In terms of my own history and relationship with Portugal, it has been in regard to the consequences of both her empire and her glorious renunciation of it in the Carnation Revolution.
I learned some conversational Brazilian Portuguese from the summer before I began high school, having embarked on my first solo travel to train in fencing with a friend, Sao Paulo being the scene of my first Last Stand during the weeks of my campaign to rescue abandoned street children from the police bounty hunters and the trauma of my near-execution, in which I find echo and kinship with that of Maurice Blanchot by the Gestapo in 1944 as written in The Moment of My Death and of Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czarist secret police in 1849 as described in The Idiot, from which I was saved by the Matadors, who welcomed me into their fearsome brotherhood with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
When next I found myself in a diasporic Portuguese language area, it was Angola during the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988 when we broke the power of the Apartheid regime.
Years later I sailed out of Georgetown on the island of Penang in Malaysia in a traditional Phinisi, lived in one of its gorgeous Portuguese Baroque and Peranakan Chinese shophouses with their internal courtyard, where among many other legacies of history the Kristang Portuguese-Malay creole language is still spoken by its community.
Many and strange are the echoes and reflections of history, including the vanished empires which have shaped us for good or ill.
World Literature: Portugal
History
Journey to Portugal: history and culture, Jose Saramago
Emigration and the Sea: An Alternative History of Portugal and the Portuguese, Malyn D. Newitt
Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, Roger Crowley
Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A Life, Peter E. Russell
Queen Of The Sea: A History Of Lisbon, Barry Hatton
The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell, Alex Fernandes
Literature
The Lusiads, Luís de Camões
The Crime of Father Amaro, Eça de Queirós
The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
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
O my brothers and sisters, our universe is not always rational or meaningful from our perspective; it is chaotic, absurd, and often hostile. We need meaning and value, but all we have is the meaning and value which we create and impose on our nothingness. The Infinite mocks us, but also beckons and challenges us to become better.
As I wrote on this day six years ago in my post of August 4 2020; A horror beyond imagining has transpired in Beirut, which lies in ruins. Civilization dispersed throughout the Mediterranean from here thousands of years ago, uniting Europe, Asia, and Africa in a community of humankind which resonates through our consciousness today.
We seek meaning in the catastrophes and life disruptive events which flesh is heir to, yet as in the disaster in Beirut such causes are often beyond our understanding.
Herein I refer now to Sura 18 of the Holy Quran, called The Cave, verses 60-82, an allegory wherein Khidr, the Islamic Trickster figure who is an immortal and is symbolized as green as an embodiment of the Garden of Paradise, who acts as a guide of the soul through the puzzles of the labyrinth of life which leads toward it, and who speaks to us through dreams, visions, and signs.
I consider it a narrative form of Godel’s Theorem; a proof of the necessity of faith and of the existence of the Infinite, of the limits of human knowledge and the Absurdity of the human condition. Such an interpretation aligns with that of the great scholar and translator Abdullah Yusuf Ali.
As with the foundational thought experiment of one of Plato’s contemporaries, the Spear of Archytas, which defines the horizon of the known as it is thrown and marks a boundary in landing, which we repeat endlessly in scientific revolutions, the unknown remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance. This is the first principle of epistemology; the Conservation of Ignorance.
The canonical story recapitulates themes of the Sacrifice of Ibrahim which I would say forms the basis of Islamic faith, and in the streets of Beirut long ago I saw it unfold once again.
In this story the Green Man instructs Moses by doing three things which are criminal and nonsensical, things which can be understood only through the foreknowledge of prophecy which is not ours. As with justice, foresight does not belong to man, for the universe is nondeterministic, limitless, and our possible futures are always in play.
The relevant passage is this; فَأَرَدْنَا أَن يُبْدِلَهُمَا رَبُّهُمَا خَيْرًا مِّنْهُ زَكَاةً وَأَقْرَبَ رُحْمًا, or “So we intended that their Lord should substitute for them a better son than him in purity and nearer to mercy,” a classic changeling substitution. It also represents a point of bifurcation on which possible futures turn.
