina’s most important election in decades – paints him as a mercurial loner who suffered a childhood of parental abuse and schoolyard bullying during the 1980s and was given the nickname El Loco (The Madman). “More than Milei’s ideas, what worries me is his state of mind and emotional stability,” said the book’s author, Juan Luis González.
A music-lover, Milei was the lead singer of a Rolling Stones cover band called Everest and, according to Lemoine, also enjoys Bob Marley and Verdi. “He loves opera. He sings opera. He’s not very good – but don’t say I said that,” she confided.
Milei was more successful as a media personality, finding fame as an economic pundit on Argentinian TV shows where he would pontificate about both the misery of inflation and the joy of tantric sex. “Each man has his own dynamic. In my particular case, I ejaculate every three months,” Milei once boasted on air.
Such titillating declarations – and Milei’s propensity for attention-grabbing foul-mouthed outbursts – made him a household name and helped him kickstart a career in politics around five years ago. The libertarian economist was elected to congress in 2021 for his party Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances) party and was swept into the presidency this week by an tsunami of voter fury at the corruption and mismanagement that millions of voters blame for Argentina’s worst economic crisis in two decades.
“The vote represents a desperate attempt at something new, come what may,” said Benjamin Gedan, an Argentina specialist from the Wilson Centre. “The option [voters had] was more of the same in catastrophic economic conditions or a radical gamble on a potentially bright future with a lot of downside risk.”
Gedan believed there would be “a lot of buyer’s remorse in Argentina” if Milei pursued even a small fraction of his ideas. Those ideas include legalising the sale of human organs, dramatically slashing social spending, downplaying the crimes of Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship, and cutting ties with Argentina’s two most important trade partners, Brazil and China. On the campaign trail, Milei vowed to abolish Argentina’s central bank and dollarise the economy, and brandished a chainsaw intended to symbolise ferocious cuts he believes will help stabilise the economy and “exterminate” rampant inflation.
Milei’s biography suggests some of those ideas may have come from his five cloned mastiff dogs who are named after economists including Murray Rothbard and Robert Lucas. “They are like two metres tall, they weigh like 100kg … He calls them his four-legged children,” said Lemoine, laughing off claims that Argentina’s future leader takes political advice from those animals.
Many experts believe Milei will be forced to moderate after taking power next month and will struggle to implement his more controversial proposals. Milei’s party controls just 38 of 257 seats in Argentina’s lower house and eight of 72 in the senate.
But on Sunday night Milei showed little sign of diluting his vision for South America’s second largest economy. “The changes this country needs are drastic,” he declared, announcing Trumpian plans to make Argentina great again.
Even before Milei’s victory was complete, Lemoine said she was certain her friend – and his sideburns – would prevail.
“I’m just happy because I saw it from the beginning. It’s nice to know that you were right even when nobody believed in it,” she said.”
What is the meaning of this disruptive event? As written by Tom Phillips, Josefina Salomón, and Facundo Iglesia in The Guardian, in an article entitled Argentina presidential election: far-right libertarian Javier Milei wins after rival concedes: Victory for TV celebrity turned politician catapults South America’s second-largest economy into an unpredictable future; “Javier Milei, a volatile far-right libertarian who has vowed to “exterminate” inflation and take a chainsaw to the state, has been elected president of Argentina, catapulting South America’s second largest economy into an unpredictable and potentially turbulent future.
With more than 99% of votes counted, the Mick Jagger impersonating TV celebrity-turned politician, who is often compared to Donald Trump, had secured 55.69% of the vote compared with 44.3% for his rival, the centre-left finance minister Sergio Massa.
“Today the reconstruction of Argentina begins. Today is a historic night for Argentina,” Milei told jubilant supporters at his campaign headquarters in Buenos Aires, calling his victory a “miracle”.
Milei promised “drastic changes” to tackle Argentina’s “tragic reality” of soaring inflation and widespread poverty. He also sent a message to the international community: “Argentina will return to the place in the world which it should never have lost.”
Earlier, Massa – who received 11.5m votes to Milei’s 14.4m – conceded defeat.
“Argentinians have chosen another path,” said Massa, who said he had called Milei to congratulate him on his victory and hinted he would retire from frontline politics.
“Obviously these are not the results we hoped for and I have spoken to Javier Milei to congratulate him because he’s the president that the majority of Argentines have chosen for the next four years,” added Massa, whose Peronist movement has governed for 16 of the last 20 years.
Pro-Milei activists rejoiced at the triumph of their 53-year-old leader, whom they describe as an economic visionary poised to lead Argentina out of one of the country’s worst economic crises in decades.
“[I’m] happy, happy, happy,” said Francisco Jiménez, a 30-year-old delivery driver and Milei activist from Villa Soldati, a working-class area outside Buenos Aires.
As he set off to join the party at Milei’s campaign HQ, Jiménez said he knew the result was likely to send Argentina’s peso tumbling against the dollar and cause more economic pain. “But I don’t think there is another option than trusting him. Now more than ever,” he added. “The situation is dire.”
During his campaign, Milei – who will take office on 10 December – vowed to abolish the central bank and dollarise the economy in order to overcome a financial calamity that has left 40% of Argentina’s 45 million citizens in poverty and pushed inflation to more than 140%. “I know how to exterminate the cancer of inflation,” Milei proclaimed during last Sunday’s final presidential debate which most pundits believed Massa had won.
Milei’s victory was celebrated by other big beasts of the global far-right including Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, who had championed his campaign and has promised to attend his inauguration. “Hope is sparkling in South America once again,” Bolsonaro wrote on X, hailing what he called a victory for “honesty, progress and freedom”.
The former US president Donald Trump wrote: “The whole world was watching! I am very proud of you. You will turn your country around and truly Make Argentina Great Again.”
His victory was also celebrated by X’s owner Elon Musk, who posted: “Prosperity is ahead for Argentina”.
Brazil’s leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who Milei has repeatedly insulted as a corrupt “communist” – recognised Milei’s victory in a tepid social media post. “Democracy is the voice of the people and must always be respected,” Lula wrote, without mentioning Milei by name. “I wish the next government good luck and success. Argentina is a great country and deserves our complete respect,” Lula added.
Colombia’s leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, lamented: “The extreme right has won in Argentina … [It is] sad for Latin America.” “Now say it without crying,” El Salvador’s right-wing president, Nayib Bukele, posted ironically in response.
Milei’s leftwing opponents reacted with shock and dejection to the election of a notoriously erratic figure whose radical ideas include legalising the sale of organs, cutting ties with Argentina’s two biggest trade partners, Brazil and China, and closing more than a dozen ministries.
Milei – a climate-denying populist who is known by the nickname El Loco (the Madman) – has also enraged millions of Argentinians by questioning the four-decade consensus over the crimes of its 1976-83 dictatorship, during which an estimated 30,000 people were killed by the military regime. His vice-presidential running mate is Victoria Villarruel, an ultra-conservative congresswoman who has played down the dictatorship’s sins.
“He is way more excessive and unstable than [Jair] Bolsonaro and Trump. So it’s highly unpredictable what this person could do [in power],” Federico Finchelstein, an Argentinian historian who studies the global far right, said on the eve of Sunday’s election.
Benjamin Gedan, the head of the Wilson Centre’s Argentina Project, said he believed one word explained the scale of Milei’s victory: desperation.
“This vote just reeks of desperation. A lot of Argentines voted knowingly against their economic interests because they recognise that the status quo is catastrophic. And there was no reason to believe that the current finance minister could plausibly be the answer,” Gedan said. “It’s a huge gamble but not a completely irrational one.”
Gedan said the election of such a radical and inexperienced political outsider thrust Argentina into uncharted waters.
“The real risk is that Argentina melts down in his attempt to radically transform the economy. That would look like massive social unrest, national strikes by unions, potential political violence and stresses against the democratic institutions. There is a pretty dark scenario if in fact he pursues aggressively his maximalist vision for Argentina.”
After hours of tension, there was an explosion of noise on the streets of Buenos Aires as news of the result spread and citizens reacted with a mixture of joy, apprehension and anger.
“Vamos Milei, the change is coming!” one woman could be heard shouting from a balcony in Recoleta, not far from the president-elect’s campaign HQ.
“Never again!” a male voice bellowed, in reference to the human rights violations that took place under Argentina’s military regime. “Milei is the dictatorship”.”
As a historical force, Milei represents anti-Peronist and anti-Catholic capitalism very like that which America exported in Operation Condor, which included the assassination of the glorious Salvador Allende, and echoes the anti Liberation Theology rhetoric and ideology once used to capture Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras as de facto colonies under the Reagan Plan.
As written by Uki Goñi in The Guardian, in an article entitled The ‘false prophet’ v the pope: Argentina faces clash of ideologies in election; “ In one corner of the ring stands Javier Milei, 52, self-described former tantric sex coach, outsider anarcho-capitalist and frontrunner in Argentina’s upcoming presidential elections; in the other, his compatriot Pope Francis, 86, world champion of the poor, repeatedly derided by Argentina’s likely next president as “a fucking communist” and “the representative of the evil one on Earth” for promoting the doctrine of “social justice” to aid the underprivileged.
Milei, a political unknown until 2020, has pledged to wage a “cultural battle” to transform Argentina into a libertarian paradise where capitalist efficiency replaces social assistance, taxes are reduced to a minimum and cash-strapped individuals are allowed to sell their body organs on the open market.
From Rome, Pope Francis has expressed grave concern about the rise of such callous policies in his home country. “The extreme right always reconstructs itself, it is the triumph of selfishness over communitarianism,” he said in a television interview in March when asked about Argentina’s upcoming elections.
In words that seemed to be referring to Milei, the only candidate in the 22 October vote with no political experience prior to 2021, the pope added: “I am terrified of saviours of the nation without a political party history.”
The pope’s doctrine of social justice is synonymous to theft in Milei’s Liberty Advances party because it relies on tax revenues. “Jesus didn’t pay taxes,” Milei once tweeted, tagging the Pope’s official account.
In a vein-popping victory speech after Argentina’s open primaries on 13 August, a tousle-haired Milei promised the demise of government benefits because they are “based on that atrocity that says that where there is a need, a right is born, its maximum expression being that aberration called social justice”.
Milei has trolled Francis with repetitive toxic tweets calling him a “communist turd”, a “piece of shit” and accusing the pontiff of “preaching communism to the world”.
Juan Grabois, a progressive Peronist with close links to the pontiff, and who lost the Peronist candidacy to current economy minister Sergio Massa, calls Milei a “false prophet” but attributes his rise to Argentina’s dire economic crisis.
“With inflation over 115% plus a 25% drop in the purchasing power of informal workers in the last seven years, voters would have to possess impossible political maturity to vote again for those who have failed them so completely,” Grabois told the Observer.
Voters disenchanted with both the rightwing Together for Change party, which held office up to 2019, and the incumbent Peronists have migrated in droves to newcomer Milei. “The music of the pied piper sounds sweet to those who have lost all hope. But there’s no point in blaming voters or the pied piper himself, we have to address the mistakes made by those of us who have a humanist concept of politics,” says Grabois.
Humanist is not a term that could be applied to Milei’s economics. Apart from legalising the sale of body organs, his spiky agenda proposes “dynamiting” the Central Bank, abolishing Argentina’s tuition-free public education system and disbanding free public health services. Milei is also treading fearlessly into anti-woke territory saying he will reinstate the ban on abortion, legalised in 2020, shut down the ministry of women, gender and diversity, as well as the ministries of science – “climate change is a socialist lie” – health, education, labour and public works, and will legalise the sale of firearms.
Despite this heady mix, Milei is broadly considered the undisputed shoo-in president appealing particularly to young underprivileged men. Milei took 30% of the vote in the open primaries earlier this month against 28% for Patricia Bullrich of United for Change and 27% for Peronist candidate Massa. Milei’s rise has been nothing short of mesmerising. A long-time economist for Argentinian billionaire Eduardo Eurnekian, he became a television star five years ago as a wild-haired economist and tantric sex coach who boasted on air about his sexual stamina and his taste for threesomes, assuring him wall-to-wall appearances on daytime talkshows.
These televised outbursts have many wondering if Milei could become unhinged under the stress of an eventual presidency.
“What happens if an unstable country is ruled by an unstable leader?”, asks journalist Juan González, author of a Milei biography titled El Loco (The Madman) published last month. “I’m worried he will actually try to push through his impracticable economic theories further devastating the economy and provoking violent social unrest.”
Milei is aware of the likelihood of violent street protests. “I’m going to put the leaders of those who throw stones in jail and if they surround the Casa Rosada [the presidential palace] they’re going to have to carry me out dead,” he said recently. More pragmatically, he has announced plans to incorporate the military into battling the “new threats” of narco gangs, human traffickers and possibly internal strife.
In a country that will celebrate four decades of uninterrupted democracy after decades of military rule when the new president takes office on 10 December 10, the prospect of the military reassuming a role in “internal conflicts” is raising alarms.
“The remiliarisation of security and intelligence is being proposed with military commandos ready for quick strategic intervention at the national level: this idea of national security is very problematic,” said Paula Litvachky, director of the Centre for Legal and Social Studies human rights organisation.
The pope has not said if Milei’s tirades have got under his skin. “I know they say things about me but I ignore it for my mental health,” he said in a television interview. “I will pray for them.”
To place this disruptive event in historical context, we must see it as an echo and reflection of Operation Condor.
As I wrote in my post of January 19 2023, Echoes and Reflections of American Imperialism and Operation Condor in South America’s Destabilized Democracies; By my writing desk hangs a reproduction of Théodore Géricault’s painting of 1818, The Raft of the Medusa, so brilliantly interrogated in Julian Barnes’ History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, which I think marvelous and a perfect allegory of our current political, economic, and environmental dilemma as a metaphor of capitalism and fascism as forms of cannibalism of humankind and of democracy, the primary causes of the immanent collapse of our civilization, and possibly also of the extinction of our species. Just to remind myself of what is at stake in this moment of history and in revolutionary struggle, and in my writing here as a witness of history and a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.
Monstrous evils of systemic inequality have yet again emerged from the darkness like an ambush predator to seize the nations of Central and South America in its jaws, and it is no accident but by design. Tyranny seeks the fall of democracy through the falsification, infiltration, and subversion of its institutions, in an echo and reflection of the CIA’s Operation Condor which once enacted imperial conquest and dominion of our hemisphere as Manifest Destiny.
In the destabilization and capture of the state through economic, social, and political warfare in Peru, the ruin of Venezuela in relentless assaults which have rendered it a failed state, and in the absurd and horrific January Insurrections in Brazil and in America itself two years ago led by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, the United States of America has acted as a proxy and sock puppet of the Fourth Reich.
Far more than this can be laid at our door, including the collapse and ruin of Central America and the Columbia-Venezuela no man’s land of barbarism, the failed state of Mexico and the monumental challenges facing the people of Chile, all results of American intervention driven by the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which our nation serves.
These are the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle we now face throughout the Americas and the world. We are abandoned by our leaders and those who would enslave us and adrift on a tiny raft of civilization founded in the forum of Athens as a free society of equals which questions itself, as we are eating each other in learned helplessness and despair.
To this existential crisis of faith in one another and hope for our future we may answer with the powers which yet remain to us as human beings; love, hope, faith, refusal to submit to authority, and solidarity of action in resistance.
Here is the great test of our humanity posed by the Rashomon Gate Event of our historical moment; who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves doomed to failure and nothingness, or a United Humankind living now at the dawn of our glory?
Of Operation Condor I have written in my journal of April 7 2021, How American Imperialism Created Our Humanitarian Crisis at the Border; Forty six years ago this April, America launched Operation Condor, a global campaign to destabilize and repress socialist governments and movements and defend capitalism as a hegemonic force and its elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege. This remains relevant to us today because it is the origin of many of the push forces driving waves of refugees to our border, and the horrific humanitarian crisis and test of our democracy created by American imperialism.
Migration is a word which conceals both the conditions which trigger it and our own complicity in creating them as consequences of our decades long policies of colonialism, anticommunist militarism, and economic warfare; ecological devastation with its drought and famine, poverty and social and political destabilization, an age of tyranny and state terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing, weaponized faith and its patriarchal sexual terror, and multigenerational wars.
In terms of refugees fleeing to America for safety and survival as well as liberty and equality we are mainly speaking of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, though the hell zone of Columbia and Venezuela now accounts for many, and with the collapse of central authority in Mexico and its degeneration into a region of warlords, oligarchs, and feudal crime syndicates we have refugees from Mexico itself as well as the traditional seasonal laborers.
Migrant labor is slave labor; this is the great truth America has never confronted and must now answer for in the suffering masses at our border. Entire sectors of our economy run on it; agriculture in which labor becomes a strategic resource as we starve without it, but also child and elder care, hospitality, and some manufacture. America’s wealth and power is created for us by others to whom we export the real costs of production, others who must remain invisible and exploitable as unregulated illegal labor to wring every ounce of value from them for our elites. Thus we weaponize economic disparity in service to power and privilege, and create and maintain hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and white supremacy.
Interests of elite hegemonies of wealth and power converge here with those of racial privilege and white supremacy in historic toxicity, in parallel with the rise of the carceral state as an instrument for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor and the repression of the Civil Rights Movement, and have done so from their origins. One such origin point is America’s appropriation, concealment, and instrumentalization of Nazi war criminals in the repression of dissent and the conquest of the world.
The Fourth Reich of which Trump was a figurehead did not emerge from nothing like Athena from the head of Zeus, but was an invention of American imperialism. As such its history and character as a global threat to democracy can be studied in the crisis of refugees and migration to which it has given birth, and in the legacies of our nation’s use of fascism as an instrument of dominion in the Americas, for as we were using it to conquer others, it was using us to seize the United States of America and the world.
As I wrote in my post of February 18 2020, Guatemala: Our Heart of Darkness; As we abduct and lockdown refugees in concentration camps and secret prisons, and drive others back into a Mexico whose government is supine before the power of its criminal organizations, we must reflect on the causes of this historic mass migration from Central America’s Dry Corridor of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; why is this happening, and what can be done to fix the problems which are driving it?
