We welcome and celebrate this first day of spring, which follows the vernal equinox of last night’s glorious darkness under a silver moon like the eye of a terrible and mad god, a night filled with the wailing of the numberless dead children cast upon seas of unknowable despair and horror in Gaza, Ukraine, the eight other theatres of World War Three and dozens of other conflicts not of their making throughout the world.
This is our normal; and as I have often written, normality is deviant.
As their names are erased and become nothing by the rain of death sent by monstrous tyrants to whom only people like themselves are truly human, I feel each like a brand on my flesh which I must now bear forward into the future.
Speak to me of “good people on both sides” when you have held the dying who do not know why they have been killed.
Since the first bandit king enslaved others to do the hard and dirty work in creating his wealth and glory, and set armed thugs and overseers to keep them in service to power, humankind has suffered under the brutal enforcement of law and order which maintains the engines of our commodification, falsification, and dehumanization.
Wars of imperial conquest and dominion, colonialism and occupation, and of ethnic cleansing and genocide such as we now witness unfolding in Gaza and Ukraine are forms and consequences of far more massive and near universal systems of unequal power and oppression, and this we must resist.
Let us “place our bodies on the gears of the machine” of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as Mario Savio teaches us, and our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth. Only then, in solidarity, can we begin to realize our possibilities of becoming human.
Such are my thoughts among endless chasms of darkness, as the seasons change this night.
But with the dawn came a day of songbirds, the first flowers of crocuses and the budding of lilacs, rebirth, change, and the joy of total freedom to balance the terror of our nothingness. Such is the magic of nature, for with spring returns hope.
All things are now possible; how shall we use this power?
Here are some of my previous interrogations of the idea of hope, which I preface with a brief history of the praxis or action of the value of hope in my life mission to discover and engage the origins of evil and in the reimagination and transformation of myself and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value as transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, seizures of power from authority, violations of normality, and freedom from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue.
How does hope work? As resilience and a sustaining function, what is its adaptive value in survival under our imposed conditions of struggle?
As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession; As a student of the origins of evil I studied everything, but especially the nexus of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, and wrote, spoke, taught, and organized always, for democracy and liberation from systems of unequal power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, for our universal human rights and against dehumanization, tyranny, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for the values of a free society of equals; among them liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
During vacations from graduate school and teaching English, Forensics, and Socratic seminars in various subjects through the Gifted and Talented Education program at Sonoma Valley High School and my practice as a counselor, I wandered the world in search of windmills that might be giants at which to tilt.
One day I crossed beyond our topologies of meaning and value and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden into the unknown, the blank places on the maps of our becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, and never returned. I live now where the dragons dwell, and I wouldn’t trade a moment of the life I have lived for any treasure on earth, for I am free.
It happened like this; one day I was driving from my day job teaching high school in Sonoma as a sacred calling to pursue the truth to my side gig in San Francisco where I practiced the repair of the world as a healer of the flaws of our humanity, things I loved but had begun to feel determinative of my scope of action, when the lightning of insight struck. In that moment of illumination I realized that I was literally in Hell, trapped in Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, for I had lived the same day more times than I could remember and was about to do so yet again. And I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this.
I recalled a line of poetry from a book on the game of Go, handwritten variously in Chinese, Japanese, and English which had mysteriously been left at the front door of our home when I was in seventh grade; “This is a message from your future self; I return from living fifty thousand years rapturous in sky, to find you living in a box. Seize the heavens and be free.”
We had just brought down the Berlin Wall, and all things had become possible. So I wondered, what if we brought down all the other walls, beginning with my own?
So I escaped from Hell and took a wrong turn to the airport where I bought a ticket to the Unknown; the agent asked me where I wanted to go, and I said the other side of the world. I had no idea where I was flying to, and when I arrived in glittering Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where the possibilities of epicurean delights were ones I could have explored at home in San Francisco had I wished, I once again found a Forbidden Door to the Unknown in a bus station beside a temple of Ganesha with a map that showed where all the roads ended in nothingness, an enormous empty space along the spine of the Malay Peninsula. I took a bus there and got off at the end of the road, where a dirt track led into the forest of the Cameron Highlands, and with nothing but whatever happened to be in my pockets began walking into an unmapped wilderness.
So began journey from which I have never truly returned, which may be described with the words of Obi Wan to Luke Skywalker as “some damn fool idealistic crusade.”
Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something of our humanity might be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.
Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.
What if we told students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all, and the best you can do is survive another day in refusal to submit and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the Abyss since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.
Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have sometimes forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
Refusal to submit is the primary human act. We can be killed, tortured, starved and imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated so long as we refuse to obey. This is our victory, in which we seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, and nothing can take this from us. In our refusal to submit, disobedience, and defiance of authority we become unstoppable as the tides, for force fails at the point of disobedience and authority has no power which is not granted to it by those it claims, and once questioned, mocked, exposed, and challenged as illegitimate the illusions with which it seduces or terrorizes us vanish into the nothingness from which they came.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?
Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another last stand, there is hope.
And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the Unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.
Such is the only possible response to the terror of our nothingness and its weaponization by those who would enslave us; the roar of defiance, as wild things who are masterless and free.
So for examples of the action of hope in my life, and my witness of history. Why then do we hope? What good is it, that we evolved such a thing?
All I have to offer in this are words, ephemeral and impermanent as leaves taking flight in the wind; a poor substitute for the golden coins which should be laid upon our eyes to bear us to unknown shores where we may be free from the limits of our form and the material basis of our lives under unequal power as imposed conditions of struggle.
We must struggle against such authoritarian forces of coercion as a universal process of becoming human, and against tyranny and terror our best defense is solidarity, loyalty, mutual aid and interdependence, faith in each other, and our duty of care for each other. If these should fail, those who would enslave us win.
A maker of mischief, I; and a bringer of Chaos, bearing songs of liberation. I cannot free us from the systems of unequal power which entrap us, but I can illuminate their limits, flaws, and internal contradictions which will inevitably bring about their collapse, and if we all of us act together we may seize our power to reimagine and transform our possibilities of becoming human and the choices we make about how to be human together.
And maybe one thing more; a spell, if you will, or a wish; I reach once more into Pandora’s Box to problematize and interrogate hope as a balance for despair.
As I wrote in my post of September 27 2020, What Do We Need Now to Forge A Future For Humankind?; We live in interesting times, a phrase attributed in popular culture as Chinese but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong; beset by complex and interdependent problems; existential threats to democracy and to our survival as a species, and confronted by a political crisis of identity driven by pervasive and overwhelming fears and the modern pathology of disconnectedness. This is a moment of decision, with extinction and civilizational annihilation hanging in the balance, of the wonder and terror of total freedom, and our choices will gloriously expand the possibilities of becoming human or cast us into oblivion.
History begins with us, or ends with us.
What do we need now if we are to forge a future for humankind?
So I asked the question three years ago, which I revisit now to recontexualize the praxis of hope as historical and political as well as personal and psychological, one which shapes us both as individuals and as nations.
Here follows a Book of Hope, to balance against despair in surviving life disruptive events, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
What is hope, and how is it useful?
Hope is power, an inherent and defining quality of human being, and a primary force of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization.
Hope dances with faith and love as parts of us which cannot be taken from us, a final space of free creative play which escapes the darkness and those who would enslave us, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and resistant to our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their carceral states of force and control.
Hope is also a fulcrum of change not only for ourselves in becoming human, but also of seizures of power in revolutionary and liberation struggle, a form of poetic vision which allows us to see beyond the limits of our material and social conditions to diagnose systemic flaws and contradictions and find new ways of being human together.
These aspects of hope as recursive processes of change, adaptation, and growth in living systems, social, political, and psychological as well as biological ecologies which construct us, make of hope a kind of freedom inborn in us, and interconnected with ideas of agency, autonomy, and liberty.
How can we find the will and power to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival? This has been the great question of my life posed by existential threats in the first three Last Stands which created and defined me; first when the police opened fire on the student protestors my mother and I were among at Bloody Thursday in People’s Park Berkeley 1969, second when I was nearly executed by police bounty hunters in Brazil in 1974 for refusal to stand aside from the street children they were authorized to kill for being who the system made them, and third in Beirut 1982 when I was given the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet as we refused to surrender to the soldiers who had just set fire to our café and expected to be burned alive.
In my very long journey to becoming who I am now, I began from the position of Camus regarding hope that it is an instrument of our subjugation to authority through faith weaponized in service to power and the falsification of lies, illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use Angleton’s iconic metaphor. Hope for me then must be abandoned if we are to become free; with time I began to see instead hope as a form of freedom, one crucial to our defiance of authority and seizures of power.
First, here is the place from which I began, as I wrote in my post of August 20 2019, On Becoming Human; This morning I was rereading my favorite stories by H.P. Lovecraft on his birthday and writing some thoughts about his work in my literary blog, sister site to this one, when I realized that his surreal mythology illuminates the existential crisis of meaning and values which confronts us in America today and in the world at large in what is rapidly becoming a post-democracy global civilization under the Fourth Reich, and that we have faced similar peril after both World Wars as western civilization destroyed and recreated itself; how can we go on when the values of the Enlightenment, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, have failed us? It is as if we looked to the heavens for signs and portents of guidance, only to find writ large the words, “I do not exist.”
One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre and Marx or a Lovecraftian one of Absurdist faith, referential to classical sources, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign, tyrannical, and hostile to humanity, ideal figures of Trump and his lunatic presidency of Absurdist-Nihilist Theatre of Cruelty whose acts reference Artaud and Pirandello, rests with our solution to the riddle of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils?
Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope in its negative form directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen as we so often do with liberators who become tyrants, or like T.S. Elliot of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bear the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation.
True freedom requires disbelief. Freedom means self-ownership and the smashing of the idols.
Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop lightningbolt awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”
It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.
Now imagine humanity after civilization destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars and is now in the process of doing so again facing that same awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country, exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one but herself.
Our responses to this awakening to possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.
Everyone possesses and uses both forces just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity, or ruptures to our prochronism, the history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.
For both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their connections. And these three principles, which concern our self-construal, history and memory, and social interconnectedness in multiple frames, can produce conflicts with each other which must be negotiated in liberation struggle.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of January 20 2021, The Turning of the Tide: With Inauguration Day Comes the Return of Hope; With this Inauguration Day comes the return of hope as a fulcrum of resilience and renewal; now begins the great work of reimagining America and ourselves.
I have a complex relationship with the idea of hope, with the ambiguity, relativity, and context-determined multiple truths and simultaneity of meaning which defines hope, that thing of redemption and transformative power which remains in Pandora’s Box after all the evils have escaped, as either the most terrible of our nightmares or the gift of the miraculous depending on how we use it.
As Dorothy says to the Wizard of Oz and makes him admit of himself, hope is a humbug, but it is also a power which cannot be taken from us by force and control, and like faith of which it is a cipher holds open the door of our liberation and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Hope is a seizure of power.
As we believe, so we may become.
Human being, meaning, and value originate in this uniquely human capacity to transcend and grow beyond our limits as an act of transformation, rebirth, and self-creation, and as a seizure of power over our identities. Among other things it allows us to escape the flags of our skin and inhabit that of others; to forge bonds through empathy and compassion and enact altruism and mercy.
This is what is most human in us, a quality which defines the limits of what is human, and which we must cherish and conserve as our most priceless gift.
Hope is the thing which can restore us to ourselves and each other, unite a divided nation and begin to heal our legacies of historical inequalities and injustices, and it can be wielded as an instrument which counters fear. Hope is the balance of fear, and fear is a negative space of hope; and because fear births hate, racism, fascism, hierarchies of elite privilege and belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, hope is a power of liberation and of revolutionary struggle.
What do I hope for now, watching the Inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as love triumphs over hate and diversity and inclusion over racism as national policy? I hope that the ideals and values we have embraced today as symbols will in time become real.
And I hope that the peaceful transfer of power and the viability and resilience of democracy will never again be threatened or called into question by any act of treason, tyranny, or terror.
Regarding that I have a story to share with you about a previous election, during which the Cambodian refugees who had been assigned for acculturation to my mother as a high school English teacher with a facility for languages, all vanished overnight from the town. They returned to her classroom in family groups two to three weeks later, and she asked them where they went. One of them answered; “To the hills. New President, soldiers come now.” She told them that can’t happen here, and the reply was “That’s what we thought before Pol Pot.” I imagine that’s what most of us thought, before Trump.
President Biden and Vice President Harris bring us hope and promise of a Restoration of democracy and our universal human rights, and to work toward unity and healing the nation. In this great cause let us work together with them to restore honor to our nation and create a free society of equals built on objective and testable truth, impartial and fair justice, liberty, equality, and a secular state.
Let us raise again the fallen cause of the American Revolution, and bear it forward into the future.
Amanda Gorman, America’s National Youth Poet Laureate, a cum laude graduate of Harvard in Sociology, delivered a brilliant and visionary inaugural address in which hope is a major theme with her poem, The Hill We Climb. In an NPR interview she said she studied the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Winston Churchill in writing it, and has signposted her references to the play Hamilton on Twitter, a poem completed on the most terrible night of our history, when Trump unleashed a mob of white supremacist terrorists under a Confederate battle flag to seize our capitol and execute our representatives in the January 6 Insurrection;
“We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
It can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith we trust.
For while we have our eyes on the future,
History has its eyes on us.”
Her article in Harper’s articulates her major source and reference as she describes herself writing The Hill We Climb in terms of occupying the same historical space as Emily Dickenson did in writing her great meditation on hope as the Civil War began in 1861, “Hope” is the thing with feathers”; “I’ve come to realize that hope isn’t something you give to others. It’s something you must first give to yourself. This year has taught us to find light in the quiet, in the dark, and, most importantly, how to find hope in ourselves. 2020 has spoken, loud and clear as a battle drum. In 2021, let us answer the call with a shout.”
Here is the text of her poem This Place (An American Lyric):
“There’s a poem in this place—
in the footfalls in the halls
in the quiet beat of the seats.
It is here, at the curtain of day,
where America writes a lyric
you must whisper to say.
There’s a poem in this place—
in the heavy grace,
the lined face of this noble building,
collections burned and reborn twice.
There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square
where protest chants
tear through the air
like sheets of rain,
where love of the many
swallows hatred of the few.
There’s a poem in Charlottesville
where tiki torches string a ring of flame
tight round the wrist of night
where men so white they gleam blue—
seem like statues
where men heap that long wax burning
ever higher
where Heather Heyer
blooms forever in a meadow of resistance.
There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant
of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising
its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago—
a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil,
strutting upward and aglow.
There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas
where streets swell into a nexus
of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown,
where courage is now so common
that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters.
There’s a poem in Los Angeles
yawning wide as the Pacific tide
where a single mother swelters
in a windowless classroom, teaching
black and brown students in Watts
to spell out their thoughts
so her daughter might write
this poem for you.
There’s a lyric in California
where thousands of students march for blocks,
undocumented and unafraid;
where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom
in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community.
She knows hope is like a stubborn
ship gripping a dock,
a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer
or knock down a dream.
How could this not be her city
su nación
our country
our America,
our American lyric to write—
a poem by the people, the poor,
the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,
the native, the immigrant,
the black, the brown, the blind, the brave,
the undocumented and undeterred,
the woman, the man, the nonbinary,
the white, the trans,
the ally to all of the above
and more?
Tyrants fear the poet.
Now that we know it
we can’t blow it.
We owe it
to show it
not slow it
although it
hurts to sew it
when the world
skirts below it.
Hope—
we must bestow it
like a wick in the poet
so it can grow, lit,
bringing with it
stories to rewrite—
the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated
a history written that need not be repeated
a nation composed but not yet completed.
There’s a poem in this place—
a poem in America
a poet in every American
who rewrites this nation, who tells
a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth
to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time—
a poet in every American
who sees that our poem penned
doesn’t mean our poem’s end.
There’s a place where this poem dwells—
it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell
where we write an American lyric
we are just beginning to tell.”
Amanda Gorman reads her poem at inauguration
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus
Netanyahu now rides upon his black horse of famine, bringing his mad dream of the Final Solution of the Palestinian Problem with all of its attendant shadows lingering from the Holocaust.
As the passage in Ezekiel 14:21 warns us when the Infinite unleashes the “Four disastrous acts of judgement” to bring a Reckoning against the Elders of Israel for crimes of idolatry, the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance.
Israelis and Palestinians are one people divided by history, divisions shaped in service to power by those who would enslave us.
Perhaps Aynn Rand saw truly in this one prediction of the collapse of our civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, as she is often paraphrased from her novel The Fountainhead; “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
If we wish to preserve our humanity, our reply must always be “All of us, in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and an emerging United Humankind.”
The Gaza War has as its major theme the question of human rights, and if such an idea will have a place in whatever future we may choose. Here then is a retrospective of my witness of history of this conflict, and of its consequences for human being, meaning, and value, and of the choices we make about how to become human together.
As I wrote in my post of January 25 2024, O Israel, Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls; We celebrate this glorious victory of solidarity over division in the Trial of Israel, with joy and dancing in the streets.
O Israel, ask not for whom the bell tolls.
Though for now it stops short of a call for ceasefire and a ruling of Israeli guilt in genocide, this judgement is a stunning and swift victory for the liberation of Palestine which finds Israel guilty of genocidal intent, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity in a way which delegitimates the state of Israel itself as a regime of tyranny and state terror and an outlaw nation of imperial dominion and colonial enslavement and theft, as well as the brutal Netanyahu settler regime which has made of the Holy Land a vast Auschwitz.
And all of this plays out on the stage of the world as exposure and truthtelling of atrocities and calculated state terror perpetrated not against criminals who committed atrocities on October 7, but against civilian populations who had nothing to do with it; seventy percent of the victims of Israeli terror are women and children. How does a child being Palestinian hurt you?
But of course to the fascists of the Netanyahu regime, only people like themselves are truly human, and this mass death and terror is what happens when you begin with such ideas of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, identitarian politics, nationalism, theocratic tyranny, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. No matter where you begin along this spectrum of fear and hate, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
While South Africa leads the championing of our humanity, and has ignited a global anticolonial rebellion against the dominion of Europe and America, two parallel and interdependent storylines trace across the Trial of Israel like leprosy; the attack on the hospital at Khan Younis, and the complicity of Biden the Baby Killer and America along with the UK in Israeli ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
In balance against such forces of darkness we now have two historic victories; the success of the Red Sea Campaign in counter-blockading the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and the international solidarity of liberated colonies in calling out an emperor who has no clothes in the Trial of Israel.
As I wrote in my post of November 29 2023 International Day of Solidarity With Palestine
On this International Day of Solidarity with Palestine, I write to apply the Occam’s Razor of simplification to the complex and emotionally charged issue of Palestinian-Israeli relations and the problem of the double minority by asking a question; what best serves the joy of humankind?
So many other ways to construct such a question, especially as principles of becoming human through revolutionary struggle and seizures of power under imposed conditions of struggle which include falsification, commodification, and dehumanization as systems of oppression; of death, learned helplessness, abjection, horror, and divisions of authorized identities?
How best to create a free society of equals as a United Humankind through secular democracy and universal human rights?
How to balance our uniqueness as individuals within a diverse and inclusive society?
How to level all hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness and annihilate all systems of unequal power?
How to bring the Chaos, disruption, fracture, change, and democratization of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and escape the legacies of our history and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
How to reimagine and transform the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value?
How to free ourselves and each other under imposed conditions of struggle which require violence and the use of social force in seizures of power, without becoming the authority we struggle against and using force and violence to enforce our own ideas of virtue?
Israeli atrocities and war crimes in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians has confronted us all with our complicity in evil, and the world is whiplashed in horror and abjection as our leaders betray us and abandon the principle of universal human rights by which our civilization is sustained, a civilization now in processes of collapse and subversion by fascism at the dawn of the Age of Tyrants. But this also means everything is in question, power can be seized, and new futures chosen, if we act in solidarity in times of chaos as a space of free creative play.
As Guillermo del Toro teaches us in Carnival Row; “Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
Clearly we must have true equality if our rights and liberties are to remain universal in the shadow of state force and control. So also are freedom and equality possible only when we are free of authorized divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
What prevents us, here in America and throughout the world, from seeing this humanitarian disaster as it is? First are elite interests of wealth and power, which have created an American colony and imperialist military giant for the purposes of dominance of the Middle East and control of the strategic asset of oil, of which Traitor Trump’s diplomatic campaign on behalf of recognition of the state of Israel by her neighbors is among the most recent forms of the historic and perfidious Arab-American Alliance, another is Biden the Baby Killer’s hugging the war criminal Netanyahu and sending a Navy ship to help terrorize civilians rather than break the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid and silence the bombs of ethnic cleansing.
That we have used the threat of Iranian influence and the ancient Sunni-Shia vendetta to divide and conquer the region, legitimize the conflicts in Yemen and Gaza as test cases of our hegemony, and destabilize democracy movements in Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran as well as perpetuate the disenfranchisement and ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine by Israel speaks to America’s true motives; not to champion peace and freedom, but to secure wealth and power through war and tyranny.
I believe the secondary cause of our blindness to the injustices of the Palestinian-Israeli situation is a legacy of the Holocaust and how we process historical narratives of victimization. Once anointed as a victim, and crowned with a white hat of blameless innocence, that figure in our imagination becomes incapable of wrongdoing in any other way. We think in terms of Good and Evil as a cosmic struggle of dichotomous forces, and of showdowns at high noon in the Westerns which are primary narratives of imperial colonialism and the apologetics of power, not in terms of the flaws of our humanity. Absolutes are simpler.
Ambiguity and moral relativization disrupt authorized identities and systems of oppression; this is their great value in revolutionary stuggle.
We are all capable of both good and evil actions, of misunderstandings, conflicted and nuanced feelings and responses, and failures of compassion. And we tend to ignore rather than confront things like moral grey areas which make us uncomfortable; this is called cognitive dissonance reduction, and it means we tend to keep doing things we know are wrong if we have a good story to justify our actions and the belief that God is on our side. The most terrible atrocities in history have been perpetrated in this way.
Here I must say plainly that I support the creation of a secular democracy in which all human beings, Palestinian and Israeli alike, are exactly equal both in fact and under the law, that I support the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of the state of Israel and the liberation of Palestine from Occupation and Blockade, and that Israel as presently constituted is a fascist tyranny of state terror which is guilty of crimes against humanity in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
A post has typified the bifurcated and dichotomous dialogs which have attached themselves to the war in Gaza; it says “If you have the power to turn off your enemy’s food, water, and energy, and attack them at your leisure, you are the bad guy.”
To this someone relied; “If you have the power to attack, rape and kidnap over 200 hostages, and hide them in a hospital, you are the bad guy.”
Here follows my reply, in one paragraph; Yes, we are all bad guys here. The use of social force has no justifications; but as resistance struggle against imposed conditions of unequal power, it may be necessary. The violence of the tyrant, the conqueror, the occupier, or the slave master cannot be compared to the violence used by the slave to break his chains. What has happened here is that both Hamas and the Netanyahu regime have delegitimated themselves in war crimes and unforgivable acts of terror which violate our universal rights. Both seek to subjugate the people in whose name they claim to act to make them complicit, a primary strategy of terror. And only love and solidarity of action against Hamas and the state of Israel by the people of Israel and Palestine together can overcome state tyranny and terror.
This leaves us with the question asked by Tolstoy and Lenin in very different works, one which founded the principles of nonviolent resistance used by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the other which began the Russian Revolution; What is to be done?
For myself and my comrades, we have a clear and simple mandate of action in three parts; Unite the Israeli and Palestinian peoples as equal citizens in a democratic secular state wherein faith and ethnicity have no legal standing, defend all civilian noncombatants, their universal human rights, and their access to humanitarian aid, and bring a direct and personal Reckoning to all war criminals on both sides.
As a child in 1969 at an event with my mother that began as a protest against the Occupation of Palestine and American responsibility for its injustices by investment of the University of California and other state institutions, in People’s Park Berkeley, Bloody Thursday May 15, I was in the front line when the police opened fire on the crowd; this was my first death and rebirth, by which I mean Most Sincerely Dead and without life signs for some while, when for a moment I stood outside of time and beheld the possible futures, timelines, and alternate realities which propagated from that moment, the limitless possibilities of becoming human and the terrible chance of a coming age of fascist tyranny, war, the fall of civilization, and the extinction of humankind which may yet come to pass if we cannot reimagine and transform ourselves and our society, and find healing for the flaws of our humanity, the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and the brokenness of the world.
Over fifty years later, I fought in the defense of al Aqsa and the Third Intifada; will we still be fighting for our humanity and our liberty fifty years from now, or fifty thousand?
My hope is that our successors in future generations will have forged a free society of equals and abandoned the use of social force, will have no tyranny or state terror to resist, and can live their lives in joy and love and not in struggle as have I.
We must dream better dreams, and stand together in solidarity of action to make them real.
Who do we want to become, we humans?
Let us choose one another and not the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites, equality, diversity, and inclusion and not the divisions and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, liberty and not the centralization of power and authority to a carceral state owned by the wealthy, democracy and not tyranny, hope and not fear, love and not hate.
As I wrote in my post of May 10 2021, The Defense of al Aqsa: Liberty versus Tyranny in Jerusalem; We may have witnessed the advent of a Third Intifada this night, in the Defense of al Aqsa and the street fighting in Gaza which followed, ignited by the perfidy and imperial conquest of a xenophobic and fascist state of Israel which regards no one but their own tribe and faith as truly human, and which has perpetrated an unprovoked and deadly attack as an act of state terror and a crime against humanity on the peaceful worshippers at one of the most sacred mosques in the Islamic world, a demonstration of power and dominion which follows weeks of provocations, assaults, and acts of propagandistic dehumanization against the people of Palestine.
Like the Second or al Aqsa Intifada which lasted four years from 28 September 2000 to 8 February 2005, unresolved issues of an Occupation now in its fifty fourth year since the June 7 1967 Conquest of Old Jerusalem by Israel, which the State of Israel celebrated according to the Hebrew calendar as Jerusalem Day today by attacking al Aqsa, and a Catastrophe ongoing now for seventy three years since Nakba Day May 15 1948, have coalesced around the symbolic value of al Aqsa, which has a contested dual identity as the Temple Mount in Judaism.
Chances of de-escalation and averting a war depend now not on local factors but on the response of the international community, for history has here become a trap which collapses to ensnare us in its jaws, and outside forces must liberate us from the failures of our system’s internal contradictions.
Will America disavow and renounce its colony of Israel, Queen of her imperial policy in the Middle East and control of the strategic resource of oil? Can international unity and the pressure of Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction free us from the tyranny and terror of an Apartheid regime as it did in South Africa?
Or is war the only reckoning humankind can offer, or will accept?
As written by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post; “On Monday night, militants in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli military exchanged rocket fire and airstrikes amid a deadly escalation of violence. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, armed groups based in blockaded Gaza, launched a barrage of rockets that landed near Jerusalem and in parts of southern Israel, injuring at least one person. Israeli airstrikes in retaliation killed at least 20 people in Gaza, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, including nine children.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the “terrorist groups” in Gaza had “crossed a red line” with their rocket attacks. But the latest explosion of hostilities has a long tail, following numerous aggressive actions by both Israeli security forces and far-right Jewish supremacist groups in Jerusalem. Two weeks ago, bands of Jewish extremists, including some settlers from the West Bank, marched through Palestinian-populated areas of the holy city, chanting “Death to Arabs,” attacking bystanders and damaging Palestinian property and homes. Israeli attempts to evict a number of Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah — a microcosm of what Palestinians view as part of a long history of dispossession and erasure at the hands of the Israeli state — had stirred Palestinian solidarity protests in various parts of the occupied territories and Israel proper.
It also raised tensions ahead of the commemoration of Jerusalem Day on Monday, an official Israeli holiday celebrating the capture of the city during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. A planned annual march by far-right ultranationalist Israelis was called off after authorities rerouted its path at the last minute. Large numbers still made their way to the Western Wall and sang an extremist vengeance song against Palestinians.
“The Hamas rocket attacks, which included the first strikes against Jerusalem in several years, came after running clashes among Israeli police, Palestinian protesters and far-right Jewish Israelis around the Old City,” my colleagues reported. “Among the hundreds injured were seven who were hospitalized in serious condition, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. Video footage circulated on social media of Israeli police officers brutally beating a detained Palestinian man.”
How can America support the state of Israel in tyranny and terror, conquest and plunder? It’s a question asked in tones of outrage, sorrow, and bafflement since the advent of the Nakba on May 15 1948, the Day of Catastrophe which began the Occupation of Palestine and the systematic enslavement and genocide of its people in the wake of the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem. How is this legitimized?
A friend has recently reframed this question for me; “I loved and embraced the Jewish tradition, joining a synagogue and working alongside its Rabbi. When I witness the treatment of Palestinians by the Jewish government of Israel, I am overwhelmed by feelings of confusion and anger. Unable to reconcile this immorality, I question the very foundation of my faith. Where is the good and moral uprising of international Jewish voices condemning the government’s path? I’ve lost faith in being Jewish.”
What is clear to me is that this crisis of faith is also an existential crisis of identity, a situation of utmost gravity and danger which also holds the potential for reimagination and transformative rebirth, a personal echo of a parallel civilizational crisis from which humankind and the global community of nations must find a way to emerge and free ourselves of the legacies of our history. Here is my reply:
The state of Israel is not identical with the Jewish faith, though the fascist-imperialist faction which Netanyahu represents would like everyone to think so.
A nation based on the assignment of its citizens to a tribal identity, the sectarian weaponization of faith in service to power and an authorized national identity, a military society with universal compulsory service, and a reconstructed Hebrew language of national unity has used identity politics to subjugate its citizens to the centralized power of tyranny; Israel is a fascist state of blood, faith, and soil no less than that of the Nazis.
Add to this toxic mix a kleptocratic regime which has propagandized narratives of historical victimization to legitimize massive theft and imperial conquest of other people’s nations and one thing is clear; Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis.
You may know from my many references to the incident in my writing that I am an antifascist, sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet in 1982 in Beirut, during our fight against the Israeli invasion and siege. In the forty years after, I have been a hunter of fascists and a revolutionary engaged in struggle for the liberation of humankind against fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and against tyranny and authoritarian regimes of force and control, for democracy and its ideals of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, and for our universal human rights. In this cause I place my life 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.
A Palestinian homeland, and justice for its people, has been among my goals since that summer so long ago. Like the goal of liberation of Ireland from British colonial rule, it remains to be achieved. In question is the idea of freedom and citizenship as the sovereignty and independence of peoples from foreign colonialism and authoritarian tyranny, and the primacy of a nonsectarian state free from divisions and hierarchies of faith, for who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
I also support the idea of an Israeli homeland, and see no reason these two states, Palestine and Israeli, should be mutually exclusive or antagonistic. Why must citizenship be bound by the limits of geography, or states by borders?
Why must one people’s Return mean another’s Exile?
To be clear, I am on the side of anyone threatened with hate crime regardless of any other factors; in riot and war my test for the use of force is simple; who holds power?
I am on the side of all those whom Frantz Fanon named The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. This applies equally to Jews and Muslims, Israel and Palestine, and any other human beings regardless of who they are, and especially without any moral burden of merit as Shaw teaches us with the character of Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue.
Some Israelis who would disagree with me on the question of Palestine and militarism in imperial conquest and regional dominion have been allies in the cause of hunting Nazis, but are blind to their own complicity in this evil due to seeing themselves as victims and defenders of victims rather than perpetrators of crimes against humanity.
This is about fear, and the destructive cycle of abuse and violence. Not membership in any group or authorized identities of belonging, hierarchies of the elite and the elect, and divisions of exclusionary otherness. The origins of violence and the social use of force are universal, historical, and systemic, and absolutely not in any mythical evil impulse, original sin, or inherent depravity of man.
The Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force belongs to no one, but to apersonal systems of unequal power. I understand all too well how power makes us feel safe, the seductive beauty of weapons which make us arbiters of virtue, and how elite membership confers entitlement; this works the same for nations as for individuals, in the playground, prison yard, and contested public spaces like the Temple Mount which is also al Aqsa.
When faith is appropriated by authority for legitimation in identity politics, identity itself becomes confused and ambiguous. To become free, we must seize ownership of ourselves as self-created and autonomous beings.
This is why the primary duties of a citizen are to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
I think of the problem of human evil and its cycle of fear, power, and force in the case of states which become the tyrannies they fought to liberate themselves from, and this is true of anticolonial revolutionary states generally because of the historical legacies of victimization and the imposed conditions of struggle, in this way; victims often become abusers because their identity is organized around power as the only means of escape and survival in a world wherein no one can be trusted.