I have hope for the future of humankind because of what I witnessed when this primary story was played out before me forty years ago, and because of it I have never despaired.
Such a gate stands or once stood in Beirut, like Rashomon Gate or a gate to the Infinite and to limitless possibilities of human becoming. It may now be dust and memories, or like Schrodinger’s Cat both exist and not exist at once; this I cannot answer for you.
But I can speak as the witness of history that something remarkable happened there in its shadow, which like Khidr exchanging the young man for another to prevent a greater evil from occurring in the future, a time travel paradox if ever there was one, struck me with the force of revelation.
It was an insignificant thing in the scope of the Siege of Beirut, one atrocity among many which was averted by the innate goodness of a single man whose name remains unknown, a tragic hero whom I will never forget, an unwilling conscript in the service of his government like so many others, who said no to authority and to the seduction of evil. The existence of humankind pivots on the balance of such individuals, and they are very few.
This Israeli soldier refused to commit violations and depravities upon the person of a Palestinian girl, about twelve years old, who had been captured for this purpose by the lieutenant of his platoon, a common loyalty test and initiation. He blushed at the first demand of his officer to the tauntings of his fellows, there in the street before the Gate of Decision we must all face, then became angry in refusal when he realized it was not a joke, that the Occupation was about terror and plunder and not as he had been told. His commanding officer murdered him where he stood with a single shot to the head as the girl escaped.
I have returned to this spot throughout my life to touch the stones stained with his blood, for I am reminded that we are not beyond redemption, and that so long as we resist unjust authority we are free, and there is hope.
As written by Bassem Mroue and Lujain Jo in ABC, in an article entitled 3 years after Beirut port blast, intrigue foils an investigation and even the death toll is disputed: attempts to prosecute those responsible are mired in political intrigue, the final death toll remains disputed and many Lebanese have less faith than ever in their disintegrating state institutions; As the country marks the anniversary Friday, relatives of some of those killed are still struggling to get their loved ones recognized as blast victims, reflecting the ongoing chaos since the Aug. 4, 2020 explosion. The blast killed at least 218 people, according to an Associated Press count, wounded more than 6,000, devastated large swaths of Beirut and caused billions of dollars in damages.
Among those not recognized as a blast victim is a five-month-old boy, Qusai Ramadan, a child of Syrian refugees. His parents say he was killed when the explosion toppled the ceiling and a cupboard in his hospital room, crushing him. They have been unable to get the infant added to the official death list, a move that could have made them eligible for future compensation.
They accuse the authorities of discriminating against victims who are not Lebanese.
Meanwhile, the blast anniversary brought renewed calls for an international investigation of those responsible, including top officials who allowed hundreds of tons of highly flammable ammonium nitrate, a material used in fertilizers, to be improperly stored for years at a warehouse in the port.
Lebanese and international organizations, survivors and families of victims sent an appeal to the U.N. Rights Council, saying that on the third anniversary of the explosion, “we are no closer to justice and accountability for the catastrophe.”
Hundreds of people marched in the Lebanese capital on Friday to mark the anniversary, with some family members of the victims calling on the international community to help in the investigation.
Carrying roses and photos of their loved ones, the families led the march and gathered outside Beirut’s port. Victims’ names were read and a moment of silence was held at 6:07 p.m. — the time when the blast occurred.
The mother of one of the victims called for an international and impartial investigation “within the U.N. framework.”
“Three years have passed and you have been turning a deaf ear to this request and this hurts a lot,” said Mireille Bazergy Khoury, the mother of Elias Khoury who was killed by the blast. “This crime is not a Lebanese issue. Victims are all of all nationalities. Please taken action.”
Maan, a Lebanese group advocating for victims and survivors, put the death toll at 236, significantly higher than the government’s count of 191. The authorities stopped counting the dead a month after the blast, even as some of the severely wounded later died.