Drought and famine caused by global warming and climate change are clear immediate causes and triggering stressors of the current migration, which are rooted in the history of American colonialism and capitalist economic warfare. These conditions have worsened longstanding issues of endemic poverty and pervasive violence and criminality, legacies of historical colonialism and American imperialist and capitalist policies and interventions, which I have described in my post of September 4 2019; There is an interesting connection between the chaos we created in Central America which is driving a mass exodus of immigration to our borders and the conspiracy theory of Islamic replacement of Europeans which inspires our greatest terrorist threat today; many of the white supremacists who ruled Algeria as a colony of France, mainly former Nazi soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion after the end of World War Two, were after its fall in 1962 hired by the government of the United States to rule El Salvador and Guatemala as puppet regimes to protect our corporate profits.
With them came the same ideology and dream of a homeland and asylum for escaped Nazis, and a secure base of operations and launchpad for the Fourth Reich, as with those who fled the fall of the colony of Algeria as a white ethnostate to France and blamed Charles de Gaulle for its abandonment, and whose descendants now form the core of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.
Among the direct effects of the secret partnership between America and our former Nazi adversaries include:
The 1954 seizure of Guatemala by Eisenhower’s CI.A., which replaced a Marxist who had seized land owned by United Fruit and redistributed it to Indian peasants with a furniture salesman from Honduras, Castillo Armas. During the course of this coup America bombed Guatemala City, killed 9,000 communists, disbanded the unions, drove off the squatters, drew up a blacklist of some 70,000 leftists, built death squads and secret prisons, gave torture and brigandage free reign, created an enduring political front, the MLN, and started making a profit from our plantations.
The 1961 seizure of Guatemala by C.I.A. officer Willauer leading 200 men, a Harvard lawyer who had flown as Chennault’s first officer with the Flying Tigers in China. Guatemala was the staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. One day I may explore this incident with all of you, but in this context I wish only to cite a source and witness of history; for my cousin Raymond Eigell trained and led the force which landed in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs.
Throughout the 1960-63 period of a civil war which continued until 1996, America crushed a pro-Castro rebellion using six C.I.A. bombers, exiled Cuban shock troops, and Green Berets who used the opportunity to test counterinsurgency theories later used in Vietnam and against American dissidents including the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and the Students For A Democratic Society.
The 1974 accession of an officer of Armas named Alarcon to the Presidency of Guatemala, who institutionalized the MLN, declaring “I am a fascist, and I have tried to model my party on the Spanish Falange.” He was, of course, a C.I.A. agent. Nixon once brought him along on his annual pilgrimage to consult with what he called his spiritual advisor, the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.
The 1982 seizure of power and Presidency of Rios Montt, an evangelical Sunday school teacher and personal friend of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who suspended the constitution, replaced the courts with secret tribunals, escalated the scorched earth warfare, torture, and disappearances of his predecessors, and one thing more. During this the most terrible period of civil war throughout Central America, when Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were in fact a single nation ruled by remnants of the Nazis we had transplanted from French Algeria as American puppet regimes, and with the full authority of Ronald Reagan, Rios Montt weaponized Protestantism against encroaching Catholic Liberation theology.
During the 18 months of the Mayan Genocide, in which his death squads killed 3,000 people each month and annihilated 600 villages, he also instituted a system of forced labor in concentration camps modeled on the Apartheid system of South Africa and ruled by terror using former British police and Protestant Orange Militia units hired from Belfast, a mercenary force who had splendidly legal Hong Kong passports courtesy of the Thatcher government.
During over 35 years of civil war in Guatemala including Rios Montt’s genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native Indians, about half a million Indians were killed, over one million conscripted into military service and used against their own people, tens of thousands driven into Mexico as refugees, and most of the rest worked to death in the concentration camps. No American Army came to liberate them; they were not white, and no one cared so long as the profits flowed. Guatemala is America’s Belgian Congo; our heart of darkness.
I think of this every day as I eat my morning banana, for each one is the living form of a silent cry, the ghost of a tear, the memory of atrocity and horror, a thing like many others of fragile beauty and fleeting pleasure won by brutality and the theft of hope, pain and blood and death made manifest. For the dead and for wrongs past I can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged and the future that must be redeemed.
The 1981 founding of ARENA in El Salvador and the 1982-3 Presidency of Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, son of one of the original French Algerian OAS/Afrika Corps legionnaires and immigrants and leader of death squads since 1972, when he was trained at the US School of the Americas, often called a school for war criminals. During the peak of the civil war in 1983-84, about 8,000 people were killed every month in El Salvador.
The 1963-75 Honduran coup and military dictatorship of Arellano, for whose regime the term Banana Republic was coined, and of course the conduct of the Contra War beginning in 1980, which included the 1984 Honduran invasion of Nicaragua supported by 5,500 American troops.
Together Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were ruled for over a generation by America through our puppet tyrants and the ARENA and MLN parties we created. But there is more; much more, of which I will mention only four more brief examples here.
The 1964-85 rule of Brazil by the Arena Party and its legacy of torture and state terror which was ended by the total bankruptcy of the nation.
The 1976 military coup in Argentina and the civil war which followed, during which some 20,000 persons were disappeared. Of our earlier involvements; Peron had been a protégé of Franco and Mussolini, and Evita was assassinated not by us but by Vatican Intelligence with radiation poisoning due to Peron’s campaign against the Church; very like the fate of the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian of Mexico whose scheme to seize Church property created a mass revolt and abandonment by European allies, except for France which sent the Foreign Legion whose atrocities delegitimized colonial rule. The Vatican also ran the Swiss escape route used by Otto Skorzeny and other SS officers at the fall of the Third Reich whom we later hired, in intact units at their former ranks, and blended with their counterparts to create the CIA and Special Forces. The most brazen flattery I have ever heard directed toward Oliver North was to compare him to Skorzeny.
The 1973 assassination of Allende in Chile and support of the Pinochet regime which killed as many as one in every hundred of its citizens.
Regarding Mexico, we long ago seized the southwest including Texas and California, drew a line in the sand to weaponize disparity and create a mass resource of illegal and therefore exploitable quasi slave labor, and now call aliens everyone on the wrong side of it who comes here to pick the fruit, wash the dishes, and clean the toilets that our own nephews and nieces, children and grandchildren, would laugh in your face at the suggestion they get their hands dirty doing themselves.
Fascism is a sin of pride whose effects reverberate still, propagating outward in ever-widening circles as a force of contagion like the ripples of a stone cast into a pond. And we are all complicit in it, who call ourselves Americans.
We must make a better future than we have the past.
The ‘false prophet’ v the pope: Argentina faces clash of ideologies in election:
Javier Milei, a culture war populist and sex coach who won country’s open primary, rages at ‘communist’ pontiff as he sets his sights on becoming president
24 de marzo de 2024 Día del Recuerdo de la Verdad, la Justicia y la Falsificación de la Historia en Argentina
El nuevo presidente de Argentina, Javier Milei, ha comenzado a reescribir la historia, a blanquear los crímenes de lesa humanidad cometidos por su brutal y depravado modelo durante la dictadura de 1976-1983 y a borrar a sus víctimas.
Como todos los tiranos fascistas, Milei intenta capturarnos en un frasco asesino de ecos y reflejos, mentiras e ilusiones, historias reescritas, identidades autorizadas y realidades alternativas; el desierto de los espejos, para utilizar la metáfora icónica de la falsificación a través de la propaganda y el control del pensamiento del ex jefe de contrainteligencia de la CIA, Angleton.
El desierto de los espejos, una frase de T.S. El Gerontin de Eliot lo uso para describir la patología de la falsificación de nosotros mismos a través de propaganda, mentiras e ilusiones, historias reescritas, secretos de estado, realidades alternativas, fe autoritaria que devora verdades. Esto lo desambiguo en comparación con su opuesto, el periodismo y el testimonio de la historia como búsqueda sagrada de la verdad. Nos convertimos en falsificaciones de nosotros mismos por sistemas de poder hegemónico de élite como el patriarcado, el racismo y el capitalismo, y por aquellos que nos esclavizarían, mediante la captura de nuestras historias como robo del alma.
James Angleton, en quien John Le Carré basó su personaje de George Smiley, también usó la frase en este sentido de manera infame, y se ha universalizado en toda la comunidad de inteligencia en la que moldeó e influyó durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial y sus secuelas, la Guerra Fría. En referencia a la biografía que David Martin escribió sobre sí mismo, titulada Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton la describió como una “infinidad de estratagemas, engaños, artificios y todos los demás dispositivos de desinformación que el bloque soviético y sus servicios de inteligencia coordinados utilizan para confundir y dividir al mundo”. Oeste… un paisaje siempre fluido donde la realidad y la ilusión se fusionan”. Y, por supuesto, todo lo que atribuyó a los soviéticos también se aplicaba a él mismo, a su propia agencia y también a Estados Unidos, y a todos los estados, porque todos son casas de ilusión.
La telenovela de Netflix Operación Carne Picada usa la frase, en una historia sobre la creación de un oficial ficticio que porta documentos diseñados para engañar a los nazis para que se preparen para la invasión de Europa en algún lugar que no sea Sicilia, una serie que vi con gran atención porque cada uno de nosotros es creado por nuestras historias exactamente como esta identidad falsa adherida al cuerpo de un abandonado. Dentro de cada uno de nosotros, un equipo de autores crea nuestras personas a través de historias, una red de recuerdos, historias e identidad; y lo hacen para sus propios fines, que no siempre entendemos.
Como escribió T. S. Eliot en Gerontin: “Después de tal conocimiento, ¿qué perdón? Piensa ahora
La historia tiene muchos pasajes astutos, corredores artificiales
Y los problemas, engañan con ambiciones susurrantes,
Nos guía por vanidades”
Somos la materia de la que están hechos los sueños, como nos enseña Shakespeare en el acto IV, escena 1 de La tempestad, una línea pronunciada por Ariel. Porque si somos seres efímeros e insustanciales, construcciones de nuestras historias, esto también significa que la naturaleza ontológica del ser humano es un terreno de lucha que puede ser reclamado mediante tomas de poder.
La primera pregunta que cabe plantearse ante una historia es: ¿de quién es ésta?
Siempre persiste la lucha entre las historias que contamos sobre nosotros mismos y las que cuentan otros sobre nosotros; las máscaras que hacemos para nosotros y las que otros hacen para nosotros.
Esta es la primera revolución en la que todos debemos luchar, la lucha por la propiedad de nosotros mismos.
¿En quiénes entonces nos convertiremos? Se pregunta a nuestro yo por superficies, imágenes y máscaras que en cada momento negocian nuestros límites con los demás.
A lo que responde nuestro yo secreto, el yo de la oscuridad y de la pasión, el yo que vive más allá del espejo y no conoce límites, libre de tiempo y espacio e infinito en posibilidades; ¿En quién quieres convertirte?
Nuestro objetivo en la lucha revolucionaria es apoderarnos de la legitimidad y la autoridad del enemigo, tomar su poder, reclamando autoridad moral, moldeando la opinión a través del control de las narrativas y construyendo solidaridad defendiendo al pueblo contra aquellos que nos esclavizarían.
Porque quien está solo, muere solo; y quien se solidariza y no abandona a sus semejantes se vuelve imparable como las mareas.
Cuando los tiranos vengan a robar nuestras almas con su red de mentiras, que encuentren una humanidad no dividida por el miedo ni abyecta en la desesperación y la impotencia aprendida, sino unida en nuestra solidaridad y garantía de los derechos humanos universales de cada uno e invicta en la negativa a someterse.
27 de noviembre de 2023 Una sombra fascista captura a Argentina: Javier Milei
La tiranía ahora nos habla a través de una nueva máscara, mientras El Loco ocupa un lugar central en Argentina. La vorágine de miedo, poder y fuerza que crea tiranías de fuerza y control, genera guerras de conquista y dominio imperial y encuentra su forma final en genocidios y deshumanización son sistemas universales de opresión, legados de nuestra historia de los cuales debemos emerger.
El mal se origina en el miedo, miedo a menudo abrumador y generalizado al que las autoridades al servicio del poder han dado forma y objetivo. La centralización del poder en estados carcelarios es inherente a las sociedades humanas porque sus causas son; de ahí las hegemonías de riqueza, poder y privilegios de las élites que se basan en jerarquías de pertenencia y alteridad excluyente y la subyugación de las castas de esclavos.
Hacer una idea sobre un tipo de personas es un acto de violencia.
La política es el arte del miedo, como me enseñó mi padre, y en Argentina nuestro miedo nos habla como un eco y reflejo del nuestro, y revela el parasitismo de las relaciones de Estados Unidos con el mundo a lo largo de nuestra historia.
Aquí hablo del Terror Rojo, la Lista Negra de Hollywood y otras formas nacionalistas de fuerza social que utilizaron el miedo para fabricar consentimiento, centralizar el poder y legitimar la autoridad después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Este fue nuestro Segundo Período Imperial, desde el final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta la caída de la Unión Soviética, influenciado por nuestra asimilación de la élite nazi a nuestras comunidades de inteligencia y fuerzas especiales en el momento de su fundación, cuando la OSS se convirtió en la CIA y la Jedburg. Los equipos se convirtieron en los Boinas Verdes.
Siendo el Primer Imperio Americano la Conquista y las políticas de Destino Manifiesto que comenzaron con el genocidio de los Nativos Americanos, se globalizaron con la guerra contra los Piratas de Berbería del Norte de África que fundaron la Infantería de Marina, y alcanzaron su apogeo en nuestra conquista del Imperio Español en 1898, que nos dio las Islas Filipinas, Cuba y Guam mientras robamos las islas hawaianas porque pudimos, y terminó con la caída de la civilización en La guerra para acabar con todas las guerras.
El Tercer Imperio o Período Imperial de la historia estadounidense comienza con Nueve Once y posiblemente termine con nuestro abandono de Afganistán; esto no está escrito y ahora está en nuestras manos.
¿Cómo ha remodelado Estados Unidos y el mundo la histeria anticomunista de la era posterior a la Segunda Guerra Mundial, que yo llamo el Segundo Imperio?
Primero, una guerra cultural total emprendida por el estado contra sus propios ciudadanos que nos dio reversiones de nuestros valores como In God We Trust on our money, que nos pide que no creamos en el Infinito sino en la autoridad del estado para hablar en Su nombre. el Juramento a la Bandera que sustituye al Estado por nosotros mismos como sus copropietarios como fuente de autoridad en una sociedad libre de iguales y por nuestra lealtad mutua como solidaridad y un grupo de hermanos, hermanas y otros.
En segundo lugar, una guerra de dominio imperial que impone hegemonías de riqueza, poder y privilegios por parte de las élites en todo el mundo, a veces centradas en la apropiación del petróleo como recurso estratégico, pero también simplemente en la ocupación de espacios como en un juego de go. Los ejemplos de la campaña global de terror y tiranía de Estados Unidos a través de estados proxy proliferan rápidamente a partir de la codificación del Método de Yakarta por la CIA en 1965 contra Sukarno, y se convierten en una interminable letanía de males, atrocidades, depravaciones, genocidios y trabajo esclavo; el Genocidio Maya en Guatemala y las guerras encubiertas en Centroamérica que resultaron en el Escándalo Irán-Contra, la alianza feroz y depravada de Estados Unidos con el régimen del Apartheid de Sudáfrica, la Guerra de los Mil Días en Vietnam, todo un Nudo Gordiano de maldades e intervenciones incluyendo nuestra locos intentos de asesinato contra Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba y otros héroes de la lucha por la liberación a quienes un Estados Unidos fiel a nuestros ideales fundacionales habría aclamado como hermanos en la revolución anticolonial y habría apoyado en lugar de estar en contra.
En Argentina, los ecos y reflejos de nuestra historia nos confrontan con las consecuencias del fracaso de la empatía como subversión de la democracia, y todos deberíamos prestar atención al hombre detrás de la cortina mientras las luces de la libertad se apagan y caen en la oscuridad una a una. uno en todo el mundo.
Porque como nos enseña George Santayana en La vida de la razón; “Quienes olvidan su historia están condenados a repetirla”.
Para ubicar este evento disruptivo en un contexto histórico, debemos verlo como un eco y reflejo de la Operación Cóndor.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 19 de enero de 2023, Ecos y reflejos del imperialismo estadounidense y la Operación Cóndor en las democracias desestabilizadas de América del Sur; Junto a mi escritorio cuelga una reproducción del cuadro de Théodore Géricault de 1818, La balsa de la Medusa, tan brillantemente interrogado en la Historia del mundo en diez capítulos y medio de Julian Barnes, que creo que es maravilloso y una alegoría perfecta de nuestra actual situación política y económica. y el dilema ambiental como metáfora del capitalismo y el fascismo como formas de canibalismo de la humanidad y de la democracia, las causas principales del colapso inminente de nuestra civilización, y posiblemente también de la extinción de nuestra especie. Sólo para recordar lo que está en juego en este momento de la historia y en la lucha revolucionaria, y en mis escritos aquí como testigo de la historia y un llamado sagrado en la búsqueda de la verdad.
Los monstruosos males de la desigualdad sistémica han surgido una vez más de la oscuridad como un depredador de emboscada para apoderarse de las naciones de América Central y del Sur en sus fauces, y no es casualidad sino intencionalmente. La tiranía busca la caída de la democracia a través de la falsificación, infiltración y subversión de sus instituciones, en un eco y reflejo de la Operación Cóndor de la CIA que una vez promulgó la conquista imperial y el dominio de nuestro hemisferio como Destino Manifiesto.
En la desestabilización y captura del Estado a través de la guerra económica, social y política en Perú, la ruina de Venezuela en ataques implacables que la han convertido en un Estado fallido, y en las absurdas y horribles insurrecciones de enero en Brasil y en los propios Estados Unidos hace dos años. Liderados anteriormente por Nuestro Payaso del Terror, el Traidor Trump, los Estados Unidos de América han actuado como representantes y títeres del Cuarto Reich.