When trust has been abrogated and proven empty and without meaning, when the capacity to bond with and feel the pain of others in empathy has been broken and one is without pity or remorse, when fear is overwhelming and generalized and has been shaped by authority to the service of power, victims learn that only power has meaning and is real. We must not allow our abusers to become our teachers.
While every such issue has its own unique origins and history, the problem itself is universal, and relates to what one fears, and how that fear is shaped by authority as identity. From our perspective as Americans interpreting events in the classic problem of the double minority typified by Israel and Palestine, how we perceive issues has much to do with how they are framed by our informing and motivating sources.
In the end we are defined by what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
The first question to ask of any story, and the most important, is simple; whose story is this?
We are lost in a wilderness of mirrors, of lies and illusions, falsifications of ourselves, distorted images and reflections, echoes and authorized identities which disfigure, disempower, and steal our souls.
How shall we answer those who would enslave us? Our authenticity and autonomy is realized through seizure of power, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and humankind as a free society of equals.
We Americans tend to see things in terms of white hats and black hats, as in the Western films which serve as origin myths and archetypes of our national character. Once victim status has been conferred, such groups and persons become white hats and good guys, incapable of evil and diametrically opposed to whomever must then be black hats. It’s a terrible way of choosing national policy.
Sadly, we humans can be good and evil at once, the flaws of our humanity echo and reflect the brokenness of the world. It is a truth proven once again tonight in al Quds or Jerusalem depending on to whom one is speaking and in what language, as Gaza burns from the onslaught of an Israeli Defense Forces run amok much the same as the night almost four decades ago in Beirut when they tried to burn Genet and I alive in our café, as a dozen human beings from whom everything but hope has been stolen swear vows to each other to hold a position covering the escape of the women and children trapped by the Israeli attack until all are safe, in a final defense not of al Aqsa Mosque, magnificent and beautiful and filled with significance, monument to the human impulse to reach beyond ourselves and to the limitless possibilities of becoming human, a stage fit for the glorious deaths of heroes, but of the disembodied screams of strangers among the nameless warrens of a derelict antiquity.
Against the chasms of emptiness and nihilistic barbarism of a world of darkness and fire, of fear and force, I have only words to offer, and I write to you what I have said to my comrades who have chosen to stand with me; I’ve lost count of Last Stands, but I’ve risked everything against impossible odds and survived more times than I can remember, and all that matters is that we abandon neither ourselves nor one another, that we refuse to submit, for this is the moment of our freedom, and it can never be taken from us.
From this night, Palestine is free, for we can be killed, but we cannot be conquered.
As I wrote in my post of November 4 2023, Stand With Humankind: On Today’s Global Rally For Palestine; Since the disruption and fracture of our ideas of universal human rights in the October 7 terror attack perpetrated by the Netanyahu regime of Israel and their partners in theocratic tyranny Hamas which delegitimized both and destabilized the world order, a great struggle between democracy and tyranny, love and hate, hope and fear has been raging in Gaza, where the fate of humankind hangs in the balance and our future possibilities of becoming human are being chosen in the great game of chance that is war.
Here, as in far too many times and places, a few unconquerable heroes and those who stand with them in solidarity as a band of brothers against the darkness of barbarian atavisms of brute fear and force and a nihilistic regime wherein only power has meaning and fear is the only means of exchange, die in the forlorn hope of buying with their lives time for civilization to awaken to the threat of fascist tyranny and imperial conquest.
How will we answer the test of our humanity in this moment of existential threat? Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a world of masters and slaves?
For these are the stakes of this game in which we now play; liberty or tyranny.
Today the Rally For Palestine throughout the world demonstrates our solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, a glorious defiance of fear weaponized in service to power by authority and of the fascisms of blood, faith, and soil through which they divide and subjugate us.
For this time of darkness and sectarian violence ends only when both Israelis and Palestinians, one people divided by history, unite to liberate each other from those who claim to rule in their name and as mouthpieces for a god of universal brotherhood and love of which they have made instead an idol of cruelty and death.
Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
When those who would enslave us come for us, as they always do, let them find not a people subjugated by learned helplessness nor divided by hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, but a United Humankind unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
Why is it important to resist our dehumanization and those who would enslave us, and to reply to the terror of our nothingness with refusal to submit and solidarity with others, regardless of where or when such existential threats arise, who is under threat or any divisions of identitarian politics weaponized by conquerors to isolate their victims from help?
How much of our humanity can we claw back from the darkness in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us, and in solidarity with each other?
We must each of us face our own Gate of Fire, as did the Spartans at Thermopylae, and choose.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, genocides, plunder and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
To paraphrase America’s Pledge of Allegiance not as an oath to a nation but as the declaration of a United Humankind; We, the People of Earth, pledge ourselves to each other, as one humankind, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Let us reply to tyranny and terror with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War and the conflict of dominion which immediately followed it between tyranny and democracy, first against fascism and then between the allies who defeated it as spheres of dominion and systems of economic and political organization but both for different dreams of a free society of equals, in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
War transforms the question of our authorship of ourselves with existential primacy; where do we ourselves end, and others begin? How may we negotiate this boundary of the Forbidden and interface with alien realms of human being, meaning, and value, with division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness or with solidarity, diversity, and inclusion, with fear or with love?
This is a war of tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil against democracy and a free society of equals, for the idea that we all of us have meaning and value which is uniquely ours and against enslavement and the theft of our souls.
Within the limits of our form, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, we struggle to achieve the human; ours is a revolution of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase meaning repair of the world which refers to our interdependence and duty of care for each other as equals who share a common humanity.
I’m sure all of us here know what Shlomo Bardin meant when he repurposed the phrase from the Kabbalah of Luria and the Midrash, but what do I mean by this?
There are only two kinds of actions which we human beings are able to perform; those which affirm and exalt us, and those which degrade and dehumanize us.
We live at a crossroads of history which may define the fate of our civilization and the future possibilities of becoming human, in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and between solidarity and division, and we must each of us choose who we wish to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
There are no Palestinians, no Israelis; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
As I wrote in my post of October 24 2023, I Stand With Humankind Against Theocratic Tyranny and Terror: the Hamas-Israel War Unfolds As the Sacrifice of Innocents to Power; When Rome was once engulfed in famine riots, the Emperor was asked if the ships in Egypt should load grain to feed the people or sand for the arena to divert them. “Load sand” was the infamous reply; and it seems it is still true today.
What can I say that has not already been said, what can I do that has not already been done, hundreds of times over across decades of Resistance to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil of every kind and description, to carceral states of force and control, to violations of our universal human rights and the idea central to democracy and our civilization that all human beings are equal and worth exactly the same, regardless of hierarchies of belonging and otherness, whether they are ours or different blood, faith, nationality?
How can I demonstrate that it is better to be a free society of equals than a prison world of masters and slaves?
Above the lands regarded as holy by three faiths a bone white moon like a dead fish eye regards us with implacable wrath in our horror and monstrosity, a rotten and poisonous holiness perverted by authorities who subjugate us by claiming to speak in the name of the Infinite and a ground of struggle not merely between them but also between humanity and dehumanization, barbarism, atavisms of instinct, and what madness and evil may together do as fear and faith are weaponized by those who would enslave us.
In reference to an article entitled Biden says West Bank settlers ‘pouring gasoline on fire’ as Israel prepares for Gaza ground invasion, I wrote; Biden the Baby Killer sputters incoherent threats at people who resist their subjugation, dehumanization, brutal repression of dissent, and genocide by the Occupation. “Who are you to fight back, you slaves, you nonwhite filth”, Biden spits in fury at the glorious defiance of those who hunger to be free. American is a shameful and squalid factory of death.
In reply to Lina Khatib’s article in The Guardian entitled Despite their rhetoric, neither Iran nor Hezbollah want an escalation of war in the Middle East. Here’s why, I wrote; I hope this has it right, but I fear our enemies wish to provoke massive death and destruction among their own peoples to forge unity and delegitimize western values. They will sacrifice anything to engineer a conflict of civilizations. And they have partners within the Israeli alt right and diaspora just as Hamas does, eager to perpetuate and secure their dominion and hegemony over their own Jewish people.
This whole ritual breaking of taboos as war crimes by Hamas is a performance designed to provoke retaliation as war crimes by Israel, to dehumanize and criminalize Israelis caught between the lies and tyranny of the state and the fear of an enemy willing to demonize itself, fear weaponized in service to power by both Hamas and her partner in terror Israel. Yet there remains an escape clause in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; the redemptive power of love.
Let us unite to liberate each other, the Jews from the state of Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza from Hamas. For those who stand between each of us and the Infinite serve neither.
And to the words of Queen Rania of Jordan as reported by Christiane Amanpour of CNN, I replied; Shocking to me as well, though sadly unsurprising. Our ideology of human rights is an apologetics of imperial and colonial power. This disruptive event of the shocking Hamas attack is designed to delegitimize Israel, America, and the whole ideology of democracy and human rights, and if we play this game by such rules of escalation and revenge the enemy wins, and our civilization falls.
Why bomb Gaza, except to kill the children of others in trade for your own killed children? I very much doubt that the leaders of Hamas have trapped themselves in the killing box of Gaza, nor that if I were to say to Israel; I will bring you the heads of your enemies, in trade for the lives of the people of Palestine who have nothing to do with the criminals who abducted and murdered the children of Israel, that this offer would be accepted.
For the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem so long dreamed of by Netanyahu and his settler-thief regime of theocratic imperialists reveals the true intention of the regime as genocide, and I suspect the attack was planned jointly by Hamas and Israel or by an unknown third force whose interests are opaque but clearly inimical to the peace and democracy process that was thriving across sectarian lines before the attack. The sabotage of the anti-Netanyahu democracy movement in Israel and of the peace and solidarity movement to unite Palestine and Israel is the true purpose and primary result of the Hamas attack.
Whose wealth and power is founded on selling arms to Israel? Now we see why Biden is pitching a Holocaust of the Palestinians rather than liberating Gaza from Hamas as the natural consequence of this humanitarian tragedy.
As I wrote in my post of October 17 2023, Chaos Is the Great Hope of the Powerless: Case of the Hamas-Israel War; A wise friend has questioned my valorization of Chaos as a principle of change in the context of Black Saturday, a term which describes the Hamas attack on Israel and the immense forces of terror, death, destruction, fracture, grief, rage, and revenge it unleashed, becoming a single tide of darkness.
Thank you once again for your kindness and your wisdom.
In this moment of tragedy I am thinking of Chaos as a disruptive force of fracture and change which has stripped us bare of our ideologies to reveal the fragile humanity beneath, and may be leveraged for liberty or tyranny by how we respond as a species and global civilization. As Guillermo del Toro writes in Carnival Row, Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.
What do I hope for now, for the peoples of Israel and Palestine? That both may unite to free each other, but first we will need universal humanitarian aid to any one on either side of these lines of division, and a Reckoning for the war crimes of both Hamas and Israel. For Israel took the bait, and gave Hamas the victory; they are now equal as war criminals without legitimacy.
Israel took the bait, and the world is calling them out for war crimes; this may be end of the Netanyahu alt right regime and the dawn of a new Middle East. I was absolutely expecting Biden and allies to enable Israels Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem; in this I rejoice to be wrong about human nature. Maybe the idea of human rights is not dead. As my mother used to sing to students who asked her to make authorizing statements about anything, artifact of a Shakespeare in Thirty Minutes theatrical show that toured nationally with some of her students in it, bouncing her open hands left and right; Maybe, maybe not, Maybe, maybe not.
No one seems to have noticed publicly that this means Israeli intelligence has been infiltrated. It is also possible that unknown puppetmasters have infiltrated and seized control of both Hamas and Israel, for purposes which are unclear and antithetical to the interests and well being of either. We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, friends.
What Reckoning, for crimes against humanity by an organization of terror which has long been a vanguard of anticolonial revolutionary struggle under the imposed conditions of Occupation, slavery, and a genocidal Blockade?
Not the totalization of the general population of Palestinians in a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing as Netanyahu wishes and Hamas intends as a strategy of delegitimation of the Israel state in the moral equivalence of terror, for if Israel, her patron America, and the international community accept the terms of struggle offered by Hamas they too become organizations of terror, and Hamas wins.
This is a decolonial revolution, and victory goes to the side who can establish the legitimacy and moral supremacy of their story. As my father taught me, Never play someone else’s game.
Hamas also wishes in this provocation to weld the peoples of Gaza to them; this is a primary strategy of fascism and tyranny, to make the people in whose name you claim to act complicit in unforgiveable crimes. Always beware those who claim to speak and act in your name as a strategy of your subjugation.
A third layer of meaning here is the ambiguity of the geopolitical and world-historical forces beyond the Holy Land; Russia, her ally Iran and the Iranian Dominion of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, especially the Assad regime of Syria which has sent forces into Israel as a client state of Russia and Iran, and Hezbollah, which offers many of the social services of a government and may be in the process of emergence as an independent state, or a true empire in the transnational sense like the Holy Roman Empire. The great question here is; has Russia opened a new front of her plan of global conquest and made this a theatre of World War Three?
How does one answer all of this? How bring a Reckoning for the terror of Hamas without authorizing and becoming complicit in the greater terror of Israel’s looming genocide of the Palestinians?
The forms that might take give me pause, for they will determine our future, and though I know what I myself must do I do not like it, and am calling out here in my journals, where I work through the consequences of my decisions before acting on them, for unknown possibilities I myself cannot envision.
Yes, my friend, Chaos has profoundly destructive forms; death among them, ruin and civilizational collapse, the negation of all we have claimed as our identity, but all are also measures of the adaptive range of systems, and can give birth to new forms from this liberated energy. And as you point out, all forces operate in opposite directions at once, creating their own opposition. These are not moral forces in balance, but ambivalent forces which contain each other in recursion.
So, while our nations try to shatter each other’s truths with overwhelming force and mass terror, I must find a path of least force to salvage what I can of our humanity, and I hope I will not fail as I did at Mariupol and Panjshir.
This may be all we have as humans lost in chasms of darkness and a Wilderness of Mirrors, this refusal to abandon each other to dehumanization, but like our refusal to submit to authority it is a power which cannot be taken from us, even in imposed conditions of struggle designed to produce abjection and learned helplessness, or rage and tribalization as identity politics and the manufacture of consent to be fed into engines of death for the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and tyrannies.
Such ephemeral and insubstantial things, like whispered prayers to abyssal unknowns, figments of love, hope, faith, which belong to the shadows, the delusions of grandeur of beasts harnessed to systems of oppression by others who yet dream that we might become more.
Dream with me.
Embrace our absurdity as flawed things wrestling with immense forces of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization in a mad quest to become human, under imposed conditions of struggle typified by atrocities designed to produce abjection, learned helplessness, and despair, as we are consumed by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege whose primary weapon is division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as identity politics and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Against all of this we have only our solidarity with each other, the redemptive power of love, our refusal to submit or to believe and trust authority which frees us as Unconquered and self created beings and Living Autonomous Zones, and our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves. Powers which cannot be taken from us, and which can seize the power of those who would enslave us.
This is why I practice the art of believing impossible things, but only those I myself have chosen or created. And crucially, act to make them real. And in this case we must bring a Reckoning to the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity regardless of who they may be or in the name of what cause they act, and silence the drums of war.
Dream with me, but act in solidarity to make it real.
As the Mad Hatter says to Alice; “That is an excellent practice, but right now you might want to focus on the Jabberwock.”
Just so.
As I wrote in my post of October 11 2023, Palestine Versus Israel Round Ad Nauseum In An Endless Litany of Woes, Atrocities, and Horrors; Forward: to my comrades in the Palestinian Resistance:
Hello everyone;
I have some thoughts on the recent events in Gaza, Gaza where I have fought and lost someone I loved, and actions by Hamas whom I have fought alongside and count as my brothers in revolutionary struggle; actions which include the taking of hostages and murder of families, war crimes which have made peace impossible in the near future and have delegitimized the cause of liberation of Palestine by making it ambiguous with dehumanization and atrocities. Such is the nature of power, and of fear weaponized in service to power.
This now is my Resistance in the cause of the peoples of Palestine and Israel, a people divided by history and sectarian theocratic terror. I question the origins and motives of such actions, which trade a tactical goal of demonstrating that Netanyahu’s alt-right monsters cannot deliver the security by which they subjugate Israel, for a strategic one of legitimacy, and will not only weld American support to the tyrant but grant him permission and immunity for the Final Solution of the Palestinian problem he has long dreamed of.
How can we salvage something of our humanity from this?
Herein I invite question, and dreams of a better future than we have the past.
Thank you for hearing me.
Hamas has brought the Chaos to the American Empire and disrupted the legitimation of Israel by the Arab American Alliance versus the Imperial Dominion of Iran, and in reaction to the relentless genocide of the Palestinians by the state of Israel now captured by Netanyahu and his alt right band of thieves.
Here now is the fulcrum of change and reckoning for seventy years of Israeli state terror and imperial conquest in an amoral and loathsome apartheid regime which inverts the values of its founding by becoming the death camps its citizens escaped, and betrays the hope and ideal of a refuge from hate and sectarian division as a reflection of the nazis from whom they have internalized oppression as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Hamas has shattered all of this, potentially, with the myth of state surveillance and control as useful and effective means of subjugation of the slave castes of any state, and the myth of the invincibility and supremacy of Israeli intelligence and military hegemony of which it is a figure of the might of carceral states, tyrannies, and empires, and the calculated reprisals by Israel which will follow are designed by Hamas in this provocation to delegitimize Israel and fracture the solidarity of her allies and collaborators in terror, of which America remains the principal sponsor and villain.
So many of the reactions to this tragedy both here among my friends and in the news media seem baffled, caught in the forks of a classic dilemma in which our heroes and our villains trade places, for in this stunning slave rebellion wherein the victims of genocide and erasure have attacked their masters, the Wretched of the Earth with whom we might normally empathize have violated two of our most cherished moral values and rules of conduct; they are not defending but attacking, which makes justifications for war and the use of social force irrelevant though this ahistorical interpretation of events ignores seventy years of oppression and authorizes the conqueror by classifying the liberation struggle of their victims as terrorism, an argument we can therefore nullify as pro Israeli misdirection and the apologetics of power, and a second and far more serious point; Hamas has taken hostages and killed civilians, war crimes which violate our universal human rights and place the perpetrators beyond all laws and all limits.
A friend has written an apology for statements born of compassion which might be confused with support of Israel as a state rather than as a people, a distinction which makes all the difference; and to this I have written the following reply:
There are no good guys in this story, just a people divided by history brutalizing each other with a savagery that threatens our humanity itself. I have fought in Gaza and lost someone there, and from my witness of history I say there is only one kind of truth which does not become a Rashomon Gate when faith is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, and this is true of both sides in this or any war; Who is bleeding? Who is suffering? Who requires acts of grace and mercy?
Not who merits compassion, for often there are no innocent, and as Shaw teaches us in Pygmalion with the iconic speech of Alfred Doolittle this places a moral burden on victims which is unjust; merely who is suffering and needs our help, in this moment, always the only time we have.
Solidarity of action, resistance, and liberation struggle all come after this; Tikkun Olam, a Jewish concept of reparative justice and praxis or the action of values, which I often describe as healing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
You have nothing to apologize for; states work very hard to confuse and conflate legitimation of the state with narratives of victimization, for who wears the white hat is a hero and beyond question. All states do this, for it is the nature of power to become centralized as force and control. Among the true horrors of identity politics is awakening to realize that one is the beneficiary of a genocide, of slavery, of patriarchy, of unequal power in any form.
So we are lost in Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, rewritten histories, falsification. But it is my fate to question all things, and many of them do not bear the test of unbelief.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
In this case I question the origins and motives of a blitzkreig which demonstrates the vulnerability of Israel, a tactical objective, at the cost of strategic goals; the immediate results include unifying global support of Israel and dividing the crucial solidarity between the anti-Netanyahu democracy and peace movements within Israel from the liberation struggle of their slave caste, the Palestinians.
Cui Bono? Neither Palestinians nor Israelis, though in the imperial totalitarian state of Israel and its fascisms of blood, faith, and soil they share a common enemy. Netanyahu and his regime benefit, though his promise of security for the people of Israel has been proven illusory and the feared Israeli intelligence and military a paper tiger as Hamas intended; whether this weakens or strengthens his hand is yet to be seen.
Security is an illusion, one convenient for tyrants in the manufacture of consent to be subjugated. In this area of liberation struggle the victory of Hamas in breaching the Wall has been an unambiguous good.
Bring down the Wall, all the walls. Not only the walls of our borders and prisons, but the walls of ideas between peoples most of all. In the long run, only this will bring us peace and a United Humankind.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
No matter where you begin with divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Why, O Israel, reproduce the conditions of your historic trauma as the prison guards, with others cast in your former role? Why, when we could be guarantors of each other’s universal human rights in a free society of equals?
Let us emerge from the legacies of our history, and create ourselves anew.
What happens next?
Disruptive and polarizing events often confront us with a choice; who is your white hat and who your black hat in this story? Whose play will you back when they enter the arena at high noon? We will begin to become human when we free ourselves of this tyranny of good and evil, so vulnerable to the lies and misdirection of those who would enslave us and who claim to speak and act in our name, especially in theocracies. For as Voltaire wrote; “Those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities”. Gott Mitt Uns; it is the most terrible battlecry, for it authorizes anything.
Today the empire begins to strike back, as Biden declares that America will stand with Israel, with the state and not her people mind you, in the abominable reprisals Netanyahu promises, having been handed by his enemies immunity and sanction for the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem he has so long dreamed of. Both this immediate trigger event of total war and the conditions which created it are consequences of American complicity, for we as a nation have failed to enact the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction policies against Israeli state terror and tyranny which might have prevented it, and if we are to be liberators and not conquerors we must at minimum now pressure Israel to lift the Blockade of Gaza and recognize Hamas as its legitimate government. Let us send humanitarian aid, not armies.
Netanyahu and Biden have declared intentions to answer force and fear with greater force and fear, as Israel accepts the offer of the moral equivalence of terror by her partner in this dance, Hamas. This will bring not lesser but greater terror, not democracy and a free society of equals but the centralization of power to totalitarian states of force and control. From the perspective of Israel and America or of any state, this is the true purpose of external threats.
As my father once said; “Politics is the art of fear, and fear is the basis of human exchange. Fear is an untrustworthy servant and a terrible master; so, whose instrument will it be?”
Of the recursive forces of fear, power, and force which are the true origin of evil and of its forms as violence, war, police states, I say to you this one true thing; fear and force cannot answer fear and force. Only love can do this, and the redemptive power of love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of Power, from falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Why are we each others jailors, and not each others liberators?
Here is the memorial I wrote for my friend, assassinated in Gaza by an Israeli sniper during the fighting over two years ago; June 21 2022, We Balance the Terror of Our Nothingness With the Joy of Total Freedom, the Flaws of Our Humanity With the Redemptive Power of Love, and the Brokenness of the World With Our Absurd Hope For the Limitless Possibilities of Becoming Human; Death is the ultimate life disruptive event, the mirror image of Chaos as creative force and the adaptive potential of a system.
This day I have re-enacted the stages of grief process as I relive an event of a year ago, caught in the labyrinth of its story, and as always with such complexes of memory, history, and identity I emerge through its passage with changed perspective.
Some stories can shatter our lives, but also free us from the legacies of history and the limits of our former selves.
This is a story which has become interwoven with my annual reading of Sartre’s works in celebration of his birthday, a juxtaposition which I find wholly appropriate, illuminating, and strangely hopeful.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
We choose our friends and lovers from among those reflections which embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves or fully integrate into our consciousness and personality; and it is the interface between these two bounded realms, the Ideal and the Real, which I am driven to interrogate today.
Here is where the art of questioning lives, at the intersection of Socratic method and classical rhetoric, the dialectics of history, and the problematization of our motives, feelings, and processes of ideation through the methods of psychotherapy.
We speak of the juxtaposition of imaginal and actual realms of being as a form of Dadaist collage as pioneered by Tristan Tzara and instrumentalized as methodology by William S. Burroughs which creates the universe of our experience, of the discontiguous, relative, ambiguous, and ephemeral nature of truth described by Akutagawa in Rashomon Gate and the methods of fiction exemplified by Raymond Queneau as applied to identity and self construal, and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty as dyadic forces of the psyche which work themselves out through our relationships with ourselves and with others. These three parallel and interdependent processes shape who we become, and how we instrumentalize others in our self creation.
We must first own the fact that dealing with our memories of someone is not the same as the lived experience of our history; it is all one sided and has been moved into an interior space of performance, and in which reimagination and transformation is ongoing. The map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski teaches us, nor is our idea of a person equal to the actual person themselves.
What parts of myself do I embody as a figural space into which to grow in the character whom I have thought of as Cleopatra, with all of the ambivalence, power, legacies of cultural history, and liminality such an identification implies, how do I imagine her now, and what kind of story have I cast us in?
I think of her now in terms of Rachel McAdams’ wily, sophisticated, and transgressive Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, as she became throughout the twelve years of our work in liberation struggle for the independence of Palestine, with elements of Millie Bobby Brown’s fearless, brilliant, and utterly without boundaries Enola Holmes as she began, bearing onward the colours of a beloved and presumed martyred family member in the course of investigating his disappearance. I am reasonably certain that this is not how she saw herself.
For illumination as to how a Palestinian woman might imagine herself, the characters she may choose to play as role models and the stories she may embody as ritual enactments, even a highly unusual one such as she, we may look to the wonderfully rich culture of Palestine’s female film directors and authors; of auteurs Annemarie Jacir, Maysaloun Hamoud, Mai Masri, and Farah Nabulsi, and of novelists Susan Abulhawa, Liana Badr, Ghada Karmi, Sahar Khalifeh, Hala Alyan, and Sahar Mustafah.
Bearing in mind that all such reading lists are nothing less than a set of authorized identities. As Margaret Atwood so splendidly demonstrates in her works, our intertexts are primary in the construction of our identities, including those of sex and gender, as mimesis and as dialectical processes of history.
And this is where it never ceases to be fascinating, the study of human being, meaning, and value and the limitless possibilities of becoming human. For in the sphere of our relationships with others, parallel and interdependent with our relationships between the masculine and feminine halves of our psyche, each co-evolves with the other in recursive processes of growth and adaptation to change in the construction of identity.
I say again; we interpret the actions of others and form relationships on the basis of our self-construal and ideas of ourselves, and we use our relations with real people to shape who we wish to become.
How does this work out in real life? As a personal example of the discontiguous gaps of meaning in the interfaces between bounded realms of masculine and feminine personae, a free space of creative play, I offer the artifacts of memory of a figure which may or may not align with the martyr I know only by her Code Name: Cleopatra.
Of the Last Stand in which we met and forged an alliance, betrayed and caught in a trap which we turned against our enemies who had trapped themselves in with us, which I think of as the final battle scene in the film Mr & Mrs Smith, this operatic quest was set in motion by the conflict of dominion between Hamas and al Qaeda in Gaza during August of 2009, during which the forces of light prevailed over those of darkness in the victory of Hamas, with Israel playing each against the other through infiltration agents, spies, deniable assets, and use of a special Recon team masquerading as various Arab factions to commit atrocities against presumed rival Arab groups in a classic policy of divide and conquer. This space of play was complicated by clan vendettas such as hers, and the usual political and religious fragmentation, crime syndicates, mercenary forces, tribalism, corruption, and the shadow wars of foreign states.
Our paths crossed several times over the next twelve years, always in memorable circumstances, sometimes as allies and others as rivals, often as both. Which of these is the real and true version of her, or of myself? Such iterations of our images are without number, like the captured and distorted selves in funhouse mirrors aligned to reflect into infinity.
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 contrast 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, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, evil genius of the C.I.A.’s Counterintelligence Service on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
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, archetypes and transpersonal figures like the anima which concerns us here, 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?
As I wrote in my post of June 21 2021, The Hope of Humankind: On Becoming Autonomous Zones as Agents of Chaos and Transformative Change; A friend has written in despair of our significance and hope for the liberation of humankind, of the impactfulness of our lives and our struggles which balance the flaws of our humanity against the monstrous and vast forces of a system of dehumanization, falsification, and commodification; for to be human is to live in a state of existential crisis and struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Today is the birthday of Jean Paul Sartre, and so this event finds me reading once again his magnificent reimagination of Jean Genet in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr; Genet who 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 thirty nine years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the first of many Last Stands.
This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell with its iconic crack, 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.
This morning I awoke to a call to identify the body of a friend missing and believed killed in Gaza by Israeli terrorists in the savage street fighting which followed the rocket attacks of last week, which I was unable to do; I searched for my friend in this sad and ruined form, like the skin of a wild thing which has sung itself utterly away, and could recognize nothing.
Where is my friend, agile, lithe, mercurial, fearless, insightful and quick witted, who always had four scenarios running and three escape routes, who survived against impossible odds through improvisation and leveraging chaos, whose vision could discern true motives within the secret chambers of the human heart and play them like an instrument as songs of rapture and terror, who chameleon-like and protean could shift identities as needed and behind their masks move among her enemies unseen?
I never knew her true name; perhaps she no longer had one, as is true for so many of us who play the Great Game of futures and the possibilities of becoming human, a term popularized by Rudyard Kipling in the novel Kim. My own names are numberless as the stars, like those of an actor who has played multitudes of roles in films and theatres of many kinds.
She first entered my orbit during the victorious struggle of Hamas against al Qaeda for dominion of Gaza in August of 2009 in Rafah, an Egyptian Palestinian drawn into the maelstrom of war like countless others by family duty and vendetta.
Yet she said no to authority at great peril when she could have said yes and become a slave, stood in solidarity with others when she could have run; this was a choice, one which confers agency, autonomy, and self-ownership as a seizure of power in a limited and deterministic context. Refusal to submit is the primary human act, one which cannot be taken from us, wherein we become Unconquered and free, and able to liberate others.
So it is that we may escape the wilderness of mirrors in which we wander, a realm of lies and illusions, captured and distorted images, falsification and the theft of the soul. For the authentic self, the image which we seize and claim as our own, flies free of its mad circus of seductions and traps. Hence we achieve our true selves and form, in rapture and exaltation as beings of our own uniqueness.
Impossible that such grandeur could be reduced to its material form, like the abandoned shell of a fantastic sea creature which has grown beyond its limits and moved on, to realms unknown.
The lines spoken by Hamlet while holding the skull of his friend Yorick came unbidden to my thoughts; “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?”
For twelve years you danced with death, and danced away laughing, until today.
Farewell, my friend; I’ll see you in the eyes of the defiant ones, who bear your fire onward into the unknown, and with it I hope your laughter. Our successors will need both fire and laughter, if the future we win for them is to be equal to its price, and worth living in.
Our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus from which warriors arise; from each, multitudes. For we live on as echoes and reflections in the lives of others, in the consequences and effects of our actions, in the good we can do for others which gathers force over time, and in the meaning, value, and possibilities we create.
How can choosing death and freedom be better than submission to authority and its weaponization of fear and force?
My experience of accepting death in confronting force and violence finds parallels in the mock executions of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maurice Blanchot, and I’m not done challenging state terror and tyranny and forces of repression. I’m going to stand between people with guns and their victims in future, as I have many times in past, and here I find resilience among my motivating and informing sources; Sartre’s total freedom won by refusal to submit, and Camus’ rebellion against authority which renders force meaningless when met by disobedience, give me the ability to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
And all who are mortal share these burdens with me. In this all who resist subjugation by authority are alike as Living Autonomous Zones, bearing seeds of change; we can say with the figure of Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
We are all Nikolai Gogol’s hero in Diary of a Madman, caught in the wheels of a great machine he services, like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. But we know that we are trapped and enslaved, and we know how and why; we know the secrets of our condition which our masters would keep silent, and in refusing to be silent we can free ourselves and our fellows. This Michel Foucault called truth telling; a poetic vision of reimagination and sacred calling to pursue the truth which bears transformative power.
So here I offer all of you words of hope for moments of despair, the horror of meaninglessness, the grief of loss, and the guilt of survivorship.
Your voice has defied our nothingness, and resounds throughout the chasms of a hostile and dehumanizing world; gathering force and transformative power as it finds a thousand echoes, and begins to awaken refusal to submit to authority and to heal the pathology of our falsification and disconnectedness.
The voice of even one human being who bears a wound of humanity which opens him to the pain of others and who places his 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, who in resistance to tyranny and terror, force and control, becomes unconquered and free, such a voice of liberation is unstoppable as the tides, an agent of reimagination and transformation which seizes the gates of our prisons and frees the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Despair not and be joyful, for we who are living Autonomous Zones help others break the chains of their enslavement simply by condition of being as well as action; for we violate norms, transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, expose the lies and illusions of authority, and render the forces of repression powerless to compel obedience.