Among those listed by the Maan initiative is Qusai, the Syrian infant. He had been undergoing treatment for a severe liver condition and was transferred to a government hospital near the port about a week before the explosion. Hospital staff said the infant needed a liver transplant and was in critical condition.
On the day of the blast, Qusai’s aunt, Noura Mohammed, was sitting at his bedside while his mother rested at home. The aunt said the staff ordered everyone to evacuate immediately after the explosion, and that she found the infant dead, crushed by fallen debris, when she returned.
Hospital officials said Qusai died an hour after the explosion, with the death certificate listing cardio respiratory arrest as the cause. The family buried him a day later.
“We asked them (the authorities) to register my son among the victims of the blast,” his mother, Sarah Jassem Mohammed, said in a recent interview in a small tent in an orchard in the northern Lebanese village of Markabta, where she lives with her husband, two sons and one daughter. “They refused.”
Lebanon is home to more than 1 million Syrian refugees, who make about 20% of the country’s population. A Lebanese group, the Anti-Racism Movement, said that among those killed in the blast were at least 76 non-Lebanese citizens, including 52 Syrians.
Meanwhile, many in Lebanon have been losing faith in the domestic investigation and some have started filing cases abroad against companies suspected of bringing in the ammonium nitrate.
The chemicals had been shipped to Lebanon in 2013. Senior political and security officials knew of their presence and potential danger but did nothing.
Lebanese and non-Lebanese victims alike have seen justice delayed, with the investigation stalled since December 2021. Lebanon’s powerful and corrupt political class has repeatedly intervened in the work of the judiciary.
In January, Lebanon’s top prosecutor Ghassan Oueidat ordered the release of all suspects detained in the investigation.
“The political class have used every tool at their disposal — both legal and extra legal — to undermine, obstruct, and block the domestic investigation into the blast,” said Aya Majzoub, deputy chief for the Mideast and North Africa at the rights group Amnesty International.
Makhoul Mohammed, 40, a Syrian citizen, was lightly injured in the blast in his Beirut apartment while his daughter Sama, who was 6 at the time, lost her left eye.
Mohammed, who settled in Canada last year, said he plans to sue those responsible for the explosion in a Canadian court.
“The (domestic) investigation will not lead to results as long as this political class is running the country,” he said.”
As written in Al Jazeera, in an article entitled Photos: Hundreds protest as Lebanon marks third anniversary of Beirut blast: Three years on, investigation is virtually at a standstill, leaving survivors still yearning for answers; “Lebanon marked three years since one of history’s biggest non-nuclear explosions rocked Beirut with hundreds of protesters marching alongside victims’ families to demand long-awaited justice.
Nobody has been held to account for the tragedy as political and legal pressures impede the investigation.
On August 4, 2020, the massive blast at Beirut’s port destroyed swathes of the Lebanese capital, killing more than 220 people and injuring at least 6,500.
Authorities said the disaster was triggered by a fire in a warehouse where a vast stockpile of ammonium nitrate fertiliser had been haphazardly stored for years.
Three years on, the probe is virtually at a standstill, leaving survivors still yearning for answers.
Protesters, many wearing black and carrying photographs of the victims, marched towards the port shouting slogans including: “We will not forget.”
“Our pain inspires our persistence to search for the truth,” said protester Tania Daou-Alam, 54, who lost her husband in the explosion.
Lack of justice “is the biggest example of rampant corruption in Lebanon, and we can no longer bear it”, she said.
The blast struck during an economic collapse, which the World Bank has called one of the worst in recent history and is widely blamed on a governing elite accused of corruption and mismanagement.
Some protesters waved a Lebanese flag covered in blood-like red paint while others carried an enormous flag covered in a written pledge to keep fighting for justice.
“I have the right to know why my fellow Lebanese were killed,” said protester Jad Mattar, 42.
Since its early days, the investigation into the explosion has faced a slew of political and legal challenges.