Se nos puede achacar mucho más que esto, incluido el colapso y la ruina de Centroamérica y la tierra de nadie de barbarie entre Colombia y Venezuela, el estado fallido de México y los desafíos monumentales que enfrenta el pueblo de Chile, todos ellos resultados de la intervención estadounidense. impulsado por las hegemonías de élite de riqueza, poder y privilegios a las que sirve nuestra nación.
Estas son las condiciones impuestas de la lucha revolucionaria que enfrentamos ahora en todo el continente americano y el mundo. Estamos abandonados por nuestros líderes y aquellos que nos esclavizarían y a la deriva en una pequeña balsa de civilización fundada en el foro de Atenas como una sociedad libre de iguales que se cuestiona a sí misma, mientras nos devoramos unos a otros en erudita impotencia y desesperación.
A esta crisis existencial de fe mutua y de esperanza en nuestro futuro podemos responder con los poderes que aún nos quedan como seres humanos; amor, esperanza, fe, rechazo a someterse a la autoridad y solidaridad de acción en resistencia.
Aquí está la gran prueba de nuestra humanidad planteada por el Evento de la Puerta Rashomon de nuestro momento histórico; ¿en quién queremos llegar a ser los humanos? ¿Amos y esclavos condenados al fracaso y a la nada, o una Humanidad Unida que vive ahora en los albores de nuestra gloria?
Sobre la Operación Cóndor escribí en mi diario del 7 de abril de 2021, Cómo el imperialismo estadounidense creó nuestra crisis humanitaria en la frontera; En abril de este año hace cuarenta y seis años, Estados Unidos lanzó la Operación Cóndor, una campaña global para desestabilizar y reprimir a los gobiernos y movimientos socialistas y defender el capitalismo como fuerza hegemónica y sus jerarquías de élite de riqueza, poder y privilegios. Esto sigue siendo relevante para nosotros hoy porque es el origen de muchas de las fuerzas de empuje que impulsan oleadas de refugiados hacia nuestra frontera, y de la horrible crisis humanitaria y prueba de nuestra democracia creada por el imperialismo estadounidense.
Migración es una palabra que oculta tanto las condiciones que la desencadenan como nuestra propia complicidad en crearlas como consecuencia de nuestras políticas de colonialismo, militarismo anticomunista y guerra económica que duran décadas; devastación ecológica con su sequía y hambruna, pobreza y desestabilización social y política, una era de tiranía y terror estatal, genocidio y limpieza étnica, fe armada y su terror sexual patriarcal, y guerras multigeneracionales.
En términos de refugiados que huyen a Estados Unidos en busca de seguridad y supervivencia, así como de libertad e igualdad, estamos hablando principalmente de Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua, aunque la zona infernal de Colombia y Venezuela ahora representa a muchos, y con el colapso de la región central autoridad en México y su degeneración en una región de señores de la guerra, oligarcas y sindicatos del crimen feudal, tenemos refugiados del propio México, así como trabajadores estacionales tradicionales.
El trabajo migrante es trabajo esclavo; Esta es la gran verdad que Estados Unidos nunca ha enfrentado y por la que ahora debe responder ante las masas que sufren en nuestra frontera. Sectores enteros de nuestra economía funcionan con él; agricultura en la que la mano de obra se convierte en un recurso estratégico ya que pasamos hambre sin ella, pero también el cuidado de niños y ancianos, la hospitalidad y algunas manufacturas. amer La riqueza y el poder de Ica son creados para nosotros por otros a quienes exportamos los costos reales de producción, otros que deben permanecer invisibles y explotables como mano de obra ilegal no regulada para exprimirles hasta el último gramo de valor para nuestras elites. De esta manera utilizamos la disparidad económica como arma al servicio del poder y los privilegios, y creamos y mantenemos jerarquías de alteridad excluyente y supremacía blanca.
Los intereses de las hegemonías de riqueza y poder de las élites convergen aquí con los del privilegio racial y la supremacía blanca en una toxicidad histórica, en paralelo con el surgimiento del estado carcelario como instrumento para volver a esclavizar a los ciudadanos negros como trabajo penitenciario y la represión de la Movimiento por los Derechos Civiles, y lo han hecho desde sus orígenes. Uno de esos puntos de origen es la apropiación, el ocultamiento y la instrumentalización por parte de Estados Unidos de los criminales de guerra nazis en la represión de la disidencia y la conquista del mundo.
El Cuarto Reich del que Trump fue una figura decorativa no surgió de la nada como Atenea de la cabeza de Zeus, sino que fue una invención del imperialismo estadounidense. Como tal, su historia y su carácter como amenaza global a la democracia pueden estudiarse en la crisis de refugiados y migraciones que ha dado origen, y en los legados del uso del fascismo por parte de nuestra nación como instrumento de dominio en las Américas, durante tanto tiempo. lo usábamos para conquistar a otros, nos estaba usando a nosotros para apoderarnos de los Estados Unidos de América y del mundo.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 18 de febrero de 2020, Guatemala: Nuestro Corazón de Tinieblas; Mientras secuestramos y encerramos a refugiados en campos de concentración y prisiones secretas, y expulsamos a otros de regreso a un México cuyo gobierno está inactivo ante el poder de sus organizaciones criminales, debemos reflexionar sobre las causas de esta histórica migración masiva desde el Corredor Seco de Guatemala en Centroamérica. , El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua; ¿Por qué sucede esto y qué se puede hacer para solucionar los problemas que lo provocan?
La sequía y la hambruna causadas por el calentamiento global y el cambio climático son causas inmediatas claras y factores desencadenantes de la migración actual, que tienen sus raíces en la historia del colonialismo estadounidense y la guerra económica capitalista. Estas condiciones han empeorado problemas de larga data de pobreza endémica y violencia y criminalidad generalizadas, legados del colonialismo histórico y de las políticas e intervenciones imperialistas y capitalistas estadounidenses, que describí en mi publicación del 4 de septiembre de 2019; Existe una conexión interesante entre el caos que creamos en Centroamérica, que está provocando un éxodo masivo de inmigración a nuestras fronteras, y la teoría de la conspiración del reemplazo islámico de los europeos que inspira nuestra mayor amenaza terrorista hoy; Muchos de los supremacistas blancos que gobernaron Argelia como colonia de Francia, principalmente ex soldados nazis que se unieron a la Legión Extranjera después del final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, fueron contratados después de su caída en 1962 por el gobierno de los Estados Unidos para gobernar El Salvador y Guatemala como regímenes títeres para proteger nuestras ganancias corporativas.
Con ellos vino la misma ideología y el mismo sueño de una patria y asilo para los nazis fugitivos, y una base de operaciones segura y plataforma de lanzamiento para el Cuarto Reich, como el de aquellos que huyeron de la caída de la colonia de Argelia como un etnoestado blanco a Francia y culparon a Charles de Gaulle por su abandono, y cuyos descendientes forman ahora el núcleo del Frente Nacional de Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Entre los efectos directos de la asociación secreta entre Estados Unidos y nuestros antiguos adversarios nazis se incluyen:
La toma de Guatemala en 1954 por la CIA de Eisenhower, que reemplazó a un marxista que se había apoderado de tierras propiedad de la United Fruit y las redistribuyó entre campesinos indios con un vendedor de muebles de Honduras, Castillo Armas. Durante el curso de este golpe, Estados Unidos bombardeó la ciudad de Guatemala, mató a 9.000 comunistas, disolvió los sindicatos, expulsó a los ocupantes ilegales, elaboró una lista negra de unos 70.000 izquierdistas, construyó escuadrones de la muerte y prisiones secretas, dio rienda suelta a la tortura y el bandolerismo, creó una sociedad duradera. frente político, el MLN, y empezamos a sacar provecho de nuestras plantaciones.
La toma de Guatemala en 1961 por la C.I.A. El oficial Willauer al frente de 200 hombres, un abogado de Harvard que había volado como primer oficial de Chennault con los Flying Tigers en China. Guatemala fue el escenario de la invasión de Bahía de Cochinos a Cuba. Quizás algún día explore este incidente con todos ustedes, pero en este contexto sólo deseo citar una fuente y un testimonio de la historia; porque mi primo Raymond Eigell entrenó y dirigió la fuerza que desembarcó en Cuba durante la Bahía de Cochinos.
A lo largo del período 1960-63 de una guerra civil que continuó hasta 1996, Estados Unidos aplastó una rebelión pro Castro utilizando seis agentes de la CIA. bombarderos, tropas de choque cubanas exiliadas y boinas verdes que aprovecharon la oportunidad para probar teorías de contrainsurgencia utilizadas más tarde en Vietnam y contra disidentes estadounidenses, incluidos los Panteras Negras, el Movimiento Indio Americano y los Estudiantes por una Sociedad Democrática.
El ascenso en 1974 de un funcionario de Armas nombró a Alarcón para la presidencia de Guatemala, quien institucionalizó el MLN, declarando “Soy fascista y he tratado de modelar mi partido según la Falange Española”. Era, por supuesto, un agente de la CIA. agente. Nixon lo llevó una vez a su peregrinación anual para consultar con lo que llamó su consejero espiritual, el infame criminal de guerra nazi Josef Mengele.
La toma del poder y la presidencia en 1982 de Ríos Montt, un maestro evangélico de escuela dominical y amigo personal de Jerry Falwell y Pat Robertson, quien suspendió la constitución, reemplazó las cortes por tribunales secretos, intensificó la guerra de tierra arrasada, la tortura y las desapariciones de sus predecesores y una cosa más. Durante este, el período más terrible de la guerra civil en toda Centroamérica, cuando Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras eran de hecho una sola nación gobernada por restos de los nazis que habíamos trasplantado de la Argelia francesa como regímenes títeres estadounidenses, y con la plena autoridad de Ronald Reagan y Ríos Montt utilizaron al protestantismo como arma contra la invasión de la teología católica de la liberación.
Durante los 18 meses del genocidio maya, en el que sus escuadrones de la muerte mataron a 3.000 personas cada mes y aniquilaron 600 aldeas, también instituyó un sistema de trabajos forzados en campos de concentración inspirados en el sistema de apartheid de Sudáfrica y gobernados por el terror utilizando a antiguos británicos. unidades de policía y de la Milicia Naranja Protestante contratadas en Belfast, una fuerza mercenaria que tenía pasaportes de Hong Kong espléndidamente legales, cortesía del gobierno de Thatcher.
Durante más de 35 años de guerra civil en Guatemala, incluida la campaña genocida de limpieza étnica de Ríos Montt contra los indios nativos, alrededor de medio millón de indios fueron asesinados, más de un millón fueron reclutados para el servicio militar y utilizados contra su propio pueblo, y decenas de miles fueron expulsados a México. como refugiados, y la mayoría del resto trabajó hasta la muerte en los campos de concentración. Ningún ejército americano vino a liberarlos; no eran blancos y a nadie le importaba mientras las ganancias fluyeran. Guatemala es el Congo belga de Estados Unidos; nuestro corazón de oscuridad.
Pienso en esto todos los días mientras como mi plátano matutino, porque cada uno es la forma viva de un llanto silencioso, el fantasma de una lágrima, el recuerdo de la atrocidad y el horror, algo como muchos otros de frágil belleza y fugaz placer conquistado. por la brutalidad y el robo de la esperanza, el dolor, la sangre y la muerte se manifiestan. Por los muertos y por los agravios del pasado nada puedo hacer; son los vivos quienes deben ser vengados y el futuro el que debe ser redimido.
La fundación de ARENA en El Salvador en 1981 y la presidencia entre 1982 y 1983 de Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, hijo de uno de los legionarios e inmigrantes originales del Cuerpo Africano/OEA argelino francés y líder de escuadrones de la muerte desde 1972, cuando fue entrenado en el Escuela de las Américas de Estados Unidos, a menudo llamada escuela para criminales de guerra. Durante el pico de la guerra civil en 1983-84, alrededor de 8.000 personas fueron asesinadas cada mes en El Salvador.
El golpe de estado hondureño de 1963-75 y la dictadura militar de Arellano, para cuyo régimen se acuñó el término República Bananera, y, por supuesto, la conducción de la Guerra de la Contra a partir de 1980, que incluyó la invasión hondureña de Nicaragua en 1984, apoyada por 5.500 tropas estadounidenses.
Juntos, Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras fueron gobernados durante más de una generación por Estados Unidos a través de nuestros tiranos títeres y los partidos ARENA y MLN que creamos. Pero hay más; mucho más, de los cuales mencionaré aquí sólo cuatro breves ejemplos más.
El gobierno de Brasil de 1964 a 1985 por el Partido Arena y su legado de tortura y terror de Estado que terminó con la quiebra total de la nación.
El golpe militar de 1976 en Argentina y la guerra civil que le siguió, durante la cual desaparecieron unas 20.000 personas. De nuestras participaciones anteriores; Perón había sido un protegido de Franco y Mussolini, y Evita fue asesinada no por nosotros sino por la Inteligencia del Vaticano con envenenamiento por radiación debido a la campaña de Perón contra la Iglesia; muy parecido al destino del emperador Habsburgo Maximiliano de México, cuyo plan para apoderarse de las propiedades de la Iglesia provocó una revuelta masiva y el abandono de los aliados europeos, excepto Francia, que envió la Legión Extranjera cuyas atrocidades deslegitimaron el dominio colonial. El Vaticano también dirigió la ruta de escape suiza utilizada por Otto Skorzeny y otros oficiales de las SS durante la caída del Tercer Reich, a quienes contratamos más tarde, en unidades intactas en sus antiguas filas, y se fusionaron con sus homólogos para crear la CIA y las Fuerzas Especiales. El halago más descarado que he oído jamás dirigido a Oliver North fue compararlo con Skorzeny.
El asesinato de Allende en Chile en 1973 y el apoyo al régimen de Pinochet que mató a uno de cada cien de sus ciudadanos.
En cuanto a México, hace mucho tiempo nos apoderamos del suroeste, incluidos Texas y California, trazamos una línea en la arena para convertir la disparidad en un arma y crear un recurso masivo de mano de obra cuasi esclava ilegal y, por lo tanto, explotable, y ahora llamamos extranjeros a todos los que están en el mundo.
Por otro lado, quien viene aquí a recoger la fruta, lavar los platos y limpiar los baños, nuestros propios sobrinos y sobrinas, hijos y nietos, se reirían en la cara ante la sugerencia de que se ensucien las manos ellos mismos.
El fascismo es un pecado de orgullo cuyos efectos todavía reverberan, propagándose hacia afuera en círculos cada vez más amplios como una fuerza de contagio como las ondas de una piedra arrojada a un estanque. Y de ello somos cómplices todos los que nos llamamos americanos.
On this holiday of Purim which begins at sunset today and ends with the fall of night tomorrow, the Jewish peoples of the world celebrate their salvation from genocide in 5th century Persia as written in the Book of Esther, and all of humankind may celebrate the triumph of love over hate, solidarity over division, and resistance over tyranny which it commemorates.
As we are confronted in the news with images of terrible violence and crimes against humanity in two wars which challenge our world order; the Israeli invasion of Gaza which has made America complicit in genocide and calls into question the idea of human rights, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a war of total destruction unlike anything Europe has seen since the Second World War which echoes its atrocities and uses thermobaric weapons as mobile crematoriums against civilians, I think of these things today in terms of the historical legacies of resistance to tyranny, slavery, wars of imperial conquest and dominion, and genocide.
How shall we defend the peoples of Palestine and Ukraine from the horrific war crimes of Netanyahu’s theocratic fascism of blood, faith, and soil and Putin’s mad imperial conquest, without ourselves becoming an empire?
The seduction of power begins with fear, especially overwhelming and generalized fear given forms of Otherness by authority in service to power; to find safety and security in becoming the arbiter of virtue. This too we must resist.
Moreover such strategies of force and control must always fail and come to ruin, for security is an illusion, and the use of social force creates its own resistance.
Never Again! is a phrase I have used often as a reply to tyranny and fascism, both in my writing and to my comrades personally as a call to total resistance without limits, and herein I wish to interrogate its meaning and consequences.
How can we use Never Again! as a principle of direct action which preserves and empowers the wellbeing and autonomy of others, without such action becoming a point of moral fracture, subversion of ideals, and the cascade failure of unequal power?
For myself the history of its use is connected to a category of my Defining Moments which I call Last Stands, the stories of which I have told many times. These include only moments in which I chose solidarity and refusal to submit over personal survival; refusing to step aside from the child behind me when ordered to surrender by the police bounty hunters in Brazil 1974, when soldiers set fire to the house Jean Genet and I were in, surrounded and unarmed, in Beirut 1982 when he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, a forlorn hope at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola 1988 for the liberation from Apartheid, and numberless others beyond my accounting.
Last Stands are choices of refusal to surrender our humanity and universal human rights, our duty of care and stewardship of one another, regardless of the consequences as lines we cannot cross without becoming something less than human.
In the ongoing Gaza War and genocide of the Palestinians, this is also a refusal to abandon the cause of “freedom of faith for all humankind” as the legend on the monument of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden’s 1631 victory at the Battle of Breitenfeld which secured this right declares, the principle of a nonsectarian state on which America is founded and of the inherent right of independence and sovereign self-determination of all peoples, and solidarity with all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth against force and control, state terror and tyranny, war and imperial conquest.