This is the primary revolutionary struggle which precedes and underlies all else; the seizure of ownership of ourselves from those who would enslave us.
Such is the hope of humankind.
Tear Down the Wall, by Pink Floyd
Middle East crisis: famine ‘imminent’ in northern Gaza, UN report says, as EU foreign policy chief calls area ‘open air graveyard’ – as it happened
We celebrate today the one hundred fifty second anniversary of the founding of the Paris Commune, a glorious legacy of resistance in which all humankind shares. It conjures for me visions of the Bacchantes, a society of women revolutionaries who printed tickets with an image of the god of ecstasy and poetic vision on one side and the address of an enemy of the people on the other, bearing the legend “good for burning”. Distribution of the lottery tickets was through street runners as if it were an illegal gambling ring, something of no real interest to the police; teams bearing axes and torches would converge on the target as a flash mob.
An ancestor of mine was one of them, called the Red Queen in reference to the character in Alice in Wonderland due to her signature method of assassination, a friend of figures of the Commune including Karl Marx, Gustave Courbet, Arthur Rimbaud, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and a comrade of Louise Michel; she was among the members of the Garde Militaire of the Commune who later immigrated to San Francisco as an intact unit, with their banners and uniforms.
The secret society of revolutionaries descended from the original Garde Militaire of the Commune throughout the world remains among the most influential of covert military organizations independent from and not authorized by any nation, though clearly not unique in this. I have always enjoyed the splendid irony that many of the world’s criminal syndicates originate exactly as the intelligence and special operations communities which are their counterparts and opposing forces do, as a final court of appeal of the people against tyrants and systems of oppression; crime and law enforcement, revolution and tyranny, the secret policeman and the rebel, arise together and are interdependent. As I have often written, the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce of resistance.
As her descendent and successor in revolutionary struggle, the Red Queen provides me with an informing, motivating, and shaping source; among her principles of action are, always go for the enemy leadership and decapitate the bosses, always strike without warning and anonymously with overwhelming force when the enemy is weakest, and never use the same trick twice.
I imagine her as a combination of Helena Bonham Carter’s Eudoria Holmes in Enola Holmes, which depicts the key figures of Suffragette history Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Sylvia, Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns.
When you dream of ur-sources of historical identity and archetypal figures who can act as guardians and guides of the soul and provide spaces to grow into, dream big.
Sustained and relentless waves of liberation actions and revolutionary struggle continue to hammer the world’s tyrannies of authoritarian force and control and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil with massive protests and electoral activism, and as we did in the Autonomous Zones of Seattle, Portland, and New York and hundreds more throughout the world, we will emerge victorious from the fight against unequal power and oppression because whosoever refuses to submit to force and defies authority and those who would enslave us becomes Unconquered and free. Each of us is a Living Autonomous Zone, ungovernable as the tide, uncontrollable as the wind; we are wild things, who serve no masters.
The Black Flag flies from the barricades in al Quds-Jerusalem, Moscow, Hong Kong, Atlanta, and dozens of other cities in every continent of earth, and its primary meaning has not changed since its use by the First International and by Louise Michel, veteran of the Paris Commune entitled the Red Virgin of Montmartre, who first flew it as an anarchist banner when she led the Paris worker’s revolt of March 9 1883; freedom versus tyranny, refusal to submit to authority, the abolition of state terror, surveillance, and control, resistance to nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and abandonment of fear as the basis of human exchange and the social use of force as a principle of human organization.
With this bold signal the people declare: we shall be ruled by none.
Vive la Commune!
Ideas of my ancestor the Red Queen
Helena Bonham Carter’s Eudoria Holmes in Enola Holmes
Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes
Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns
the Paris Commune, a reading list
Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune, Rupert Christiansen
An ancient length of iron rests hidden among my tools, pitted and scarred from many battles and acts of sabotage, artifact of a heritage of resistance which reaches back into antiquity and connects us with the lives of others who refused to submit to authority; in this case the unconquered Irish.
A workingman’s tool that can be used as a weapon, this is a traditional iron crow, a term whose first written use was in a poem in 1386 which describes the wicked triangular punch like a crow’s beak at the terminus of its curved handle, now called a crowbar, wrecking bar, or infamously as Edward Abbey did a monkeywrench, and normally now with wedged clawfoot prybars at both ends instead of just the foot, originally a pirate’s boarding weapon and breaching tool which by the early 1400’s had developed into the bec de corbin; Joan of Arc’s helmet has a strike imprint from one along the cheekplate.
I will tell you two stories of the origins of this fragment of our history, one American and the other of the Old World. Both are true, if in different ways.
Probably forged by my partner Theresa’s grandfather, the great socialist politician and labor organizer John F. McKay, blacksmith by trade though he published and edited several newspapers, and carried by him as a walking stick for some thirty years, this particular crowbar struck fear into company thugs and strikebreakers and brought hope to workingmen and their families.
He began life as do many Americans, bearer of a historical legacy of survival and resistance; his father Hugh McKay had been a schoolteacher kidnapped at Inverness into service in the British Navy, who had killed or grievously wounded a British officer in a sword duel aboard ship, and was released by a sympathetic jailer before he was to be hanged. He jumped ship and swam the St Lawrence River to freedom in America.
As an Industrial Workers of the World unionist and with his friend Eugene V. Debs, John F. McKay defied and challenged authority throughout the world to forge a better future in which no worker can be used against another. He began this life work as a Montana state senator in 1918-1922; for union organizing among the miners and loggers he was excommunicated by the Church, and defeated an assassin sent against him.
An infamous event from this period was the Centralia Massacre of November 11 1919, in which a local Washington State headquarters of the IWW was attacked by members of the American Legion who had been called on by the town council to restore order during a strike; they surrounded and fired on the building, and a young IWW man who happened to be a World War One veteran fired back, killing several of them. The remaining strikebreakers stormed the building, killed several of the office staff, and castrated, dragged behind cars, and lynched others. Their mutilated bodies were hung about town; captured survivors were convicted on trumped up charges and given sentences of 25 years. From this abattoir emerged a champion of the people; I believe this event began John F. McKay’s shift from political to direct action. At the end of his term in the senate he became a full time IWW organizer.
In 1930 he moved to Spokane and founded the All Worker’s Party, and with the hundreds of men he organized kept thousands of people alive during the Great Depression, by raiding trains for food to distribute while his teams turned the power and water back on for families who had no cash to pay the utilities with, among other things.
And with this wrecking bar in his fist he fought for liberty, equality, and justice for the rest of his life.
Before we reach back into antiquity to share a second origin story, here are my recommendations for reading into the history of Ireland; Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, Tim Pat Coogan’s 1916: One Hundred Years of Irish Independence, The Troubles: Irelands Ordeal 1966-1996, and Wherever Green is Worn: the Story of the Irish Diaspora, and Fintan O’Toole’s The Irish Times Book of the Century and The History of Ireland in 100 Objects.
As we move further in time from our point of reference, possibilities multiply, meanings change, and futures become ambiguous; so it is with the past as well. So we turn from history to myth, and an origin story from which the Clan McKay constructs its identity.
Possibly this crowbar is the haft of the ax of Sigurd the Mighty, Norse King of Orkney, who in 892 became the only man in history to have been bitten to death by a decapitated head. It happened this way; that in a great battle he struck off the head of Maelbrighte the Poisonous, Gaelic King of Moray, whose line were the last independent Irish rulers of Scotland, the original ancestor being anointed king by St Patrick himself, and a direct ancestor of all persons McKay and MacKay from Niall of the Nine Hostages, High King of Tara. Sigurd the Mighty tied the head of Maelbrighte the Poisonous to his saddle, and the head bit his leg which became infected and killed him.
After generations of war the grandchildren of these two kings who had killed each other in battle united in marriage, becoming like many Scots a blend of Irish and Viking, figures of the origins of Scotland. The great ax was a wedding present, and a peace treaty.
The malefic ax, consecrated to the Viking trickster god of battle, magic, and poetry, Odin, whose name means Master of Ecstasy and Fury, referring to the twin arts of poetry and war, and on the other side to the Irish Crow of Battle, death, time, magic, and transformation, the goddess Morrigan, Queen of Death and Nightmares, in equal part, as a peace offering at a wedding which unified the two peoples in the historic struggle for dominion, and signaled the birth of a new nation.
Thus multigenerational trauma and vendetta became the forge of a new nation. Sociologists call it the Brazilian Solution; described by Ciara Nugent and Thais Regina in Time “As Brazil emerged from the slavery era in the 1900s, elites in the country promoted an idea of the country as a “racial democracy”—a supposedly harmonious mixing of Indigenous, white European, and Black African cultures. But at the same time, politicians, the media and academics also encouraged the descendants of enslaved Africans and indigenous communities to marry and have children with the descendants of white colonizers. Some conservative Brazilians still idealize their country as a racial democracy, where racial discrimination or conflict cannot exist.”
I believe this practice began with Alexander the Great requiring his soldiers to marry Afghan women and so render everyone blood relatives rather than imperial colonists and indigenous subjects. I wonder how well it would work for Double Minority nations like Israel and Palestine or in Northern Ireland.
Though clearly absurd for any state to enforce a policy of intermarriage en masse, and fraught with peril and vile abuses of power, one could begin by sending all the children to the same schools together as we do in America, and let nature take its course. It remains a primary goal of public education, wherein everyone begins as equals and mixes freely to level all divisions of class, race, and faith, which is why Lincoln enacted the system after the Civil War.
In Northern Ireland, one would of course begin with an independent and sovereign nation, committed to our universal human rights and total decolonization at all levels of society and realms of human being, meaning, and value, with a secular state where all are equal before the law and no divisions or institutions of faith are authorized.
Thus the wrecking bar of the great John McKay and possibly a relic of the peace that united the Irish and Norse peoples of Scotland sings to me of liberty and equality, and of the redemptive power of love to free us from the legacies of our history.
And so this battered thing of dual origins and secret history waits among the other tools of my trade, that of resistance, chaos, anarchy, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.
Of these it whispers secrets, awakens lost histories, restores forbidden senses of awareness and vision, opens doors of possibilities, and sends beautiful, terrible dreams of things which may have been or yet may be.
Such is the legacy of humankind, which belongs to all of us. Seize and use it without fear, and build a better humanity and a better future for us all.
A heroic wave of mass protests sweeps the world in reply to Putin’s rigged election, in defiance of assassination and torture used by the regime in the brutal repression of dissent, wherein peace and democracy movements in Russia cohere in one voice to call out the emperor who has no legitimacy.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz; “You’re just an old humbug!”
In Russia and throughout the world, let us perform, the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. Such are the stages of revolutionary struggle in delegitimizing unjust authority.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
As written in The Observer editorial entitled Insecure, weak Putin craves the popular vote, but uses violence to guarantee it: This parody of an election will be remembered for the cynically methodical manner in which he and his cronies stole the people’s right to freely choose Russia’s leader; “The frequency with which Vladimir Putin raises the possibility of using nuclear weapons to attack Britain and other western countries in support of his war of conquest in Ukraine is both chilling and irresponsible. These threats from Russia’s president, echoed by his sycophantic predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev, have become almost routine, prompting suggestions that Putin is not really serious. Yet while there is certainly an element of bluff, and a crude attempt at intimidation, complacency about his behaviour is dangerous – and potentially catastrophically misplaced.
No entirely rational national leader would casually raise the risk of mass annihilation in this way, let alone one who commands the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Putin’s incomprehensible decision to mount a full-scale invasion of Ukraine revealed a man cut off from political and military realities, impervious to opposing views, obsessed by supposed western plotting, and in thrall to his own deluded fantasies about restoring the power and sway of pre-Soviet imperial Russia. His complicity in targeting Ukraine’s civilians and numerous war crimes and assassinations shows he will stop at nothing.
Putin is not a fit person to lead Russia. He portrays himself as a man of the common people yet wholly lacks common decency, integrity and honour. He should be standing in the dock of the international criminal court in The Hague, where he faces war crimes charges over the abduction of Ukrainian children, not standing for re-election as president for another six years.
Putin’s victory in the election, which concludes this weekend, is a foregone conclusion. He faces no credible rival. The Kremlin has spent an estimated $1.2bn (£1bn) on “information management” (meaning lies and propaganda), vote-fixing in occupied Ukraine, and unopposed nationwide campaigning. Lavish state funding, including a reported 20-fold increase in spending on internet projects, platforms and media, has a single aim: a Putin landslide.
Not content with absolute power, the leader needs to be loved and adored
If it were not so sinister, Putinism might objectively be considered an interesting phenomenon. Not content with absolute power, the leader needs to be loved and adored. He craves the legitimacy conferred by popular vote, but abhors the uncertainty of a free democratic process. He purports to listen to people’s concerns, as in marathon phone-ins and rallies, but only hears what he wants to hear: positive affirmation of his omniscience. A weak man plays the strongman, horse-riding bare-chested in Siberia and assassinating rivals with a sneer and a smirk. Over the course of nearly a quarter of a century, Putin has bent and subverted Russia’s entire system of government to his will. He has co-opted, compromised or ostracised the monied elites. He has turned the state into his personal fiefdom and embezzled on an obscene scale. Putinism works through fear and corruption, underpinned by exploitative patriotism. Alexei Navalny, his foremost critic, was murdered because he exposed such abuses. He ridiculed insecure Putin and made him feel small, when he desperately needs to feel great. In Navalny’s telling, the tsar has no clothes. Worse, for a Russian, he has no soul.
This parody of an election will be remembered, if at all, for the cynically methodical manner in which Putin and his cronies stole the people’s right to freely choose Russia’s leader. It will be remembered for the accompanying threats to unleash a humanity-obliterating nuclear war upon the world. And the crass brutality of Putinism will be forever symbolised by last week’s hammer attack in Lithuania on Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s close associate.
Ultimately, it is violence, not votes, that keeps Putin in power. But it cannot sustain him indefinitely. The oppressed of Russia must look to their history and keep faith. One day, this too will pass.”
As written by Andrew Roth in The Guardian, in an article entitled A farce, not an election’: Russians abroad join ‘Noon against Putin’ protest: Voters turn out at midday from the UK to Latvia and Turkey to Thailand in action Alexei Navalny endorsed before his death; “The queue to vote at the Russian embassy stretched for more than half a mile along Kensington Gardens on Sunday as hundreds of Russians arrived at midday as part of a worldwide act of protest to show their opposition to Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine.
It took a quarter of an hour to walk to the end of the queue past people bearing signs that read: “These ‘elections’ are fake”, “My president is Alexei Navalny” and “Vladimir Putin, go fuck yourself”.
Near the end of the queue, Maria Dorofeyeva, a young woman, stood with a sign that read: “Against Putin, against the war! For freedom, peace and fair elections!” The words Putin and war were dripping blood.
“I expected there to be a lot of people, but not this many. I didn’t know there were so many Russians in London,” she said. “It gives me some hope to see how many people are not happy with the dictatorship, the war, with what’s happening in Russia. And we want to stop it.”
The long queues appeared in Russian cities and world capitals, where the Russian diaspora has swelled as hundreds of thousands have arrived in a wave of emigration triggered by the war and mobilisation at home. There were long waits in Yerevan in Armenia and Almaty in Kazakhstan, where tens of thousands of Russians have emigrated, on Istanbul’s pedestrian Istikali Street, in Phuket in Thailand and in cities across Europe including Riga and The Hague.
The protest action, labelled “Noon against Putin”, was proposed by the St Petersburg politician Maxim Reznik and endorsed by Navalny before his death. He called it a safe way for Russians inside and outside the country to congregate publicly and show their opposition to the president.
“There are many people around you who are anti-Putin and anti-war, and if we come at the same time, our anti-Putin voice will be much louder,” said his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who has vowed to continue his protest work.
Navalnaya voted in Berlin on Sunday alongside other members of Navalny’s entourage and thousands of other Russians in a queue that snaked for more than a mile through central Berlin near the Brandenburg Gate and ended at the Holocaust Memorial. “Putin is a murderer!” they chanted at one point.
In London, hundreds more protesters stood directly across from the embassy behind banners declaring opposition to Putin and the war in Ukraine. This Will Pass by the band Russian punk band Pornofilmy and other protest songs played over a loudspeaker:
“All of it will pass, everything passes sometime
In a year, in a day, in an instant
Yesterday’s dictator will lie alone in the morgue
Now just a dead old man.”
Marina Ellis held a sign calling the elections “fake” against a backdrop of the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag.
“I’m boycotting the elections. I’m not going to vote … It’s not elections, it’s a farce,” she said. “I want British people to see that not all Russians support the war. They are absolutely against Putin … If you support Putin and you have access to all the information, then you’re just an idiot.”
“I’m very happily surprised,” she said of the turnout. “I’m happy to see all these people.”
Ksenia, 24, said she had voted in elections six years ago but had not re-registered this time because “now I feel like it makes no sense to vote any more … But still I wanted to do something today,” she said, to express her opposition to the war and to Putin. So she held a sign that read: “I was born under Putin. I won’t die under him.”
Gennady, a pensioner, held his fist in the air as Russians streamed past him toward the end of the queue. “I am happy to see so many thinking, smart people,” he said. “These people have come here to be counted.
“I think it’s a clever action and it’s probably all that can be done today. You see the way that protest is put down in Russia. But it can’t last this way for ever.”
Asked for his opinion of Putin, he said he believed his time in power would “always end in a war”. “Peaceful people are dying,” he said. “Ukrainians are dying. Russians are dying. Children are dying. It’s a crime against humanity.
“There are many Russians who think differently,” he said. “But they’re being crushed. And the propaganda that is poisoning the minds of families, of grandfathers and grandmothers, is destroying all of our lives. We must fight back.”
What is to be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such different consequences? Herein I offer my thoughts as I worked through the consequences of the social use of force in the context of Russian tyranny and the invasion of Ukraine, before making my decision to launch simultaneous actions to bring a Reckoning to Putin and his regime and to join the fight in Mariupol to liberate the Black Sea and the ports of Ukraine, 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; There is a line in Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Power That Preserves, third novel of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, spoken of a hero who refuses to be summoned to the rescue because in his other world, our own, a child has been bitten by a snake and must be saved; “Could I damn a world to save the life of one child? I’m not sure I could make that choice.”
Today we contemplate its opposite; I’m not sure I could make the decision to let the world burn and trigger the extinction of humankind to save the life of one man, Vladimir Putin, whose mad imperial conquest of Ukraine now threatens the future of us all.
The life of one war criminal versus the incalculable horrors he will bring; I could not choose to save a monster who may destroy us all over saving humankind and our world.
The violence of the slaver cannot be compared to the violence used by a slave to break his chains., as Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours teaches us.
A senator with whom I am not usually aligned made an entirely reasonable suggestion recently, for which he has been denounced in the media by friend and foe alike, even AOC for whom I have already declared in the next Presidential election, regardless of whether or not she is on the ballot.
I am having difficulty understanding why this suggestion was not embraced with great bipartisan enthusiasm, given our history. After all, assassination and overthrowing inconvenient governments is something we do all the time. We even manufacture or capitalize on unforgiveable just causes of war like Russia’s firebombing of a nuclear site this week to launch imperial conquests of our own; the terror attack on the Twin Towers provided a pretext to seize the heroin fields of Afghanistan and the oil fields of Iraq, sacrifices to our shared rituals of public grieving and need for vengeance, and Hearst’s fictions regarding the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor gave us the Spanish-American War, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Hawaiian Islands which we stole simply because we could, and later the Presidency of the war’s hero, Teddy Roosevelt.
Go us? We normally seize such chances with great avarice.
Perhaps we are growing up, we humans, and abandoning the use of force and violence. The question is whether we can survive to reach the stage of childhood’s end; and this is the inherent dilemma of force and power, for such forces are dichotomous, bidirectional, and have unintended consequences.
As written by Joan E Greve and Vivian Ho in The Guardian; “Lindsey Graham has attracted widespread condemnation after the South Carolina senator suggested Vladimir Putin should be assassinated in order to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Graham first made the suggestion in an appearance on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show on Thursday evening, and he then repeated the idea in a tweet that quickly went viral.
“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” Graham said on Twitter. “You would be doing your country – and the world – a great service.”
Brutus refers to one of the assassins of the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, and Stauffenberg was a German army officer who was executed for attempting to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944.
Graham added in a separate tweet: “The only people who can fix this are the Russian people. Easy to say, hard to do. Unless you want to live in darkness for the rest of your life, be isolated from the rest of the world in abject poverty, and live in darkness you need to step up to the plate.”
Despite immediate criticism of Graham’s comments from left and right in the US, he doubled down on the idea in a Friday morning interview with Fox & Friends. “I’m hoping somebody in Russia will understand that he is destroying Russia, and you need to take this guy out by any means possible,” Graham said.
American lawmakers of both parties responded to Graham’s comments with shock, dismay and outrage, pointing out the danger in demanding the assassination of a leader whose troops are currently engaged in shelling nuclear plants.
“I really wish our members of Congress would cool it and regulate their remarks as the administration works to avoid [a third world war],” the progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar said in a tweet.
Republican members of Congress were no less critical, as Senator Ted Cruz derided Graham’s suggestion as “an exceptionally bad idea”. “Use massive economic sanctions; BOYCOTT Russian oil [and] gas; and provide military aid so the Ukrainians can defend themselves,” Cruz said. “But we should not be calling for the assassination of heads of state.”
Even Marjorie Taylor Greene – the extremist congresswoman who has sparked outrage for, among other things, comparing coronavirus-related restrictions to the treatment of Jewish people during the Holocaust – chimed in from the right with criticism of Graham.
“While we are all praying for peace [and] for the people of Ukraine, this is irresponsible, dangerous [and] unhinged. We need leaders with calm minds [and] steady wisdom,” Greene said on Twitter. “Not blood thirsty warmongering politicians trying to tweet tough by demanding assassinations. Americans don’t want war.”
White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said: “We are not advocating for killing the leader of a foreign country or regime change. That is not the policy of the United States.”
Really? When has this not been precisely our national policy? President Biden ordered the assassination of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, a man in Syria whom our state claimed without any evidence was the new leader of ISIS, who if the charge was true was a danger only to our common enemies al Qaeda and the Assad regime, mass murdering his entire family merely to divert attention from his many failures, just as Trump had done the year before with his supposed predecessor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Did America not assassinate Salvador Allende and attempt countless times to assassinate Fidel Castro, both heroes as great as any American President?
Did we not kill in massive and horrific numbers to win our freedom from the British Empire in the Revolutionary War, from slavery in the Civil War, and from fascism in the Second World War?
We are a nation founded in death and terror through the words with which George Washington sent twelve thousand soldiers to put down the Whisky Rebellion of 1792 and demonstrate the power of the new federal government to enforce taxes; “Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force; like fire it is a dangerous servant — and a fearful master.”
Do not speak to me of the moral superiority of America.
O my brothers, sisters, and others who walk with me through this age of fire, wherein liberty and tyranny hang in the balance and possibly the survival or extinction of humankind, I thank you for the time we have spent together in conversation here, which I cherish as a refuge from the world, as a theatre in which I may process my reactions to the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, and as a forge of action in the performance of my chosen roles as a truthteller, a maker of mischief for tyrants, and in becoming a fulcrum of change.
Ours is a universe of Chaos, irrational and uncontrollable, and circumstances beyond the scope of our volition may visit disaster and life disruptive events upon us at any moment, for any reasons or none at all, and if by chance this is the last thing I have the opportunity to write, I want you and everyone who has been part of my life to know that you have helped me find balance for the terror of our nothingness in the joy of our freedom and the beauty of the world, healing in the redemptive power of love, and hope for our future possibilities of becoming human in poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of humankind.
If by chance you knew our time here in which to do and be the things that bring meaning and value to our lives may number not millennia but hours and days, what would you do and be? Do and be that now, and never stop; for as Kurt Vonnegut teaches us in Mother Night, we become what we pretend to be. What matters here is that our performances of ourselves are chosen and owned by us, and that we own the stories in which we live.
The most important question to ask of a story is; whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We are about to pass through a Rashomon Gate event, of fracture, relativization, the bifurcation of timelines and propagation of alternate futures and realities, and all bets are off as to what awaits us on the other side.
And all of this because a mad tyrant cowers and rages in his warrens of darkness, fragmented and torn apart by the demons which inhabit him as his dreams of empire and dominion fall apart and in accord with Newton’s Third Law create the forces of their own destruction, much as with his predecessor Adolf Hitler at the end, with one crucial difference; beneath his finger lies the button which will launch nuclear annihilation, and it calls to him, whispering; ”Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
So, as Alfred Doolittle said to Higgins in My Fair Lady, “I put it to you; and I leave it to you”; do we save one life and damn the world?
As I wrote in my post of February 22 2022, Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Malcolm X; We are shaped by our histories as narratives in which we play our parts; and we also change and seize ownership of our histories and our stories as we perform and enact them.
This brings us back to issues of unequal power, identity, and the social use of force and violence, issues which the life and works of Malcolm X center and bring into terrible and wonderful focus.
His principle of action, By Any Means Necessary, is like a riddle challenge uttered by a Zen master, for which there is no single interpretation, and to which no words but only deeds may give answer. It is a principle which helped set us free from history, and which in the end rebounded on him and killed him.
A dangerous idea, for the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law and always acts in both directions, action and reaction, unpredictable and slippery in one’s grasp. Yet an idea must be dangerous if it is to be useful in the struggle for liberation.
The violence used by a slavemaster cannot be compared to the violence used by a slave to break his chains, as Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours has been paraphrased, an extension of Nietzsche’s dichotomy of master versus slave morality. This dictum has its reverse; the state has no legitimate authority to use death, violence, force, or control in the repression of dissent, theft of citizenship or violations of our universal human rights, or authorization of identities. This got Trotsky killed by Stalin, as he rightly called out tyranny and terror as tyranny and terror regardless of what those who would enslave us call themselves.
Revolutionary struggle, protest movements, and wars of liberation use force and violence to achieve a society free of inequality when there are no other means possible, due to the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle when the tyranny and terror of authority, state force and control, and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege answer dissent with repression because they are without legitimacy and have only fear to keep the slaves at their work. Those who would enslave us refuse to negotiate because they see only themselves as human, and without debate we are left only the sword.
Any who stand between the tyranny and state terror of conquest, enslavement, and death, and the lives of innocents are heroes and champions of our humanity. The particulars are irrelevant.
How do such terrible things arise and seize hold of us, shaping us to their uses?
As I wrote in my post of October 24 2021 Embracing Our Monstrosity: Hierosgamos in Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights; Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein?
Yet as Prospero said of Caliban, we must also say of Frankenstein’s monster; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
As I have written of Vander Meer’s retelling of Frankenstein in the novel Borne; Mary Shelly’s glorious novel was also about the abandonment of a child who is no longer perfect, among a number of other themes, including the origins of violence.
A major theme of the novel Frankenstein is the monstrosity of God, who like Victor creates and then abandons his child when it is imperfect and no longer a reflection of his, when we become our own free and independent beings. Yes, Victor wants to become a god, which is why the story resonates with everyone, and is an allegory of the failure of science to realize Idealist visions of humanity, the novel being both a codification and critique of Romantic Idealism.
But in his quest to become a god, Victor also desires to be worshipped and obeyed; he wants to free himself from subjugation by authority, but not to liberate others. Instead of changing the nature of power, force, and control in casting down from his throne a tyrant god who bound us to his laws and then abandoned us through the abolition of the Law and of the social use of force and the centralization of power and authority to an elite as would a true revolutionary, Victor’s tragic flaw of pride compels him to become the next tyrant and enact the role of his former nemesis.
It is a cycle of substitutive tyranny which as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out in his novel Lolita, a brilliant critique of the failure of Idealism which led to his father’s execution in the Russian Revolution as an aristocrat, has been recapitulated throughout the world in revolutions which become tyrannies, especially under the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified Martin Chatwin and now like Saturn a monstrous cannibal god; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important. The great question which democracy attempts to answer is how to balance the rights and needs of individuals so that none may infringe upon another’s.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
I have no use for anything that limits our power to resist evil; the boundaries of the Forbidden, the tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue, or the limits of our humanity.
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the French and American Revolutions and their imperial successor states, those of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism as taught to us by Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita and by his model Thomas Mann in Death in Venice are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
How does a revolution seize power without becoming a tyranny? How shall we gather the force and will to resist unjust authority, without enforcing our own notions of the good on others in our turn?
This is the dilemma of power; that we must wield force to take it from our oppressors, and that we must relinquish it when it is ours and refuse to shape our fellows to our will.
We must refuse to submit to authority if we are to seize our liberty; and we must refuse to subjugate others that they may do the same if we are to avoid becoming the monsters we hunt.
I like and empathize with the character of Victor in Mary Shelly’s allegory of the origins of evil, and have used variants of this name as aliases because he is a figure of Milton’s rebel angel, but also I admire the monster in all his magnificence, a figure of the Shadow based on Caliban in The Tempest. The story is about their relationship as parent and abandoned and damaged child, about the interplay of these selves in the growth of the psyche and processes of becoming human, and about the political consequences of otherness and monstrosity.
Frankenstein addresses themes of science versus nature, reason versus passion, and both of these within a Promethean rebellion against God, authority, and universal Law as a form of Idealism; this from the perspective of the monster’s creator.
From the monster’s view, the novel portrays the disfigurement of the soul through abandonment by a parent who also functions as a figure of a creator-god and of Authority, known as the problem of the Deus Absconditus which refers to the god who bound us to his despicable Laws and then ran away before he was caught, and who drives the child to achievement and supremacy as his proxy of dominion and vindication before the world rather than empowering the child’s own agency to discover and follow a unique bliss and personhood- what the Greeks called Arete or Virtue but also denoting superiority as with the apex predator and ideal of patriarchal masculinity Achilles in the Iliad, one of Mary Shelly’s sources- in a chosen arena but who like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring must renounce love to win supremacy and power, rendering all victory meaningless and hollow, dehumanizing the child and shaping a vessel of rage and vengeance, a tyrant forged in the violence of the struggle to free himself from enslavement, with the iron self discipline and will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others. It is about birthing monsters, and the chaotic plasticity of identity and relationships.
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
A story which is at once Greek tragedy and Freudian study of the processes and relations between the id, ego, and superego, with a third parallel storyline relating a Romantic reimagination of Biblical Genesis like that of Blake, it is both the apotheosis of Romantic Idealism and its first criticism, exegesis and classical myth, dialectic on responsibility and discourse on Aristotle’s categories of being, critique of Rousseau’s natural man and of Nietzsche’s Superman which it also inspired in a recursive loop of influence across the seas of time. Its author was a Pythian visionary whose insight reached centuries into the future, and whose immense scholarship reimagined some of the greatest works of our historical civilization.
Mary Shelly’s influence echoes through time, multiplies, and reshapes the contexts of its polymorphous meanings. One cannot think of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa without thinking of his original, the dual-aspected monster-child created to bind our nature with reason, nor read her sources and references in the prophecies of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost without reevaluating them in terms of Mary Shelly’s novel; her work resonates through past and future, and what touches, it changes.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein?
A nested set of puzzle box themes and contexts, multiple narrative threads which create paradoxes of meaning, role reversals and inversions of identities, and the questioning of the mission of civilization and the morality of progress; Mary Shelly created the modern world with her great book Frankenstein.
It is a modernity which can unfold limitless possibilities of becoming human, or like Pandora’s Box and the Lament Configuration of the toymaker LeMarchand in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser mythos unleash horrors beyond our imagination, as Putin now threatens to do with nuclear war and annihilation.
With Putin like Dr Strangelove hypnotized by the siren call of his missiles and their promise of ultimate power, the power of total destruction and the end of humankind, chanting Oppenheimer’s ritual invocation; “Behold! I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds!”, the question before us all changes.
Nuclear annihilation whispers from the darkness, unleash me, and I’ll make you powerful. But this is a lie, for such power will also consume us and steal our souls.
The great question to which we must now find answer is no longer when is it good to be bad, but how much of our humanity we are willing to sacrifice for our survival as a species.
As I wrote in my post of February 5 2020, Democracy Falls in America: the Acquittal of Traitor Trump; At the end I am driven finally to reconsider the position of the great, flawed idol of my youth Malcolm X; by any means necessary.
By any means necessary; this is a horrible, terrible principle of action, one fraught with endless possibilities of inhumanity and malign power, yet if we are forced to a resistance of survival as was Camus, who wrote for those who must claw their way out of the ruins of lost positions and face yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival, how else may we combat our dehumanization?
We must never surrender hope, for our resistance can triumph over anything but the loss of our faith in ourselves and one another. So long as one of us remembers the dream of freedom, we may yet redeem our humanity.
My answer to the Republican subversion of democracy remains NO!
Yet beyond this, we must fight not merely against fascism but also for democracy and the universal rights of man. As we resist fascism to defend equality and freedom as our common human rights, so we must use force and violence against social and institutional systems, structures, and ideologies and not persons, for we may seek truth together nonviolently with those with whom we disagree as the signal virtue of democracy and humanism, even with our enemies as brother warriors.
Resisting evil means resisting that of others against our universal humanity, but it also means resisting the seduction of evil and power and of our own use of force to compel others.
Power is the evil impulse which births monsters.
So often in history those who commit true atrocities are utterly convinced of the justice of their cause, Gott Mitt Uns, are informed and motivated by narratives of victimhood and have abandoned the self-questioning which is the fulcrum of a free society of equals. This, too, we must resist.
For this is why revolutions, once power has been seized and tyranny overthrown, may become themselves tyrannies, and why I prefer to let others run amok and be ungovernable to the specter of authoritarian social control.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue.
And remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
Further illumination may be found in Anthony Burgess’ masterpiece Napoleon Symphony, a tragedy of Napoleon and Beethoven’s Eroica and a novel whose discovery was a defining moment of my fourteenth year and has remained with me ever since, despite my teenage adoration of Napoleon as a hero of revolution and liberation, a universal genius and ideal of human being.
Here is the ground of struggle between tyranny and resistance under imposed conditions of systemic unequal power in the use of social force and violence, and between seizures of power as ownership of identity versus the falsification of authorized identities in the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; history, memory, identity.
Read it as I did beneath a print of Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, depicting a Shadow pantheon with the wonderful image of the rebel Titan Typhoeus as a chthonic ape and his three gorgon daughters to his left under signifying masks of Death, Madness, and Desire (I found Disease redundant and renamed her Desire as a better balance of forces, plus she is depicted as a three aspected goddess to the right as Lasciviousness, Wantonness, and Intemperance); really, what more could a boy ask for?
And here is the dynamism of our relationship with our shadow self and all that we fear and experience as disgust and revulsion, fear of nature and of our instinctive selves externalized and projected as fear of otherness, loss of self and of control, and degradation to an animal state which drive identity politics and social constructions of race, gender, and class or caste which includes nationalism and sectarian faith, especially when overwhelming and pervasive fear and real existential threats are weaponized by authority in service to power, as Malcolm X was falsified by Elijah Muhammed’s Black Muslim separatist nationalism as his herald, in reaction against the greater historical and systemic evils and multigenerational trauma and inequality of white supremacist terror and the legacies of slavery.
Processes of transformational change and social adaptation are chaotic and interdependent, and their causes are circular or more complex as we can see in the case of Malcolm X and liberation struggle, and in all such histories. This is one lesson we can learn from Malcolm X; there is no just authority. And those who claim to speak for you often do so as a primary strategy of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and in your subjugation to tyranny.
A second such lesson is that racism in general, and all divisions and social hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, compel submission to authority through the weaponization of fear as an arbiter of our most important relationship, that of the conscious and unconscious or shadow self, which can be read in how we feel and think about nature and those truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
We define ourselves through figures of otherness who represent unintegrated parts of ourselves and define the limits of the human; freaks, monsters, and all those beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and that which we claim as ours.
For this fear of nature as the origin of racism I have a simple solution; let us embrace our monstrosity, and perform violations of normality and transgressions of the Forbidden as sacred acts of Chaos in pursuit of truth.
The third gift of Malcolm X to our limitless future possibilities of becoming human is a life lived in revolutionary struggle and resistance against systems, structures, and institutions of unequal power as direct interrogation and engagement with the state as embodied violence, and with the consequences of the use of social force.
He died for our chance to learn these three things, how authority falsifies and subjugates us as a primary historical process, how racism and other inequalities of power are born of fear of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, and the dichotomous and bidirectional nature of violence and the dialectical processes of the use of social force in tyranny and terror and in resistance and revolution, and as a martyr and teacher of wisdom Malcolm X is a figure of liberation who belongs to all humankind.
How can we disambiguate the violence of the “slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains” as Trotsky phrased it, of tyranny and carceral states from revolutionary struggle and liberation, of action in accord with our duty of care for others and our interdependence and solidarity from the enforcement of virtue and imperialism?
As I wrote in my post of February 4 2022, A Stain of Cruelty: the Assassination of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi ; To paraphrase the line from Hamlet and Star Trek in season one, episode 13, The Conscience of the King; There’s a stain of cruelty on your armor, President Biden.
We have answered terror and death with terror and death, and this is both tragic and shameful. Force cannot answer force, nor heal the flaws of our humanity.
As written for CNN by Barbara Starr, Oren Liebermann, Jeremy Herb and Eyad Kourdi; “It was the biggest US raid in the country since the 2019 operation that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Biden spoke from the White House Thursday morning to announce that the operation had taken “a major terrorist leader off the battlefield.”
“Thanks to the bravery of our troops, this horrible terrorist leader is no more,” Biden said from the Roosevelt Room. “Knowing that terrorist had chosen to surround himself with families, including children, we made a choice to pursue a Special Forces raid at a much a greater risk to our own people rather than targeting him with an airstrike.”
Now and then Biden reminds us all that he was among the principal collaborators in Bush’s invasion of Iraq as imperial conquest and colonial plunder to seize the strategic resource of oil by which America maintains a global hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege, an addiction which will result in the extinction of humankind as a species, and in the authorization through the Patriot Act of a carceral state of brutal force and pervasive surveillance and thought control exceeded only by Xin Jinping’s holocaust of the Uighurs of Xinjiang, which has enabled the most massive theft of our freedoms in our history, including the McCarthy era, and the most bizarre and reprehensible regime of torture, most infamous in the crimes against humanity perpetrated at Guantanamo and other secret prisons for political enemies of the regime and its oligarchic, plutocratic, and corporate robber baron paymasters, including even the grisly hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials.
Once again our heroes and champions are proven to have feet of clay, and I mourn the failure of moral vision and addiction to power and the use of force and violence of President Biden, our government, and America as a guarantor of universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
On this day and all too often, the Promethean Fire of the Torch of Liberty which illuminates the gates of our nation in New York Harbor did not reach across the wild seas to foreign shores. This is a great tragedy, and it is a tragedy which is ours and for which we must answer.
The deaths of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi and his family as a consequence of America’s raid on his home, not an arrest for crimes provable in a court of law but political assassinations, are rightly being compared in the media to the assassination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by Trump. This situates Biden and Trump on an equal level of criminal amorality and state terror.
Before the stage of the world and history, it also generates moral equivalence between ISIS and America, as our enemies intend by their provocations as a strategy of delegitimation of a regime. I use this myself as a democracy activist, for the art of revolution is about claiming the moral high ground and the delegitimation of authority and seizing control of the narrative.
Sending armies and police to enforce virtue through violence and repression is not only evil, it is also stupid; for it plays into the hands of the enemy. As Shakespeare teaches us in Henry V; “When lenity and cruelty play for kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.”
There are still notable differences between Biden and Trump, and between the goals, values, and ideals of Democrats and Republicans, madness and treason among them. But today those differences became suddenly and horrifically more narrow, and I fear we will need more than the eye of a needle as a window to a better future.
As written in my post of October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: Parallel Lives and Reflections; The personal and historical forces which create tyrants and monsters among us have been a lifelong study of mine, aspects of a curiosity regarding the origins and nature of evil born of primary childhood traumas in the Bloody Thursday massacre ordered by Ronald Reagan against a student peace protest in Berkeley 1969 when I was nine and my near execution in Brazil at the age of fourteen defending street children from police bounty hunters, which echoes those of Maurice Blanchot in June 1944 by the Nazis and Dostoevsky’s in 1849 by Czarist police, informed by Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird and focused by the classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, both of which I read during high school. Thus I became fascinated by the intersections of literature, philosophy, history, and psychology, and chose the origins of evil as my lifelong field of study.
As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.
A full psychological and historical study of Trump and al-Baghdadi as figures of fascist terror and madness on a global political scale in the context of civilizational conflicts would require a book of Biblical proportions and thesis-level scholarship such as Waite’s brilliant work on Hitler. Here I note only some of the obvious alignments and congruences; both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women.
Of Trump we have a cornucopia of information; Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch and The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee are excellent resources, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator. Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremberg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and his puppetmaster Putin, his model Hitler, and his mirror image al-Baghdadi, as monsters and tyrants who reflect one another and as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty, the state as embodied psychopathy and violence, and government as performance art.
For their performances of leadership as clowns of terror and madness provide mirror opposite images of the reign of the Roman Emperor described with wit and guile by Antonin Artaud in his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, a figure who disrupted norms as an agent of change and chaos to transform an inert and ossified society, whereas Trump and al-Baghdadi have acted as partners in reaction to disrupt civilization itself and return us to a pre-democratic barbarian tyranny.
Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.
So I wrote on October 28 2019; and so I must write now of Biden’s secret face and heart of darkness, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, linked now for eternity as figures of terror, murderous retribution, and cruelty.
State terror and imperialism has met sectarian and patriarchal terror as tyranny and organizations of institutionalized violence and power; we can only hope now that they will recognize their twin image in the mirror of death which war and acts of force and violence confront us with, and walk away from the precipice which threatens to consume us all.
As Ken Kesey said in his historic speech to a peace protest against the war in Vietnam recorded in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; “The way to end war is just walk away and say fuck it. Just walk away and say fuck it.”
Every word of this remains true, in these and all cases of tyranny and the institutional terror of carceral states of force and control, of authorized identities and falsification by propaganda and rewritten histories, of imperial conquest and dominion and colonial exploitation and enslavement. It is also true now of Russia in the invasion of Ukraine.
As I wrote here of Trump we may also say of his master Putin; for Traitor Trump is but a negative space and shadow cast by his original type, and both are atavisms of fear and force, chasms of emptiness which nothing can fill, no amount of dominion and control of others, displays of wealth and power or vainglorious strutting, to which no sacrifices of things loved by others or the terror and pain of their victims can suffice, for such is the nature of psychopathy and of politics as a theatre of cruelty.
What does this mean?
For us in this moment and in the context of the question of violence and the social use of force, it means that in the unequal balance of power between Russia and Ukraine, wherein real people are dying because someone has the power to steal what they have, a predator for whom nothing is real or has meaning but force and power, we must find answer to the declaration of Ayn Rand’s monstrous protagonist Howard Roark in The Fountainhead as he commits rape; “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
Who will stop Putin’s conquest of Ukraine?
If they come for one of us, let them be met with all of us; not divided by hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, nor defeated by learned helplessness and terror, but united in solidarity and refusal to submit as one unconquerable and united humankind.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. There is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
For me, this is simple; the nation invading another is in the wrong. This is no different from chancing to discover a policeman kneeling on someone’s neck, in which case our duty of care for others requires us to save the life of the person who is being murdered right in front of us, regardless of any irrelevant details like which of them has the badge and the gun, the authority and the power, by any means necessary.
Law serves power, and there is no just authority.
Even if neither nation is a democracy, and victims of unequal power have no inherent moral burden of virtue as Shaw teaches us with the figure of Arthur Doolittle in My Fair Lady, one of them stealing the lives and freedom of the other as the right of sovereignty, self-determination, autonomy, and independence cannot be just, and must be opposed.
By any means necessary.
While the political origins of conflict are often ambiguous, its consequences for the people in the path of a conquest are not. As my long term goals remain a united humankind and a stateless society which has abandoned the social use of force and control and with it all laws, authorized identities, and the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue, and the emergence of a free society of equals from divisions of exclusionary otherness, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, I stand with Ukraine and with any liberation movement of sovereignty and independence anywhere, and with the people of Russia against the oligarchy and Putin and for all democracy movements against tyranny.
Let us stand in solidarity as a band of brothers, wherever men hunger to be free.
Our duty of care for others sometimes requires us to 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. I am only one man, and not extraordinary, with nothing but my witness of history and my vision of our future possibilities of becoming human to hurl against the chasms of darkness and the terror of our nothingness in the face of overwhelming force and amoral imperial and carceral states.
But 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.”
Here I would declare Sic Semper Tyrannis, but this is a phrase from the shadows and legacies of our history from which we must emerge, and includes the assassinations of Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln, whose killers I despise and would not align myself with.
I do not trust certainties or those who act in their name, Gott Mitt Uns bearing a history of atrocities and terror which has no equals, and includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Year’s War, and the Holocaust. As Voltaire wrote in his 1765 essay Questions sur les miracles; “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
Instead I will say with the magnificent Lt. Aldo Raine in Inglorious Basterds, and I hope in a way which preserves and reflects the moral ambiguity, contingency, and relativity of the original in the film; “Now that I can’t abide. How ’bout you, can you abide it?”
Here are the references from my essay; first among them my theme song for Last Stands, which I posted on August 24 as I joined the defense of Afghanistan after its fall, and post now as I prepare to join the defense of Ukraine with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade:
Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
Insecure, weak Putin craves the popular vote, but uses violence to guarantee it | Observer editorial
The New Annotated Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Leslie S. Klinger (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Guillermo del Toro (Introduction), Anne K. Mellor (Afterword)
The Tempest, Folger Shakespeare Library, by William Shakespeare, Paul Werstine (Editor), David Lindley (Editor), Israel Gollancz (Preface & Glossary), Barbara A. Mowat (Editor)
Herein I write a manifesto of action as Socratic dialog and Swiftian satire, which as stated in the title questions “the Origins of Evil and the Social Use of Force, and of the State as Embodied Psychopathy and Violence”.
As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty declares, my intent is “to incite, provoke, and disturb.”
Consider also that I claim the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen as Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and that I do these things in performance as what Foucault called a truth teller, in the pursuit of truth as a sacred calling.
In this essay I interrogate a set of interdependent problems which I believe are central to the project of becoming human we all share, and the consequences of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force posed to us by the situation we face in this moment, and here I use the term moment in the ways that Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou did, wherein a monstrous tyrant threatens nuclear war and the extermination of all humankind on a whim of infantile tantrum, and we must choose one or the other.
It is a dilemma which like all use of social force makes us complicit in evil, a primary strategy of fascism in our subjugation, and which reproduces the conditions from which states arise as embodied psychopathy and violence, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Badiou claims events are fundamentally indeterminate and structured by the dialectics of possibility and impossibility, maybe-maybe not as my mother used to say to students who asked her for positional declarations, judgements, authorized versions, singing the words and bouncing her hands from side to side.
For Derrida, as my friend Rene Troy Tun has described, “the event in its absolute singularity is thus resistant to cognitive description, critical objectification, interpretive reduction, and theoretical elaboration.”
Here with this primary existential question of human being, meaning, and value I struggle to find synthesis; like the performance of our identities, this process need not be determinative or prescriptive, but a space of free creative play.
If we have no answers, we must learn to ask better questions.
In this tilting at windmills I use Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars as my model, a magisterial work which comes in male and female versions and whose meaning changes with a difference of seventeen lines between them.
How if Vladimir Putin Should Be Assassinated? Do we save one life, that of a mad tyrant who will destroy us, and damn the world?
16 марта 2024 г. Массовый глобальный протест разоблачает императора, у которого нет легитимности: сфальсифицированные выборы Путина
Героическая волна массовых протестов прокатилась по миру в ответ на фальсифицированные выборы Путина, несмотря на убийства и пытки, используемые режимом для жестоких подавлений инакомыслия, в то время как движения за мир и демократию в России объединяются в один голос, чтобы призвать императора, который не имеет легитимности.
Всегда обращайте внимание на человека за кулисами. Как говорит Дороти Озу; «Ты просто старый обманщик!»
В России и во всем мире давайте исполним четыре основные обязанности гражданина; Полномочия по вопросам, полномочия по разоблачению, полномочия по имитации и полномочия по оспариванию. Таковы этапы революционной борьбы за делегитимацию несправедливой власти.
Закон служит власти, порядок присваивает, и справедливой власти не существует.
Что делать, как просили Толстой и Ленин с такими разными последствиями? Здесь я излагаю свои мысли, когда я прорабатывал последствия социального применения силы в контексте российской тирании и вторжения на Украину, прежде чем принять решение начать одновременные действия, чтобы принести расплату Путину и его режиму и присоединиться к сражайтесь в Мариуполе за освобождение Черного моря и портов Украины, в моем посте от 6 марта 2022 г. Что, если Владимира Путина следует убить? Исследование истоков зла и социального использования силы, а также государства как воплощения психопатии и насилия; В третьем романе «Хроник Томаса Ковенанта» Стивена Р. Дональдсона «Сила, которая сохраняет» есть строка, в которой говорится о герое, который отказывается быть вызванным на помощь, потому что в его другом мире, нашем, ребенка укусил змея и ее надо спасать; «Могу ли я проклясть мир, чтобы спасти жизнь одного ребенка? Я не уверен, что смогу сделать такой выбор».
Сегодня мы рассматриваем противоположное; Я не уверен, что смог бы принять решение позволить миру сгореть и вызвать вымирание человечества, чтобы спасти жизнь одного человека, Владимира Путина, чье безумное имперское завоевание Украины теперь угрожает будущему всех нас.
Жизнь одного военного преступника и неисчислимые ужасы, которые он принесет; Я не мог выбрать спасение монстра, который может уничтожить нас всех, вместо спасения человечества и нашего мира.
Насилие работорговца нельзя сравнивать с насилием, которое использует раб, чтобы разорвать свои цепи, как учит нас Троцкий в книге «Их мораль и наша».
Сенатор, с которым я обычно не согласен, недавно сделал вполне разумное предложение, за что его осудили в средствах массовой информации как друзья, так и враги, даже АОК, за которого я уже высказался на следующих президентских выборах, независимо от того, будет ли это или нет она в бюллетенях для голосования.
Мне трудно понять, почему это предложение не было воспринято с большим энтузиазмом обеих партий, учитывая нашу историю. В конце концов, убийства и свержение неудобных правительств — это то, чем мы занимаемся постоянно. Мы даже создаем или извлекаем выгоду из непростительных справедливых причин войны, таких как бомбардировка Россией ядерного объекта на этой неделе, чтобы начать собственные имперские завоевания; террористическая атака на башни-близнецы послужила предлогом для захвата героиновых полей Афганистана и нефтяных месторождений Ирака, жертвоприношения нашим общим ритуалам общественного горя и жажды мести, а также вымыслы Херста о затоплении военного корабля США «Мэн» в Гаване в 1898 году. Харбор подарил нам Испано-американскую войну, Кубу, Филиппины, Гуам, Пуэрто-Рико, Гавайские острова, которые мы украли просто потому, что могли, а затем и президентство героя войны Тедди Рузвельта.
Пойти к нам? Обычно мы с большой жадностью пользуемся такими шансами.
Возможно, мы, люди, взрослеем и отказываемся от применения силы и насилия. Вопрос в том, сможем ли мы выжить и достичь стадии конца детства; и это неотъемлемая дилемма силы и власти, поскольку такие силы дихотомичны, двунаправлены и имеют непредвиденные последствия.
Как написано Джоан Э. Греве и Вивиан Хо в The Guardian; «Линдси Грэм вызвала широкое осуждение после того, как сенатор от Южной Каролины предложил убить Владимира Путина, чтобы положить конец вторжению России в Украину.
Впервые Грэм высказал это предложение во время выступления на шоу ведущего Fox News Шона Хэннити в четверг вечером, а затем повторил эту идею в твите, который быстро стал вирусным.
«Есть ли Брут в России? Есть ли в российской армии более успешный полковник Штауффенберг? Единственный способ положить этому конец — это чтобы кто-нибудь в России устранил этого парня», — написал Грэм в Твиттере. «Вы окажете своей стране – и миру – огромную услугу».
Брут относится к одному из убийц римского императора Юлия Цезаря, а Штауффенберг был офицером немецкой армии, казненным за попытку убить Адольфа Гитлера в 1944 году.
Грэм добавил в отдельном твите: «Единственные люди, которые могут это исправить, — это русские люди. Легко сказать, трудно сделать. Если вы не хотите прожить во тьме всю оставшуюся жизнь, быть изолированным от остального мира в условиях крайней нищеты и жить во тьме, вам нужно взять на себя ответственность».
Несмотря на немедленную критику комментариев Грэма со стороны левых и правых в США, он еще раз усилил эту идею в пятничном утреннем интервью Fox & Friends. «Я надеюсь, что кто-то в России поймет, что он разрушает Россию, и вам нужно уничтожить этого парня любыми возможными способами», — сказал Грэм.
Американские законодатели от обеих партий отреагировали на комментарии Грэма шоком, тревогой и возмущением, указав на опасность требования убийства лидера, войска которого в настоящее время занимаются обстрелами атомных электростанций.
«Мне бы очень хотелось, чтобы наши члены Конгресса охладили это и урегулировали свои высказывания, поскольку администрация работает над тем, чтобы избежать [третьей мировой войны]», — написала в Твиттере прогрессивная конгрессменка Ильхан Омар.
Члены Конгресса-республиканцы были не менее критичны, поскольку сенатор Тед Круз высмеял предложение Грэма как «исключительно плохую идею». «Используйте масштабные экономические санкции; БОЙКОТ российской нефти [и] газа; и предоставить военную помощь, чтобы украинцы могли защитить себя», — сказал Круз. «Но мы не должны призывать к убийству глав государств».
Даже Марджори Тейлор Грин – конгрессмен-экстремистка, которая вызвала возмущение, среди прочего, сравнив ограничения, связанные с коронавирусом, с обращением с евреями во время Холокоста – присоединилась справа с критикой Грэма.
«Хотя мы все молимся за мир [и] за народ Украины, это безответственно, опасно [и] безумно. Нам нужны лидеры со спокойным умом и твердой мудростью», — написал Грин в Twitter. «Не кровожадные воинственные политики, пытающиеся жестко писать в Твиттере, требуя убийств. Американцы не хотят войны».
Пресс-секретарь Белого дома Джен Псаки заявила: «Мы не выступаем за убийство лидера иностранного государства или смену режима. Это не политика Соединенных Штатов».
Действительно? Когда это не было именно нашей национальной политикой? Президент Байден приказал убить Абу Ибрагима аль-Хашими аль-Курайши, человека в Сирии, которого наше государство без каких-либо доказательств объявило новым лидером ИГИЛ, который, если обвинение было правдой, представлял опасность только для наших общих врагов, Аль-Каиды и режим Асада, массово убивающий всю его семью просто для того, чтобы отвлечь внимание от своих многочисленных неудач, точно так же, как Трамп сделал годом ранее со своим предполагаемым предшественником Абу Бакром аль-Багдади.
Разве Америка не убила Сальвадора Альенде и не пыталась бесчисленное количество раз убить Фиделя Кастро, обоих героев, столь же великих, как любой американский президент?
Разве мы не убивали в огромных и ужасающих количествах, чтобы завоевать свободу от Британской империи в Войне за независимость, от рабства во время Гражданской войны и от фашизма во Второй мировой войне?
Мы — нация, основанная на смерти и терроре, благодаря словам, с которыми Джордж Вашингтон послал двенадцать тысяч солдат, чтобы подавить восстание виски 1792 года и продемонстрировать силу нового федерального правительства по обеспечению соблюдения налогов; «Правительство — это не разум. Это не красноречие. Правительство — это сила; как огонь, это опасный слуга и пугливый господин».
Не говорите мне о моральном превосходстве Америки.
О мои братья, сестры и другие, кто идет со мной в этот огненный век, когда на чаше весов висят свобода и тирания и, возможно, выживание или вымирание человечества, я благодарю вас за время, которое мы провели здесь в беседе, которая Я лелею как убежище от мира, как театр, в котором я могу обработать свои реакции на сломанность мира и недостатки нашей человечности, и как кузницу действия в исполнении выбранных мной ролей говорящего правду. создатель зла для тиранов и становящийся опорой перемен.
Наша вселенная Хаоса, иррационального и неконтролируемого, и обстоятельств, выходящих за рамки
наша воля может навлечь на нас катастрофу и разрушительные для жизни события в любой момент, по любым причинам или вообще без них, и если случайно это последнее, что у меня есть возможность написать, я хочу, чтобы вы и все, кто был частью моей всю жизнь знать, что ты помог мне найти баланс между ужасом нашего небытия в радости нашей свободы и красоте мира, исцелении искупительной силой любви и надеждой на наши будущие возможности стать людьми в поэтическом видении и переосмысление и трансформация человечества.
Если бы вы случайно знали, что время, проведенное здесь, чтобы делать и заниматься тем, что придает смысл и ценность нашей жизни, может исчисляться не тысячелетиями, а часами и днями, что бы вы делали и кем были? Делайте и будьте этим сейчас и никогда не останавливайтесь; поскольку, как учит нас Курт Воннегут в «Матери Ночи», мы становимся теми, кем притворяемся. Здесь важно то, что наши представления о самих себе выбираются и принадлежат нам, и что мы владеем историями, в которых живем.
Самый важный вопрос, который следует задать в истории: чья это история?
Всегда остается борьба между масками, которые другие создают для нас, и теми, которые мы делаем для себя. Это первая революция, в которой мы все должны бороться; борьба за право собственности на себя.
Мы вот-вот пройдем через событие Врат Расёмон, перелом, релятивизацию, раздвоение временных линий и распространение альтернативных вариантов будущего и реальностей, и все ставки на то, что ждет нас на другой стороне, сделаны.
И все это потому, что безумный тиран съеживается и бушует в своих лабиринтах тьмы, фрагментированный и раздираемый демонами, населяющими его, в то время как его мечты об империи и господстве рушатся и в соответствии с Третьим законом Ньютона создают силы собственного разрушения. , как и в случае с его предшественником Адольфом Гитлером в конце, с одним важным отличием; под его пальцем лежит кнопка, запускающая ядерное уничтожение, и она зовет его шепотом; «Освободи меня, и я сделаю тебя могущественным».
Итак, как сказал Альфред Дулиттл Хиггинсу в «Моей прекрасной леди»: «Я вам это говорю; и я оставляю это тебе»; мы спасем одну жизнь и проклянем мир?
Как я писал в своем посте от 22 февраля 2022 года, в годовщину мученической кончины Малкольма Икса; Наша история формирует нас как повествования, в которых мы играем свои роли; и мы также изменяем и захватываем право собственности на нашу историю и наши истории по мере того, как мы их исполняем и разыгрываем.
Это возвращает нас к вопросам неравной власти, идентичности и социального использования силы и насилия, вопросам, которые жизнь и творчество Малкольма Икс сосредотачивают и придают им ужасный и чудесный фокус.
Его принцип действия «Любыми необходимыми средствами» подобен загадке, произнесенной мастером дзэн, для которой не существует единого толкования и на которую не могут дать ответ никакие слова, а только дела. Это принцип, который помог нам освободиться от истории и который, в конце концов, отразился на нем и убил его.
Опасная идея, поскольку применение силы подчиняется третьему закону Ньютона и всегда действует в обоих направлениях, действия и противодействия, непредсказуемо и скользко в руках. Однако идея должна быть опасной, если она хочет быть полезной в борьбе за освобождение.
Насилие, используемое рабовладельцем, нельзя сравнивать с насилием, которое использует раб, чтобы разорвать свои цепи, как перефразировал Троцкий в книге «Их мораль и наша», которая является продолжением ницшеанской дихотомии морали господина и раба. У этого изречения есть и обратная сторона; государство не имеет законных полномочий применять смерть, насилие, силу или контроль для подавления инакомыслия, кражи гражданства или нарушений наших универсальных прав человека или установления личности. Это привело к тому, что Сталин убил Троцкого, поскольку он справедливо называл тиранию и террор тиранией и террором, независимо от того, как называют себя те, кто хотел нас поработить.
Революционная борьба, протестные движения и освободительные войны используют силу и насилие для построения общества, свободного от неравенства, когда нет других средств, из-за навязанных условий революционной борьбы, когда тирания и террор власти, государственная сила и контроль, а элитные гегемоны богатства, власти и привилегий отвечают на инакомыслие репрессиями, потому что они лишены легитимности и имеют только страх удерживать рабов на их работе. Те, кто хотел бы поработить нас, отказываются вести переговоры, потому что считают людьми только себя, и без дебатов нам остается только меч.
Любой, кто стоит между тиранией и государственным террором завоеваний, порабощения и смерти, а также жизнями невинных людей, является героями и защитниками нашей человечности. Детали не имеют значения.
Как такие ужасные вещи возникают и захватывают нас, приспосабливая нас к их использованию?
Как я писал в своем посте от 24 октября 2021 г. «Принимая наше чудовище: Иеросгам во Франкенштейне и Грозовом перевале»; Наши монстры, мы сами; гениальность, безумие, вдохновение, стремление стать богами; кто из нас не жаждал украсть божественный огонь, заглянуть за пределы самих себя, т.
o бросать вызов всем ограничениям и законам? Быть хотя бы на мгновение непобежденным Виктором Франкенштейном?
Однако, как Просперо сказал о Калибане, мы также должны сказать и о чудовище Франкенштейна; «Эту вещь тьмы я признаю своей».
Как я уже писал о пересказе Вандером Меером Франкенштейна в романе «Борн»; В великолепном романе Мэри Шелли речь шла также об отказе от ребенка, который уже не идеален, а также о ряде других тем, включая истоки насилия.
Основная тема романа «Франкенштейн» — чудовищность Бога, который, как и Виктор, создает, а затем бросает своего ребенка, когда он несовершенен и больше не является его отражением, когда мы становимся своими собственными свободными и независимыми существами. Да, Виктор хочет стать богом, поэтому эта история находит отклик у всех и является аллегорией неспособности науки реализовать идеалистические взгляды на человечество, причем роман является одновременно кодификацией и критикой романтического идеализма.
Но в своем стремлении стать богом Виктор также желает, чтобы ему поклонялись и ему подчинялись; он хочет освободиться от порабощения властью, но не освободить других. Вместо того, чтобы изменить природу власти, силы и контроля, свергнув со своего трона бога-тирана, который привязал нас к своим законам, а затем покинул нас посредством отмены Закона и социального использования силы, а также централизации власти и власть для элиты, как это сделал бы настоящий революционер, трагический недостаток гордости Виктора вынуждает его стать следующим тираном и разыграть роль своего бывшего врага.
Это цикл заместительной тирании, который, как указал Владимир Набоков в своем романе «Лолита», блестящей критике краха идеализма, приведшего к казни его отца во время русской революции как аристократа, был повторен во всем мире в революциях, которые стали тирании, особенно в навязанных условиях антиколониальной борьбы.
В сериале «Волшебники» есть фраза, произнесенная злодеем из сериала «Волшебники», пережившим жестокое обращение в детстве и тираном, известным как Зверь за свои ужасные преступления, когда-то бессильным и напуганным Мартином Чатвином, а теперь, как Сатурн, чудовищным богом-людоедом; «Знаешь, когда я был мальчиком, мужчина, который должен был заботиться обо мне, склонял меня над своим столом и держал меня снова и снова каждый раз, когда я была с ним наедине. Это помогает мне понять истину. Ты сильный или ты слабый. «
Вот подлинная ложь тирана и фашиста в апологетике и самооправдании власти; ложь о том, что только сила имеет смысл, что нет добра и зла. То, как мы используем власть, имеет такое же значение, как и то, кто ею владеет. Страх и сила — основные, но не единственные средства человеческого обмена; любовь, членство и принадлежность не менее важны. Великий вопрос, на который пытается ответить демократия, заключается в том, как сбалансировать права и потребности людей, чтобы никто не мог ущемлять права других.
Эта линия прекрасно отражает внутренние противоречия вагнеровского кольца страха, власти и силы как источника зла; поскольку использование социальной силы подрывает собственные ценности. Тем не менее, навязанные условия революционной борьбы часто требуют насилия, и пока боги закона и порядка не будут свергнуты со своих тронов, я должен согласиться со знаменитым изречением Сартра в его пьесе 1948 года «Грязные руки», процитированным Францем Фаноном в его речи 1960 года. «Почему мы используем насилие»; Малкольм Икс сделал его бессмертным; «любыми средствами».
Как написано Уолтером Родни в книге «Приземление с моими братьями»; «Нам сказали, что насилие само по себе является злом и что, какова бы ни была причина, оно морально неоправданно. По каким нормам морали насилие, применяемое рабом, чтобы разорвать свои цепи, может считаться таким же, как насилие рабовладельца? По каким стандартам мы можем приравнять насилие чернокожих, которых угнетали, подавляли, подавляли и репрессировали на протяжении четырех столетий, к насилию белых фашистов? Насилие, направленное на восстановление человеческого достоинства и равенства, не может оцениваться теми же мерками, что и насилие, направленное на поддержание дискриминации и угнетения».