Among my personal role models in antifascism and revolution is the fictional character of Harry Tuttle played by Robert de Niro in the film Brazil, whose line “we’re all in this together,” echoes through forty some years of my life and adventures.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen, in the summer of 1974, to train with some fellow fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there, though later the venue was moved to Mexico. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy my age I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial and equestrian sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls, from which I have never truly returned.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of white and patriarchal privilege, genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood, not because of language but of implicit systems of oppression. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, and a jar of tagged ears to prove the count. This was how the elites of Brazil had chosen to solve the problem of abandoned street children, fully ten per cent of the national population. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we do not challenge and defy tyranny and unjust systems.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and to obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a traumatic near death experience, similar to the mock executions of Maurice Blanchot by the Nazis in 1944 as written in The Instant of My Death and Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czar’s secret police in 1849 as written in The Idiot; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was reflexive and a decision of instinct beneath the level of conscious thought or volition, where the truths of ourselves written in our flesh are forged and revealed. Asked to let someone die to save myself, I simply said no. When thought returned to me from this moment of panic or transcendence of myself, I asked how much to let us walk away, whereupon he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, infamous for avenging his mother’s savage murder by killing his father and eating his heart, who had been arrested the previous year after a spectacular series of one hundred or more revenge killings of the most fiendish and monstrous of criminals, powerful men beyond the reach of the law or who were the law and who had perpetrated atrocities on women and children. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, with the words; “You are one of us, come with us” and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
“We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge”; so they described themselves to me, and this definition of solidarity as praxis or the action of values remains with me and shadows my use of the battle cry Never Again! As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene I; “If you wrong us, shall we not avenge?”
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased; all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth.
Second is the day when Jean Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982.
Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.
We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said “Fix bayonets?”
And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for forty two years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire in 1918. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the second of many Last Stands.
This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell, I am broken open to the suffering of others and the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.
Of the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the largest battle ever fought in Africa, even more vast than El Alamein; this was where the system of Apartheid was broken. In a massive campaign involving over 300,000 Cuban volunteer soldiers between December 1987 and March 1988, in coordination with Angolan and other indigenous forces, international volunteers, and with Soviet aid and advisors, defeated the far larger and technologically superior South Africa and their UNITA and American allies and mercenaries in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, an Angolan military base which South Africa had failed to capture with five waves of assaults.
While the spectacle of this grand final battle in a decades long liberation struggle was unfolding, I was making mischief behind enemy lines in the bush. Here I discovered a lost unit, mainly Zulu, which was encircled by Apartheid forces. After reporting what I knew of the area to the command group and a brief conference in several languages, an old fellow who had heretofore been silent stood up from the shadows of the tent, whose shirtless form displayed a fearsome and magnificent scar from a lion’s claws, and said; “We are surrounded and outnumbered with no ammunition and worse, no water, and no one is coming to help us. We must attack.”
The sergeant smiled at this as if he had been given a marvelous gift, strode outside, and gave the order which if you are lucky you will never hear; “Fix bayonets!”
And the men about to die erupted in song. “Usuthu! Umkhonto wami womile!” The first is a universal Zulu battle cry, which asks the spirits of ones ancestors to awake and bear witness to the glorious acts of heroism one is about to perform. “My spear is thirsty”, that last.
And we were victorious, though the cost was terrible. No such costs are too great to bear compared to the costs of submission to slavery, commodification, falsification, and dehumanization; for in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free, and this power of self-ownership as victory in the struggle for our humanity cannot be taken from us. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Long ago I lost count of Last Stands; these have become truths written in my flesh, and I bear such marks without number. As doubtless will those who now stand with Palestine, Ukraine, or any people under threat of annihilation.
In all of this what matters is that in refusal to submit to authority and to force we become Unconquered and free; this is victory as a condition of being which cannot be taken from us, much like the heroic Ukrainian soldier guarding a desolate island who refused to surrender to a Russian warship with the words; “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” Such a man cannot be conquered, and his immortal words speak for his whole nation.
The secret of force, power, and authority is that these things are hollow and fragile, and fail when met with disobedience and the simple refusal to believe and to submit.
How do we find the will to do these things, to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival?
The truth is we need nothing beyond ourselves and our moment of decision to do such things; no great universal principles, not even the negative space of a heroic figure to inhabit and perform before the stage of the world. All we need is this; that others who rely on us will die if we do not.
This is what makes us human, and its something we must continue to affirm no matter what the cost.
There may be one more thing that can help us in such moments of decision; if we remember who we are, and not how others imagine us.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
History, memory, identity; we are a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation across vast gulfs of time, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
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 for ownership of ourselves.
We have begun to remember who we are, we Americans, after the long spell of falsification cast by Traitor Trump and his Fourth Reich propagandists; we have now called for a ceasefire in Gaza, after half a year of secretly arming Israel’s Gaza War at the orders of Genocide Joe. Europe too is reawakening as NATO coheres its resistance to the imperial conquest of Ukraine and to the threat of a Russian conquest of Europe. As yet America has done nothing to bring regime change to either outlaw nation, nor silenced the bombs, nor liberated Ukraine or Palestine, nor opened the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid; but all of this remains possible, if we all help as we can.
At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom.
Here too, in a moment which parallels that of Spain in 1936 and Poland in 1939, we must say Never Again!
As I defined the phrase in my post of March 6 2022, How if Vladimir Putin Should Be Assassinated? An Interrogation of the Origins of Evil and the Social Use of Force, and of the State as Embodied Psychopathy and Violence; “I cannot be complicit in silence with these crimes against humanity, to which as with fascism there can be but one reply: Never Again! A rallying cry complicated by its popularization in the title of founder of the Jewish Defense League Meir Kahane’s book “Never Again!: A Program for Survival, its origin is in Isaac Lambdan’s 1926 poem Masada; “Never shall Masada fall again”; it first appeared in its current form on signs written by the prisoners of Buchenwald after its liberation.
Elie Wiesel defines the phrase in his novel Hostage; “Never again” becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow. There will never again be hatred, people say. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children. And never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence. It’s a prayer.”
As written in the article The Persistence of Genocide at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University: “According to the great historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, the phrase “Never Again” first appeared on handmade signs put up by inmates at Buchenwald in April, 1945, shortly after the camp had been liberated by U.S. forces.”
As written by Emily Burack in the Jerusalem Post; “After a gunman took the lives of 17 students and staff at their high school in Parkland, Florida, students there launched a national campaign to promote gun control. They called for a major protest in Washington, DC, on March 24, and are encouraging similar protests and student walkouts across the country.
And they took a name for their campaign, #NeverAgain, that has long been linked to Holocaust commemoration.
Parkland junior Cameron Kasky is credited with coining the hashtag. A Twitter account for the movement, NeverAgainMSD, is described as “For survivors of the Stoneman Douglas Shooting, by survivors of the Stoneman Douglas Shooting.”
Some supporters of the students’ efforts are put off by their use of Never Again. Lily Herman, writing in Refinery29, said “it’s very uncomfortable to watch a term you’ve used to talk about your family and people’s own heritage and history be taken away overnight.”
Malka Goldberg, a digital communications specialist in Maryland, tweeted, “When I saw they’re using #NeverAgain for the campaign it bothered me, b/c many Jews strongly [associate] that phrase w/ the Holocaust specifically. For a second it felt like cultural appropriation, but I doubt the kids knew this or did it intentionally.”
Hasia Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, is unfazed by the students’ use of the phrase. While some may object to the phrase Never Again being reappropriated for gun control, it “does not mean that reaction is appropriate or reasonable,” she told JTA.
While some have traced the phrase to the Hebrew poet Isaac Lambdan’s 1926 poem “Masada” (“Never shall Masada fall again!”), its current use is more directly tied to the aftermath of the Holocaust. The first usage of Never Again is murky, but most likely began in postwar Israel. The phrase was used in secular kibbutzim there in the late 1940s; it was used in a Swedish documentary on the Holocaust in 1961.
But the phrase gained currency in English thanks in large part to Meir Kahane, the militant rabbi who popularized it in America when he created the Jewish Defense League in 1968 and used it as a title of a 1972 book-length manifesto. As the president of the American Jewish Committee, Sholom Comay, said after Kahane’s assassination in November 1990, “Despite our considerable differences, Meir Kahane must always be remembered for the slogan Never Again, which for so many became the battle cry of post-Holocaust Jewry.”
For Kahane, Never Again was an implicitly violent call to arms and a rebuke of passivity and inactivity. The shame surrounding the alleged passivity of the Jews in the face of their destruction became a cornerstone of the JDL. As Kahane said, “the motto Never Again does not mean that ‘it’ [a holocaust] will never happen again. That would be nonsense. It means that if it happens again, it won’t happen in the same way. Last time, the Jews behaved like sheep.”
Kahane used Never Again to justify acts of terror in the name of fighting antisemitism. In the anthem of the Jewish Defense League, members recited, “To our slaughtered brethren and lonely widows: Never again will our people’s blood be shed by water, Never again will such things be heard in Judea.”
Later, however, Kahane’s violent call for action was adapted by American Jewish establishment groups and Holocaust commemoration institutions as a call for peace, tolerance and heeding the warning signs of genocide.
These days, when the phrase is used to invoke the Holocaust, it can be either particular or universal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tends toward the particular when he uses it to speak about the need for a strong Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust.
“I promise, as head of the Jewish state, that never again will we allow the hand of evil to sever the life of our people and our state,” he said in a speech at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp marking International Holocaust Memorial Day in 2010.
But Netanyahu has also used the phrase in its universal sense of preventing all genocides. After visiting a memorial to the victims of the Rwanda genocide in 2010, Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, wrote in the guestbook, “We are deeply moved by the memorial to the victims of one history’s greatest crimes — and reminded of the haunting similarities to the genocide of our own people. Never again.”
Then-President Barack Obama also used the phrase in its universal sense in marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2011. “We are reminded to remain ever-vigilant against the possibility of genocide, and to ensure that Never Again is not just a phrase but a principled cause,” he said in a statement. “And we resolve to stand up against prejudice, stereotyping, and violence – including the scourge of anti-Semitism – around the globe.”
That’s similar to how the US Holocaust Memorial Museum uses the phrase. In choosing the name Never Again as the theme of its 2013 Days of Remembrance, its used the term as a call to study the genocide of the Jews in order to respond to the “warning signs” of genocides happening anywhere.
And Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and author who came to be associated with the phrase, also used it in the universal sense. ”Never again’ becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow … never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence,” the Nobel laureate wrote in 2012.
Never Again is a phrase that keeps on evolving. It was used in protests against the Muslim ban and in support of refugees, in remembrance of Japanese internment during World War II and recalling the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. And now the phrase is taking on yet another life: in the fight for gun control in America.
Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish studies at Indiana University who is presently a visiting scholar at the Center for Jewish History in New York, told JTA, “For [Kahane], Never Again was not ‘this will not happen again because we will have a country’ but ‘we Jews will never be complacent like we were during the war.’ That is, for Kahane, Never Again was a call to militancy as the only act of prevention. In Parkland it is a call for gun control. In a way, a call for anti-militancy.”
So the dialectical forces of history have unfolded Never Again! Like an origami Moebius Loop toward Infinity, from the defense of victims as our duty of care for others to general principles of action. I am uncomfortable with such abstractions; for they begin again a recapitulation of the cycle of centralization of authority and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which makes genocides possible. Gott Mitt Uns; it is an ancient evil.
As Voltaire has written; “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue. To protect and defend others from harm, our universal human rights, and democracy as a free society of equals, yes. Resistance and solidarity in the struggle against tyranny and fascism, always, and by any means necessary.
But we must never legitimize the use of social force because some of us are less human than others. No matter where you begin in authorizing identities, normalities, or the tyranny of imposed ideas of virtue, with elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, with fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
And now I will ask the same questions as in the beginning of my dialog herein, but I will reverse the order of the questions.
So, how can we use Never Again! as a principle of direct action which preserves and empowers the wellbeing and autonomy of others, without such action becoming a point of moral fracture and unequal power?
How shall we defend the peoples of Palestine and Ukraine from the horrific war crimes of Israeli and Russian imperial conquest and genocide, without ourselves becoming an empire?
As written by David Rieff in The Persistence of Genocide; “According to the great historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, the phrase “Never Again” first appeared on handmade signs put up by inmates at Buchenwald in April, 1945, shortly after the camp had been liberated by U.S. forces. “I think it was really the Communists who were behind it, but I am not sure,” Hilberg said in one of the last interviews he gave before his death in the summer of 2007. Since then, “Never Again” has become kind of shorthand for the remembrance of the Shoah.
At Buchenwald, the handmade signs were long ago replaced by a stone monument onto which the words are embossed in metal letters. And as a usage, it has come to seem like a final word not just on the murder of the Jews of Europe, but on any great crime against humanity that could not be prevented. “Never Again” has appeared on monuments and memorials from Paine, Chile, the town with proportionately more victims of the Pinochet dictatorship than any other place in the country, to the Genocide Museum in Kigali, Rwanda. The report of conadep, the Argentine truth commission set up in 1984 after the fall of the Galtieri dictatorship, was titled “Nunca Mas” — “Never Again” in Spanish. And there is now at least one online Holocaust memorial called “Never Again.”
Since 1945, “never again” has meant, essentially, “Never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.”
There is nothing wrong with this. But there is also nothing all that right with it either. Bluntly put, an undeniable gulf exists between the frequency with which the phrase is used — above all on days of remembrance most commonly marking the Shoah, but now, increasingly, other great crimes against humanity — and the reality, which is that 65 years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, “never again” has proved to be nothing more than a promise on which no state has ever been willing to deliver. When, last May, the writer Elie Wiesel, himself a former prisoner in Buchenwald, accompanied President Barack Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel to the site of the camp, he said that he had always imagined that he would return some day and tell his father’s ghost that the world had learned from the Holocaust and that it had become a “sacred duty” for people everywhere to prevent it from recurring. But, Wiesel continued, had the world actually learned anything, “there would be no Cambodia, and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia.”
Wiesel was right: The world has learned very little. But this has not stopped it from pontificating much. The Obama administration’s National Security Strategy Paper, issued in May 2010, exemplifies this tendency. It asserts confidently that “The United States is committed to working with our allies, and to strengthening our own internal capabilities, in order to ensure that the United States and the international community are proactively engaged in a strategic effort to prevent mass atrocities and genocide.” And yet again, we are treated to the promise, “never again.” “In the event that prevention fails,” the report states, “the United States will work both multilaterally and bilaterally to mobilize diplomatic, humanitarian, financial, and — in certain instances — military means to prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities.”
Of course, this is not strategy, but a promise that, decade in and decade out, has proved to be empty. For if one were to evaluate these commitments by the results they have produced so far, one would have to say that all this “proactive engagement” and “diplomatic, financial, and humanitarian mobilization” has not accomplished very much. No one should be surprised by this. The U.S. is fighting two wars and still coping (though it has fallen from the headlines) with the floods in Pakistan, whose effects will be felt for many years in a country where America’s security interests and humanitarian relief efforts are inseparable. At the same time, the crisis over Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons capability is approaching its culmination. Add to this the fact that the American economy is in shambles, and you do not exactly have a recipe for engagement. The stark fact is that “never again” has never been a political priority for either the United States or the so-called international community (itself a self-flattering idea with no more reality than a unicorn). Nor, despite all the bluff talk about moral imperatives backed by international resolve, is there any evidence that it is becoming one.
And yet, however at variance they are with both geopolitical and geoeconomic realities, the arguments exemplified by this document reflect the conventional wisdom of the great and the good in America across the “mainstream” (as one is obliged to say in this, the era of the tea parties) political spectrum. Even a fairly cursory online search will reveal that there are a vast number of papers, book-length studies, think tank reports, and United Nations documents proposing programs for preventing or at least halting genocides. For once, the metaphor “cottage industry” truly is appropriate. And what unites almost all of them is that they start from the premise that prevention is possible, if only the “international community” would live up to the commitments it made in the Genocide Convention of 1948, and in subsequent international covenants, treaties, and un declarations. If, the argument goes, the world’s great powers, first and foremost of course the United States, in collaboration with the UN system and with global civil society, would act decisively and in a timely way, we could actually enforce the moral standards supposedly agreed upon in the aftermath of the Holocaust. If they do not, of course, then “never again” will never mean much more than it has meant since 1945 — which, essentially, is “Never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.”
The report of the United States Institute for Peace’s task force on genocide, chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, is among the best of these efforts. As the report makes clear, the task force undertook its work all too painfully aware of the gulf between the international consensus on the moral imperative of stopping genocide and the ineffectiveness to date of the actual responses. Indeed, the authors begin by stating plainly that 60 years after the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention and twenty years after it was ratified by the U.S. Senate, “The world agrees that genocide is unacceptable and yet genocide and mass killings continue.” To find ways to match words and “stop allowing the unacceptable,” Albright and Cohen write with commendable candor, “is in fact one of most persistent puzzles of our times.”
Whether or not one agrees with the task force about what can or cannot be done to change this, there can be no question that sorrow over the world’s collective failure to act in East Pakistan, or Cambodia, or Rwanda is the only honorable response imaginable. But the befuddlement the authors of the report confess to feeling is another matter entirely. Like most thinking influenced by the human rights movement, the task force seems imbued with the famous Kantian mot d’ordre: “Ought implies can.” But to put the matter bluntly, there is no historical basis to believe anything of the sort, and a great deal of evidence to suggest a diametrically opposing conclusion. Of course, history is not a straitjacket, and the authors of the report, again echoing much thinking within the human rights movement, particularly Michael Ignatieff’s work in the 1990s, do make the argument that since 1945 there has been what Ignatieff calls “A revolution of global concern” and they call a “revolution in conscience.” In fairness, if in fact they are basing their optimism on this chiliastic idea, then one better understands the degree to which the members of the task force came to believe that genocide, far from being “A Problem From Hell,” as Samantha Power titled her influential book on the subject, in reality is a problem if not easily solved then at least susceptible to solution — though, again, only if all the international actors, by whom the authors mean the great powers, the un system, countries in a region where there is a risk of a genocide occurring, and what they rather uncritically call civil society, make it a priority.
Since it starts from this presupposition, it is hardly surprising that the report is upbeat about the prospects for finally reversing course. “Preventing genocide,” the authors insist, “is a goal that can be achieved with the right institutional structures, strategies, and partnerships — in short, with the right blueprint.” To accomplish this, the task force emphasizes the need for strengthening international cooperation both in terms of identifying places where there is a danger of a genocide being carried out and coordinated action to head it off or at least halt it. Four specific responses are recommended, one predominantly informational (early warning) and three operational (early prevention, preventive diplomacy, and, finally, military intervention when all else has failed). None of this is exactly new, and most of it is commonsensical from a conceptual standpoint. But one of the great strengths of the report, as befits the work of a task force chaired by two former cabinet secretaries, is this practical bent — that is to say, its emphasis on creating or strengthening institutional structures within the U.S. government and the un system and showing how such reforms will enable policymakers to respond effectively to genocide.
However, this same presupposition leads the authors of the report to write as if there were little need for them to elaborate the political and ideological bases for the “can do” approach they recommend. Francis Fukuyama’s controversial theory of the “End of History” goes unmentioned, but there is more than a little of Fukuyama in their assumptions about a “final” international consensus having been established with regard to the norms that have come into force protecting populations from genocide or mass atrocity crimes. It is true that there is a body of such norms: the Genocide Convention, the un’s so-called Responsibility to Protect doctrine, adopted by the World Summit (with the strong support of the Bush administration) in 2005, and various international instruments limiting impunity, above all the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court. And, presumably, it is with these in mind that the report’s authors can assert so confidently that the focus in genocide prevention can now be on “implement[ing] and operationalizing the commitments [these instruments] contain.”
It is here that doubt will begin to assail more skeptical readers. Almost since its inception, the human rights movement has been a movement of lawyers. And for lawyers, the establishment of black-letter international law is indeed the “end of the story” from a normative point of view — an internationalized version of stare decisis, but extended to the nth degree. On this account such a norm, once firmly established (which, activists readily admit, may take time; they are not naifs), can within a fairly short period thereafter be understood as an ineradicable and unchallengeable part of the basic user’s manual for international relations. This is what has allowed the human rights movement (and, at least with regard to the question of genocide, the members of the task force in the main seem to have been of a similar cast of mind) to hew to what is essentially a positivist progress narrative. However, the human rights movement’s certitude on the matter derives less from its historical experience than it does from its ideological presuppositions. In this sense, human rights truly is a secular religion, as its critics but even some of its supporters have long claimed.
Of course, strategically (in both polemical and institutional terms) the genius of this approach is of a piece with liberalism generally, of which, in any case, “human rights-ism” is the offspring. Liberalism is the only modern ideology that will not admit it is an ideology. “We are just demanding that nations live up to the international covenants they have signed and the relevant national and international statutes,” the human rights activist replies indignantly when taxed with actually supporting, and, indeed, helping to midwife an ideological system. It may be tedious to have to point out in 2010 that law and morality are not the same thing, but, well, law and morality are not the same thing. The problem is that much of the task force report reads as if they were.
An end to genocide: It is an attractive prospect, not to mention a morally unimpeachable goal in which Kantian moral absolutism meets American can do-ism, where the post-ideological methodologies (which are anything but post-ideological, of course) of international lawyers meet the American elite’s faith, which goes back at least to Woodrow Wilson if not much earlier in the history of the republic, that we really can right any wrong if only we commit ourselves sufficiently to doing so. Unfortunately, far too much is assumed (or stipulated, as the lawyers say) by the report’s authors. More dismayingly still, far too many of the concrete examples either of what could have been done but wasn’t are presented so simplistically as to make the solutions offered appear hollow, since the challenge as described bears little or no resemblance to the complexities that actually exist.
The calls for an intervention in Darfur reached their height after the moral imperative for intervention had started to dissipate.
Darfur is a good example of this. The report mentions Darfur frequently, both in the context of a nuts and bolts consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of various states and institutions such as the UN and the African Union, which have intervened, however unsatisfactorily, over the course of the crisis, and as an example of how the mobilization of civil society can influence policy. “In today’s age of electronic media communication,” the report states, “Americans are increasingly confronted in their living rooms — and even on their cell phones — with information about and images of death and destruction virtually anywhere they occur. . . . The Internet has proven to be a powerful tool for organizing broad-based responses to genocide and mass atrocities, as we have seen in response to the crisis in Darfur.”
The problem is not so much that this statement is false but rather that it begs more questions than it answers, and, more tellingly still, that the report’s authors seem to have no idea of this. There is no question that the rise in 2005 and 2006 of a mass movement calling for an end to mass killing in Darfur (neither the United Nations nor the most important relief groups present on the ground in Darfur agree with the characterization of what took place there as a genocide) was an extraordinarily successful mobilization — perhaps the most successful since the anti-Apartheid movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Beginning with the activism of a small group of college students who in June 2004 had attended a Darfur Emergency Summit organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and addressed by Elie Wiesel, and shortly afterwards founded an organization called Save Darfur, the movement rapidly expanded and, at its height, included the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus, right-wing evangelicals, left-leaning campuses activists, mainline human rights activists, and American neoconservatives. But nowhere does the task force report examine whether the policy recommendations of this movement were wise, or, indeed, whether the effect that they had on the U.S. debate was positive or negative. Instead, the report proceeds as if any upsurge in grassroots interest and activism galvanized by catastrophes like Darfur is by definition a positive development.
In reality, the task force’s assumption that any mass movement that supports “more assertive government action in response to genocide and mass atrocities” is to be encouraged is a strangely content-less claim. Surely, before welcoming the rise of a Save Darfur (or its very influential European cousin, sos Darfour), it is important to think clearly not just about what they are against but what they are for. And here, the example of Save Darfur is as much a cautionary tale as an inspiring one. The report somewhat shortchanges historical analysis, with what little history that does make it in painted with a disturbingly broad brush. Obviously, the task force was well aware of this, which I presume is why its report insists, unwisely in my view, that it was far more important to focus on the present and the future more than on the past. But understanding the history is not marginal, it is central. Put the case that one believes in military intervention in extremis to halt genocide. In that case, intervening in late- 2003 and early-2004, when the killing was at its height, would have been the right thing to do. But Save Darfur really only came into its own in late 2005, that is, well after the bulk of the killing had ended. In other words, the calls for an intervention reached their height after the moral imperative for such an intervention had started to dissipate. An analogy can be made with the human rights justification for the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein. As Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, has pointed out, had this happened during Baghdad’s murderous Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1988, there would have been a solid justification for military intervention, whether or not Human Rights Watch would have agreed with it. But to intervene fifteen years later because of the massacre was indefensible on human rights grounds (though, obviously, there were other rationales for the war that would not have been affected by such reasoning).
If you want to be a prophet, you have to get it right. And if Save Darfur was wrong in its analysis of the facts relevant to their call for an international military intervention to stop genocide, either because there had in reality been no genocide (as, again, the un and many mainstream ngos on the ground insisted) or because the genocide had ended before they began to campaign for intervention, then Save Darfur’s activism can just as reasonably be described in negative terms as in the positive ones of the task force report. Yes, Save Darfur had (and has) good intentions and the attacks on them from de facto apologists for the government of Sudan like Mahmood Mamdani are not worth taking seriously. But good intentions should never be enough.
In fairness, had the task force decided to provide the history of the Darfur, or Bosnia, or Rwanda, in all their frustrating complexity, they would have produced a report that, precisely because of all the nuance, the ambiguity, the need for “qualifiers,” doubtless would have been of less use to policymakers, whose professional orientation is of necessity toward actionable policies. But when what is being suggested is a readiness for U.S. soldiers (to be sure, preferably in a multilateral context) in extreme cases to kill and die to prevent genocide or mass atrocity crimes, then, to turn human rights Kantianism against them for a change, it is nuance that is the moral imperative. Again, good intentions alone will not do. Qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bete, Pascal said. Who wishes to act the angel, acts the beast.
History, in all its unsentimentality, is almost always the best antidote to such simplicities. And yet, if anything, the task force’s report is a textbook case of ahistorical thinking and its perils. The authors emphasize that, “This task force is not a historical commission; its focus is on the future and on prevention.” The problem is that unless the past is looked at in detail, not just conjured up by way of illustrations of the West’s failures to intervene that the task force hopes to remedy, then what is being argued for, in effect, are, if necessary, endless wars of altruism. To put it charitably, in arguing for that, I do not think the authors have exactly established their claim to occupying the moral high ground. If they had spent half the time thinking about history in as serious a way as they did about how to construct the optimal bureaucratic architecture within the U.S. government, then what the task force finally produced would have been a document that was pathbreaking. Instead, they took the conventional route, and, in my view, will simply add their well-reasoned policy recommendations to the large number that came before and, indeed, as in the case of the recent initiative of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies on the so-called Will to Intervene, have already begun to come after.
With the best will in the world, what is one to make of arguments made at the level of generalization of the following?
Grievances over inequitable distribution of power and resources appear to be a fundamental motivating factor in the commission of mass violence against ethnic, sectarian, or political groups. That same inequality may also provide the means for atrocities to be committed. For example, control of a highly centralized state apparatus and the access to economic and military power that comes with it makes competition for power an all-or-nothing proposition and creates incentives to eliminate competitors. This dynamic was evident in Rwanda and Burundi and is serious cause for concern in Burma today.
The fact is that, vile as they are, there is actually very little likelihood of the butchers in Rangoon committing genocide — their crimes have other characteristics. It is disheartening that the members of the task force would allow the fact that they, like most sensible people, believe that Burma is one of the worst dictatorships in the world, to justify their distorting reality in this way, when they almost certainly know better. And since they do precisely that, it is hard not to at least entertain the suspicion — whose implications extend rather further than that and beg the question of what kind of world order follows from the task force’s recommendations — that consciously or (and this is worse, in a way) unconsciously they reasoned that if they could identify the Rangoon regime as genocidal, this would make an international intervention to overthrow it far more defensible. If this is right, then, if implemented, the report (again, intentionally or inadvertently) would have the effect of helping nudge us back toward a world where the prevention of genocide becomes a moral warrant for other policy agendas (as was surely the case with Saddam Hussein in 2003, and was the case with General Bashir in Khartoum until the arrival of the Obama administration).
I write this in large measure because the task force’s description of why mass violence and genocide occur could be a description of practically the entire developing world. Analysis at that level of generalization is not just useless, it is actually a prophylactic against thought.
It gets worse. The authors write:
“It is equally important to focus on the motivations of specific leaders and the tools at their disposal. There is no genocidal destiny. Many countries with ethnic or religious discrimination, armed conflicts, autocratic governments, or crushing poverty have not experienced genocide while others have. The difference comes down to leadership. Mass atrocities are organized by powerful elites who believe they stand to gain from these crimes and who have the necessary resources at their disposal. The heinous crimes committed in Nazi-occupied Europe, Cambodia, and Rwanda, for example, were all perpetrated with significant planning, organization, and access to state resources, including weapons, budgets, detention facilities, and broadcast media.
There are also key triggers that can tip a high-risk environment into crisis. These include unstable, unfair, or unduly postponed elections; high-profile assassinations; battlefield victories; and environmental conditions (for example, drought) that may cause an eruption of violence or heighten the perception of an existential threat to a government or armed group. Sometimes potential triggers are known well in advance and preparations can be made to address the risk of mass atrocities that may follow. Poorly planned elections in deeply divided societies are a commonly cited example, but deadlines for significant policy action, legal judgments, and anniversaries of highly traumatic and disputed historical events are also potential triggers that can be foreseen.”
I tax the reader’s patience with such a long quotation to show how expertise can produce meaninglessness. For apart from the mention of poorly planned elections — a reference to Rwanda that is perfectly correct as far as it goes — the rest of this does not advance our understanding one iota. To remedy or at least alleviate these vast social stresses, the task force recommends “effective [sic] early prevention”! The authors themselves were obliged to admit that, “Such efforts to change underlying social, economic, or political conditions are difficult and require sustained investment of resources and attention.” Really, you think? But about where these resources, as opposed to institutional arrangements, are to come from, they are largely silent, apart from emphasizing the need to target with both threats and positive inducements leaders thought likely to choose to commit such crimes. But the authors know perfectly well that, as they themselves put it, “early engagement is a speculative venture,” and that “the watch list of countries ‘at risk’ can be long, due to the difficulty of anticipating specific crises in a world generally plagued by instability.” Surely, people like Secretary Albright and Secretary Cohen know better than anyone that such ventures are never going to be of much interest to senior policymakers, just as the global Marshall Plan that would be required to effectively address the underlying causes of genocidal wars is never going to be on offer.
To a great power, and to the citizens of great power, powerlessness is simply an unconscionable destiny. The task force report, with its strange imperviousness to viewing historical tragedy as much more than an engineering problem, is a perfect illustration of this. Unsound historically, and hubristic morally, for all its good intentions, the task force report is not a blueprint for a better future but a mystification of the choices that actually confront us and between which we are going to have to choose if we are ever to prevent or halt even some genocides. My suspicion is that the reason that the very accomplished, distinguished people who participated in the task force did not feel obliged to face up to this is because the report gives as much weight to the national interest basis for preventing or halting genocide as it does to the moral imperative of doing so. As the report puts it:
“ First, genocide fuels instability, usually in weak, undemocratic, and corrupt states. It is in these same types of states that we find terrorist recruitment and training, human trafficking, and civil strife, all of which have damaging spillover effects for the entire world.
Second, genocide and mass atrocities have long-lasting consequences far beyond the states in which they occur. Refugee flows start in bordering countries but often spread. Humanitarian needs grow, often exceeding the capacities and resources of a generous world. The international community, including the United States, is called on to absorb and assist displaced people, provide relief efforts, and bear high economic costs. And the longer we wait to act, the more exorbitant the price tag. For example, in Bosnia, the United States has invested nearly $ 15 billion to support peacekeeping forces in the years since we belatedly intervened to stop mass atrocities.
Third, America’s standing in the world — and our ability to lead — is eroded when we are perceived as bystanders to genocide. We cannot be viewed as a global leader and respected as an international partner if we cannot take steps to avoid one of the greatest scourges of humankind. No matter how one calculates U.S. interests, the reality of our world today is that national borders provide little sanctuary from international problems. Left unchecked, genocide will undermine American security.
A core challenge for American leaders is to persuade others — in the U.S. government, across the United States, and around the world — that preventing genocide is more than just a humanitarian aspiration; it is a national and global imperative.”
Again, apologies for quoting at such length. but truthfully, is one meant to take this seriously? There is absolutely no evidence that terrorist recruiting is more promising in failed states than, say, in suburban Connecticut where the (very middle-class) Faisal Shahzad, son of a retired Pakistani Air Force vice-marshal, plotted to explode a car bomb in Times Square. Nor, in the U.S. case is there any basis for concluding that the main source of immigration is from places traumatized by war. To the contrary, most of our immigrants are the best and the brightest (in the sense not of the most educated but most enterprising) of Mexico, the Philippines, India, and China. The proportion of migrants from Sudan or Somalia is small by comparison. As for the costs of peacekeeping, are the authors of the report serious? Fifteen billion dollars? The sum barely signifies in the rubric of the military budget of the United States. And lastly, the report’s claim that the U.S. won’t be viewed as a global leader and respected as an international partner if it doesn’t take the lead to stop genocide is absurd on its face. Not respected by whom, exactly? Hu Jintao in Beijing? Merkel in Berlin? President Felipe Calderon in Mexico City? To put it charitably, the claim conjures up visions of Pinocchio, rather than Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson.
The report calls for courage, but courage begins at home. Pressed by Armenian activists at one of the events held to launch the report as to why they had both earlier signed a letter urging the U.S. not to bow to Armenian pressure and formally recognize the Armenian genocide, Secretary Cohen and Secretary Albright refused over and over again to characterize the Armenian genocide as, well, a genocide. It is true that the Armenian activists had come looking for a confrontation. But there can be little question that both secretaries did everything they could to avoid committing themselves one way or the other. “Terrible things happened to the Armenians,” Secretary Albright said, refusing to go any further. The letter, she explained, had been primarily about “whether this was an appropriate time to raise the issue.” For his part, Secretary Cohen, emphasized that angering the Turks while the Iraq war was raging could lead to Turkish reactions that would “put our sons and daughters in jeopardy.” And, in any case, the task force was not “a historical commission.”
This is a perfectly defensible position from the perspective of prudential realpolitik. The problem is that what the task force report constantly calls for is political courage. And whatever else they were, Secretaries Albright and Cohen’s responses were expedient, not courageous. There will always be reasons not to intervene — compelling pressures, I mean, not trivial ones. Why should a future U.S. government be less vulnerable to them than the Bush or Obama administrations? About this, as about so many other subjects, the task force report is as evasive as Secretary Albright and Secretary Cohen were at the press conference at which the Armenian activists confronted them. Doubtless, they had to be. For the solutions they propose are not real solutions, the history they touch on is not the actual history, and the world they describe is not the real world.”
Schindler’s List: What The Girl In The Red Coat Represents, Explained
23 במרץ 2024 בפורים: למה אנחנו מתכוונים כשאנחנו משתמשים בביטוי; “לעולם לא שוב!”
בחג פורים זה שמתחיל היום בשקיעה ומסתיים עם סתיו הלילה מחר, חוגגים עמי העולם את ישועתם מרצח העם בפרס המאה ה-5 כפי שכתוב במגילת אסתר, וכל האנושות עשויה לחגוג את הניצחון. של אהבה על שנאה, סולידריות על פילוג והתנגדות על עריצות שהיא מנציחה.
כאשר אנו מתמודדים בחדשות עם תמונות של אלימות נוראה ופשעים נגד האנושות בשתי מלחמות המאתגרות את סדר העולם שלנו; הפלישה הישראלית לעזה שהפכה את אמריקה לשותפה ברצח עם ומעמידה בספק את רעיון זכויות האדם, והפלישה הרוסית לאוקראינה, מלחמת הרס מוחלט שלא דומה לשום דבר שאירופה ראתה מאז מלחמת העולם השנייה, המהדהדת את הזוועות והשימושים שלה. נשק תרמברי כמשרפות ניידות נגד אזרחים, אני חושב על הדברים האלה היום במונחים של המורשת ההיסטורית של התנגדות לעריצות, עבדות, מלחמות כיבוש ושליטה אימפריאלית ורצח עם.
איך נגן על עמי פלסטין ואוקראינה מפני פשעי המלחמה הנוראיים של הפשיזם התיאוקרטי של נתניהו של הדם, האמונה והאדמה והכיבוש האימפריאלי המטורף של פוטין, מבלי שעצמנו נהיה אימפריה?