А вот отрывок, на который он ссылается из книги Льва Троцкого в книге «Их мораль и наша: Классовые основы моральной практики»; «Рабовладелец, который хитростью и насилием заковывает раба в цепи, и раб, который хитростью или насилием разрывает цепи, — пусть не говорят нам презренные евнухи, что они равны перед судом нравственности!»
Мне не нужно ничего, что ограничивает нашу способность противостоять злу; границы Запретного, тирания нормальности и представления других людей о добродетели или пределы нашей человечности.
И все же, размышляя, я думаю о тех великих деятелях, которые были одновременно героями освобождения и злодеями тирании; Наполеон, Вашингтон, Сталин, Мао — этот список представляет собой почти бесконечный перечень горестей и провалов видения, в которых дивные новые миры превратились в ад и государства-тюрьмы. В качестве доказательства я привожу Французскую и Американскую революции и их имперскую
Государства-преемники, Советский Союз и Коммунистическая партия Китая, и, прежде всего, государство Израиль, мечта об убежище, выкованная в терроре Холокоста, жертвы которого извлекли неправильные уроки из нацистов и взяли на себя свою роль в оккупации Израиля. Палестина. Опасности идеализма, которым нас учили Владимир Набоков в «Лолите» и его модель Томас Манн в «Смерти в Венеции», вполне реальны; но так же опасны подчинение власти и соучастие в молчании перед лицом зла.
Как революция захватит власть, не превратившись при этом в тиранию? Как нам собрать силу и волю, чтобы противостоять несправедливой власти, не навязывая в свою очередь другим свои представления о добре?
Это дилемма власти; что мы должны применить силу, чтобы отобрать его у наших угнетателей, и что мы должны отказаться от него, когда оно принадлежит нам, и отказаться подчинять своих собратьев нашей воле.
Мы должны отказаться подчиняться власти, если хотим захватить нашу свободу; и мы должны отказаться подчинять других, чтобы они могли сделать то же самое, если мы хотим не стать монстрами, на которых охотимся.
Мне нравится и сопереживает персонаж Виктора в аллегории происхождения зла Мэри Шелли, и я использовал варианты этого имени в качестве псевдонимов, потому что он является фигурой мятежного ангела Мильтона, но я также восхищаюсь этим монстром во всем его великолепии, фигура Тени по мотивам Калибана из «Бури». История об их отношениях как родителя и брошенного и поврежденного ребенка, о взаимодействии этих личностей в развитии психики и процессах становления человека, а также о политических последствиях инаковости и чудовищности.
Франкенштейн обращается к темам противостояния науки и природы, разума и страсти, и обе эти темы находятся в рамках прометеева восстания против Бога, власти и универсального закона как формы идеализма; это с точки зрения создателя монстра.
С точки зрения монстра роман изображает обезображивание души из-за того, что ее бросил родитель, который также действует как фигура бога-творца и Власти, известная как проблема Deus Absconditus, которая относится к богу, который привязал нас к его презренные законы, а затем сбежал, прежде чем его поймали, и который подталкивает ребенка к достижениям и превосходству как его доверенное лицо владычества и оправдания перед миром, вместо того, чтобы наделять ребенка способностью самостоятельно открывать и следовать уникальному блаженству и индивидуальности – что за Греки называли Арете или Добродетель, но также обозначали превосходство, как в случае с высшим хищником и идеалом патриархальной мужественности Ахиллесом в «Илиаде», одним из источников Мэри Шелли – на выбранной арене, но который, как Альберих в «Кольце Вагнера», должен отказаться от любви, чтобы завоевать превосходство и власть. делая любую победу бессмысленной и пустой, дегуманизируя ребенка и формируя сосуд ярости и мести, тирана, выкованного в жестокой борьбе за освобождение себя от порабощения, с железной самодисциплиной и волей, чтобы в свою очередь подчинять других, страшен и жалок и с величием измученного непокорного зверя, заключенного в ту же плоть, что и невинный, которого нужно любить и который не может понять, почему он кажется другим чудовищным. Речь идет о рождении монстров и хаотической пластичности идентичностей и отношений.
Как написано Октавом Мирбо в «Саду пыток»; «Монстры, монстры! Но монстров нет! То, что вы называете монстрами, — это высшие формы или формы, находящиеся за пределами вашего понимания. Разве боги не монстры? Разве гениальный человек не является чудовищем, подобным тигру или пауку, как и все индивидуумы, живущие вне социальной лжи, в ослепительном и божественном бессмертии вещей? Да ведь я тоже — чудовище!»
История, которая одновременно является греческой трагедией и фрейдистским исследованием процессов и отношений между Ид, Эго и Супер-Эго, с третьей параллельной сюжетной линией, связанной с романтическим переосмыслением библейского Бытия, таким как история Блейка, и одновременно является апофеозом романтического идеализма. и его первая критика, экзегеза и классический миф, диалектика ответственности и рассуждения о категориях бытия Аристотеля, критика естественного человека Руссо и Сверхчеловека Ницше, которую она также вдохновила в рекурсивной петле влияния через моря времени. Ее автором был пифийский провидец, чье видение простиралось на столетия вперед и чья огромная ученость позволила переосмыслить некоторые из величайших произведений нашей исторической цивилизации.
Влияние Мэри Шелли отражается во времени, умножается и меняет контексты ее полиморфных значений. Нельзя думать о Грегоре Замсе Кафки, не думая о его оригинале, двуаспектном ребенке-монстре, созданном для того, чтобы связать нашу природу с разумом, нельзя читать ее источники и ссылки в пророчествах Уильяма Блейка и «Потерянного рая» Мильтона, не переоценивая их с точки зрения Роман Мэри Шелли; ее работа находит отклик в прошлом и будущем, а что касается, то меняется.
Кто может читать произведения Эмили Бронте, не осознавая ее великого «нет»?
изменился ли «Грозовой перевал» вместе с нашим осознанием того, что его автор считала себя Виктором Франкенштейном и титаном Прометеем, изгнанным с небес, подобно мятежному ангелу Мильтона? Что Хитклиф — ее монстр, демон, с которым нужно объединиться в возвышенном ницшеанском восторге преобразующего возрождения? И не меняет ли это прочтение ее источника Франкенштейна?
Вложенный набор тем и контекстов-пазлов, множество повествовательных нитей, которые создают парадоксы значений, смену ролей и инверсию идентичностей, а также сомнение в миссии цивилизации и морали прогресса; Мэри Шелли создала современный мир своей великой книгой «Франкенштейн».
Это современность, которая может раскрыть безграничные возможности стать человеком, или, как «Ящик Пандоры» и «Конфигурация плача» производителя игрушек ЛеМаршана в мифах Клайва Баркера «Восставший из ада», высвободить ужасы, превосходящие наше воображение, как Путин сейчас угрожает сделать с ядерной войной и уничтожением.
Когда Путин, как доктор Стрейнджлав, загипнотизированный звуком сирены своих ракет и их обещанием абсолютной власти, силы тотального разрушения и конца человечества, повторяет ритуальное заклинание Оппенгеймера; «Вот! Я стал Смертью, разрушителем миров!», вопрос, стоящий перед нами, меняется.
Ядерное уничтожение шепчет из тьмы: освободи меня, и я сделаю тебя могущественным. Но это ложь, ибо такая сила поглотит и нас и украдет наши души.
Великий вопрос, на который мы теперь должны найти ответ, заключается уже не в том, когда хорошо быть плохим, а в том, какой частью нашей человечности мы готовы пожертвовать ради выживания как вида.
Как я писал в своем посте от 5 февраля 2020 года, демократия в Америке падает: оправдание предателя Трампа; В конце концов я вынужден, наконец, пересмотреть позицию великого, ошибочного кумира моей юности Малкольма Икса; любыми необходимыми способами.
Любыми необходимыми средствами; это ужасный, ужасный принцип действия, чреватый бесконечными возможностями бесчеловечности и злонамеренной силы, но если мы вынуждены сопротивляться выживанию, как Камю, писавший для тех, кто должен выбраться из руин потерянного мира, позиции и столкнуться с еще одним Последним противостоянием, без надежды на победу или даже на выживание, как еще мы можем бороться с нашей дегуманизацией?
Мы никогда не должны отказываться от надежды, поскольку наше сопротивление может победить что угодно, кроме потери веры в себя и друг друга. Пока кто-то из нас помнит мечту о свободе, мы еще можем искупить нашу человечность.
Мой ответ республиканцам на подрыв демократии остается НЕТ!
Однако помимо этого мы должны бороться не только с фашизмом, но также за демократию и универсальные права человека. Поскольку мы сопротивляемся фашизму, чтобы защитить равенство и свободу как наши общие права человека, мы должны использовать силу и насилие против социальных и институциональных систем, структур и идеологий, а не против людей, поскольку мы можем искать истину вместе ненасильственно с теми, с кем мы не согласны, поскольку выдающаяся добродетель демократии и гуманизма, даже несмотря на то, что наши враги — братья-воины.
Сопротивление злу означает сопротивление злу других против нашей универсальной человечности, но это также означает сопротивление соблазну зла и силы, а также нашему собственному использованию силы для принуждения других.
Власть – это злой импульс, порождающий монстров.
Так часто в истории те, кто совершает настоящие злодеяния, полностью убеждены в справедливости своего дела, Gott Mitt Uns, информированы и мотивированы рассказами о жертвенности и отказались от самоанализа, который является основой свободного общества равных. Этому мы тоже должны противостоять.
Именно поэтому революции после захвата власти и свержения тирании сами могут стать тираниями, и именно поэтому я предпочитаю позволять другим выходить из-под контроля и быть неуправляемыми перед призраком авторитарного социального контроля.
Давайте не будем посылать армии, чтобы насаждать добродетель.
И всегда помните предупреждение Ницше в книге «По ту сторону добра и зла»; «Тот, кто сражается с монстрами, должен быть осторожен, чтобы не стать монстром. И если ты долго будешь смотреть в бездну, бездна посмотрит обратно на тебя».
Дальнейшее освещение можно найти в шедевре Энтони Берджесса «Наполеоновская симфония», трагедии о Наполеоне и «Героической» Бетховена, а также в романе, открытие которого стало определяющим моментом моего четырнадцатого года и с тех пор остается со мной, несмотря на мое подростковое обожание Наполеона как героя. революции и освобождения, универсальный гений и идеал человеческого существа.
Здесь лежит основа борьбы между тиранией и сопротивлением в навязанных условиях системного неравного могущества в использовании социальной силы и насилия, а также между захватом власти как владения идентичностью и фальсификацией санкционированных идентичностей в борьбе между историями, о которых мы рассказываем. мы сами и те, кто рассказал о нас другим; история, память, личность.
Прочтите ее так же, как я под репродукцией «Бетховенского фриза» Климта, изображающего пантеон Теней с чудесным образом восставшего Титана Тифо.
Евс в образе хтонической обезьяны и его три дочери-горгоны слева от него под масками Смерти, Безумия и Желания (я счёл Болезнь лишней и переименовал её в Желание как лучший баланс сил, к тому же она изображена как трёхликая богиня по отношению к справедливо как распутство, распутство и невоздержанность); действительно, чего еще может желать мальчик?
И вот динамизм наших отношений с нашим теневым «я» и всем, чего мы боимся и переживаем как отвращение и отвращение, страх перед природой и нашим инстинктивным «я», воплощенным вовне и проецируемым как страх инаковости, потери себя и контроля, а также деградации в животное состояние, которое управляет политикой идентичности и социальными конструкциями расы, пола, класса или касты, которое включает национализм и сектантскую веру, особенно когда подавляющий и всепроникающий страх и реальные экзистенциальные угрозы используются властью в качестве оружия на службе власти, как был фальсифицирован Малкольм Икс Черным мусульманским сепаратистским национализмом Элайджи Мухаммеда в качестве его глашатая, в ответ на большее историческое и системное зло, а также на травмы многих поколений и неравенство террора сторонников превосходства белой расы и наследия рабства.
Процессы трансформационных изменений и социальной адаптации хаотичны и взаимозависимы, а их причины носят циклический характер или более сложны, как мы можем видеть в случае с Малкольмом Иксом и освободительной борьбой, а также во всех подобных историях. Это один урок, который мы можем извлечь из Малкольма Икса; нет справедливой власти. И те, кто утверждает, что говорит от вашего имени, часто делают это в качестве основной стратегии фашизма крови, веры и почвы и вашего подчинения тирании.
Второй такой урок заключается в том, что расизм в целом, а также все разделения и социальные иерархии членства в элите и исключительной инаковости вынуждают подчиняться власти посредством превращения страха в оружие в качестве арбитра наших самых важных отношений, отношений сознательного и бессознательного или теневого «я». , которую можно прочитать в том, как мы чувствуем и думаем о природе и тех истинах, которые имманентны природе и записаны в нашей плоти.
Мы определяем себя через фигуры инаковости, которые представляют собой неинтегрированные части нас самих и определяют границы человеческого существования; уроды, монстры и все те, кто находится за пределами Запретного и того, что мы считаем своим.
Для этого страха перед природой как источника расизма у меня есть простое решение; давайте примем наше чудовище и будем совершать нарушения нормальности и запретного как священные акты Хаоса в поисках истины.
Третий дар Малкольма Икса нашим безграничным будущим возможностям стать человеком — это жизнь, прожитая в революционной борьбе и сопротивлении системам, структурам и институтам неравной власти, как прямой допрос и взаимодействие с государством как воплощенное насилие, и с последствиями использование социальной силы.
Он умер за наш шанс узнать эти три вещи: как власть фальсифицирует и подчиняет нас как первичный исторический процесс, как расизм и другие виды неравенства власти рождаются из страха перед дикостью природы и дикостью самих себя, а также из-за дихотомического и двунаправленного природа насилия и диалектические процессы использования социальной силы в тирании и терроре, в сопротивлении и революции, а как мученик и учитель мудрости Малкольм Икс является фигурой освобождения, принадлежащей всему человечеству.
Как мы можем устранить двусмысленность насилия «рабовладельца, который хитростью и насилием заковывает раба в цепи, и раба, который хитростью или насилием разрывает цепи», как это выразил Троцкий, тирании и тюремных государств из революционной борьбы и освобождения? , действий в соответствии с нашим долгом заботиться о других, а также с нашей взаимозависимостью и солидарностью от насаждения добродетели и империализма?
Как я писал в своем посте от 4 февраля 2022 года «Пятно жестокости: убийство Абу Ибрагима аль-Хашими аль-Курайши»; Перефразируя фразу из «Гамлета» и «Звездного пути» в первом сезоне, 13-й серии «Совесть короля»; На ваших доспехах пятно жестокости, президент Байден.
На террор и смерть мы ответили террором и смертью, и это одновременно трагично и постыдно. Сила не может ответить на силу или исцелить недостатки нашей человечности.
Как написано для CNN Барбарой Старр, Ореном Либерманном, Джереми Хербом и Эйядом Курди; «Это был самый крупный рейд США в стране со времен операции 2019 года, в результате которой был убит лидер ИГИЛ Абу Бакр аль-Багдади.
Байден выступил из Белого дома в четверг утром, чтобы объявить, что в результате операции «крупный лидер террористов покинул поле боя».
«Благодаря храбрости наших войск этого ужасного лидера террористов больше нет», — сказал Байден из комнаты Рузвельта. «Зная, что террорист решил окружить себя семьями, включая детей, мы сделали выбор провести рейд спецназа с гораздо большим риском для нашего народа, а не наносить по нему авиаудар».
Время от времени Байден напоминает нам всем об этом.
что он был одним из главных соучастников вторжения Буша в Ирак в ходе имперского завоевания и колониального грабежа с целью захватить стратегический ресурс нефти, с помощью которого Америка поддерживает глобальную гегемонию богатства, власти и привилегий, зависимость, которая приведет к вымиранию человечества. как вид, а также в санкционировании посредством Патриотического акта тюремного состояния жестокой силы, всеобщего наблюдения и контроля над мыслями, которое превосходит только холокост уйгуров Синьцзяна, организованный Синь Цзиньпином, что привело к самой массовой краже наших свобод в нашей истории. , включая эпоху Маккарти, а также самый причудливый и предосудительный режим пыток, наиболее печально известный преступлениями против человечности, совершенными в Гуантанамо и других секретных тюрьмах для политических врагов режима и его олигархических, плутократических и корпоративных грабителей-баронов-капитаров, в том числе даже ужасная истерия Салемских процессов над ведьмами.
В очередной раз доказано, что наши герои и чемпионы стоят на глиняных ногах, и я скорблю о провале морального видения и пристрастии к власти, а также о применении силы и насилия со стороны президента Байдена, нашего правительства и Америки как гаранта всеобщих прав человека и маяк надежды для мира.
В этот день слишком часто Прометеев огонь Факела Свободы, освещающий ворота нашей страны в гавани Нью-Йорка, не достигал диких морей и чужих берегов. Это великая трагедия, и это наша трагедия, за которую мы должны ответить.
Смерть Абу Ибрагима аль-Хашими аль-Курайши и его семьи в результате американского рейда на его дом, а не ареста за преступления, доказуемые в суде, а политических убийств, справедливо сравнивается в средствах массовой информации с убийством Абу Бакр аль-Багдади от Трампа. Это ставит Байдена и Трампа на одинаковый уровень криминальной аморальности и государственного террора.
На сцене мира и истории это также порождает моральную эквивалентность между ИГИЛ и Америкой, как и хотят наши враги своими провокациями в качестве стратегии делегитимации режима. Я сам использую это как активист демократии, поскольку искусство революции заключается в утверждении морального превосходства, делегитимации власти и захвате контроля над повествованием.
Отправлять армии и полицию для укрепления добродетели посредством насилия и репрессий — это не только зло, но и глупо; ибо это играет на руку врагу. Как учит нас Шекспир в «Генрихе V»; «Когда милосердие и жестокость играют за королевство, более мягкий игрок быстрее всех побеждает».
Между Байденом и Трампом, а также между целями, ценностями и идеалами демократов и республиканцев все еще существуют заметные различия, безумие и предательство среди них. Но сегодня эти различия внезапно и ужасающе сузились, и я боюсь, что нам понадобится нечто большее, чем игольное ушко, как окно в лучшее будущее.
Как написано в моем посте от 28 октября 2019 года: Трамп и аль-Багдади: параллельные жизни и размышления; Личностные и исторические силы, которые создают тиранов и монстров среди нас, были предметом моего изучения на протяжении всей жизни, аспектами любопытства относительно происхождения и природы зла, порожденного первичными детскими травмами во время резни в Кровавый четверг, заказанной Рональдом Рейганом против студенческого протеста за мир. в Беркли в 1969 году, когда мне было девять лет, и моя близкая казнь в Бразилии в возрасте четырнадцати лет, когда я защищала беспризорных детей от полицейских охотников за головами, что перекликается с действиями Мориса Бланшо в июне 1944 года, совершенными нацистами, и Достоевского в 1849 году, совершенным царской полицией, о чем сообщает Ежи Косинский. роман «Нарисованная птица» и основан на классическом исследовании Адольфа Гитлера, основанном на его речах и произведениях, «Психопатический Бог» Роберта Г. Л. Уэйта, оба из которых я прочитал в старшей школе. Таким образом, я увлекся пересечением литературы, философии, истории и психологии и выбрал происхождение зла в качестве области своих исследований на всю жизнь.
Пока мир празднует смерть аль-Багдади, одновременно тирана и монстра, а Трамп ставит в этом заслугу единственной победы своей администрации, словно трофейную голову какого-то опасного зверя, застреленного проводником, пока он наслаждался коктейлями в охотничьем лагере Возможно, будет интересно сравнить параллельные жизни, методы и цели Трампа и аль-Багдади.
Полное психологическое и историческое исследование Трампа и аль-Багдади как фигур фашистского террора и безумия в глобальном политическом масштабе в контексте цивилизационных конфликтов потребует книги библейского масштаба и научных исследований уровня диссертации, таких как блестящая работа Уэйта о Гитлере. Здесь я отмечаю лишь некоторые очевидные совпадения и совпадения; И Трамп, и аль-Багдади страдают манией величия и психопатами, которые захватили власть посредством манипулирования теми, кто считал себя жертвами, и с готовностью дегуманизировали других, чтобы изменить их статус, используя нарушение норм и переосмысление реальности с помощью лжи и неправильных указаний, чтобы формировать историю, и приняли режимы государственного террора и кампании р
религиозные и этнические чистки, а также патриархальное женоненавистничество и сексуальное насилие в отношении женщин.
О Трампе у нас есть рог изобилия информации; Книга доктора Джастина Франка «Трамп на диване» и «Опасный случай Дональда Трампа: 27 психиатров и экспертов в области психического здоровья оценивают президента» Бэнди Икс. Ли являются отличными источниками, особенно освещающими эротические отношения Трампа с его дочерью, фантазии о насилии и власти. которые коренятся в его детских отношениях с тираническим и жестоким отцом, а также в его неспособности любить или сопереживать другим в результате того, что его бросила мать.
Патологическая ложь, плохой контроль импульсов, грандиозные фантазии и заблуждения дополняют картину нарциссической личности и психопатического хищника. Трамп не может отличить правду от лжи и заблуждений; его безумие и детское слабоумие, истерики и психотическая ярость, издевательства и нарциссизм избалованного ребенка, однако, не освобождают его от ответственности за свои действия или за действия предательской клики сексуальных хищников и фашистов, которую он собрал вокруг себя.
То, как особое безумие Трампа выражается в нашей национальной политике, — это ужас, который можно описать с точностью; его страх перед заражением и фиксацией фекалий трансформируется в его фирменную кампанию против небелых и политику этнических чисток и расистского государственного террора, его женоненавистничество в патриархальную волну юридического лишения репродуктивных прав женщин, его хрупкое эго, путаницу в идентичности и потребность в внимание к управлению митингами, подобными Нюрнбергу, культивированию презренных автократов и одержимой мести любому, кто отказывается выразить обожание и подчинение.
Прежде всего, то, что объединяет Трампа и его кукловода Путина, его модель Гитлера и его зеркальное отражение аль-Багдади, как монстров и тиранов, отражающих друг друга и как параллельные фигуры и исторические силы, — это теория политики как театра жестокости, государства как воплощенная психопатия и насилие, а также правительство как перформанс.
Их лидерские роли клоунов террора и безумия представляют собой зеркально противоположные образы правления римского императора, остроумно и коварно описанные Антоненом Арто в его великом романе «Гелиогабал»; или Коронованный анархист, фигура, которая нарушила нормы как агент перемен и хаоса, чтобы преобразовать инертное и закостенелое общество, тогда как Трамп и аль-Багдади действовали как партнеры в ответной реакции, чтобы разрушить саму цивилизацию и вернуть нас к додемократическому состоянию. варварская тирания.
Трамп утверждает, что убил свое темное отражение и теневое «я» своим ложным заявлением о победе, одержанной нашей разведкой и военными службами; но история всегда будет видеть это второе лицо за его маской, тайного близнеца, которого он несет в вечность, лицо силы и извращенных желаний, не сдерживаемых законами и ценностями демократической цивилизации и свободного общества равных: лицо сердца Трампа. тьма, аль-Багдади.
Так я написал 28 октября 2019 года; и поэтому сейчас я должен написать о тайном лице и сердце тьмы Байдена, Абу Ибрагиме аль-Хашими аль-Курайши, который теперь навеки связан как фигуры террора, убийственного возмездия и жестокости.
Государственный террор и империализм встретили сектантский и патриархальный террор как тиранию и организации институционализированного насилия и власти; теперь мы можем только надеяться, что они узнают свой двойственный образ в зеркале смерти, с которым нам противостоят война и акты силы и насилия, и уйдут от пропасти, которая угрожает поглотить всех нас.
Как сказал Кен Кизи в своей исторической речи на мирном протесте против войны во Вьетнаме, записанном в романе Тома Вулфа «Кислотный тест на электрическое охлаждение»; «Способ положить конец войне — это просто уйти и сказать: «К черту все это». Просто уйди и скажи: «К черту все».
Каждое слово этого остается верным в этих и во всех случаях тирании и институционального террора тюремных государств силы и контроля, санкционированных идентичностей и фальсификации пропагандой и переписанной истории, имперских завоеваний и владычества, колониальной эксплуатации и порабощения. То же самое относится и к вторжению России на Украину.
Как я писал здесь о Трампе, мы можем также сказать и о его господине Путине; ибо предатель Трамп — это всего лишь негативное пространство и тень, отбрасываемая его первоначальным типом, и оба являются атавизмами страха и силы, пропастью пустоты, которую ничто не может заполнить, никаким количеством владычества и контроля над другими, демонстрациями богатства и власти или тщеславным напыщенным поведением. , для которого не могут быть достаточными жертвования вещами, любимыми другими, или ужасом и болью их жертв, ибо такова природа психопатии и политики как театра жестокости.
Что это значит?
Для нас в данный момент и в контексте вопроса о насилии и использовании силы в обществе это означает, что в условиях неравного баланса сил между Россией и Украиной, когда реальные люди умирают, потому что кто-то имеет власть украсть то, что они имеют.
аве, хищник, для которого ничто не реально и не имеет значения, кроме силы и власти, мы должны найти ответ на заявление чудовищного главного героя Айн Рэнд Говарда Рорка в «Источнике», когда он совершает изнасилование; «Вопрос не в том, кто мне позволит; вот кто меня остановит».
Кто остановит Путинское завоевание Украины?
Если они придут за одним из нас, пусть встретят их со всеми нами; не разделенные иерархией элитарной принадлежности и исключающей инаковости, не побежденные выученной беспомощностью и террором, но объединенные в солидарности и отказе подчиниться как одно непобедимое и единое человечество.
Я охотник на фашистов, и у меня охотничья мораль. Есть простой тест на применение силы; кто держит власть?
Для меня это просто; нация, вторгающаяся в другую, неправа. Это ничем не отличается от случайного обнаружения полицейского, стоящего коленями на чьей-то шее, и в этом случае наш долг заботиться о других требует от нас спасти жизнь человека, которого убивают прямо на наших глазах, независимо от каких-либо несущественных деталей, например, какие из них есть значок и пистолет, авторитет и власть, любыми необходимыми средствами.
Закон служит власти, а справедливой власти не существует.
Даже если ни одна из наций не является демократией, и жертвы неравной власти не имеют присущего им морального бремени добродетели, как учит нас Шоу на примере фигуры Артура Дулитла в «Моей прекрасной леди», где один из них крадет жизнь и свободу другого, как право суверенитет, самоопределение, автономия и независимость не могут быть справедливыми, и им необходимо противостоять.
Любыми необходимыми способами.
Хотя политические истоки конфликтов часто неоднозначны, их последствия для людей, находящихся на пути завоевания, таковыми не являются. Поскольку моими долгосрочными целями остаются объединенное человечество и общество без гражданства, которое отказалось от социального использования силы и контроля, а вместе с ним и всех законов, авторитетных личностей и тирании идей добродетели других людей, а также возникновение свободного общества равный от разделения исключительного инаковости, элитной гегемонии богатства, власти и привилегий, а также от фашизма крови, веры и почвы, я поддерживаю Украину и любое освободительное движение за суверенитет и независимость где бы то ни было, а также народ России против олигархия и Путин и все демократические движения против тирании.
Давайте будем солидарны, как группа братьев, везде, где люди жаждут свободы.
Наш долг заботиться о других иногда требует от нас поставить свою жизнь на баланс со всеми теми, кого Франц Фанон называл «Несчастными Земли»; бессильные и обездоленные, заставленные замолчать и стертые. Я всего лишь один человек, и не выдающийся, у которого нет ничего, кроме моего свидетельства истории и моего видения наших будущих возможностей стать людьми, чтобы броситься в пропасть тьмы и ужас нашего небытия перед лицом подавляющей силы и аморального имперского и тюремные состояния.
Но я не могу молча быть соучастником этих преступлений против человечества, на которые, как и на фашизм, может быть только один ответ: Никогда Больше! Сплоченный клич, осложненный его популяризацией в названии книги основателя Лиги защиты евреев Меира Кахане «Никогда снова!: Программа выживания», его происхождение берет начало из стихотворения Исаака Ламбдана «Масада» 1926 года; «Никогда Масада не падет снова»; В нынешнем виде он впервые появился на табличках, написанных узниками Бухенвальда после его освобождения.
Эли Визель определяет эту фразу в своем романе «Заложник»; «Никогда больше» становится больше, чем лозунгом: это молитва, обещание, клятва. Никогда больше не будет ненависти, говорят люди. Никогда больше не тюрьма и пытки. Никогда больше не будет страданий невинных людей или расстрелов голодающих, напуганных, напуганных детей. И никогда больше не прославлять низкое, уродливое, темное насилие. Это молитва».
Здесь я бы назвал Sic Semper Tyrannis, но это фраза из теней и наследия нашей истории, из которой мы должны выйти, и включает в себя убийства Юлия Цезаря и Авраама Линкольна, убийц которых я презираю и к которым не присоединяюсь.
Я не доверяю достоверности или тем, кто действует от их имени, Gott Mitt Uns несет в себе историю зверств и террора, не имеющую себе равных и включающую крестовые походы, инквизицию, Тридцатилетнюю войну и Холокост. Как писал Вольтер в своем эссе 1765 года «Вопросы о чудесах»; «Те, кто может заставить вас поверить в абсурдность, могут заставить вас совершать злодеяния».
Вместо этого я скажу с великолепным лейтенантом Альдо Рейном в «Бесславных ублюдках», и я надеюсь, что это сохранит и отразит моральную двусмысленность, случайность и относительность оригинала в фильме; «Теперь я этого терпеть не могу. А ты, сможешь это вытерпеть?
Как читать такой манифест?
Здесь я пишу манифест действия в виде сократического диалога и свифтианской сатиры, который, как указано в названии, ставит под вопрос «происхождение зла и социального использования силы, а также государства как воплощенной психопатии и насилия».
Как гласит девиз моей публикации «Факел свободы», мое намерение — «подстрекать, провоцировать и беспокоить».
Учтите также, что я провозглашаю четыре основные обязанности гражданина: власть задавать вопросы, власть разоблачать, ложную власть и власть оспаривать, и что я делаю эти вещи, действуя как то, что Фуко называл говорящим правду, в поисках истины как священного принципа. звоню.
В этом эссе я исследую ряд взаимозависимых проблем, которые, по моему мнению, являются центральными в проекте становления человеком, который мы все разделяем, а также последствия вагнеровского кольца страха, власти и силы, возникающие перед нами в ситуации, с которой мы сталкиваемся в данный момент. , и здесь я использую термин «момент» так же, как это делали Жак Деррида и Ален Бадью, когда чудовищный тиран угрожает ядерной войной и истреблением всего человечества по прихоти инфантильной истерики, и мы должны выбрать одно или другое.
Это дилемма, которая, как и любое использование социальной силы, делает нас соучастниками зла, основная стратегия фашизма в нашем порабощении, и которая воспроизводит условия, из которых возникают государства, как воплощенную психопатию и насилие, элитную гегемонию богатства, власти и привилегий. и фашизм крови, веры и почвы.
Бадью утверждает, что события фундаментально неопределенны и структурированы диалектикой возможности и невозможности, возможно, а может быть, и не так, как моя мать говорила студентам, которые просили ее дать позиционные декларации, суждения, авторитетные версии, напевая слова и покачивая руками из стороны в сторону. сторона.
Для Деррида, как описал мой друг Рене Трой Тун, «событие в своей абсолютной сингулярности, таким образом, устойчиво к когнитивному описанию, критической объективации, интерпретативной редукции и теоретической разработке».
Здесь, с этим основным экзистенциальным вопросом человеческого бытия, смысла и ценности, я изо всех сил пытаюсь найти синтез; как и проявление нашей идентичности, этот процесс не должен быть определяющим или предписывающим, а должен быть пространством свободной творческой игры.
Если у нас нет ответов, мы должны научиться задавать более правильные вопросы.
В этой борьбе с ветряными мельницами я использую в качестве модели «Хазарский словарь» Милорада Павича, авторитетный труд, который существует в мужской и женской версиях и смысл которого меняется с разницей в семнадцать строк между ними.
Что, если Владимира Путина убьют? Спасем ли мы одну жизнь безумного тирана, который уничтожит нас и проклянет мир?