פיתוי הכוח מתחיל בפחד, במיוחד פחד מוחץ ומוכלל הנתון בצורות של אחר על ידי סמכות בשירות לכוח; למצוא ביטחון ובטחון בהפיכתו לבורר המידות. גם לזה עלינו להתנגד.
יתרה מכך, אסטרטגיות כאלה של כוח ושליטה חייבות תמיד להיכשל ולהתקלקל, שכן ביטחון הוא אשליה, והשימוש בכוח חברתי יוצר התנגדות משלו.
לעולם לא שוב! הוא ביטוי שהשתמשתי בו לעתים קרובות כתשובה לעריצות ולפשיזם, הן בכתיבתי והן לחבריי באופן אישי, כקריאה להתנגדות מוחלטת ללא גבולות, ובזה אני מבקש לחקור את משמעותו והשלכותיו.
איך נוכל להשתמש ב- Never Again! כעיקרון של פעולה ישירה המשמר ומעצים את הרווחה והאוטונומיה של אחרים, מבלי שפעולה כזו תהפוך לנקודת שבר מוסרית, חתרנות לאידיאלים וכישלון מפל של כוח לא שוויוני?
עבורי, ההיסטוריה של השימוש בו קשורה לקטגוריה של הרגעים המגדירים שלי, שאני קורא להם עמודים אחרונים, שאת סיפוריהם סיפרתי פעמים רבות. אלה כוללים רק רגעים שבהם בחרתי בסולידריות ובסירוב להיכנע על פני הישרדות אישית; מסרב לזוז הצידה מהילד שמאחורי כשציידי הראשים של המשטרה קיבלו פקודה להיכנע בברזיל 1974, כאשר חיילים הציתו את הבית בו ז’אן ז’נה ואני היינו, מוקפים ולא חמושים, בביירות 1982 כשהשביע אותי בשבועה. של ההתנגדות, תקווה עזובה בקרב Cuito Cuanavale באנגולה 1988 לשחרור מהאפרטהייד, ועוד אינספור אחרים מעבר לחשבון שלי.
עמדות אחרונות הן בחירות של סירוב לוותר על האנושות שלנו וזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, חובת הזהירות והניהול שלנו זה בזה, ללא קשר להשלכות כקווים שאנו לא יכולים לחצות מבלי להפוך למשהו פחות אנושי.
במלחמת עזה המתמשכת ורצח העם של הפלסטינים, זהו גם סירוב לנטוש את מטרת “חופש האמונה לכל המין האנושי” כאגדה על האנדרטה של ניצחונו של גוסטבוס אדולפוס משבדיה ב-1631 בקרב ברייטנפלד, שהבטיחה זאת. הימין מצהיר, העיקרון של מדינה לא עדתית שעליה מושתתת אמריקה ושל הזכות הטבועה לעצמאות והגדרה עצמית ריבונית של כל העמים, וסולידריות עם כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי כדור הארץ נגד כוח ושליטה, מדינה טרור ועריצות, מלחמה וכיבוש אימפריאלי.
בין המודלים האישיים שלי לחיקוי באנטי-פשיזם ובמהפכה היא דמותו הבדיונית של הארי טאטל בגילומו של רוברט דה נירו בסרט ברזיל, שהשורה שלו “כולנו בזה ביחד”, מהדהדת לאורך ארבעים שנים מהחיים וההרפתקאות שלי.
תן לי לשים את זה בהקשר; ברזיל הייתה חווית הסולו הראשונה שלי בנסיעות חוץ, טסתי לסאו פאולו כשהייתי בן ארבע עשרה, בקיץ 1974, כדי להתאמן עם כמה סייפים אחרים לקראת המשחקים הפאן אמריקאים שתוכננו להתקיים שם, אם כי מאוחר יותר הועבר המקום ל מקסיקו. הייתה לי קצת פורטוגזית שיחה חדשה שלמדתי, הזמנה להתארח בביתו של ילד בגילי שהכרתי ממעגל טורנירי הסייף שאיתו יכולתי לגלות את השובבות המקומית, וחזיונות של מסיבות חוף.
אז נכנסתי לעולם של נימוסים חצרניים ומשרתים עם כפפות לבנות, מארחים אדיבים ומבריקים שהיו מאורות מקומיים וזרקו כדור פורמלי מפואר כדי להציג אותי, וחבר שאיתו חלקתי תשוקה מטורפת לספורט לחימה ולספורט סוסים. , אבל גם עולם של חומות גבוהות ושומרים חמושים.
המבט הראשון שלי מעבר לאשליה זו הגיע עם קולות של ירי רובה מהשומרים; כשהסתכלתי מהמרפסת שלי לראות מי תוקף את החזית
בשער גיליתי שהשומרים יורים לתוך קהל של קבצנים, בעיקר ילדים, שהסתערו על משאית שהובילה את אספקת המזון השבועית. באותו יום עשיתי את הטיול הסודי הראשון שלי מעבר לחומות, שממנו מעולם לא חזרתי באמת.
אילו אמיתות מסתתרות בחומות הארמונות שלנו, שמעבר להן אסור להביט? קל להאמין לשקרי הסמכות כשאדם חבר באליטה שבאינטרס שלה הם טוענים שהוא מחזיקים בכוח, ולא להטיל ספק במניעים ובעמדת הפריבילגיה של עצמו. קל להחריד להאמין בשקרים כאשר אנו הנהנים מהיררכיות של אחרות מוציאה מהכלל, מפערי עושר וכוח ואי-שוויון המיוצרים באופן מערכתי ומיוצרים נשק בשירות לשלטון, ומפריבילגיות לבנים ופטריארכליים, רצח עם, עבדות, כיבוש ואימפריאליזם.
תמיד שימו לב לאיש שמאחורי הווילון. כי אין סמכות צודקת, וכפי שדורותי אומרת בקוסם מארץ עוץ, הוא “רק זקן זקן”, והשקרים והאשליות שלו, הכוח והשליטה שלו, אינם משרתים אינטרסים מלבד שלו.
בהיותי נער אמריקאי נאיבי, הרגשתי שחובתי לדווח על התקרית; אבל בתחנת המשטרה התקשיתי להפוך את עצמי למובן, לא בגלל שפה אלא בגלל מערכות דיכוי מרומזות. הם חשבו שאני שם כדי להמר על המשמר שלי בתחרות חודשית מתמשכת שעבורה השוטר הכניס הכי הרבה ילדי רחוב; היה לוח גיר על קיר התחנה בשביל זה, וצנצנת עם אוזניים מתויגות כדי להוכיח את הספירה. כך בחרו האליטות של ברזיל לפתור את בעיית ילדי הרחוב הנטושים, עשרה אחוזים מהאוכלוסייה הלאומית. משחק הימורים נוסף שנקרא “הגדול”, היה בו השוטר בעט בבטן של הנערות ההריוניות ביותר ודורג בין עשרת גורמי המוות המובילים בברזיל עבור נערות מתבגרות, המתגוררות תמיד באזורי שכונות עוני המכילים את העניים והשחורים ביותר. אזרחים; זאת בעיר שהוקמה על ידי עבדים אפריקאים שנמלטו כרפובליקה חופשית.
למדתי הרבה בשבועות שלאחר מכן; מעל הכל למדתי מי אחראי לאי השוויון הללו; אנחנו כן, אם לא נאתגר את העריצות ומערכות לא צודקות ומתריסות אותן.
במהלך לילות הרפתקאותיי מעבר לחומות ופעולות כדי לעזור ללהקות הילדים הקבצנים ולחסום את ציד הראשים של המשטרה חוויתי חוויה טראומטית של כמעט מוות, בדומה להוצאות להורג המדומה של מוריס בלאנשו על ידי הנאצים ב-1944 כפי שנכתב ב” מיידי מותי ופיודור דוסטויבסקי על ידי המשטרה החשאית של הצאר ב-1849 כפי שנכתב ב”אידיוט”; נמלט מרדף דרך מערך מנהרות עם ילד פצוע בין היתר ונלכד בשטח הפתוח על ידי שני רובאי משטרה שתפסו עמדות אגפים וכיוונו אלינו בעוד המנהיג קרא להיכנע מעבר לעיקול של מנהרה. עמדתי מול נער עם רגל מעוותת שלא יכול היה לרוץ בזמן שהאחרים התפזרו ונמלטו או מצאו מקומות מסתור, וסירבתי לעמוד מהצד כשהצטוו לעשות זאת. זה היה רפלקסיבי והחלטה של אינסטינקט מתחת לרמה של מחשבה או רצון מודע, שבו האמיתות של עצמנו שנכתבו על בשרנו מזויפות ומתגלות. ביקשתי לתת למישהו למות כדי להציל את עצמי, פשוט אמרתי שלא. כשחזרה אלי המחשבה מרגע זה של בהלה או התעלות של עצמי, שאלתי כמה לתת לנו להתרחק, ואז הוא הורה לאנשיו לירות. אבל הייתה רק ירייה אחת במקום הפגנה של אש צולבת, והחטאה רחבה; היה לו זמן לשאול “מה?” לפני נפילה ארצה.
ואז גילו את עצמם המצילים שלנו, לאחר שהתגנבו למשטרה מאחור; המטאדורים, שאפשר לתאר אותם כאנשי משמר, כנופיית פושע, קבוצה מהפכנית, או שלושתם, שהוקמה על ידי הכונן והפושע הידוע לשמצה של ברזיל פדרו רודריגס פילו, הידוע לשמצה בכך שנקם את הרצח הפראי של אמו על ידי הריגת אביו ואכילת ליבו, אשר נעצר בשנה הקודמת לאחר סדרה מרהיבה של מאה רציחות נקמה או יותר של הפושעים המטומטמים והמפלצתיים ביותר, גברים חזקים מעבר להישג ידם של החוק או שהיו החוק ושעשו זוועות בנשים וילדים. לתוך האחווה האימתנית הזו התקבלתי, עם המילים; “אתה אחד מאיתנו, בואי איתנו” וברחובות סאו פאולו באותו קיץ לא עמדתי שוב לבד.
“אנחנו לא יכולים להציל את כולם, אבל אנחנו יכולים לנקום”; אז הם תיארו לי את עצמם, וההגדרה הזו של סולידריות כפרקסיס או פעולת ערכים נשארת איתי ומצללת את השימוש שלי בזעקת הקרב לעולם לא שוב! כפי שכתב שייקספיר ב”סוחר מוונציה”, מערכה שלישית, סצנה א’; “אם אתה טועה בנו, האם לא ננקום?”
מהרגע שראיתי את השומרים של משפחת האצולה שאיתם התארחתי יורים על קהל הילדים חסרי הבית והקבצנים רוחשים את משאית אספקת המזון בשער האחוזה, עירומים ושלדיים ברעב, מצולקים ונכים ומשובשים במחלות לא ידועות. לכל אדם שעבורם שירותי בריאות ותזונה בסיסית א
מחדש תנאים מוקדמים חופשיים ומובטחים של הזכות האוניברסלית לחיים, נואשים לקומץ מזון שיכול להיות עוד יום אחד של הישרדות; באותו רגע בחרתי בצד שלי, ועמי הם חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והנמחקים; כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי כדור הארץ.
השני הוא היום שבו ז’אן ז’נה הוביל אותי למסלול חיי עם שבועת ההתנגדות בביירות בקיץ 1982.
חיילים ישראלים הציתו את הבתים ברחוב שלי וקראו לאנשים לצאת ולהיכנע. הם כיסו את עיניהם של הילדים של אלה שעשו זאת והשתמשו בהם כמגן אנושי.
לא היה לנו נשק אחר מלבד בקבוק השמפניה הריק שסיימנו זה עתה עם ארוחת הבוקר שלנו של קרפ תותים; שאלתי “יש רעיונות?”, והוא משך בכתפיו ואמר “לתקן כידונים?”
ואז הוא נתן לי עקרון פעולה שלפיו אני חי כבר ארבעים ושתיים שנה; “כשאין תקווה, אדם חופשי לעשות דברים בלתי אפשריים, דברים מפוארים.”
הוא שאל אותי אם אני מתכוון להיכנע, ואמרתי שלא; הוא חייך וענה, “גם אני לא.” וכך הוא השביע אותי לשבועה שהגה ב-1940 בפריז בתחילת הכיבוש עבור חברים שהוא יכול לאסוף, מנוסח מחדש מהשבועה שנשא כלגיונר ב-1918. הוא אמר שזה הדבר הטוב ביותר שהוא אי פעם. צָעִיף; “אנו נשבעים את נאמנותנו זה לזה, להתנגד ולא להיכנע, ולא לנטוש את חברינו.”
אז הפכתי להיות נושאת מסורת בת למעלה משמונים שנה וחיצפתי בסכסוך המפחיד והנורא ביותר שידע העולם, זמן קצר לפני שציפיתי להישרף בחיים בדוכן האחרון מבין רבים.
זה היה רגע הזיוף שלי, ההחלטה הזו לבחור במוות על פני כפיפות, ומאז שנפגעתי ממנו אני פעמון, מצלצל. וכמו פעמון החירות, אני פתוח לסבלם של אחרים ולפגמי האנושות שלנו. זו הייתה המתנה הגדולה ביותר שניתנה לי אי פעם, האמפתיה הזו שנושאת מפצע קדוש, ולעולם לא אפסיק את הקריאה לחירות, ולא אהסס לענות כפי שאני יכול לקריאה לסולידריות עם אחרים.
מבין קרב Cuito Cuanavale, הקרב הגדול ביותר שנלחם אי פעם באפריקה, עצום אפילו יותר מאל עלמיין; זה היה המקום שבו נשברה שיטת האפרטהייד. במערכה ענקית שכללה למעלה מ-300,000 חיילים מתנדבים קובנים בין דצמבר 1987 למרץ 1988, בתיאום עם כוחות אנגולה וילידים אחרים, מתנדבים בינלאומיים, ועם סיוע ויועצים סובייטים, הביסו את דרום אפריקה הגדולה והעדיפה בהרבה מבחינה טכנולוגית ואת UNITA והאמריקאית שלהם. בעלי ברית ושכירי חרב בקרב Cuito Cuanavale, בסיס צבאי אנגולי שדרום אפריקה לא הצליחה לכבוש בחמישה גלי תקיפות.
בעוד המחזה של הקרב האחרון הגדול הזה במאבק שחרור ארוך של עשרות שנים התגלגל, עשיתי שובבות מאחורי קווי האויב בשיח. כאן גיליתי יחידה אבודה, בעיקר זולו, שהוקפתה על ידי כוחות האפרטהייד. לאחר דיווח על מה שידעתי על האזור לקבוצת הפיקוד וכנס קצר במספר שפות, קם בחור זקן שעד כה שתק מצללי האוהל, שצורתו ללא חולצתו הראתה צלקת אימתנית ומרהיבה מציפורני אריה. , ואמר; “אנחנו מוקפים וחסרי מספרם בלי תחמושת וגרוע מכך, בלי מים, ואף אחד לא בא לעזור לנו. אנחנו חייבים לתקוף”.
הסמל חייך על כך כאילו ניתנה לו מתנה נפלאה, פסע החוצה ונתן את הפקודה שאם יתמזל מזלך לעולם לא תשמע; “תקן כידונים!”
והגברים שעומדים למות התפרצו בשירה. “אוסוטו! Umkhonto wami womile!” הראשון הוא קריאת קרב זולו אוניברסלית, המבקשת מרוחות אבותיו להתעורר ולהעיד על מעשי הגבורה המפוארים שעומדים לבצע. “החנית שלי צמאה”, זה האחרון.
וניצחנו, למרות שהמחיר היה נורא. אין עלויות כאלה גדולות מכדי לשאת בהשוואה לעלויות הכניעה לעבדות, סחורה, זיוף ודה-הומניזציה; כי בסירוב להיכנע אנו הופכים לבלתי נכבשים וחופשיים, ואי אפשר לקחת מאיתנו את הכוח הזה של בעלות עצמית כניצחון במאבק על האנושיות שלנו. כפי שכתב מקס סטירנר; “לא ניתן להעניק חופש; יש לתפוס אותו.”
מזמן איבדתי את ספירת היציעים האחרונים; אלה הפכו לאמיתות הכתובות על בשרי, ואני נושא סימנים כאלה ללא מספר. ללא ספק יהיו אלה שעומדים כעת לצד פלסטין, אוקראינה או כל עם שנמצא בסכנת השמדה.
בכל זה מה שחשוב הוא שבסירוב להיכנע לסמכות ולכפות אנו הופכים לבלתי נכבשים וחופשיים; זהו ניצחון כתנאי הוויה שאי אפשר לקחת מאיתנו, בדומה לחייל האוקראיני הגיבור השומר על אי שומם שסירב להיכנע לספינת מלחמה רוסית במילים; “ספינת מלחמה רוסית, לך תזדיין.” אדם כזה אי אפשר לכבוש, ודבריו האלמותיים מדברים בעד כל האומה שלו.
ט
סוד הכוח, הכוח והסמכות הוא שהדברים האלה חלולים ושבירים, ונכשלים כשהם נתקלים בחוסר ציות ובסירוב פשוט להאמין ולהיכנע.
איך אנחנו מוצאים את הרצון לעשות את הדברים האלה, לצאת מהחורבות ולעשות עוד עמדה אחרונה, מעבר לתקווה לניצחון או אפילו הישרדות?
האמת היא שאנחנו לא צריכים שום דבר מעבר לעצמנו ולרגע ההחלטה שלנו לעשות דברים כאלה; אין עקרונות אוניברסליים גדולים, אפילו לא המרחב השלילי של דמות גיבורה לאכלס ולהופיע לפני בימת העולם. כל מה שאנחנו צריכים זה זה; שאחרים שסומכים עלינו ימותו אם לא.
זה מה שהופך אותנו לאנושיים, וזה משהו שאנחנו חייבים להמשיך לאשר לא משנה מה המחיר.
יכול להיות שיש עוד דבר אחד שיכול לעזור לנו ברגעים כאלה של החלטה; אם נזכור מי אנחנו, ולא איך אחרים מדמיינים אותנו.
האם אנחנו לא הסיפורים שאנו מספרים על עצמנו, לעצמנו ולאחרים?
היסטוריה, זיכרון, זהות; אנחנו פרוכרוניזם, היסטוריה המתבטאת בצורתנו של האופן שבו פתרנו בעיות של הסתגלות על פני מפרצי זמן עצומים, כמו קונכייה של יצור ימי פנטסטי.
תמיד נשאר המאבק בין המסכות שאחרים עושים לנו, לבין אלה שאנחנו עושים לעצמנו. זו המהפכה הראשונה שבה כולנו חייבים להילחם; המאבק לבעלות על עצמנו.
התחלנו להיזכר מי אנחנו, אנחנו האמריקאים, אחרי התקף הארוך של הזיוף שהטילו הבוגד טראמפ ותעמולי הרייך הרביעי שלו; קראנו כעת להפסקת אש בעזה, לאחר חצי שנה של חימוש חשאי במלחמת עזה של ישראל בהוראת רצח העם ג’ו. גם אירופה מתעוררת מחדש כאשר נאט”ו מאחד את התנגדותה לכיבוש האימפריאלי של אוקראינה ולאיום של כיבוש אירופה הרוסי. עד כה אמריקה לא עשתה דבר כדי להביא שינוי משטר לאומה מחוץ לחוק, לא השתיקה את הפצצות, לא שחררה את אוקראינה או פלסטין, ולא פתחה את המצור הישראלי של סיוע הומניטרי; אבל כל זה נשאר אפשרי, אם כולנו נעזור ככל שנוכל.
ברגעים של ספק כמו זה קראתי שוב את המיתוס של סיזיפוס של קאמי, את הזקן והים של המינגווי, את Invictus של הנלי, I.F. משפט סוקרטס של סטון; מיתוסים, סיפורים, שירה והיסטוריה של הוד של ההתנגדות המקנה חופש. גם כאן, ברגע המקביל לזה של ספרד ב-1936 ופולין ב-1939, עלינו לומר לעולם לא ש
Islamic State Khorasan Province brings the war home to Moscow in retaliation for Russian acts of war in Syria and throughout the contested region of Africa which includes Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and Nigeria.
ISKP is also the group who committed similar bomb attacks against Iran and Pakistan, a group whose existence is a consequence of the partnership of Russia and her primary ally the Dominion of Iran in the Assad regime of Syria.
Sadly this does not make America natural allies with Russia and Iran or her proxy states in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, which complicates our response to Islamic State theocracy and terror.
In this tragic and spectacular attack on Moscow, Russia’s pigeons have come home to roost.
As I wrote in my post of May 27 2022, Theatres of World War Three: West Africa, the Sahel, and Lake Chad Regions; Here I offer insight and policy guidance into what I hope will be the last of the many Theatres of World War Three; West Africa, the Sahel, and Lake Chad regions. Mali is the primary conflict now, but a general conflict rages throughout the whole region as Islamic State insurgencies contest with nations under the hammer of famine and drought, and Russia’s mercenaries exploit opportunities to seize dominion in defense of elite wealth and power.
Sudan is a pivot point and interface between bounded realms of sub-Saharan Africa as discussed here, and Libya with whose fate it is closely aligned. To disambiguate the Sudan and Libyan Civil Wars from the general regional conflict, Libya being a unique war of colonial European interests as a wishbone pulled between Russia and Turkey for dominion of the Mediterranean, where sub-Saharan Africa, including Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and Nigeria, is not a Great Powers proxy war and civil war but a struggle for power between variants of Islamic State Jihadist groups and the nations which control the resources they covet, with Russia leveraging this into regional dominion through the use of Wagner Group mercenaries as deniable assets.
It is now the presence of the Wagner Group defending elite interests in fighting Islamic State insurgencies and operating the mines for the governments which have become their proxies and front organizations which defines this theatre of war.
And it is the Wagner Group we must interrogate for insight into Russia’s plans and methods of world conquest and dominion when as in Syria there are willing surrogates to open the door of empire.
All of this is possible because France has abandoned her former colonies to their fate, because of the brilliant and visionary Islamic State strategy of delegitimation through provocation and implication in war crimes, some real and some false flag operations by elite IS units in French uniforms in coordination with infiltration agents inside actual French entities, and skillful propaganda. In parallel with blackening the reputation of France, ISGS has been successfully building a viable trans-national state in the region.
This means that the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, an independent operational arm of Islamic State West Africa Province created in 2015 with al-Sahrawi’s oath of allegiance to IS and split from al-Qaeda, and despite continued factional fighting between the two organizations, is now providing central Command, Intelligence, and Communications to jihadist insurgencies generally in its sphere of influence, as an emergent dominion to which Russia is the only balance. I describe this historical movement as the Syrianization of the conflict.
There are other possibilities for future Africas without foreign empires and their proxy regimes of brutal and kleptocratic tyrants and endless violence for control of resources, and in the long game this requires the free and open sharing of resources among her peoples and states which are guarantors of our universal human rights and secular democracy as a counterforce to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
To win the liberty of the peoples of Africa one must begin with food, water, medical aid, and safety; the first requirements of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The political follows the humanitarian. Freedom from hunger, disease, violence, and labor exploitation; liberate a people from these, and tyranny will find no point of leverage.
Beyond this prescription I must give warning here; let us send no armies to enforce virtue, for the most likely result of challenging Russian influence in the region is another Great Powers war of imperial dominion between Russia and France which replicates that of Russia and Turkey in Libya. This will fail, because it plays directly into the hands of ISGS.
If you fight an insurgency with conventional forces, you will lose. ISGS has demonstrated a genius for this kind of war, and in large part it is not the kind of war our armies are designed to fight. In this arena, victory on the battlefield is irrelevant, because the victory you must win is within the human soul. And here we win love and loyalty by standing with, not against, our fellow human beings. We must offer the better alternative in meeting the needs of the people, both material and otherwise.
And in this arena we have clear advantage, for democracy is better than tyranny, equality as diversity and inclusion is better than tribalism, racism, and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, truth is better than the lies and illusions of propaganda, justice is better than rule by the wealthiest robber baron or the most brutal and amoral bandit king, and a secular state is better than tyrannies of the authorized interpreters and enforcers of divine will, for who so ever stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
A common enemy of humankind is the weaponization of fear by authority in service to power, especially as identity politics and divisions of faith. Gott Mit Uns; it is our most ancient and terrible battle cry, for it permits anything.
As Voltaire teaches us in his 1765 essay Questions sur les miracles; “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
As written by Pjotr Sauer in The Guardian, in an article entitled Moscow terror attack: Putin says all four gunmen held as death toll reaches 133; “Vladimir Putin said Russia had arrested all four gunmen responsible for the shooting that killed 133 people at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow, claiming that the perpetrators of one of the worst terror attacks in the country’s history planned to flee to Ukraine.
In his first public comments on the terrorist attacks that shocked the nation, the Russian president made no mention of Islamic State’s claim to have carried out the attack.
Instead, Putin suggested without evidence that Ukraine may have been involved in Friday’s attack at the Crocus City Hall just outside Moscow, saying that “the Ukrainian side” had “prepared a window” for the terrorists to cross the border from Russia into Ukraine before they were apprehended.
“They tried to hide and move towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them from the Ukrainian side to cross the state border,” Putin said in a televised address.
His comments came short of directly blaming Ukraine for the attack, saying that those responsible would be punished, “whoever they may be, whoever may have sent them”. The four suspected gunmen were all foreign citizens, Russia’s interior ministry later said.
Islamic State, through an affiliated news agency, claimed responsibility for the attack late on Friday in a post on Telegram, in which they claimed the gunmen had managed to escape afterwards. On Saturday, IS released a photo of what it said were the four attackers behind the shooting rampage.
In a statement, the group said the shooting came within the context of the “raging war” between Islamic State and countries fighting Islam.
A US official said Washington had intelligence confirming Islamic State’s claim.
Russian officials and state news channels have been quiet about Islamic State’s claim to have carried out the attack, but a US official said Washington had intelligence confirming it.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said in a statement that Russian officials were engaged in accusations against Kyiv “with the goals of stirring up anti-Ukrainian hysteria in Russian society and creating conditions to boost mobilisation of Russian citizens into the criminal aggression against our state”.
Some Russian officials also speculated that Ukraine, the country against which Russia launched a full-scale invasion two years ago, was responsible.
Alexey Chepa, the first deputy chair of the state duma committee on international affairs, said the “events were connected to Ukraine”.
The death toll from the attack had risen to 133 by Saturday afternoon, according to a statement from Russia’s investigative committee. Putin declared a day of mourning for Sunday and passed his condolences on to the families of those killed in the attack.
Russian authorities said at least 145 people had been injured, with 16 people in a “critical state”.
“The number of victims of the terrorist attack will grow significantly,” said Andrei Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region.
Photos on Friday evening showed Crocus City Hall engulfed in flames as graphic videos appeared to show several people being killed by the unidentified gunmen. In one clip, three men in fatigues carrying rifles fired at point-blank range into bodies strewn about the lobby of the concert hall. Other video footage showed people screaming, crawling on their hands and knees out of the music venue or fleeing down stairwells.
The attack came minutes before a veteran Russian rock band was to start playing in front of a sold-out audience.
Witness accounts describe scenes of chaos and confusion, with many concertgoers initially assuming the sound of gunshots was part of the show.
“We entered the hall and took our seats right in the centre. At some moment we heard a large bang coming from outside the room, we thought it was part of the concert,” Arina, a clinical psychologist from Moscow told the Guardian.
“But at some point, we understood something was seriously wrong, we realised there were shootings. Then we saw a man in camouflage holding an automatic gun … We all lay on the ground. I looked beside me and I saw many injured people covered in blood,” she said.
The Russian investigative committee said those killed in the concert hall died of gunshot wounds and “poisoning” related to the fire.
The committee added that the attackers had used “a flammable liquid to set fire to the premises of the concert hall”.
Baza, a telegram channel close to Russia’s security services, said more than 10 bodies of the victims had been found in one of the toilets of the Crocus City Hall.
According to the channel, the victims were hiding from the shooting but later died because of the smoke.
The international community condemned the incident, with the UN security council calling it a “heinous and cowardly terrorist attack”.
The British foreign secretary, David Cameron, said the UK “condemns the deadly attack in the strongest possible terms”.
The Crocus City Hall shooting was the deadliest attack in Russia since the 2004 Beslan school siege, in which 334 people, including 186 children, were killed after being held captive by militants for two days.
Questions will be raised as to why Putin appeared to have rejected a terror warning weeks before the attack.
The attack on Friday came two weeks after western countries led by the US had issued terror warnings and told their citizens not to join public gatherings in Russia.
The group that claimed credit for the deadly terrorist attack was an Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan called Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISKP.
According to US officials, Washington had collected intelligence in March that ISKP had been planning an attack on Moscow, according to officials.
Putin had called the March warnings from western embassies a “provocation”.
But citing a source in Russia’s security services, the state agency Tass on Saturday admitted that Russian security services did indeed receive information from the US over a potential terrorist attack.
The FSB previously said it had foiled an attack on a Moscow synagogue by ISKP, a group that seeks to create a caliphate across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Iran.
On Saturday, Russian state news aired footage of interrogations of three alleged attackers, including one where the suspect is speaking in Tajik through an interpreter.
ISKP has previously been reported to have recruited radicalised nationals from central Asia, including Tajikistan.
In one of the clips, circulated by Russian bloggers, members of the security forces are seen cutting off the ear of a man who is later interrogated over the attack.
Russian authorities had also recently carried out a series of raids against armed Islamist militants in the region of Ingushetia, leading to firefights between police and the fighters.
Paweł Wójcik, a specialist in Islamic State messaging and propaganda, said IS messaging after the Moscow attack was similar to previous attacks that the group claimed in Tehran and Kabul.
“The messaging we saw from IS following the attack was standard,” Wójcik told the Guardian.
Wójcik said IS would have “many motives” to launch a terrorist attack in Russia, including Moscow’s involvement in the campaign against IS in Syria, Mali and Burkina Faso.
Putin changed the course of the Syrian civil war by intervening in 2015, supporting the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, against the opposition and IS.
Wójcik added that ISKP had recently “strongly embraced anti-Russia narrative in its propaganda output”.
As written by Jason Burke in The Guardian, in an article entitled Who is thought to be behind the Moscow attack? Islamic State has claimed responsibility and experts say an IS branch – Islamic State Khorasan Province – is prime suspect; “More than 100 people have been killed and scores wounded in Russia’s worst terror attack in years.
Who is responsible for the attack?
Islamic State (IS) has claimed responsibility for the attack, praising the “Islamic fighters” who carried it out. Many commentators and US officials have pointed to the IS affiliate called Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) as prime suspect – though so far there is no evidence that this is the case.
ISKP is a branch of Islamic State in Afghanistan. The name comes from that given to a region by some local Islamic rulers and so explicitly rejects modern national frontiers while evoking what its members consider the lost glory and power of Muslim empires.
It was formed at the peak of the expansion of IS in 2015 when the Iraq- and Syria-based group was trying to expand by building a network of affiliates through the Middle East, the Maghreb, west Asia and other parts of Africa. These efforts brought mixed results. However, hundreds of disillusioned Taliban fighters and some from factions in Pakistan were attracted by the extremism and resources of IS. These formed the nucleus of ISKP – and the group remains linked to IS to this day.
Has ISKP always attacked this kind of international target?
No, which is why it is important that ISKP have not themselves claimed responsibility for the attack in Moscow. This has come from IS central communications channels, not their own.
Also, ISKP has been mainly focused on a local campaign until relatively recently. It has launched hundreds of attacks on both civilian targets and security forces, including western forces, in Afghanistan. Two attacks in 2020 targeted a Kabul maternity ward and Kabul University. Others have hit mosques and ethnic or religious minorities in Afghanistan.
The group was also responsible for a hugely destructive attack on Kabul’s international airport in 2021 that killed 13 US troops and more than 150 civilians during the chaotic US evacuation from the country. This was an international target but still in Afghanistan.
But is ISKP striking international targets now?
To an extent. The group has hit targets in Tajikistan and Pakistan, neighbours of Afghanistan, and a hotel in Afghanistan favoured by Chinese nationals. Earlier this year, the US intercepted communications confirming the group had carried out twin bombings in Iran that killed nearly 100 people – though ISKP did not claim responsibility.
Earlier this month, the most senior US general in the Middle East said ISKP could attack US and western interests outside Afghanistan “in as little as six months and with little to no warning”.
Why might ISKP launch this kind of attack?
Over recent decades, lots of extremist Islamist factions have moved their focus from purely local targets to international ones. Reasons can vary from group to group. Sometimes a new leader brings a personal agenda, other times launching long-range international attacks is seen as a way to attract new recruits, win new resources from sponsors or mobilise followers otherwise disillusioned by local failures. They are also often a way to distinguish one group from competitors – in the case of ISKP, the Taliban, who have always eschewed such a strategy – and al-Qaida, which pioneered the strategy but has had a local focus since 2011.
It is entirely possible too that ISKP is acting on direct orders from IS leaders. Despite the collapse of the IS caliphate in Syria and Iraq, there are still ties between ISKP and senior figures there. In 2022, a UN report drawing on intelligence from member states said ISKP was a recipient of funds from the leadership “through trusted cash couriers” and there is no reason why orders should not be sent too.
IS is still apparently seeking opportunities for such strikes. A network planning to attack a concert hall in Brussels that was recently broken up by French and Belgian police were reportedly at least inspired by IS. But this also raises the possibility that a different IS affiliate or faction was responsible or even a semi-autonomous group inspired by IS.
Why would ISKP or IS leaders target Russia at all?
IS leaders, like many Islamic militants, are mindful of Russian support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and see Moscow as part of the broader coalition of Christian or western forces against Islam. This is a key point made by IS propaganda from Pakistan to Nigeria.
In September 2022, ISKP militants claimed responsibility for a deadly suicide bombing at the Russian embassy in Kabul and some experts say the group has opposed the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in recent years. Michael Kugelman, of the Washington-based Wilson Center, said ISKP “sees Russia as being complicit in activities that regularly oppress Muslims” and counts as members a number of central Asian militants with their own grievances against Moscow.
ISKP leaders may also see Russia, along with China and others, as important to the continued rule of the Taliban and are seeking to undermine them. An attack in Moscow would thus combine local and more global agendas.”
As written by Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian, in an article entitled Moscow attack is grim reminder that large-scale acts of terror have not gone away; “It was a warning that proved grimly prophetic. Just over two weeks ago, as Russia’s presidential election was reaching its final stages, the US embassy in Moscow said it was “monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts” over the ensuing 48 hours.
The unusually clear public alert was repeated by the UK, which reiterated its longstanding advice, warning British citizens against going to Russia. As a close ally in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, Britain will have seen whatever raw intelligence the US warning was based on, most likely intercepted communications.
No attack came within that timeframe, but it is now tragically clear the respite was only temporary. A terrorist attack on Friday night by a group of gunmen on crowds attending a pop concert on the outskirts of Moscow has left at least 133 dead and 140 wounded, responsibility for which was claimed by Islamic State.
Whether more details underpinning the warning were passed from the US to their Russian counterparts is unclear, given the two countries are engaged in a proxy war in Ukraine, nor is it certain the alert would have been well received. But it is an uncomfortable reminder that large-scale terror attacks have not gone away.
Moscow, meanwhile, is trying to promote an alternative theory. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, sought to accuse Ukraine of involvement, saying that the four suspects now apprehended had “tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the state border”.
Given Russia’s war in Ukraine, the claim is unsurprising. But on any initial assessment it lacks credibility. While Ukraine has been seeking to strike military and industrial targets hundreds of miles inside Russia, its leaders well understand they would rapidly forfeit international support if they carried out a massacre of civilians.
Ukraine has targeted airbases and seaports inside Russia, and it may even have flown two drones over the Kremlin. This year Kyiv almost certainly attacked a gas terminal in St Petersburg and refineries in Yaroslavl and Volgograd, escalation enough to prompt anxiety in the US, worried about the impact on global oil prices. But none of these are mass casualty attacks aimed at peacefully congregating civilians.