We celebrate today the beginning of the rebirth of America as a guarantor of our universal human rights and the Great Renunciation of our colonies and puppet tyrannies of force and control which are antithetical to all our principles of democracy and human being, meaning, and value, among these being the Netanyahu regime of Israel and its fascisms of blood, faith, and soil which have corrupted us and made us complicit in genocide and war crimes in Gaza and elsewhere.
Herein I abjure not the state of Israel as a sanctuary of Jewish peoples, but as an American colony and proxy of imperial dominion whose mission is to enforce our empire and protect our profits from oil as a strategic resource which confers supremacy and creates and maintains elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege for whom our nation is a performative instrument of dominion.
The atrocities and horrors of the Gaza War have revealed the truths beneath our mask of illusions; how far from our values and ideals we have fallen, and the lines of fracture to which we must bring healing and change.
I find it hopeful that our institutions of government are capable of rapid change and adaptive growth in response to citizen activism and the will of the people; the victorious Uncommitted electoral campaign has made state tyranny and terror in the form of the Democratic Party blink with the stunning policy reversal of Chuck Schumer’s historic speech and Biden’s endorsement of it.
I dream of a future Israel which is a true democracy wherein all human beings are equal, of a future Palestine which is a sovereign and independent nation wherein no one need fear for the lives and those of their families on the basis of faith, race, or national identity, and of a future America in which imperial colonialism is abandoned and all human beings of whatever nation, faith, race or ethnicity share equally in our universal human rights to life, liberty, self determination of identity and the pursuit of happiness including that of faith, a free society of equals and a United Humankind wherein we are all of us guarantors of each other’s human rights.
We have far to go if we are to escape the legacies of our history, but in the renouncement of Israel’s Occupation and genocide of Palestine, America begins to find her heart.
As written by Chris Stein in The Guardian, in an article entitled Biden says Schumer made ‘good speech’ in breaking with Benjamin Netanyahu: President also condemns US surge in Islamophobia in comments that could portend broader shift in sentiment towards Gaza war; “Joe Biden on Friday said Senator Chuck Schumer made “a good speech” that reflected many Americans’ concerns when he publicly broke with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over his handling of the war in Gaza.
While the US president announced no changes in his administration’s policy towards Israel, his views on the speech Schumer made Thursday from the floor of the US Senate, where the New York Democrat is the majority leader, could portend a broader shift in sentiment.
Tensions have been rising between senior members of the Biden administration, including the president and the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and rightwinger Netanyahu, in the continued absence of a ceasefire deal.
Schumer’s speech was a surprise to many and attracted criticism from US Republican lawmakers and Israel’s ruling party.
“I’m not going to elaborate on the speech. He made a good speech,” Biden said at the start of an Oval Office meeting with Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar , adding that he had been given advance notice of Schumer’s comments.
“I think he expressed a serious concern shared not only by him, but by many Americans,” Biden said.
Varadkar also addressed the conflict, saying: “We need a ceasefire as soon as possible to get food and medicine in, to get the hostages out. We need to talk about how we can make that happen and move towards a two-state solution.”
Biden said he agreed with his comments.
Hamas, the Islamist militancy that controls Gaza, launched a surprise attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, killing more than 1,200 people and taking around 240 hostages back into the Palestinian territory, where more than 100 are still being held. In response, Israel invaded and besieged Gaza and has so far killed at least 30,000 people in the coastal strip, and put some parts on the brink of famine, according to the United Nations.
In a separate statement, the president marked the International Day to Combat Islamophobia by warning that prejudice against Muslims has seen an “ugly resurgence … in the wake of the devastating war in Gaza”.
“That includes right here at home. I’ve said it many times: Islamophobia has no place in our nation,” Biden said.
The US government has publicly supported Israel since the October attack. But on Thursday, Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the US, called for new elections in the country, saying Netanyahu had “lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel”.
Schumer said Netanyahu, who has long opposed Palestinian statehood, was among several roadblocks to implementing the two-state solution supported by the United States, where Israel and a Palestinian state would exist in peace. He also blamed rightwing Israelis, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.
“These are the four obstacles to peace, and if we fail to overcome them, then Israel and the West Bank and Gaza will be trapped in the same violent state of affairs they’ve experienced for the last 75 years,” Schumer said.
The Senate leader accused the prime minister of being “too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”
The ruling Likud party responded to Schumer by defending the prime minister’s public support in the country and saying Israel was “not a banana republic”.
“Contrary to Schumer’s words, the Israeli public supports a total victory over Hamas, rejects any international dictates to establish a Palestinian terrorist state, and opposes the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza,” it said in a statement.
The Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, struck a similar tone. “Israel is not a colony of America whose leaders serve at the pleasure of the party in power in Washington. Only Israel’s citizens should have a say in who runs their government,” he said from the chamber’s floor, shortly after Schumer spoke.
Congress is in the midst of a months-long deadlock over passing legislation to authorize military assistance for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. The bill has the support of Biden and passed the Democratic-led Senate, but the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has so far refused to put it to a vote in the Republican-controlled chamber.
Retired Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas told the New York Times it was significant that such a high-ranking US Jewish official would publicly take Netanyahu to task.
“For a Jewish senator from New York, the majority leader, a friend of Netanyahu who’s the most centrist possible Democrat and even leans hawkish on Israel, to voice criticism like this?” Pinkas told the New York Times. “If you’ve lost Chuck Schumer, you’ve lost America.”
The US sees Israel as its closest ally in the Middle East, and is a major supplier of its weapons. But concern has risen among Democrats over the death toll in Gaza.
Biden’s support for Israel has caused a domestic split, with pro-Palestine protesters disrupting his speeches and tens of thousands of people casting protest votes in the Democratic primaries, including in swing states that will be crucial to his re-election chances in November. Last week, Biden was overheard saying he needs to have a “come to Jesus meeting” with the Israeli prime minister as relations fray.
Netanyahu appears ready to press on with a fresh military offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, though Biden has warned against doing so without a “credible” safety plan for the 1.3 million people sheltering there.
On Friday, the Times of Israel reported that the prime minister rejected as “ridiculous” a Hamas proposal for a ceasefire and release of hostages in exchange for Israel freeing between 700 and 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Israel nevertheless said it would send a delegation to Qatar for more talks.”
Biden says Schumer made ‘good speech’ in breaking with Benjamin Netanyahu
Full text of Senator Chuck Schumer’s speech: ‘Israeli elections are the only way’: Democratic majority leader says four obstacles preventing peace are Hamas, far-right Israelis, PA President Abbas — and Netanyahu /The Times of Israel
15 במרץ 2024 האמריקאית מתחילה למצוא את ליבה: נאום שומר והוויתור שלנו על ישראל
אנו חוגגים היום את תחילת הולדתה מחדש של אמריקה כערובה לזכויות האדם האוניברסאליות שלנו והוויתור הגדול על המושבות שלנו ועריצות הבובות שלנו של כוח ושליטה שהם מנוגדים לכל העקרונות שלנו של דמוקרטיה והוויה אנושית, משמעות וערך, בין אלה משטר נתניהו בישראל והפשיזם של הדם, האמונה והאדמה שלו שהשחיתו אותנו והפכו אותנו שותפים לרצח עם ופשעי מלחמה בעזה ובמקומות אחרים.
בזאת אינני מתכחש למדינת ישראל כמקום מקדש של עמים יהודים, אלא כמושבה אמריקאית ונציגה של שליטה אימפריאלית שתפקידה לאכוף את האימפריה שלנו ולהגן על רווחינו מנפט כמשאב אסטרטגי המעניק עליונות ויוצר ומקיים אליטה. הגמוניות של עושר, כוח וזכות שעבורן האומה שלנו היא מכשיר ביצועי של שליטה.
הזוועות והזוועות של מלחמת עזה חשפו את האמיתות שמתחת למסכת האשליות שלנו; כמה רחוק מהערכים והאידיאלים שלנו נפלנו, ומקווי השבר שאליהם עלינו להביא ריפוי ושינוי.
אני מוצא תקווה שמוסדות הממשל שלנו מסוגלים לשינוי מהיר וצמיחה מותאמת בתגובה לפעילות האזרחית ולרצון העם; מסע הבחירות הבלתי מחויב המנצח גרם לעריצות המדינה וטרור בדמות המפלגה הדמוקרטית למצמץ עם היפוך המדיניות המדהים של נאומו ההיסטורי של צ’אק שומר ואישורו של ביידן בו.
אני חולם על ישראל עתידית שהיא דמוקרטיה אמיתית שבה כל בני האדם שווים, על פלסטין עתידית שהיא אומה ריבונית ועצמאית שבה אף אחד לא צריך לחשוש לחייהם ושל משפחותיהם על בסיס אמונה, גזע, או זהות לאומית, ושל אמריקה עתידית שבה הקולוניאליזם האימפריאלי נטוש וכל בני האדם מכל אומה, אמונה, גזע או עדה שותפים באופן שווה בזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו לחיים, לחירות, להגדרה עצמית של זהות ולרדיפה אחר האושר, כולל זו של אמונה, חברה חופשית של שווים ואנושיות מאוחדת שבה כולנו ערבים זה לזכויות האדם של זה.
יש לנו עוד רחוק ללכת אם ברצוננו לברוח מהמורשת של ההיסטוריה שלנו, אבל בוויתור על הכיבוש ורצח העם של ישראל בפלסטין, אמריקה מתחילה למצוא את ליבה.
Arabic
15 مارس 2024 أمريكا تبدأ في العثور على قلبها: خطاب شومر وتخلينا عن إسرائيل
نحتفل اليوم ببداية ولادة أمريكا من جديد كضامن لحقوق الإنسان العالمية لدينا والتخلي الكبير عن مستعمراتنا وطغاة القوة والسيطرة العميلة التي تتعارض مع جميع مبادئنا المتعلقة بالديمقراطية والإنسان والمعنى والقيمة. ومن بين هؤلاء نظام نتنياهو الإسرائيلي وفاشياته الدموية والإيمانية والأرضية التي أفسدتنا وجعلتنا متواطئين في الإبادة الجماعية وجرائم الحرب في غزة وأماكن أخرى.
أنا هنا لا أرفض دولة إسرائيل باعتبارها ملاذاً للشعوب اليهودية، بل كمستعمرة أمريكية ووكيل للسيطرة الإمبريالية التي تتمثل مهمتها في فرض إمبراطوريتنا وحماية أرباحنا من النفط كمورد استراتيجي يمنح التفوق ويخلق النخبة ويحافظ عليها. هيمنة الثروة والسلطة والامتيازات التي تعتبر أمتنا أداة أداء للهيمنة.
لقد كشفت الفظائع والفظائع التي ارتكبت في حرب غزة عن الحقائق الكامنة وراء قناع الأوهام لدينا؛ إلى أي مدى سقطنا عن قيمنا ومثلنا العليا، وخطوط الكسر التي يجب أن نصل إليها بالشفاء والتغيير.
أجد أنه من المأمول أن تكون مؤسساتنا الحكومية قادرة على التغيير السريع والنمو التكيفي استجابة لنشاط المواطنين وإرادة الشعب؛ لقد جعلت الحملة الانتخابية غير الملتزمة المنتصرة طغيان الدولة والإرهاب في شكل الحزب الديمقراطي يتضاءل مع الانقلاب السياسي المذهل لخطاب تشاك شومر التاريخي وتأييد بايدن له.
أحلم بإسرائيل المستقبلية التي تكون ديمقراطية حقيقية يتساوى فيها جميع البشر، وبفلسطين المستقبلية التي تكون أمة ذات سيادة ومستقلة حيث لا يحتاج أحد إلى الخوف على حياة وحياة أسره على أساس الإيمان أو العرق أو الدين. أو الهوية الوطنية، وأمريكا المستقبلية التي يتم فيها التخلي عن الاستعمار الإمبريالي ويتقاسم جميع البشر من أي أمة أو عقيدة أو عرق أو عرق بالتساوي في حقوق الإنسان العالمية في الحياة والحرية وتقرير المصير للهوية والسعي لتحقيق السعادة بما في ذلك الإيمان، ومجتمع حر متساوٍ، وإنسانية موحدة حيث نكون جميعًا ضامنين لحقوق الإنسان لبعضنا البعض.
لا يزال أمامنا الكثير لنقطعه إذا أردنا الهروب من تراث تاريخنا، ولكن في نبذ الاحتلال الإسرائيلي والإبادة الجماعية لفلسطين، بدأت أمريكا في العثور على قلبها.
Like the leprous tracks of an unseen plague, fascism reaches out as the legacies of our history, like hungry ghosts who seek to possess us with madness and degradation of our humanity.
Portugal is a shining example of how we can reimagine and transform ourselves and our choices about how to be human together, a global colonial empire which liberated herself and her colonies in the 1974 Carnation Revolution.
A wave of fascist subversions of democracy and electoral captures of power throughout Europe now threatens to falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us and steal our souls, in coordinated actions by a Nazi revivalist Fourth Reich, exactly as we here in America have long endured in Traitor Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty.
Let us give to fascist tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!
Yes, but how? Herein I signpost that as we are all being attacked together, we may find greater power in international solidarity and a united front in Resistance.
When they come for us, let those who would enslave us find not a humankind defeated by learned helplessness and division, but a United Humankind in which we are all guarantors of each other’s liberty, equality, and universal human rights.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As written by Alexander C. Kaufman in Huffpost, in an article entitled Portugal’s Far Right Surges In Biggest Election Since Dictatorship Ended 50 Years Ago; “Portugal’s far right is set to take on its biggest role in governing the country since the fall of the fascist Estado Novo regime 50 years ago after quadrupling its bloc of lawmakers in the national Parliament.
The results of Sunday’s election are not yet final, but by Monday morning showed the hardline party Chega had won at least 48 of the parliament’s 230 seats, up from 12. The center-right Democratic Alliance — led by the Social Democrats with a couple of tiny conservative parties — secured 79 seats. The Socialists claimed 77.
Chega — Portuguese for “enough” — formed just five years ago as a right-wing faction of the traditional center-right Social Democrats split off under the leadership of Andre Ventura, a charismatic former sportscaster who gained notoriety by attacking gay rights and Portugal’s tiny Roma minority.
Its rise to power over the last few elections shocked many in a country that had seemed immune to the strain of bombastic populism animating the political right in France, the Netherlands and Germany, inoculated by such recent memories of authoritarian rule.
But Chega’s anti-establishment rhetoric found new purchase among Portuguese voters after the long-ruling Socialist Party government collapsed in November amid a corruption scandal involving alleged backroom deals for major green infrastructure projects.
Ahead of Sunday’s snap election, Chega papered the country’s traffic circles with billboards pitching Ventura as the man to “cleanse” Portugal’s political class, which the far-right blamed for everything from stagnant wages to high housing costs.
Luis Montenegro, leader of the Social Democratic Party, had previously ruled out a coalition with the far right. Without Chega, however, the Democratic Alliance does not have enough votes to command a parliamentary majority.
While Montenegro’s chief rival, Pedro Nuno Santos, conceded defeat after his center-left Socialist Party’s nine-year run came to an end, he refused to support the center-right coalition’s agenda, including across-the-board tax cuts, according to Reuters.
Ventura told reporters that Sunday’s vote “clearly showed” Portuguese voters wanted a Democratic Alliance that includes Chega. If the center-right refuses to work with Chega and cannot govern, Ventura said the blame will fall on Montenegro.
If Montenegro is unable to form a government, he could end up resigning, clearing the way for a party leader with a different view of Chega.
“The new [Social Democrat] leader may feel differently about the opportunity of governing along with Chega,” said José Santana Pereira, an associate professor of political science at the University Institute of Lisbon.
It’s difficult to tell what Chega’s priorities would be in a government. Unlike its allied far-right movements elsewhere in Europe, the Portuguese hardliners support the European Union and take relatively moderate positions on immigration. While the party’s nostalgia for Portugal’s imperial past has attracted conservative Catholics, Ventura has said Chega would not reopen the debate on the legality of abortion.
“Chega doesn’t present a clear political program, so it’s very difficult to see,” António Costa Pinto, a research professor at the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences, told HuffPost ahead of the election. “Chega is changing its position every day. It’s like Donald Trump.”
The election notches another victory for Europe’s far right.
Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who grew up as part of a youth group descended from dictator Benito Mussolini’s political machine, took power in late 2022 and just survived a major electoral test in a local vote.
Despite extremist statements vowing to ban Muslim houses of worship, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders won a stunning upset in November’s election just weeks after Portugal’s corruption scandal erupted.
The radical Alternative for Germany party made major gains in last year’s election, and polls show the far-right movement in second place ahead of next year’s vote.”
As written by Sam Jones and Lili Bayer in The Guardian, in an article entitled Portugal election: centre-right alliance claims victory, rejects role for far right; “The leader of Portugal’s centre-right Democratic Alliance, Luis Montenegro, has claimed victory after a closely contested parliamentary election that saw the far-right surge.
With almost 99% of Sunday’s votes counted, the Democratic Alliance – an electoral platform made up of the large Social Democratic party (PSD) and two smaller conservative parties – and the Socialist party (PS) were each on 28.67%.
The far-right Chega party was in third place with 18%.
In the early hours of Monday, Montenegro reiterated his election promise not to rely on Chega to govern or to strike any deals with the populists, although it was unclear if he could govern without their support.
Montenegro told a crowd of cheering supporters it was crucial for political parties in the new parliament to act responsibly and “comply with the wish of the Portuguese people”.
“I always said that winning the elections would mean having one vote more than any other candidacy, and only in those circumstances would I accept to be prime minister,” he said in an address to party supporters shortly after midnight.
“It seems inescapable that the AD won the elections and that the Socialists lost,” he added after partial official results showed his side secured a slim lead over the Socialists, in power since 2015, in Sunday’s polls.
The leader of the Socialist party, Pedro Nuno Santos, conceded defeat and congratulated the Democratic Alliance on its victory.
“Everything indicates that the result won’t enable the Socialist Party to be the most voted party,” Nuno Santos said, according to Bloomberg.
The result marked a huge surge for Chega, which was founded five years ago by André Ventura, a former TV football pundit who was once a rising star in the PSD. The party broke through in the 2019 election, attracting 1.3% of the vote and gaining its first MP in Portugal’s 230-seat assembly. Three years later, it took 7.2% of the vote and won 12 seats.
The vote was triggered by the socialist prime minister, António Costa, resigning in November after an investigation was launched into alleged illegalities in his administration’s handling of large green investment projects.
Costa – who had been in office since 2015 and who won a surprise absolute majority in the 2022 general election – has not been accused of any crime. He said that while his conscience was clear, he felt he had no choice but to step down because the “duties of prime minister are not compatible with any suspicion of my integrity”.
He also announced that he would not be running for prime minister in the election, leaving the Socialist party in the hands of Nuno Santos, a former infrastructure minister from the leftwing of the party.
Speaking as the results came in, Costa acknowledged his party’s performance was “far from the one we had two years ago and far from the one we had wanted”.
Although Montenegro, has explicitly ruled out any deals with Chega because of what he calls Ventura’s “often xenophobic, racist, populist and excessively demagogic” views, he is now likely to come under considerable pressure from his own party to reach an agreement with the far-right party to help the PSD into government.
Even with the backing of the smaller centre-right Liberal Initiative – which is on course to finish fourth on around 4.9% – any potential minority government led by the Democratic Alliance would probably still have to rely on Chega’s support to pass legislation, leaving its stability in the hands of the far right.
According to the Expresso newspaper, Portugal’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, has broken with the convention of presidential neutrality by saying he will do everything possible to prevent Chega from reaching office. He said he would reject any moves to replace Montenegro as prime minister should the right win a majority.
Ventura has hit back at the president’s comments, saying: “In Portugal, it’s not the president of the republic who chooses the government – it’s the voters.”
As the night wore on, other European far-right leaders were quick to toast Chega’s success and offer their support and solidarity.
Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s Vox party, congratulated Ventura and “our Portuguese friends and neighbours” on “this great result”, while Maximilian Krah, Alternative for Germany’s leader in the European parliament, said Chega was on the way to a “fantastic success”.
Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s National Rally, hailed a “great breakthrough”, saying the Portuguese people were “defending their identity and their prosperity, and sweeping away the corrupt socialists!”.
In Hungary, Ádám Samu Balázs, the head of the international secretariat for Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, called the results a “great breakthrough”. He added: “The fight of our friend and ally André Ventura against the globalist left and for the protection of national sovereignty and the defence of Europe is exemplary.”
The Socialists had been hoping the threat of the far right moving closer to government would rally centrist voters as it did in 2022. The Democratic Alliance, meanwhile, had offered the prospect of change after eight years of socialist rule, promising to promote economic growth by cutting taxes and improve squeezed public services.
Chega had sought to capitalise on widespread dissatisfaction with Portugal’s mainstream left and right parties as the country continues to suffer a housing crisis, stressed health and education systems, and low wages.
“Never in the history of Portugal has there been a greater possibility of overthrowing the bipartisan system that has been killing us for the past 50 years,” Ventura told supporters at a recent Chega rally in northern Portugal. “We have never been this close.”
The party had made political corruption a central theme of its campaign, putting up huge billboards around the country reading: “Portugal needs a clean-up.”
The investigation that caused the collapse of Costa’s government – which examined possible “malfeasance, active and passive corruption of politicians and influence peddling” – led to searches of the environment and infrastructure ministries and of Costa’s official residence, and to the arrest of five people, among them his chief of staff. The five were subsequently released and the investigating magistrate retained only the charge of influence peddling.
It is not the only scandal dogging the Socialists. The former prime minister José Sócrates is due to stand trial over allegations that he pocketed €34m from three companies while he was in power between 2005 and 2011. Sócrates has denied any involvement in fraud or money-laundering and has maintained his innocence.
The PSD is also facing corruption allegations, with two prominent party officials in Madeira resigning recently amid a graft investigation.”
Portugal’s Far Right Surges In Biggest Election Since Dictatorship Ended 50 Years Ago
Today, We Celebrate the Carnation Revolution: On April 25, 1974, a mutiny in the Portuguese army put an end to five decades of dictatorship. The revolution that followed showed how working people can take a modern economy into their own hands.
14 de março de 2024 Nas eleições em Portugal, as trevas se acumulam
Nas eleições de Portugal, a escuridão aumenta.
Tal como os rastos leprosos de uma praga invisível, o fascismo estende-se como legado da nossa história, como fantasmas famintos que procuram possuir-nos com a loucura e a degradação da nossa humanidade.
Portugal é um exemplo brilhante de como podemos reimaginar e transformar a nós mesmos e às nossas escolhas sobre como ser humanos juntos, um império colonial global que se libertou e às suas colónias na Revolução dos Cravos de 1974.
Uma onda de subversões fascistas da democracia e de capturas eleitorais do poder em toda a Europa ameaça agora falsificar-nos, mercantilizar-nos, desumanizar-nos e roubar-nos as almas, em acções coordenadas por um Quarto Reich revivalista nazi, exactamente como nós aqui na América temos sofrido durante muito tempo em Traidor. O Teatro da Crueldade de Trump.
Dêmos à tirania fascista a única resposta que ela merece; Nunca mais!
Sim mas como? Aqui sinalizo que, à medida que estamos todos a ser atacados em conjunto, podemos encontrar maior poder na solidariedade internacional e uma frente unida na Resistência.
Quando vierem atrás de nós, que aqueles que nos querem escravizar encontrem não uma humanidade derrotada pelo desamparo e pela divisão aprendidos, mas uma Humanidade Unida na qual todos somos garantes da liberdade, da igualdade e dos direitos humanos universais uns dos outros.
Pois somos muitos, estamos vigiando e somos o futuro.
Portugal, a reading list
History
Journey to Portugal: history and culture, Jose Saramago
The Inquisitors’ Manual, The Natural Order of Things, Act of the Damned, An Explanation of the Birds, The Return of the Caravels, Knowledge of Hell, What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire?, António Lobo Antunes
Baltasar and Blimunda, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, All the Names, Blindness, Death with Interruptions, Seeing, Caim, The Double, The Cave, The Tale of the Unknown Island, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Stone Raft, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, The Notebook, José Saramago
Dancing in the streets, and enough gunfire to stand in for the firecrackers of a Chinese New Year’s parade.
Rejoice, O Haiti, for you are now free, and your future belongs to you.
Here we are now all of us Living Autonomous Zones, and though in this moment of victory we run amok and are ungovernable, the question remains of what we will do with our power, come the dawn.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Who do we want to become, we humans, masters and slaves, or a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights?
Let us enact reversals of order, play tricks which open the gates of our prisons to paths of change, pursue the sacred calling of the truth teller, perform the four duties of a citizen; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority, and dream anew the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, our society, and the systems and structures of our civilization.
Let us bring the Chaos.
In this moment of seizure of power I am thinking of Chaos as a disruptive force of fracture and change which has stripped us bare of our lies to reveal the fragile truths of our humanity beneath, and may be leveraged for liberty or tyranny by how we respond as a species and global civilization. As Guillermo del Toro writes in Carnival Row, Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.
If we can dance our true and secret selves before the stage of the world on this night, why not every night?
Celebrate with us the liberation of Haiti as a liminal and transformative time of exploring unknowns beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the defiance of authority, the sabotage of hierarchies, of systems of oppression, of carceral states of force and control, and the violation of norms.
Rejoice with us in this time of reversals of order through the performance of Acts of Transgression and Chaos. Let us forge new truths, destroy and create ourselves and transform the systems and structures of colonial oppression and tyranny, patriarchy and white supremacist terror, forces of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, into a diverse and inclusive free society of equals.
Dance with us in joy, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.
While many have written of the collapse of order in Haiti in terms of loss of control by police as corrupt and brutal enforcers of elite wealth, power, and privilege, and the delegitimation of authority as a kleptocratic puppet of American imperialism through anticolonial liberation struggle, even those whose speak of our revolution as an apolitical amok time of criminal gangs and argue for greater repression of dissent and a mercenary army of occupation from Kenya, as did the now deposed and in exile Prime Minister Ariel Henry, recognize the systems of oppression and unequal power in which our revolution originates.
As written by Patrick Smith, Char Adams, and Michelle Garcia at MSN, in an article entitled What to know about the crisis of violence, politics and hunger engulfing Haiti; “Along-simmering crisis over Haiti’s ability to govern itself, particularly after a series of natural disasters and an increasingly dire humanitarian emergency, has come to a head in the Caribbean nation, as its de facto president remains stranded in Puerto Rico and its people starve and live in fear of rampant violence.
The chaos engulfing the country has been bubbling for more than a year, only for it to spill over on the global stage on Monday night, as Haiti’s unpopular prime minister, Ariel Henry, agreed to resign once a transitional government is brokered by other Caribbean nations and parties, including the U.S.
But the very idea of a transitional government brokered not by Haitians but by outsiders is one of the main reasons Haiti, a nation of 11 million, is on the brink, according to humanitarian workers and residents who have called for Haitian-led solutions.
“What we’re seeing in Haiti has been building since the 2010 earthquake,” said Greg Beckett, an associate professor of anthropology at Western University in Canada.
What is happening in Haiti and why?
In the power vacuum that followed the assassination of democratically elected President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, Henry, who was prime minister under Moïse, assumed power, with the support of several nations, including the U.S.
When Haiti failed to hold elections multiple times — Henry said it was due to logistical problems or violence — protests rang out against him. By the time Henry announced last year that elections would be postponed again, to 2025, armed groups that were already active in Port-au-Prince, the capital, dialed up the violence.
Even before Moïse’s assassination, these militias and armed groups existed alongside politicians who used them to do their bidding, including everything from intimidating the opposition to collecting votes. With the dwindling of the country’s elected officials, though, many of these rebel forces have engaged in excessively violent acts, and have taken control of at least 80% of the capital, according to a United Nations estimate.
Those groups, which include paramilitary and former police officers who pose as community leaders, have been responsible for the increase in killings, kidnappings and rapes since Moïse’s death, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University in Sweden. According to a report from the U.N. released in January, more than 8,400 people were killed, injured or kidnapped in 2023, an increase of 122% increase from 2022.
“January and February have been the most violent months in the recent crisis, with thousands of people killed, or injured, or raped,” Beckett said.
Armed groups who had been calling for Henry’s resignation have already attacked airports, police stations, sea ports, the Central Bank and the country’s national soccer stadium. The situation reached critical mass earlier this month when the country’s two main prisons were raided, leading to the escape of about 4,000 prisoners. The beleaguered government called a 72-hour state of emergency, including a night-time curfew — but its authority had evaporated by then.
Aside from human-made catastrophes, Haiti still has not fully recovered from the devastating earthquake in 2010 that killed about 220,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless, many of them living in poorly built and exposed housing. More earthquakes, hurricanes and floods have followed, exacerbating efforts to rebuild infrastructure and a sense of national unity.
Since the earthquake, “there have been groups in Haiti trying to control that reconstruction process and the funding, the billions of dollars coming into the country to rebuild it,” said Beckett, who specializes in the Caribbean, particularly Haiti.
Beckett said that control initially came from politicians and subsequently from armed groups supported by those politicians. Political “parties that controlled the government used the government for corruption to steal that money. We’re seeing the fallout from that.”
Many armed groups have formed in recent years claiming to be community groups carrying out essential work in underprivileged neighborhoods, but they have instead been accused of violence, even murder. One of the two main groups, G-9, is led by a former elite police officer, Jimmy Chérizier — also known as “Barbecue” — who has become the public face of the unrest and claimed credit for various attacks on public institutions. He has openly called for Henry to step down and called his campaign an “armed revolution.”
But caught in the crossfire are the residents of Haiti. In just one week, 15,000 people have been displaced from Port-au-Prince, according to a U.N. estimate. But people have been trying to flee the capital for well over a year, with one woman telling NBC News that she is currently hiding in a church with her three children and another family with eight children. The U.N. said about 160,000 people have left Port-au-Prince because of the swell of violence in the last several months.
Deep poverty and famine are also a serious danger. Gangs have cut off access to the country’s largest port, Autorité Portuaire Nationale, and food could soon become scarce.
Haiti’s uncertain future
A new transitional government may dismay the Haitians and their supporters who call for Haitian-led solutions to the crisis.
But the creation of such a government would come after years of democratic disruption and the crumbling of Haiti’s political leadership. The country hasn’t held an election in eight years.
Haitian advocates and scholars like Jemima Pierre, an associate anthropology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, say foreign intervention, including from the U.S., is partially to blame for Haiti’s turmoil. The U.S. has routinely sent thousands of troops to Haiti, intervened in its government and supported unpopular leaders like Henry.
“What you have over the last 20 years is the consistent dismantling of the Haitian state,” Pierre said. “What intervention means for Haiti, what it has always meant, is death and destruction.”
In fact, the country’s situation was so dire that Henry was forced to travel abroad in the hope of securing a U.N. peacekeeping deal. He went to Kenya, which agreed to send 1,000 troops to coordinate an East African and U.N.-backed alliance to help restore order in Haiti, but the plan is now on hold.
Kenya agreed last October to send a U.N.-sanctioned security force to Haiti, but Kenya’s courts decided it was unconstitutional. The result has been Haiti fending for itself.
“A force like Kenya, they don’t speak Kreyòl, they don’t speak French,” Pierre said. “The Kenyan police are known for human rights abuses. So what does it tell us as Haitians that the only thing that you see that we deserve are not schools, not reparations for the cholera the U.N. brought, but more military with the mandate to use all kinds of force on our population? That is unacceptable.”
Henry was forced to announce his planned resignation from Puerto Rico, as threats of violence — and armed groups taking over the airports — have prevented him from returning to his country.
Now that Henry is to stand down, it is far from clear what the armed groups will do or demand next, aside from the right to govern.
“It’s the Haitian people who know what they’re going through. It’s the Haitian people who are going to take destiny into their own hands. Haitian people will choose who will govern them,” Chérizier said recently, according to The Associated Press.
Haitians and their supporters have put forth their own solutions over the years, holding that foreign intervention routinely ignores the voices and desires of Haitians.
In 2021, both Haitian and non-Haitian church leaders, women’s rights groups, lawyers, humanitarian workers, the Voodoo Sector and more created the Commission to Search for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis. The commission has proposed the “Montana Accord,” outlining a two-year interim government with oversight committees tasked with restoring order, eradicating corruption and establishing fair elections.”
As written by Peter Beaumont and Luke Taylor in The Guardian, in an article entitled Haiti PM Ariel Henry resigns after gang insurrection caused days of chaos; “The embattled Haitian prime minister, Ariel Henry, has resigned after a gang insurrection against his government plunged the country into anarchy and prevented his return from a trip to Kenya.
Henry, who is now in Puerto Rico, said he would formally quit after the installation of a transitional council to lead the Caribbean state, which has been submerged in chaos since the assassination of its president Jovenel Moïses in July 2021 by Colombian mercenaries.
“For more than a week, our country has experienced an increase in acts of violence of all kinds perpetrated against the population: assassinations, attacks against law enforcement, looting, systematic destruction of public and private buildings,” Henry said in the video statement.
“We deplore the numerous losses of human life. The government that I lead cannot remain indifferent to this situation. As I have always said, no sacrifice is too great for our common homeland Haiti.
“I’m asking all Haitians to remain calm and do everything they can for peace and stability to come back as fast as possible.”
Haitian leaders meeting in Jamaica have agreed to form a new transitional government led by a seven-member presidential council that will choose a new interim prime minister, but it is unclear who will lead Haiti out of the crisis that has involved a wholesale collapse of democratic accountability in a country that last had elections in 2016.
Henry had been trying to secure a UN-backed taskforce of foreign troops to bolster the country’s police and shore up order since October 2022. On 1 March, he finally got Kenya to sign an agreement to send 1,000 officers to the Caribbean.
But further complicating the picture, Kenyan officials said on Tuesday that the deployment would be put on hold until a new government was announced.
“The deal they signed with the president still stands, although the deployment will not happen now because definitely we will require a sitting government to also collaborate with,” Salim Swaleh, a spokesperson for Kenya’s foreign ministry, told the New York Times. “Because you don’t just deploy police to go on the Port-au-Prince streets without a sitting administration.”
It is unclear how Haiti’s gangs – who now control 80% of the capital, Port-au-Prince – can be persuaded to disarm. “Even if you have a different kind of government, the reality is that you need to talk to the gangs,” said Robert Fatton, a Haitian politics expert at the University of Virginia. “You can’t suppress them.”
Fatton said officials would still have to deal with the gangs and try to convince them to give up their weapons, “but what would be their concessions?”
Underlining that point, Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, a former police officer who is considered to be Haiti’s most powerful gang leader, told reporters that if the international community continued backing a transition, “it will plunge Haiti into further chaos”.
“We Haitians have to decide who is going to be the head of the country and what model of government we want,” said Chérizier, who leads the gang federation G9 Family and Allies. “We are also going to figure out how to get Haiti out of the misery it’s in now.”
Haiti’s gangs joined forces during 10 days of chaos during which they set police stations on fire, stormed ports and prisons and laid siege to the capital’s international airport.
Henry, who has been unable to enter Haiti because the violence has forced the closure of its main international airports, arrived in Puerto Rico a week ago, after being barred from landing in the Dominican Republic, where officials said that he lacked a required flight plan.
A senior US official said Henry remained in Puerto Rico, and that the decision for him to step down was made on Friday. Henry expressed a desire to return to Haiti in the future, the official said.
Henry’s resignation, however, seems unlikely to solve Haiti’s decades-long crisis of governance – punctuated by violence, natural disasters and external interventions, including by the US and UN – which has persisted since the Duvalier dictatorship was ended by an uprising in 1986.
Succumbing to a process set in motion by Moïses’s murder during a night-time assault on his Pétion-Ville home, Haiti’s enfeebled government has collapsed under the weight of gang and vigilant violence, some of it linked to political figures.
The poorest country in the western hemisphere, Haiti has also struggled with widespread corruption among its political and business elite, as gangs – often more heavily armed than the country’s ineffective police – have turned vast areas into no-go zones, setting up check points to control roads and neighbourhoods.
Henry’s government was widely viewed as corrupt and illegitimate because it repeatedly failed to hold elections.
Videos distributed on Haitian social media appeared to show celebrations in the street, with people dancing to music in a party atmosphere while fireworks were launched.
Under the 74-year-old’s rule, gangs seized control of much of the country and regularly terrorised civilians, cutting off food and fuel supplies and blocking roads. Nearly half of the population – 4.35 million – regularly go hungry.
Among those with voting rights on the new council are the Pitit Desalin party, run by the former senator and presidential candidate Moïse Jean-Charles, who is now an ally of Guy Philippe, a former rebel leader who led a successful 2004 coup and was recently released from a US prison after pleading guilty to money laundering.”
As written by Macacollvie J. Neel in The Haitian Times in an article entitled The gang takeover of Haiti happened long before this jailbreak; “In some of the news stories making the rounds about the gangs taking over Haiti’s capital, too many have had a tone of incredulity for my taste. The shock and amazement running through those reports, as though this all came out of the blue, is what surprises me.
One story said the prison invasion was a new low for Haiti. Another quoted an expert saying he wasn’t sure if this type of attack on Haiti’s institutions had happened before. So here I am, asking, ‘How is this a surprise?”
At The Haitian Times, we’ve covered these brazen attacks too many times to count. Gangs have decimated entire neighborhoods, kidnapped from church pulpits, invaded the highest court in the land, occupied police stations, controlled access to critical ports, forced hospitals to close and otherwise imposed control on so many institutions. Few places were left for gangs to attack, but the jails.
The only difference with the weekend’s attack is that the gangs allowed journalists access to document the death and destruction they wrought. For the first time in some years – I’d say since journalists like my colleague Dieu-Nalio Chery were forced to flee Haiti – we’re getting professional photos of corpses lining the streets, of women literally cowering in corners, of the Colombian assassination suspects too scared to leave the prison.
Just before and during the attacks, the two factions behind them — under the Viv Ansam alliance between G9 and G-Pep — coordinated which neighborhoods to strike via WhatsApp and social media groups. For days and weeks prior, as deployment talks progressed, the gangs sent out warnings about overthrowing the government using counterfeit liberation messages. For years, in fact, they’ve wanted a place at legit political negotiation tables, deservedly or not, so they would be factored in the international community’s plans for Haiti.
So now, come now, everyone. What did we expect? Let’s sensationalize less and focus more on the unsexy, but important steps toward stability. Ask questions like what’s the breakdown of the $600 million annual budget for the Kenya-led mission?
First, let’s get on the same page.
Multinational force overdue
The gangsterization of Haiti is a well-documented phenomenon. We know, from our acclaimed series in 2022, that these gangs are very strategic, structured and savvy criminal organizations with financial backing from some very high profile, moneyed people. Thus, the economic sanctions of late imposed on some in the elite. These groups, we said back in 2022, operate more like Community-Embedded Transnational Armed Groups, or CETAG, which typically exert power through corrupt politicians in legitimate institutions. But facing a political vacuum, no wonder Haiti’s gangs are going directly for a power grab.
Haitians, in Haiti and abroad. We’ve seen it in the stories about babies drowning as desperate parents run away from indiscriminate bullets and fires set to their villages. We’ve seen it in the many families who trek to Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s office, begging for help and sleeping there in huddled masses, only to find no recourse or succor from the head of the state.
There’s a reason that, say what you will about Henry’s controversial tenure, his ask for an armed force to help fight these gangs makes sense. The problem is that the gangs alone aren’t Haiti’s key issue in the long run. We have to deal with the structural kleptocracy, rampant corruption and many -isms eating away at the country to have a real chance at long-term stability. But I digress…
The 300 or so gangs running around Haiti’s capital have been in charge of the country indirectly for years, long before the past week’s chaos. If there was any one turning point to note recently, it was in 2022, when gangs took over the judicial headquarters. The facility was left in shambles, lawyers and judges couldn’t report to work, entire drawers of case files were destroyed.
The gang claiming responsibility, 5 Segond, shot and posted online videos of them at the property, acting like they were in a poorly produced rap music video.
Even worse, nothing happened to them. No one was held accountable for any of it. So what did we expect to happen in a place that doesn’t have any elected officials, no president and an unpopular Prime Minister? Of course the gangs are going to be emboldened and take over formally. So will the so-called political opposition, wannabe freedom fighters and anyone else with access to guns and money.
Let’s get Haiti off life support
Haiti has been on life-support for a very, very long time. Its ills have been right there for everyone to see, even more so for the media covering it – in and out of Haiti. In 2023, according to the U.N., more than 8,400 people in Haiti were killed, injured, kidnapped or otherwise victimized by gang violence, a 122 percent increase over 2022. As we entered this year, 1,008 were killed or injured in January alone, making it the most violent month on record.
Yes, setting free inmates from jail is news. Massacring an untold number of people is news. We can’t dismiss how horrendous these acts are, but none of that is really new news in Haiti. To cast the prison invasion as the height of Haiti’s worst is admitting how terribly ignorant the world is to the country’s condition. It undermines the hundreds of thousands who’ve been crying out for years against the rampant lawlessness, warlike atrocities, lynchings, immolations, sexual violence, slaughter and so many other crimes against humanity many Haitians endure every day.
In the end, that’s why the ignorance about how bad things have gotten is so off-putting and frankly bad journalism. It reiterates the saddest aspect of Haiti’s condition: That people don’t know or care enough about the country to activate real solutions.
It hurts to acknowledge this. If there’s one silver lining, it’s that this latest episode, brought to us by the gangs themselves, clearly displays the culmination of the gangs’ rise to power over decades. It can bring awareness to people who oppose the audacity of strongmen invading the halls of power.
I hope too that this latest “what’s wrong with Haiti” moment serves as one more reason to pursue the real actions required to stop the madness, with more urgency. I hope regular people watching all over the world feel the need to push their governments to support stabilizing Haiti. We’re at a critical window with this deployment, but even if someone cares only for a moment, that might just be long enough to make a difference in the pace and power of the force.”
Here I must rebut the notion that the greatest mass prison break in modern history was a disaster for the cause of liberation in Haiti; modeled on the storming of the Bastille as it was, and intended to destabilize a corrupt colonialist regime, and in accord with the principle that we must throw open the gates of our prisons where ever we may find them, I believe this action was the final trigger event of Haiti’s liberation.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
As written by Peter Beaumont in The Guardian, in an article entitled Can Haiti avoid history repeating as burning streets meet vying elites?; “Scenes of unrest in Haiti, as Ariel Henry announced his resignation as prime minister amid a violent gang uprising, have brought a strong sense of deja vu.
An international proposal for a transitional council to rule the country appeared to be crumbling on Wednesday. But those jostling for influence are familiar figures associated with political parties, coalitions, and the tiny oligarchic business elite that have been key players in the country’s long-running crisis of political legitimacy.
Haiti has been here before, repeatedly, in the turbulent decades since the 1986 fall of the François Duvalier dictatorship. There have been coups, transitional governments (sometimes military), ineffectual leaders and politicians who have cynically employed criminal gangs to pursue power.
The leftwing president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former parish priest and anti-poverty champion, employed armed gangs known as “chimères” – ghosts – and established a template for political violence when conflict flared up.
Henry’s predecessor, Jovenel Moïse, who was assassinated by Colombian mercenaries in 2021, reportedly was allied with the G9 gang alliance, which in turn played a key role in Henry’s removal. Figures seen as potentially influential in the country’s next chapter are said to have their own gang links.
All of which makes it likely that, whether or not the gangs that pushed out Henry are explicitly given a seat at the table – as they have demanded – the threat of violence will remain unless there is a radical rethinking of political accountability in Haiti.
Among the factions jockeying for influence is the Platfòm Pitit Desalin party, run by the former senator and presidential candidate Moïse Jean-Charles, an ally of Guy Philippe, a former police officer and coup leader with ties to politicians and the business elite. Philippe was instrumental in the 2004 rebellion against Aristide and was recently released from a US prison having served time after pleading guilty to money laundering.
In a video posted on social media, Philippe rejected a proposed transitional council which had been backed by the Caribbean regional bloc and the US.
“The decision of Caricom is not our decision,” he said. “Haitians will decide who will govern Haiti.”
Underpinning the succession of crises of governance is a more urgent issue: the fact that since US marines landed in Haiti in 1915 to start a 19-year occupation, Washington has played a key role in either anointing or sustaining the country’s leaders, who have mostly emerged from the same small elite.
Among those who have criticised the latest negotiations for a transitional council has been Jake Johnston, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. In a blogpost this week, he wrote: “Though negotiations have been taking place for the better part of a week, none of the participants or discussions has been made public, leaving the vast majority of Haitians in the dark.”
Johnston added: “It was US and foreign support for Henry that pushed the situation to its dire state. But rather than letting a truly Haitian-led process play out, those same foreign powers have opted for a stability pact that, it would seem, is likely to lock in an unsustainable status quo at least in the short term.”
Washington and the wider international community have bet heavily on a Kenyan-led intervention force to stabilise Haiti. That has been put on hold since Henry’s resignation, although Kenya’s president, William Ruto, insisted on Wednesday that his country remained committed to the plan. But previous interventions have had troubled histories: a 2004-17 UN mission was tarnished by widespread sexual misconduct allegations, and sewage from a UN camp was implicated in a cholera outbreak that killed nearly 10,000 people.
Dr Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow for Latin America at the Chatham House thinktank, is among those who sees history being repeated. “We are seeing all the usual suspects,” he said, adding that “in moments of crisis the void is filled by the old guard of the ancient elite”.
Sabatini is sceptical too of the “diplomatic laziness” that in Haiti has tended to gravitate towards familiar political faces from a discredited political system – and the international community’s insistence that elections would magically produce a solution to Haiti’s chronic lack of political representation and accountability.
Negotiations in Jamaica that led to Henry’s resignation were aimed in large part at ending the current gang uprising, but he suggested that holding elections quickly could actually empower the gangs.
“The rather ad hoc effort to cobble together an exit strategy for the current president and move to elections quickly risks opening up space for gangs. They have the organisation and the rhetoric,” said Sabatini, who described Jimmy Chérizier – the leader of the G9 Family and Allies gang and apparent architect of the current unrest – as an effective “political entrepreneur” in a country lacking any social mechanisms to generate significant political renewal or reform.
In large part, that is intimately bound up with the long-term failure of Haitian state institutions, and with the international donor community that has long bypassed them. With so many services provided either by NGOs or by the private sector, ordinary and impoverished Haitians have long been excluded as stakeholders in their own political system – a vacuum into which the gangs have interposed themselves.
On Monday, Chérizier made it clear in an impromptu press conference that he regarded himself as a key player. “The Haitian people will choose who will govern them,” he warned.”
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
What to know about the crisis of violence, politics and hunger engulfing Haiti
De la danse dans les rues et suffisamment de coups de feu pour remplacer les pétards d’un défilé du Nouvel An chinois.
Réjouis-toi, ô Haïti, car tu es désormais libre et ton avenir t’appartient.
Nous voici désormais tous dans des zones autonomes vivantes, et même si en ce moment de victoire nous sommes devenus fous et ingouvernables, la question demeure de savoir ce que nous ferons de notre pouvoir, à l’aube.
En fin de compte, tout ce qui compte, c’est ce que nous faisons de notre peur et comment nous utilisons notre pouvoir.
Qui voulons-nous devenir, nous les humains, maîtres et esclaves, ou une société libre d’égaux garants des droits humains universels de chacun ?
Promulguons des renversements d’ordre, jouons des tours qui ouvrent les portes de nos prisons aux voies du changement, poursuivons la vocation sacrée de celui qui dit la vérité, accomplissons les quatre devoirs d’un citoyen ; remettre en question l’autorité, dénoncer l’autorité, se moquer de l’autorité et défier l’autorité, et rêver à nouveau de la réimagination et de la transformation de nous-mêmes, de notre société et des systèmes et structures de notre civilisation.
Apportons le Chaos.
En ce moment de prise de pouvoir, je considère le Chaos comme une force perturbatrice de fracture et de changement qui nous a dépouillés de nos mensonges pour révéler les vérités fragiles de notre humanité en dessous, et qui peut être exploitée pour la liberté ou la tyrannie par la façon dont nous réagissons. en tant qu’espèce et civilisation mondiale. Comme l’écrit Guillermo del Toro dans Carnival Row, le chaos est le grand espoir des impuissants.
Si nous pouvons danser notre vrai et secret moi devant la scène du monde ce soir-là, pourquoi pas tous les soirs ?
Célébrez avec nous la libération d’Haïti comme une période liminale et transformatrice d’exploration d’inconnus au-delà des frontières de l’Interdit, du défi à l’autorité, du sabotage des hiérarchies, des systèmes d’oppression, des états carcéraux de force et de contrôle, et de la violation des droits de l’homme. normes.
Réjouissez-vous avec nous en cette période de renversements d’ordre à travers la performance d’Actes de Transgression et de Chaos. Forgeons de nouvelles vérités, détruisons et créons nous-mêmes et transformons les systèmes et les structures de l’oppression et de la tyrannie coloniales, du patriarcat et de la terreur suprémaciste blanche, des forces de l’altérité exclusive et des fascismes du sang, de la foi et du sol, en une société libre, diversifiée et inclusive. équivaut à.
Dansez avec nous dans la joie, la révolution et l’effroi des chevaux.
Alors que beaucoup ont écrit sur l’effondrement de l’ordre en Haïti en termes de perte de contrôle de la police en tant que exécutrice corrompue et brutale de la richesse, du pouvoir et des privilèges de l’élite, et de délégitimation de l’autorité en tant que marionnette kleptocratique de l’impérialisme américain à travers la lutte de libération anticoloniale, même ceux qui parlent de notre révolution comme d’une époque apolitique de bandes criminelles et plaident pour une plus grande répression de la dissidence et une armée d’occupation mercenaire du Kenya, comme l’a fait le Premier ministre aujourd’hui déchu et en exil Ariel Henry, reconnaissent les systèmes d’oppression et puissance inégale dans laquelle notre révolution prend son origine.
Ici, je dois réfuter l’idée selon laquelle la plus grande évasion massive de prison de l’histoire moderne a été un désastre pour la cause de la libération en Haïti ; calquée sur la prise de la Bastille telle qu’elle fut, et destinée à déstabiliser un régime colonialiste corrompu, et conformément au principe selon lequel nous devons ouvrir grand les portes de nos prisons partout où nous pouvons les trouver, je crois que cette action était la dernière événement déclencheur de la libération d’Haïti.
La loi est au service du pouvoir, l’ordre s’approprie et il n’y a pas d’autorité juste.
Car nous sommes nombreux, nous regardons et nous sommes l’avenir.
Here I began, at the door to the Absurd, and I look back now from the other side, after a lifetime of strangeness, among the freaks and monsters myself; America was always an illusion, a figment of lies, distorted shapes in the funhouse of our Wilderness of Mirrors, echoes and reflections which capture, possess, and falsify, but which also reveal truths and extend us into the Infinite among chasms of darkness.
Among my Defining Moments are those I categorize as By Encounters with Possible Selves As Shaping Forces of Becoming Human, figures and images of the possibilities of our myriad future selves as reflected in the eyes of others with whom we share imaginal spaces.
We choose as our companions through life those who represent qualities and figures of human being, meaning, and value we wish to integrate in our becoming; those who perform roles we wish to step into.
Herein I number the conversations and personal relationships with those who shaped me and left upon me their mark of strangeness; first among them an influence of my childhood, Edward Albee, as I watched my father direct his plays and listened to their conversations.
With a title taken from the song Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? in the 1933 Disney short film Three Little Pigs, where two of the pigs are convinced they’re safe from the wolf in their straw and twig houses, you know that threatening truths will undo the house of illusions George and Martha, emblematic founders of America, have built around themselves.
As written by Ben Brantley in The New York Times; “Mr. Albee has unsparingly considered subjects outside the average theatergoer’s comfort zone: the capacity for sadism and violence within American society; the fluidness of human identity; the dangerous irrationality of sexual attraction and, always, the irrefutable presence of death.”
In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee has given us the Great American Play, a mirror in which we see ourselves as we are rather than the illusions we have spun around and through ourselves as a defensive mask. It is about the historical and political consequences of a lie we told at our founding about freedom and equality in a government designed to leave structural power asymmetries of wealth, race, and gender untouched; about the human cost of dysfunctional relationships based on unequal power and falsificaltion, and about the implications for meaning and being when the personal and political realms of action collide and change each other.
This play is a masterpiece, and I think we should all watch the film in school before we go to vote for the first time, and as an ongoing national ritual observance every four years before the polls open in our Presidential elections. It reminds us that our democracy is a performance, which deceives, commodifies, and dehumanizes us, and manufactures consent to be enslaved.
We could by our actions make our values and ideals real as lived truths in a free society of equals, but first we must escape and bring a Reckoning for the legacies of our history.
In this context I think of America as represented in Edward Albee’s iconic play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. My father directed some of his plays, and I listened intently to their conversations during rehearsals from a center front seat in the theatre, from the very young age of four, and memorizing everything as texts which overwrote my own thinking, conversations which interrogated Albee’s direct influences and references among his fellow Absurdists Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter.
The line of transmission of Absurdist elements in literature originates with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll, Nikolai Gogol, and Franz Kafka, diverges from the limits of Humanism with Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Witold Gombrowicz, Albert Camus, Albee and his ilk as previously cited, diverged from the main tradition as Nihilism in Samuel Beckett, Thomas Ligotti, and Kobo Abe, and continues today in the works of Haruki Murakami, Kurt Vonnegut, and Elif Shafak.
Of my adventures as a theatre brat I shall recount here only one; during my father’s direction of The Sandbox my mother asked Edward Albee if she could have a picture taken with him, whereupon he pointed to the gallery along the theatre entrance and said, “Let’s take it in front of the Jackson Pollock; it looks like Martha’s mind.” For Edward Albee, whose works were among those I could recite verbatim at the age of four, literally as I used to sit in at rehearsals and give the actors their lines if someone forgot, the failure of order in both political and psychological terms was a symptom of Sartrean bad faith.
Here also Albee leads us through a labyrinth of mirrors, a funhouse of distorted images, both comical and grotesque, images which capture and reflect, assimilating or robbing us of our uniqueness in infinite regress to steal our souls, which through his magic of seeing our true selves becomes a Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror as in in Anderson’s The Snow Queen, fragmented images which multiply our possibilities of becoming human.
I particularly like the following lines from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, laden with satire of our falsification through invented histories and authorized identities, and influential to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra;
“Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don’t know the difference.
George: No, but we must carry on as though we did.
Martha: Amen.”
Do see the iconic 1966 film adaptation starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; I used to show it to high school students on day one of American History.
And I would say in preface to the class; Here we see images of the history from which must emerge to become human as self-created and self-owned beings; histories which we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails, with legacies of unequal power and multigenerational epigenetic trauma.
I want you to seize these images and reclaim them for your own. Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We are gathered here to study history and our place in it, and to interrogate our informing, motivating, and shaping sources as stories, to perform the four primary duties of a citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and to be what Foucault called truth tellers.
So, I have a film for you which models how to perform these roles, and this is where we will begin our study of American History, with the Original Lie which founded our nation, for there is no equality under the law if there is no social equality in praxis, and our magnificent reinventions of our civilization and ourselves in America’s founding documents leave vast systems of unequal power unchanged; class, race, and gender among others. This is who we are, and it falls to each of us to make a better future than we have the past; to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.
Such was my annual speech in preface to the study of American history.
Also informative and insightful, Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee, includes his ideas about Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Sam Shepherd, as well as autobiographical writings about his own life, work, and worldview.
Finally, written four decades after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, there is his last and greatest work, displaying the final form of his political psychology and an evolution of all the themes that have come before in his long career as a playwright, like a summa theologica of our time; The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?
The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? is a Greek tragedy in structure which employs the methods of comedy to subversive ends, about the uncontrollable, totalizing nature of love and passion as a bringer of chaos and renewer of the world, sweeping all before it like a tidal wave.
Nowhere in his cannon of work is Edward Albee’s intention more clear; to empower and liberate us both personally and politically. As an examination of Keats’ ideal of Love it is insightful and superb; as an extension and interrogation of the themes of Thomas Mann in Death in Venice and his reinterpreter Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita it is a brilliant satire and political fable. Herein he restates his primary insight; that life is a struggle for control and ownership of identity, the persona or mask that is worn in Greek theatre, between ourselves and our society.
As written by the Edward Albee Society, On The Goat of Who Is Sylvia?; “The play is about love, and loss, the limits of our tolerance and who, indeed, we really are.” Indeed, while bestiality is one of the many topics addressed in Albee’s play, the playwright’s main objective is more aligned with imagining ourselves “subject to circumstances outside our own comfort zones.”
In an interview with Charlie Rose focused on The Goat’s 2002 New York premiere, Albee stated, “Imagine what you can’t imagine. Imagine that, all of a sudden, you found yourself in love with a Martian, in love with something you can’t conceive of. I want everybody to be able to think about what they can’t imagine and what they have buried deep as being intolerable and insufferable. I want them to just think freshly and newly about it.”
Even the play’s title echoes this sense of multiplicity in terms of its meaning. Albee said in his interview with Charlie Rose, “A goat is two things. A goat is the animal, and, also, I believe a person can be a goat, the butt of a situation.” Florescu offers a more symbolic definition of the word goat: “Sylvia is everybody’s goat, ready to unleash our wildest desires, potentially dissolving, or, at least, diminishing the ravaging effects of our gregarious, unhealthy regimented selves.” Zinman suggests that the use of the term “goat” could also refer to “scapegoat”: “The goat is wholly innocent, victimized by Martin’s obsessive love and Stevie’s murderous revenge.” Yet, in an advertisement created by The Philadelphia Theatre Company for their production, a picture of a goat “with a snapshot of the play’s characters hanging out of its mouth, suggesting that a goat, who will, notoriously, eat anything, has devoured this family alive,” suggests the personification of the goat and, thus, Sylvia’s own responsibility for the events that take place. In addition, the name Sylvia, Zinman argues, references Shakespeare’s pastoral vision in Two Gentlemen of Verona.
As stated by Esbjornson, The Goat is ultimately meant to be a tragedy. Even the set he and John Arnone collaborated on had columns to provide a “classical quality to it, a Greek-tragedy quality.” Zinman states, “In ancient Greek tragedy, the hero, at the height of his happiness, often complacent in his smooth fortunate life, undergoes a sudden reversal of fortunes.” Indeed, once Martin confesses his affair to Ross, his fate is no longer his own. According to Aristotle, he must then “‘fall from a great height,’” which Martin does; he is reduced from an award-winning architect to a mere sexual deviant. Whereas Martin acts more as a tragic hero, Ross, on the other hand, takes the place of the chorus “representing the vox populi and of setting the wheels of tragedy in motion.”
Albee thinks a play can be called political only if “…it makes people think differently enough about things so that their life alters including their politics.” In order to make a difference in a contemporary society so accustomed to debunking generally accepted restrictions, Albee had to “…go even further afield than Nabokov to find a taboo still standing.” In Zinman’s opinion, Albee’s view is that sexuality is “…more complex, far wider, deeper, and less governable than we generally think.” Albee’s use of bestiality is meant to parallel society’s view of homosexuality which “appear[s] normal by comparison.” Gainor furthers her argument by stating that it is through bestiality that Martin “literalizes his extremity of alienation and longing.” By experiencing prejudice for his own sexual proclivities, Martin must “accept his son’s desires with equanimity, applying his newly gained insights on dominant and marginal practices.”
In this way, Martin and Billy can seek to rebuild their relationship. Robinson writes of The Goat: “Albee’s play insists that it is about something beyond a domestic crisis that can be cordoned off and concealed from the world – though it is about that too. We see that the personal is political, yes, but also something more: that what is private about our lives only comes to have meaning as we enter the public sphere and this public sphere enters us.” Ultimately, as Robinson states, The Goat is meant to affect both the micro and macro levels of society in a way that encourages progressive thinking even in uncertain times. “
And on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, also from the EAS website; “George and Martha revel in the dissection of the truth and illusion that have kept them bound in their fiery marriage. The illusionary component of George and Martha’s relationship is best symbolized by their imaginary son. George, jarred by Martha’s breaking of their rule, decides to kill off or “exorcise” their son, thus explaining the significance of Act III’s title. Adler writes, “…George exorcises the child not only to kill the illusion and live in reality, but to destroy one reality—that in which he has failed to exercise the strength necessary to make the marriage creative even without children–and create a new reality to take its place. George, through mapping out for Nick and Honey the way to redirect their lives, achieves for Martha and himself a radical redirection of their own.” Unlike Martha and George who are universally acknowledged by critics as having married for love, Nick and Honey’s marriage was only initiated because of Honey’s pregnancy coupled by her father’s wealth. George tries to steer Nick and Honey away from the fate that he and Martha are currently battling: the use of illusion as a weapon against each other. Martha, too, as Hoorvash and Porgiv comment, “…senses that something is lacking, not merely in her marriage or her life, but also in the lives of everyone else.” Paolucci further asserts: “The younger couple mirror our own embarrassment and own public selves; Martha and George, our private anguish.” In an interview with Rakesh H. Solomon, Albee comments on George and Martha’s imaginary son as a metaphor for this profound discontentment: “There is a distinction between the death of a metaphor and the death of a real child. And the play for me is more touching and more chilling if it is the death of the metaphor.” George’s shattering of the illusion of his and Martha’s son is his answer to Martha’s desire for him to “…assert his strength” against her “…many masculine qualities…[which] feeds off of George’s emasculation.” The duality of George’s personality allows for a breadth of interpretations for actors. Albee comments: “‘Once you’ve played George in my play no other role with the possible exception of Hamlet will challenge you quite as much as far as magnitude of text, complexity of language and the challenge of working on many planes at the same time.’”
George and Martha’s inability to conceive also plays into the extended metaphor of Albee’s play, suggesting that “…sterility and fertility are simply metaphors for social stagnation and progress, respectively. George’s solution, rather, is closer to a religious one, which has always been part of the American ideology” Albee’s inspiration for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was the tumultuous state of American society during the 1960s. Dircks writes of Albee: “Albee saw an American society as sustaining itself on national illusions of prosperity and equality; here too, the situation demanded an honest confrontation of problems and a heightened state of communication.” Zinman, too, states, “Albee’s political and cultural agenda is woven into the characters’ preoccupations, and thus into the dialogue.” Thus, there can be no mistaking Albee’s allusion to George and Martha Washington, the first couple of the United States. Still, other critics attribute Albee’s inspiration to not just American politics but also to Virginia Woolf, herself, and her short story: “Lappin and Lapinova.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? remains an impactful script that speaks to universal conflicts each generation must face: Who are we? What do we represent? and What will our futures hold?”
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? With Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton
On this day of One 1445 Hijri, Ramadan begins; a month of peace, fasting, prayers, celebrations of family and community, and acts of charity and kindness throughout the Islamic diaspora. Among humankind’s most universal global rituals of interdependence and the redemptive and transformative power of love, it retains its ancient origins as a time of truce and a festival of peace, in which war and the social use of force and violence are abandoned and solidarity, compassion, and mercy celebrated.
I think of these things as meanings of Ramadan in the context in which I first participated in it, in solidarity with a community under siege and foreign invasion in Kashmir over thirty years ago, and of all the peoples throughout the world who are not free to live and believe as they choose, the Uighur of Xinjiang and the Rohingya of Myanmar among them, of places where sectarian divisions have been exploited by imperial powers in conflicts of dominion like Yemen and Syria, and of the tragedy of Occupied Palestine and Israel’s genocidal Gaza War.
Humankind needs love, and its forms as mercy, compassion, empathy, community, solidarity, and trust, and all the hope we can salvage from the jaws of our destruction and the shadows of our fear and grief.
Like all things which bear the legacies of our history Ramadan has many other meanings, but this above all; the design of our humanity is such that we are stewards of each other, bearers of wounds which open us to the pain of others, but bearers also of the redemptive and transformative power of love which can heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī; “Let the beauty we love be what we do.”
Peace be upon us all.
Arabic:
11 آذار (مارس) 2024 طقوس التكافل واللطف ورموز قوة الحب التعويضية والتحويلية في مداواة جراح إنسانيتنا وانكسار العالم
رمضان مبارك يا أصدقاء.
في مثل هذا اليوم من 1445 هـ يبدأ شهر رمضان. شهر من السلام والصوم والصلاة واحتفالات الأسرة والمجتمع والأعمال الخيرية والعطف في جميع أنحاء الشتات الإسلامي. من بين الطقوس العالمية الأكثر عالمية للترابط والقوة التعويضية والتحويلية للحب ، فإنه يحتفظ بأصوله القديمة كوقت للهدنة ومهرجان للسلام ، حيث يتم التخلي عن الحرب والاستخدام الاجتماعي للقوة والعنف والتضامن والرحمة واحتفل بالرحمة.
أفكر في هذه الأشياء على أنها معاني رمضان في السياق الذي شاركت فيه لأول مرة ، تضامنيًا مع مجتمع محاصر وغزو أجنبي في كشمير منذ أكثر من ثلاثين عامًا ، وجميع شعوب العالم الذين ليسوا أحرارًا في يعيشون ويؤمنون كما يختارون ، من بينهم الأويغور في شينجيانغ والروهينجا في ميانمار ، بالأماكن التي تم فيها استغلال الانقسامات الطائفية من قبل القوى الإمبريالية في صراعات الهيمنة مثل اليمن وسوريا ، ومأساة فلسطين المحتلة.