Even if those apprehended by Moscow prove to be the gunmen and were heading south, it would not be obvious their best strategy would be to cross the frontlines of an active war. “Everything in this war will be decided only on the battlefield,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on Friday night, adding: “Terrorist attacks do not solve any problems …”
Moscow may appear far away from the west, but it is also far from Kerman, Iran, the site of a terror attack in January claimed by Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) that killed 84. If it is confirmed that the Moscow attack was carried out by the same group, it is uncomfortable reminder that it is on the rise.
ISKP was also behind another suicide bomb attack at Kabul airport, Afghanistan, in August 2021, killing 170 Afghans and 13 US troops, in the process of carrying out the retreat from the country ordered by the US president, Joe Biden, a few months earlier. Its focus may have been Russia on Friday, but it was US forces less than three years ago.
The mass killing at a concert venue also carries with it obvious chilling echoes of the murderous attack, also by IS gunmen, at the Bataclan in Paris in November 2015, which killed 89, and the suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena in 2017 after an Ariana Grande concert, which killed 22.
Last year, leaks from US intelligence showed that ISKP, based in Afghanistan, was conducting “aspirational plotting” in the US, Europe and Asia, with targets such as the last World Cup in Qatar in mind. Whatever the west’s wider relationship with Moscow is, counter-terror investigators know it is time to be particularly vigilant.”
Moscow terror attack: Putin says all four gunmen held as death toll reaches 133
Here in five acts as in a theatrical performance of myself do I offer my thoughts on Poetry Day.
Act One
A definition of terms, or What is Poetry?
First before all must be the true names of things.
Words matter. They can divide us, and they can unite us. Words can exalt and defile; they can shape our images and possibilities of becoming human and create or limit the worlds to which we can aspire, they can replace stones we hurl at one another and heal the pathology of our disconnectedness.
Always treasure words, for they represent the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and harbour imaginal creative power. We bear them forward as memories, histories, identities, like the shells of fantastic sea creatures; sounds which are analogies of form or what Gaston Bachelard called coquilles au parole.
So also do they bear us forward, and await their moment of wakefulness as seeds of becoming.
Act Two
Being an Apology for my digressive ars poetica; my writing style is idiosyncratic and strange, but so am I.
Once I sailed on the Lake of Dreams, was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision; and in such visions I fell into a sea of words, images, songs, histories, layered and interconnected with one another like a web of reflections and the echoes of voices lost in time, a wilderness of mirrors which capture and distort and extend ourselves infinitely in all directions.
Here is a shadow self of our histories which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tale and tail, legacies from which we must emerge to create ourselves anew and those which we cannot abandon without losing who we are.
Here my intertexts are manifest, seize and shake me with tumultuous voices and untrustworthy purposes, for where do our histories end and we begin?
We cannot escape each other, my shadows and I.
Act Three
An offering, ephemeral as memories borne by perfume and soaring on the wind, up into the gaps of reality through the gates of our dreams, to the Infinite, free from the flags of our skin, of which only echoes and reflections remain, etched upon our histories by the lightning of illumination to balance against the terror of our nothingness.
Sounds and Echoes
Once there was a sound
Without a shell to echo it
Not the vast roar and thunder
Of the sea
And her moonstruck tides
Chaos and the birth of universes
Undulating with the splendor of life
In all our thousands of myriads
Limitless possibilities of becoming
Dance with the Impossible in rapture and terror
Hope and despair, faith in each other as solidarity of action
Versus the pathology of our disconnectedness
And the lightning shatters us with fracture and disruption,
Sublimes the chasms of darkness we are lost in
A negation which is also a gift
Opening spaces of free creative play
Such is the embrace of death as liberation
From the limits of our form,
The flaws of our humanity,
And the brokenness of the world.
We escape the spirals of our shell
Soar among celestial spheres
Become exalted and defiled
Free and nameless as wild things
I am sound and echo
Abandoning the shell I have sung myself free from
Where am I now?
Act Four
Manifestoes of Action; poetry as revolutionary struggle.
As I wrote in my post of October 14 2021, On Art as Poetic Vision, Transgression, Seizure of Power, Reimagination, and Transformation: a Manifesto; Why do I write?
I offer here a manifesto of art as poetic vision, reimagination and transformation in the contexts of the performance of identities and in the guerilla theatre of political action and revolutionary struggle.
Art is transgressive when it challenges and violates our ideas of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, it is a seizure of power and refusal to submit to authorized identities which confers freedom and autonomy through becoming self-created and self-owned, Unconquered and beyond subjugation by force and control, and it is poetic vision as Surrealist reimagination and transformation when it depicts and guides our passage through the labyrinth of time, history, memory, and the falsification of our captured and distorted images in the wilderness of mirrors, lies, and illusions, to enact our rapture and exaltation, our transcendence into realms of dream and of vision wherein rules do not apply and when it seizes us with truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Art is intended to question and transform the rules and substance of human being, meaning, and value; to discover within the boundaries and interfaces, the silent and empty places of change and the limitless adaptive potential of systems, of unknowns, disconnects, misaligned juxtaposition and strange angles of view, new possibilities of becoming human.
I first understood the power of the unknown as a force of liberation as a boy whose bedroom wall was a collage of Bosch prints, curious and strange, which I would project myself into as dream gates. William S. Burroughs, beatnik friend of my father the counterculture theatre director, would show up for dinner without warning and tell weird fairytales into the night; he also drew curious figures into the collage of heavens and hells, and here was a definition of art and of its purpose; transformation of the possibilities of becoming human through reimagination and ecstatic poetic vision.
This is why I claim as the purpose of my writing to incite, provoke, and disturb; change and growth originate in disruption, fracture, and chaotization, and in the four primary duties of a citizen; to question, mock, expose, and challenge authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
This free space of play, of the unknown as unclaimed space and the adaptive potential of a system, whose boundaries like the known shores on our maps of becoming human frame the range of choices and act as authorized identities and an intrinsic limit on freedom as future possibilities, remains outside and beyond all limits and systems of knowledge, like Gödel’s Theorem; no matter how much we learn and shift the boundaries of the known universe, the Infinite remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance.
If so the task of becoming human involves Bringing the Chaos; reimagination and transformation, the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
As I wrote in my post of December 21 2022, We Are the Toys of Santa’s Workshop, and We Are Made of Words; On this day of winter solstice, darkest of all our days, and possibly as democracy itself begins to die from lack of faith as Tinkerbell warns us with the ritual command to clap our hands lest the faeries die, as Russia and China test our will and threaten to unleash global nuclear war and the fall of civilization, as the survival or extinction of our species hangs in the balance under threats of war, pandemic, and ecological catastrophe, as the Pentagon on this day only one year ago issued rebukes without accountability as tacit authorization to the fascist infiltrated and subverted military units on the brink of mutiny and civil war, it is good to remember who we are, who we have chosen to be, and who we wish to become.
Now is the time to rage against the dying of the light.
When those who would enslave us come for any one of us, let them find an America and a humankind not subjugated with learned helplessness or divided by exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united in solidarity and resistance.
And in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free.
Owning our stories as the songs of ourselves is a primary human act in which we become autonomous and self-created beings; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
The first question we must ask of our stories is this; whose story is this?
If we imagine the processes of our construction as a vast workshop like that of Santa’s elves, I believe that the parts of our assemblage are words and the rules for using them to create meaning as grammar.
As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake, a work which he began in 1922 with the German publication of the TLP and which occupied the rest of his life, as a response like that of Yeats in The Second Coming and of T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland to the collapse of civilization in three successive waves of mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
He envisioned a united humankind wherein war is no longer possible, a world without emperors and kings or the carceral states and colonialist empires they rule with their silly little flags and terrible divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game.
Joyce was a master of languages and chose this as his instrument for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and for the rebirth of civilization.
And this love of languages as free creative play in which we ourselves are the artifact and product of our art is what caught my attention and created my teenage identification with Joyce. For I love languages and had grown up with three voices; English as my primary and home language, though shaped by immersion in the rhythms and phrases of the King James Bible and the Dutch language of the Reformed Church which surrounded me in the town where I was raised. Languages are a hobby of mine, often grounded in reading books which have immeasurably shaped my own writing and speaking style and turn of phrase.
Chinese is my second language from the age of nine, study which included Traditional Chinese inkbrush calligraphy and conversation with my teacher of martial arts, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and much else, who spoke, in addition to superb British English full of Anglo-Indian and Shanghailander idiom, the Wu dialect of Shanghai and the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, as well as Mandarin, Japanese, and other languages, having served in the Chinese military from 1920 when he joined the Whampoa Military Academy through the Second World War, escaping the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in 1969 when my father arranged for him to teach me. He was a window into other worlds and times to me, was Sifu Dragon.
As my third language I studied French in school rather than English from seventh grade through high school. This Defining Moment bears interrogation; during seventh grade I took the AP English test given to high school seniors for university credit and tested out of English classes through senior year of high school. This was among tests arranged by my parents and teachers who conspired to force me into high school two years early, and had tried with math the previous year, which I absolutely refused but for one class, where I traded seventh grade English for Freshman French literature and language, a chance I fell upon with ravenous delight.
The French teacher was a blonde goddess, and here imagine the reporter Rita Skeeter played by Miranda Richardson who corners Harry Potter in the broom closet in The Goblet of Fire, who motivated her students by offering a trip to Paris, with her, after graduation from high school for the best senior French student each year; competition for this honor was fierce, and I was a very, very good student. Thanks for the soft landing in high school, Miss Starring.
Brazilian Portuguese was my fourth language, though limited to conversational proficiency, legacy of a formative trip in the summer of my fourteenth year just before starting high school.
It was during that summer, my first solo foreign travel, to train as a fencer with a friend from the tournament circuit for the Pan American Games planned to be held there the following year, that I witnessed a crime against humanity, the massacre of street children who had swarmed a food truck, a trauma and disruptive event followed by weeks in which I helped them evade the police bounty hunters who ruled the streets as apex predators.
From the moment I saw what the guards were shooting at beyond the walls of the palace in which I was a guest, I chose my side, and I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
We all seek paths of healing from trauma, and of hope and the redemptive power of love in transforming the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. I found such paths in literature as poetic vision, and in our languages and our stories as instruments with which we can operate directly on our psyche and take control of our adaptation and the evolution of human consciousness as an unfolding of intention. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and for this primary insight I owe the effects of reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions. I had begun my search for meaning and my Freshman year of high school by reading Anthony Burgess’ Napoleon Symphony, a novel which questioned my hero Napoleon and illuminated two of my other heroes Beethoven and Klimt, then turned to the study of language itself; S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, and Wittgenstein’s TLP, before discovering Joyce.
James Joyce’s linguistics scholarship was immense; he took Italian as his third academic language, taught himself Dano-Norwegian as a teenager to read his adored Ibsen in the original, and his modern languages degree cites Latin, Italian, French, German, and Norwegian. He loved languages and studied them as a game, as do I; his adult fluency included Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Russian, Finnish, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Modern Greek.
All of this went into his masterpiece Finnegans Wake, written in a private language filled with games and experiments of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety according to the principle of Wittgenstein that because all rules are arbitrary they can be reimagined and changed at will and ourselves with them, a language densely layered with literary allusions and references, loaned and invented words, and of signs with multiple meanings like the paths of a labyrinth. You need a working knowledge of several languages to get the jokes; no wonder I loved him.
I’m not sure it’s intended to communicate anything, so coded and laden with puzzles is his new language; like the notation for the principles of a system by which to create and order the universe. He spent the rest of his life searching for the lost runes able to break and reforge the oaths and bindings of existence, to renew ourselves and our world; perhaps he found them.
Though I may claim no such realization of a guiding vision of our limitless possibilities of becoming human nor Quixotic quest to create and affirm that which is human in us as he, Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake demonstrated for me a great truth which has illuminated my understanding ever since; we are made of our ideas and of our stories, and forged with our words and our languages.
We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?
Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?
Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2020, The Transformative Power of Art: a Manifesto; The transformative power of art, its ability to reframe our ideas about self and other, to shift boundaries, reassign values, reclaim history and identity from silence, erasure, marginalization, and the authorization of inequalities of power and divisions of exclusionary otherness; these are among the vital functions which make art a primary human and social activity.
Art as poetic vision precedes and parallels politics as a means of changing our civilization and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; it represents a power held by autonomous individuals and communities against the tyranny of state force and control. Politics is a social art which is primary to our interdependent human nature and processes of becoming human. Through our words, images, and performance we can question, mock, expose, and challenge authority and incite, provoke, and disturb others in bringing transformational change to the systems and structures within which we are embedded, and I hope liberate us from them.
Art is life, for it involves us personally and directly in processes of adaptive growth and in renegotiation of our social contracts and relationships with others, both personal and political, and informs and motivates the performance of our identities.
If we are caught in a rigged game, we must change the rules and terms of struggle. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, authority delegitimized, traditional systems and structures interrogated, limits transgressed, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities of becoming human discovered.
We must question, expose, mock, subvert, transgress, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. For there is no just authority.
Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As I wrote in my post of December 30 2021, The Year in Review; In these last days of 2021, my thoughts turn to the year in review; to Defining Moments, both for myself as a witness of history and for the world as informing, motivating, and shaping forces of human being, meaning, and value and of memory, history, and identity, the stories of which we are made, and to the causes I have championed and the threats to our future possibilities of becoming human which remain.
Herein I write as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and in the role Foucault described as a truth teller in reference to parrhesia and the four primary duties of a citizen; to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty proclaims, my intent is to provoke, incite, and disturb, and I hope that you have found my daily journal useful as a resource for international antifascist action and resistance, revolutionary struggle, liberation and democracy movements, forging networks of allyship and solidarity, founding autonomous zones, and seizures of power both personal and political.
During my years as a Forensics teacher and debate coach, I began the first day of each new year with a demonstration of purpose. On my desk I would place a solid base with the words; “This is a fulcrum”. Across it I would set a teeter totter saying; “It balances a lever.” And finally; “When your parents ask you what you’re learning in Forensics, tell them you’re learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.” Such is my hope now for us all.
Truth telling as an ars poetica is about the regenerative and transformational power of truth in the sense that Keats used when he spoke of beauty, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”
But truth telling is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky. On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
Act Four
A benediction
May yours be days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
Act Five
A coda in the form of Modern American Literatures reading lists, which like all reading lists that claim to represent a canon of literature is nothing less than a set of authorized identities.
Here I have disambiguated Modern American Poetry from authors who cannot be represented among the six ethnicities to make it easier for people to find authors who speak for them and offer spaces to grow into, as the original purpose of my lists, which eventually included 27 national literatures, was for choice reading for high school students free from state and school board control or any criteria other than quality.
Complete Poems, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition 8 Volume Set (Ronald Schuchard Editor), T.S. Eliot
Dove Descending: A Journey into T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Thomas Howard
T.S. Eliot’s the Waste Land (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations), Harold Bloom
T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Lyndall Gordon
The Complete Poems 1927-1979, Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, Susan McCabe
W.H. Auden; poems selected by John Fuller
W.H. Auden: a commentary, John Fuller
Collected Poems, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (Bloom’s Major Poets) Harold Bloom ed
Opus Posthumus, Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Harold Bloom
Collected Poems, 1912-1944, Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion, Helen in Egypt, Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall and Advent, HERmione, Palimpsest, White Rose and the Red, The Sword Went Out to Sea: Synthesis of a Dream, (as Delia Alton), H.D.
The H.D. Book, Robert Duncan
The Dream Songs, John Berryman
A, Complete Short Poetry, Le Style Apollinaire: The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire, Bottom: On Shakespeare, Prepositions +: the Collected Critical Essays, Louis Zukofsky
Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, Mark Scroggins
The Collected Poems, The Bell Jar, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
(Karen V. Kukil Editor), Sylvia Plath
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Heather Clark
Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Judith Kroll
Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, Julia Gordon-Bramer
Selected Poems, 1945–2005, Robert Creely
Collected Poems 1947-1997, Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems, Deliberate Prose – Essays 1952 to 1995, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996, The Fall of America Journals, 1965–1971, Alan Ginsberg
The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, Jason Shinder ed
I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, Bill Morgan
Revolutionary Letters 50th Anniversary Edition, Spring and Autumn Annals, The Poetry Deal, Diane di Prima
Mountains and Rivers Without End, The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, Gary Snyder
A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems, I Praise My Destroyer: Poems, Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire, Diane Ackerman
Selected Poems, Michael McClure
The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton: A Biography, Diane Wood Middlebrook
The Maximus Poems, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems (George F. Butterick Editor), Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews, Charles Olsen
What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson’s “The King-Fishers”, Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography, Ralph Maud
The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition, Stephen Fredman
Ground Work I: Before the War, Ground Work II: In the Dark, Selected Poems, Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan
Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, Bertholf editor
Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness, Peter O’Leary
On Opening the Dreamway, James Hillman
A Poet’s Mind: Collected Interviews with Robert Duncan 1960-1985, Wagstaff
An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle, Michael Duncan
The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, Amy Clampitt
The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons: Volume 1 (1955-1977), Volume 2 (1978-2005), Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues, A.R. Ammons
The Collected Poems, New & Selected Essays, Tesserae: Memories & Suppositions, Denise Levertov
A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov, Donna Hollenberg
The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia
Hypodermic Light: The Poetry of Philip Lamantia and the Question of Surrealism, Steven Frattali
The Dead and the Living, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002, Stag’s Leap: Poems, Arias, Sharon Olds
Selected Poems, Robert Bly
Collected Poems: 1950-2012, Adrienne Rich
The Problem of the Many, Timothy Donnelly
Averno, The Triumph of Achilles, Faithful and Virtuous Night, Proofs and Theories, American Originality, Louise Gluck
The Lost Spells, Robert Macfarlane
Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015, Just Kids, M Train, Year of the Monkey, Devotion, Patti Smith
Torch of Liberty 