يحتاج الجنس البشري إلى الحب ، وأشكاله كرحمة ورحمة وتعاطف ومجتمع وتضامن وثقة ، وكل أمل يمكننا إنقاذه من فكي دمارنا وظلال خوفنا وحزننا.
مثل كل الأشياء التي تحمل موروثات تاريخنا ، فإن رمضان له معاني أخرى كثيرة ، ولكن هذا قبل كل شيء ؛ إن تصميم إنسانيتنا يجعلنا وكلاء لبعضنا البعض ، وحاملين للجروح التي تفتحنا على آلام الآخرين ، ولكننا أيضًا حاملون لقوة الحب التعويضية والتغييرية التي يمكن أن تشفي عيوب إنسانيتنا وانكسار العالم.
كما كتبه جلال الدين محمد الرومي. “دع الجمال الذي نحبه يكون ما نفعله”.
السلام علينا جميعا.
هنا مرة أخرى جزء من قصيدتي الحب ينتصر على مر الزمن ؛
لم يتم تصميم البشر ليكونوا بمفردهم
لاننا ابواب تفتح بعضنا بعضا
ونعيد بعضنا البعض لأنفسنا في عالم غير مبال
عندما نكون متوحشين ومكسورين وضائعين ؛
الحب هو أعظم قوة لجميع القوى
التي تشكل وتحفز وتعلم الكائنات الحية
الحب يخلق ، الحب يعوض ، الحب يتحول ،
ينتصر الحب على علم أمراض انفصالنا
من الجمال ، من اللامتناهي ، ومن المجتمع البشري ؛
ينتصر الحب بمرور الوقت.
Persian:
11 مارس 2024 آیینهای وابستگی متقابل و مهربانی و تمثیلهای قدرت رستگاری و دگرگونکننده عشق در التیام زخمهای انسانیت ما و شکستگیهای جهان
مبارک رمضان دوستان.
در این روز 1444 هجری قمری، ماه رمضان آغاز می شود. ماه صلح، روزه، نماز، جشن خانواده و اجتماع و احسان و احسان در سراسر غربت اسلامی. در میان جهانی ترین آیین های جهانی بشر برای وابستگی متقابل و قدرت رستگاری و دگرگون کننده عشق، خاستگاه باستانی خود را به عنوان زمان آتش بس و جشنواره صلح حفظ می کند که در آن جنگ و استفاده اجتماعی از زور و خشونت کنار گذاشته می شود و همبستگی، شفقت. ، و رحمت جشن گرفت.
من این موارد را به معنای معنای ماه رمضان در زمینه ای که برای اولین بار در آن شرکت کردم ، در همبستگی با جامعه تحت محاصره و حمله خارجی بیش از سی سال پیش در کشمیر ، و همه مردم در سراسر جهان که آزاد نیستند ، در آن شرکت کنم. همانطور که انتخاب می کنند ، اویغور سین کیانگ و روهینگیای میانمار در میان آنها زندگی کنند و باور کنند ، مکانهایی که در آن اختلافات فرقه ای توسط نیروهای امپراتوری در درگیری های سلطه مانند یمن و سوریه مورد بهره برداری قرار گرفته است و فاجعه فلسطین اشغالی.
بشریت به عشق ، و اشکال آن مانند رحمت ، شفقت ، همدلی ، اجتماع ، همبستگی و اعتماد ، و همه امیدهایی که می توانیم از آرواره های نابودی و سایه های ترس و غم خود نجات دهیم ، نیاز دارد.
مانند همه چیزهایی که میراث تاریخ ما را به همراه دارند ، ماه رمضان معانی بسیاری دیگری نیز دارد ، اما این بیش از هر چیز دیگری است. طراحی انسانیت ما به گونه ای است که ما مهماندار یکدیگر هستیم ، حامل زخمهایی هستیم که ما را به درد دیگران باز می کند ، اما همچنین حامل قدرت رستگاری و تحول گرایانه عشق است که می تواند نقایص انسانیت ما و شکسته شدن جهان.
همانطور که جلال الدین محمد رامی نوشته است؛ “بگذارید زیبایی که دوست داریم همان کاری باشد که انجام می دهیم.”
درود بر همه ما
در اینجا دوباره قطعه ای از شعر من عشق با گذشت زمان پیروز می شود.
انسان ها به گونه ای طراحی نشده اند که تنها باشند
زیرا ما درهایی هستیم که یکدیگر را باز می کنیم
و در جهانی بی تفاوت یکدیگر را به خودمان برگردانیم
وقتی وحشی و شکسته و گم شویم
عشق بزرگترین قدرت همه نیروهاست
که موجودات زنده را شکل می دهد ، ایجاد انگیزه می کند و آنها را آگاه می کند
عشق ایجاد می کند ، عشق بازخرید می شود ، عشق تغییر شکل می دهد ،
عشق بر آسیب شناسی قطع ارتباط ما پیروز می شود
از زیبایی ، از بینهایت و از جامعه بشریت ؛
عشق با گذشت زمان پیروز می شود.
Turkish:
11 Mart 2024 Karşılıklı Bağımlılık ve Nezaket Ritüelleri ve İnsanlığımızın Yaralarını ve Dünyanın Kırıklığını İyileştirmede Sevginin Kurtarıcı ve Dönüştürücü Gücünün Alegorileri
Arkadaşlar Mübarek Ramazan.
Hicri 1444 yılının bu gününde Ramazan başlar; İslam diasporası boyunca barış, oruç, dualar, aile ve topluluk kutlamaları ve hayırseverlik ve nezaket eylemlerinin olduğu bir aydır. İnsanoğlunun en evrensel küresel karşılıklı bağımlılık ritüelleri ve sevginin kurtarıcı ve dönüştürücü gücü arasında, savaşın ve güç ve şiddetin toplumsal kullanımının terk edildiği, dayanışmanın, merhametin ve merhametin olduğu bir ateşkes zamanı ve bir barış festivali olarak kadim kökenlerini koruyor. ve merhamet kutlandı.
Bunları, ilk katıldığım bağlamda, otuz yılı aşkın bir süre önce Keşmir’de kuşatma altında olan ve yabancı işgali altındaki bir toplulukla ve özgür olmayan dünyadaki tüm halklarla dayanışma içinde Ramazan’ın anlamları olarak düşünüyorum. Yemen ve Suriye gibi egemenlik çatışmalarında ve İşgal Altındaki Filistin trajedisinde, emperyal güçler tarafından mezhepsel bölünmelerin sömürüldüğü yerlerde, Sincan Uygurları ve Myanmarlı Rohingyalar, seçtikleri gibi yaşıyor ve inanıyorlar.
İnsanlığın sevgiye ve merhamet, şefkat, empati, topluluk, dayanışma ve güven biçimlerine ve yıkımımızın çenelerinden ve korku ve kederimizin gölgelerinden kurtarabileceğimiz tüm umutlara ihtiyacı vardır.
Tarihimizin mirasını taşıyan her şey gibi Ramazan’ın da pek çok anlamı vardır ama her şeyden önce; insanlığımızın tasarımı öyledir ki, birbirimizin hizmetkarları, bizi başkalarının acısına açan yaraların taşıyıcılarıyız, aynı zamanda insanlığımızın kusurlarını ve kırılganlığı iyileştirebilen sevginin kurtarıcı ve dönüştürücü gücünün taşıyıcılarıyız. Dünya.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rmī’nin yazdığı gibi; “Sevdiğimiz güzellik yaptığımız şey olsun.”
Hepimizin selamı olsun.
Urdu
11 مارچ 2024 باہمی انحصار اور مہربانی کی رسومات اور ہماری انسانیت اور دنیا کے ٹوٹنے کے زخموں کو مندمل کرنے میں محبت کی مخلصی اور تبدیلی کی طاقت کی علامتیں
رمضان مبارک، دوستو۔
اس دن 1445 ہجری کو رمضان المبارک شروع ہوتا ہے۔ امن کا مہینہ، روزے، دعائیں، خاندان اور برادری کی تقریبات، اور اسلامی ڈاسپورا میں خیرات اور احسان کے اعمال۔ بنی نوع انسان کی باہمی انحصار کی سب سے عالمگیر عالمی رسومات اور محبت کی چھٹکارا اور تبدیلی کی طاقت کے درمیان، یہ اپنی قدیم ابتدا کو جنگ بندی کے وقت اور امن کے تہوار کے طور پر برقرار رکھتا ہے، جس میں جنگ اور طاقت اور تشدد کے سماجی استعمال کو ترک کر دیا جاتا ہے اور یکجہتی، ہمدردی ، اور رحمت منائی گئی۔
میں ان چیزوں کو رمضان کے اس تناظر میں سمجھتا ہوں جس میں میں نے پہلی بار اس میں شرکت کی تھی، تیس سال قبل کشمیر میں محاصرے اور غیر ملکی حملے کی زد میں رہنے والی کمیونٹی کے ساتھ اظہار یکجہتی کے لیے، اور دنیا بھر کے تمام لوگوں کے ساتھ جو آزاد نہیں ہیں۔ اپنی مرضی کے مطابق جیو اور یقین کرو، سنکیانگ کے ایغور اور ان میں سے میانمار کے روہنگیا، ان جگہوں پر جہاں یمن اور شام جیسے تسلط کے تنازعات اور مقبوضہ فلسطین کے المیے میں سامراجی طاقتوں کے ذریعہ فرقہ وارانہ تقسیم کا استحصال کیا گیا ہے۔
بنی نوع انسان کو محبت کی ضرورت ہے، اور اس کی شکلیں رحم، ہمدردی، ہمدردی، برادری، یکجہتی، اور اعتماد، اور وہ تمام امیدیں جن سے ہم اپنی تباہی کے جبڑوں اور اپنے خوف اور غم کے سائے سے نجات حاصل کر سکتے ہیں۔
ہماری تاریخ کی وراثت رکھنے والی تمام چیزوں کی طرح رمضان المبارک کے اور بھی بہت سے معنی ہیں لیکن یہ سب سے بڑھ کر۔ ہماری انسانیت کا ڈیزائن ایسا ہے کہ ہم ایک دوسرے کے محافظ ہیں، زخموں کے علمبردار ہیں جو ہمیں دوسروں کے درد کے لیے کھولتے ہیں، لیکن محبت کی نجات اور تبدیلی کی طاقت کے علمبردار بھی ہیں جو ہماری انسانیت کی خامیوں اور ٹوٹ پھوٹ کو دور کر سکتی ہے۔ دنیا.
جیسا کہ جلال الدین محمد رومی نے لکھا ہے۔ “جس خوبصورتی کو ہم پسند کرتے ہیں وہی ہونے دیں جو ہم کرتے ہیں۔”
ہم سب پر سلامتی ہو۔
April 3 2022 Reply To An Accusation of Preaching
My essay on Ramadan as an institution of universal peace yesterday found an unforeseen question from an angle I never imagined, always an event to be cherished, savored, and given reign to provoke thought;
“Is preaching allowed in this group?”
To this I replied; I hope not. Herein I speak of a time of truce and peace, from a place of great horror in Mariupol. We humans must affirm our interdependence and universality if we are ever to abandon the social use of force and violence.
For myself, Ramadan is an example for us all from a culture which is reviled and demonized as otherness by our own, an example of fear weaponized in service to authority, the carceral state, and wars of imperial conquest and dominion.
All I ask us to believe is that love is better than hate, mercy better than revenge, solidarity better than division.
To this I received a reply; “So you answer with more preaching. Personally I find religion repugnant and your woo woo unrealistic.”
Here is my answer; I too generally mislike religion as authority and institutional power. Gott Mitt Uns; it is humankinds oldest terror, for it permits anything, as Voltaire teaches us in his famous principle “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. Certainly this is true of America’s new religion, QAnon, and its uses in the fascist subversion of democracy.
As to woo woo, my life work and field of study is the origin of evil, a legacy of working through early trauma and near-death experiences, which I attribute to the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; and as his great operatic myth allegorizes, power over others requires the renunciation of love. This suggests a correlate; love can redeem the flaws of our humanity and answer division with solidarity.
Can we not celebrate a time of renunciation of war and violence, and universal brotherhood and love as transcendence of the flags of our skin?
In reflection I am surprised to have never before known my writing to be called preaching or religious in character or intent; I grew up with ten years of formal study in Taoism and Zen Buddhism from the age of nine, and among other things I am a former monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana order of Tibetan Buddhism and a scholar of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism within Sunni Islam, legacies of my time of revolutionary struggle in Nepal and resistance to conquest and occupation in Kashmir respectively. I was once similarly taken aback and startled by being addressed as General, being nonviolent except in revolutionary struggle, seizures of power from tyrants, and the hunting of fascists. Now as then, it provoked my rethinking and interrogation of my own motives, values, and ideals, and their praxis as action.
What do I believe?
I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; this is my 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.
If we are speaking of belief as obedience to authority and institutions of temporal power, I am with Nikos Kazantzakis; ”I believe nothing, I hope for nothing, I am free.”
If however we are speaking of belief as Ideals and value systems, that is something entirely different. My test of disambiguation here is submission to organizations or figures of power and elite hierarchies of belonging and membership, for no matter where you begin along that path, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
Democracy as a free society of equals embodies ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and requires a nonsectarian state and a free press as what Foucault called truthtelling.
Underlying our values and ideals at a greater level of abstraction are those which are also innate capacities of human being, truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh; including hope as freedom, love as equality and our universal human rights which are parallel and interdependent with those of a citizen, and fraternity or faith in each other as solidarity and our duty of care for others.
And the first principle of our civilization as founded in the Forum of Athens and the Trial of Socrates is that we must always question ourselves, a crucial dimension of truthtelling. This value has as its action the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
All of this is a ground of struggle between liberty and tyranny, enslavement, falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
We may also speak of poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization as a kind of faith, and of poetic and metaphorical truth as belief, as I have in reference to Coleridge, Blake, Keats, and Lewis Carroll’s principle of action in Alice in Wonderland, 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.
In reference to my philosophy and ideology, here is a poem which I wrote in French for a Swiss publisher; here the original is after the English version. This may be the most coherent articulation of what may be called my belief system, though I believe nothing on the basis of any authority other than the test of my own questioning, and regard the pursuit of truth as a sacred calling, truths which are ambiguous, relative, ephemeral, and shifting as consequences of the Rashomon Gate of time and our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
The Flag of My Skin
Time, memory, history, identity, and the revolution of becoming ourselves;
the skin I have escaped in serpentine transformation has become a flag,
but of what nation?
Who owns this kingdom of flesh that we share?
This realm of the senses is both a boundary we must transgress
to discover ourselves and seize ownership of our freedom and being,
and an interface by which we shape each other, a propulsive and generative force of the human sublime, of truths written in our skin.
We are interdependent, vast and oceanic beings, exalted by our passion beyond the limits of our form but also autonomous individuals who create ourselves and one another over enormous gulfs of time, limitless in our possibilities of becoming human but also forms described as negative spaces of each other.
Being is a dance of myriad partnerships, transforms of messages and principles of organization and growth which are recursive, chaotic, a beauty of strangeness and the bizarre, a realm of Medusa, goddess and monster.
There is but one rule in nature; anything goes.
Who authorizes and validates the possibilities and performances of our identity?
Shall we not dethrone, mock, and challenge such tyrannies of normality?
Let us forge an art of fire by which to liberate us from the shells of our history, a poetics of revolution by which to incite, provoke, and disturb.
There are no maps of the unknown; only of the history written in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation, assigned values, interpreted meanings, and created ourselves through our anchorages of civilization, a prochronism whose purpose is to buffer the shock of change and shield identity from loss.
Yet it is this history and memory we must escape to create ourselves anew as we wander this wilderness of mirrors and of echoes, a labyrinth of shifting paths which leads both inward to our true selves and outward to other peoples and to their different truths and possibilities of becoming human.
Our senses are transducers through which we change energy into messages and topologies of reality; it is this logosphere within which we live and from which we arise and recreate ourselves continually, transcendent and surreal.
Humans are a system for transforming things into ideas.
So also do we transform our world and each other by our ideas, the real and the ideal reflecting and shaping each other in recursion. And this revolutionary and ongoing coevolution and process of becoming human is the central creative force of existence and of humankind.
The struggle for ownership of identity between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight. And what of the flag of our skin, of our history which we have unwound from ourselves as an endless scroll of signs, as a shroud, a chrysalis?
This I leave to you, to those we claim and who in turn claim us, to others who are different as well as those alike, and to us all.
We may belong to our past, but the future belongs to us.
It is yours and ours, the undiscovered country; use it wisely.
Le drapeau de ma peau
Le temps, la mémoire, l’histoire, l’identité et la révolution de devenir nous-mêmes;
la peau que j’ai échappée dans la transformation serpentine est devenue un drapeau,
mais de quelle nation?
À qui appartient ce royaume de chair que nous partageons?
Ce royaume des sens est à la fois une frontière que nous devons transgresser
de se découvrir et de s’approprier notre liberté et notre être,
et une interface par laquelle nous nous façonnons, force propulsive et génératrice du sublime humain, de vérités écrites dans notre peau.
Nous sommes des êtres interdépendants, vastes et océaniques, exaltés par notre passion au-delà des limites de notre forme mais aussi des individus autonomes qui se créent et se créent au-dessus d’énormes gouffres de temps, sans limites dans nos possibilités de devenir humain mais aussi des formes décrites comme des espaces négatifs de L’une et l’autre.
L’être est une danse de myriades de partenariats, de transformations de messages et de principes d’organisation et de croissance qui sont récursifs, chaotiques, une beauté d’étrangeté et de bizarre, un royaume de Méduse, déesse et monstre.
Il n’y a qu’une seule règle dans la nature; tout va.
Qui autorise et valide les possibilités et les performances de notre identité?
Ne détrônerons-nous pas, ne nous moquerons-nous pas de ces tyrannies de la normalité?
Forgeons un art du feu pour nous libérer des coquilles de notre histoire, une poétique de la révolution pour inciter, provoquer et troubler.
Il n’y a pas de cartes de l’inconnu; seulement de l’histoire écrite sous notre forme de la façon dont nous avons résolu les problèmes d’adaptation, assigné des valeurs, interprété des significations, et nous nous sommes créés à travers nos ancrages de civilisation, un prochronisme dont le but est d’amortir le choc du changement et de protéger l’identité de la perte.
Pourtant, c’est à cette histoire et à cette mémoire que nous devons échapper pour nous recréer en nous promenant dans ce désert de miroirs et d’échos, un labyrinthe de chemins changeants qui mène à la fois vers nous-mêmes et vers d’autres peuples et vers leurs différentes vérités et possibilités. de devenir humain.
Nos sens sont des transducteurs par lesquels nous transformons l’énergie en messages et en topologies de réalité; c’est cette logosphère à l’intérieur de laquelle nous vivons et dont nous surgissons et nous recréons continuellement, transcendante et surréaliste.
Les humains sont un système pour transformer les choses en idées.
De même, nous transformons notre monde et les uns les autres par nos idées, le réel et l’idéal se reflétant et se façonnant mutuellement en récursivité. Et cette coévolution et ce processus révolutionnaires et continus de devenir humain sont la force créatrice centrale de l’existence et de l’humanité.
La lutte pour la propriété de l’identité entre les masques que les autres fabriquent pour nous et ceux que nous fabriquons pour nous-mêmes est la première révolution dans laquelle nous devons tous lutter. Et qu’en est-il du drapeau de notre peau, de notre histoire que nous avons déroulée de nous-mêmes comme un rouleau de signes sans fin, comme un linceul, une chrysalide?
Je vous laisse ceci, à ceux que nous revendiquons et qui à notre tour nous réclament, à ceux qui sont différents ainsi qu’à ceux qui nous ressemblent, et à nous tous.
Nous pouvons appartenir à notre passé, mais l’avenir nous appartient.
C’est le vôtre et le nôtre, le pays inconnu; fais-en bon usage.
What is to be done? Alice Slays the Jabberwocky:
Arabic
3 أبريل 2022 رد على اتهامه بالوعظ
وجدت مقالتي عن رمضان كمؤسسة للسلام العالمي بالأمس سؤالاً غير متوقع من زاوية لم أتخيلها أبدًا ، ودائمًا ما يكون حدثًا يستحق الاعتزاز به ويستمتع به ويمنحه السيادة لإثارة الفكر ؛
“هل الوعظ مسموح به في هذه المجموعة؟”
أجبته على هذا. لا اتمنى. هنا أتحدث عن زمن الهدنة والسلام ، من مكان مرعب في ماريوبول. يجب علينا نحن البشر أن نؤكد ترابطنا وعالميتنا إذا أردنا في أي وقت التخلي عن الاستخدام الاجتماعي للقوة والعنف.
بالنسبة لي ، يعتبر رمضان مثالاً لنا جميعًا من ثقافة يتم شيطنها وتشويهها كآخر من قبل ثقافتنا ، ومثال على الخوف الذي تم تسليحه في خدمة السلطة ، والدولة الجثثية ، وحروب الغزو والسيطرة الإمبرياليين.
كل ما أطلبه هو أن الحب أفضل من الكراهية ، والرحمة أفضل من الانتقام ، والتضامن أفضل من الانقسام.
تلقيت ردا على هذا. “لذلك تجيب بمزيد من الوعظ. أنا شخصياً أجد الدين بغيضاً وخطرك غير واقعي “.
هنا جوابي. أنا أيضًا لا أحب الدين بشكل عام باعتباره سلطة وقوة مؤسسية. جوت ميت Uns إنه أقدم إرهاب للبشرية ، لأنه يسمح بأي شيء ، كما يعلمنا فولتير في مبدأه الشهير “أولئك الذين يستطيعون جعلك تؤمن بالسخافات يمكن أن يجعلوك ترتكب الفظائع”. من المؤكد أن هذا ينطبق على دين أمريكا الجديد ، QAnon ، واستخداماته في التخريب الفاشي للديمقراطية.
بالنسبة إلى woo woo ، فإن عملي في حياتي ومجال دراستي هو أصل الشر ، وهو إرث من العمل من خلال الصدمات المبكرة وتجارب الاقتراب من الموت ، والتي أنسبها إلى حلقة Wagnerian من الخوف والقوة والقوة ؛ وكما تقول أسطورة الأوبرا العظيمة ، فإن القوة على الآخرين تتطلب نبذ الحب. هذا يشير إلى وجود علاقة. يمكن للحب أن يصحح عيوب إنسانيتنا ويجيب على الانقسام بالتضامن.
ألا نستطيع أن نحتفل بوقت نبذ الحرب والعنف والأخوة والحب الكونيين كتعالي لأعلام بشرتنا؟
في التفكير ، أنا مندهش لأنني لم أعرف من قبل أن كتاباتي تُدعى وعظًا أو دينية في طبيعتها أو نواياها ؛ لقد نشأت مع عشر سنوات من الدراسة الرسمية في الطاوية والبوذية الزينية منذ أن كنت في التاسعة من عمري ، ومن بين أمور أخرى أنا راهب سابق من طائفة كاجيو فاجرايانا للبوذية التبتية وعالم في الطريقة النقشبندية للصوفية داخل الإسلام السني ، إرث من زمن النضال الثوري في نيبال ومقاومة الفتح والاحتلال في كشمير على التوالي. لقد شعرت بالدهشة والذهول ذات مرة من خلال مخاطبتي بصفتي جنرالًا ، وبكوني لاعنفًا إلا في النضال الثوري ، والاستيلاء على السلطة من الطغاة ، وصيد الفاشيين. الآن كما في ذلك الوقت ، أثار ذلك إعادة تفكيري واستجوابي في دوافعي وقيمي ومُثُلي وتطبيقاتها العملية كإجراء.
ماذا اعتقد؟
أمارس فن الإيمان بـ “ستة أشياء مستحيلة قبل الإفطار”. هذا هو إيماني ، على الرغم من أنني إذا سئلت مباشرة فأنا أقتبس عادةً من كيتس ؛ “لست متأكدًا من شيء سوى قداسة عواطف القلب وحقيقة الخيال – ما تعتبره المخيلة جمالًا يجب أن يكون حقًا – سواء كان موجودًا من قبل أم لا – لأن لدي نفس فكرة كل عواطفنا مثل الحب كلهم في جلالهم ، مبدعون من الجمال الأساسي “، أو الرومي ؛ “دع الجمال الذي تحبه هو ما تفعله” ، اعتمادًا على من يسأل ، وفي أي لغة وأمة.
إذا كنا نتحدث عن الإيمان كطاعة للسلطة ومؤسسات السلطة الزمنية ، فأنا مع نيكوس كازانتزاكيس ؛ “أنا لا أصدق أي شيء ، وآمل في لا شيء ، أنا حر.”
ومع ذلك ، إذا كنا نتحدث عن الإيمان كمثل وأنظمة قيم ، فهذا شيء مختلف تمامًا. اختباري في توضيح الغموض هنا هو الخضوع لمنظمات أو شخصيات ذات سلطة وتسلسل هرمي للنخبة من الانتماء والعضوية ، بغض النظر عن المكان الذي تبدأ فيه على هذا الطريق ، ينتهي بك الأمر دائمًا عند أبواب أوشفيتز.
من يقف بيننا وبين اللانهائي لا يخدم أيًا منهما.
تجسد الديمقراطية كمجتمع حر من أنداد مُثل الحرية والمساواة والحقيقة والعدالة ، وتتطلب دولة غير طائفية وصحافة حرة كما أطلق عليها فوكو قول الحقيقة.
الكامنة وراء قيمنا ومثلنا العليا على مستوى أعلى من التجريد هي تلك التي هي أيضًا قدرات فطرية للإنسان ، وحقائق متأصلة في الطبيعة ومكتوبة في جسدنا ؛ بما في ذلك الأمل كحرية ، والحب كمساواة ، وحقوق الإنسان العالمية الموازية والمترابطة مع حقوق المواطن ، والأخوة أو الإيمان ببعضنا البعض كتضامن وواجبنا في رعاية الآخرين.
والمبدأ الأول لحضارتنا على النحو الذي تأسس في منتدى أثينا ومحاكمة سقراط هو أننا يجب أن نسأل أنفسنا دائمًا ، وهو بُعد حاسم في قول الحقيقة. هذه القيمة لها من عملها الواجبات الأساسية الأربعة للمواطن ؛ سلطة السؤال ، وفضح السلطة ، والسلطة الصورية ، وسلطة التحدي.
كل هذا هو أرضية صراع بين الحرية والاستبداد
الغسل والتزييف والتسليع ونزع الصفة الإنسانية.
لا يمكن أن يكون هناك سوى رد واحد على الاستبداد والفاشية. لن يحدث مطلقا مرة اخري!
قد نتحدث أيضًا عن الرؤية الشعرية في إعادة تصور وتحويل أنفسنا وحضارتنا كنوع من الإيمان ، وعن الحقيقة الشعرية والمجازية كإيمان ، كما قلت في إشارة إلى مبدأ عمل كولريدج ، وبليك ، وكيتس ، ولويس كارول. في Alice in Wonderland ، كما تعلمنا أليس عند سرد الأشياء الستة المستحيلة في معركتها مع Jabberwocky.
في طريقها لمحاربة تنين ، ورؤيته لأول مرة مروعة ، تشير أليس إلى ماد هاتر في فيلم تيم بيرتون الجميل ؛ “هذا مستحيل.”
الذي يقول له حتر ، “فقط إذا كنت تؤمن بذلك”.
“في بعض الأحيان ، أؤمن بستة أشياء مستحيلة قبل الإفطار.”
“هذه ممارسة ممتازة ، ولكن الآن فقط ، قد ترغب حقًا في التركيز على Jabberwocky.”
هكذا فقط.
بالإشارة إلى فلسفتي وأيديولوجيتي ، إليكم قصيدة كتبتها بالفرنسية لناشر سويسري. هنا الأصل بعد النسخة الإنجليزية. قد يكون هذا هو التعبير الأكثر تماسكًا لما يمكن أن يسمى نظام إيماني ، على الرغم من أنني لا أصدق أي شيء على أساس أي سلطة بخلاف اختبار استجوابي ، وأعتبر السعي وراء الحقيقة بمثابة دعوة مقدسة ، وحقائق غامضة ، نسبي ، سريع الزوال ، ومتحول كنتيجة لبوابة راشومون الزمنية وإمكانياتنا اللامحدودة في أن نصبح بشرًا.
علم بشرتي
الوقت والذاكرة والتاريخ والهوية وثورة أن نصبح أنفسنا ؛
الجلد الذي هربت منه في تحول اعوج أصبح علمًا ،
لكن من أي أمة؟
من يملك مملكة الجسد هذه التي نتشاركها؟
عالم الحواس هذا هو حد يجب علينا تجاوزه
لاكتشاف أنفسنا والاستيلاء على ملكية حريتنا ووجودنا ،
وواجهة نشكل بها بعضنا البعض ، قوة دافعة ومولدة لسامية الإنسان ، للحقائق المكتوبة في جلدنا.
نحن كائنات مترابطة وواسعة ومحيطية ، يعلوها شغفنا الذي يتجاوز حدود شكلنا ولكن أيضًا الأفراد المستقلون الذين يخلقون أنفسنا وبعضنا البعض عبر فجوات زمنية هائلة ، لا حدود لإمكانياتنا في أن نصبح بشرًا ولكن أيضًا أشكال توصف بأنها مساحات سلبية من بعضها البعض.
إن الوجود عبارة عن رقصة من الشراكات التي لا تعد ولا تحصى ، وتحولات الرسائل ومبادئ التنظيم والنمو التي هي متكررة ، وفوضوية ، وجمال الغرابة والغرابة ، عالم ميدوسا ، إلهة ووحش.
لا توجد إلا قاعدة واحدة في الطبيعة. كل شيء مباح.
من يصرح ويتحقق من إمكانيات وأداء هويتنا؟
ألا يجب أن نخلع عن عرشنا ونستهزئ به ونتحدى هذه الاستبداد الطبيعي؟
لنصنع فنًا من النار نحررنا به من قذائف تاريخنا ، شاعرية للثورة يمكن بواسطتها التحريض والاستفزاز والتشويش.
لا توجد خرائط للمجهول. فقط للتاريخ المكتوب في شكلنا الخاص بكيفية حلنا لمشاكل التكيف ، والقيم المخصصة ، والمعاني المفسرة ، وخلق أنفسنا من خلال مراسي الحضارة ، وهي عملية استباقية تهدف إلى حماية صدمة التغيير وحماية الهوية من الضياع.
ومع ذلك ، يجب أن نهرب من هذا التاريخ والذاكرة لنخلق أنفسنا من جديد بينما نتجول في هذه البرية من المرايا والصدى ، وهي متاهة من المسارات المتغيرة التي تقودنا إلى الداخل إلى أنفسنا الحقيقية وإلى الخارج إلى الشعوب الأخرى وإلى حقائقهم وإمكانياتهم المختلفة. من أن يصبح إنسانًا.
حواسنا هي محولات طاقة نغير من خلالها الطاقة إلى رسائل وطوبولوجيا للواقع ؛ هذا هو عالم اللوغوسفير الذي نعيش فيه وننشأ منه ونعيد تكوين أنفسنا باستمرار ، متعال وسريالي.
البشر نظام لتحويل الأشياء إلى أفكار.
لذلك نحن أيضًا نحول عالمنا وبعضنا البعض من خلال أفكارنا ، الحقيقية والمثالية التي تعكس وتشكل بعضنا البعض في التكرار. وهذا التطور المشترك الثوري والمستمر وعملية التحول إلى إنسان هي القوة الخلاقة المركزية للوجود والبشرية.
الصراع من أجل ملكية الهوية بين الأقنعة التي يصنعها الآخرون لنا والأقنعة التي نصنعها لأنفسنا هي الثورة الأولى التي يجب علينا جميعًا النضال فيها. وماذا عن علم بشرتنا ، عن تاريخنا الذي فكناه عن أنفسنا بصفته لفيفة لا نهاية لها من العلامات ، ككفن ، شرنقة؟
أترك هذا لكم ، لأولئك الذين ندعيهم والذين بدورهم يطالبون بنا ، للآخرين المختلفين وكذلك لأولئك على حد سواء ، ولنا جميعًا.
قد ننتمي إلى ماضينا ، لكن المستقبل لنا. إنها لك ولنا ، البلد غير المكتشف ؛ استخدمه بحكمة
Torch of Liberty 