In December 2020, lead investigator Fadi Sawan charged former Prime Minister Hassan Diab and three ex-ministers with negligence.
But as political pressure mounted, Sawan was removed from the case.
His successor, Tarek Bitar, unsuccessfully asked lawmakers to lift parliamentary immunity for MPs who were formerly cabinet ministers.
The interior ministry has refused to execute arrest warrants that the lead investigator has issued.
In December 2021, Bitar suspended his probe after a barrage of lawsuits, mainly from politicians he summoned on charges of negligence.
Bitar has refused to step aside but has not set foot inside Beirut’s Justice Palace for months.
“Work [on the investigation] is ongoing,” a legal expert with knowledge of the case said, requesting anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Bitar is determined to keep his promise to deliver justice for victims’ families, the expert added.
On Thursday, 300 individuals and organisations, including Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International, renewed a call for the United Nations to establish a fact-finding mission – a demand Lebanese officials have repeatedly rejected.
“If those responsible are not held accountable, it will put the country on a trajectory that allows this kind of crime to be repeated,” HRW’s Lama Fakih told the Agence France-Presse news agency at the protest.
As written by Tamara Qiblawi in CNN, in an article entitled Beirut’s port blast two years on: An open wound festers as authorities try to close the case; “Clocks stopped when one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history ripped through Beirut. Inside wrecked homes and shops, the force of the shockwaves froze the dials of timepieces, some vintage, others sleek and modern.
It was 6:07 pm. Thousands of lives were upended and the Lebanese capital — no stranger to disaster — was transformed into a hellscape.
Much like the broken clocks, the catastrophe appears to have been suspended in time. Thursday marks two years since the port explosion. Yet the city’s hardest hit, eastern neighborhoods still bear the scars of the blast. The relatives of at least 215 people who perished still rally for justice. The judicial investigation into the explosion is moribund. And the port’s hulking wheat silos — which withstood the effects of the blast despite their proximity — have been burning for weeks.
In the two years since the explosion, Lebanon’s political elite — known colloquially by the pejorative term al-sulta, or “the power” — has evaded justice and tried to sweep the memory under the proverbial rug. For activists, especially relatives of the deceased, it was painfully reminiscent of the way in which the country’s civil war ended in 1990.
Then, an amnesty law absolved Lebanon’s warring parties of apparent crimes against humanity and war crimes, including massacres, rapes, extrajudicial executions and mass displacement. Accounts of the 15-year conflict are nowhere to be found in the country’s official history books. An entire population was instructed to move on.
The authorities’ playbook has been similar in its response to the 2020 port blast, which remains the single most deadly explosion in Lebanon’s modern history, causing material and physical casualties as far as 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) away.
In the intervening years, the government has repeatedly blocked a judicial probe that charged several officials with criminal neglect over the improper storage of up to 2,700 tons of explosive ammonium nitrate, the ignition of which led to the devastating blast. Some of those who were charged were re-elected to parliament this year.
Earlier this year, the government also rolled out plans to demolish the damaged silos, drawing the ire of the victims’ families, who regard them as a memorial to the disaster. The government bowed to popular pressure and the plan was dropped.
But weeks later, the structure began to burn, arousing the suspicion of activists and relatives of the deceased. They accused the government of making half-hearted attempts to put out the fires — a charge it denies. When two of the silos finally collapsed over the weekend, activists seethed.
“For weeks you let the silos slowly burn and took no serious action to stop the fire,” activist Lucien Bourjeily tweeted, apparently addressing the political establishment. “The collapse (of the silos) today resembles the collapse of the state which is slowly falling apart, with no serious action to stop this nor hold those responsible accountable.”
Beirut’s wheat silos are many things at once. They stand as a towering tombstone to a bygone era. The smoldering structure also seems to fester like the open wound of the city’s collective memory. And importantly to relatives of the victims, it marks the scene of a crime, a looming mass that serves as a reminder of the quest for accountability.
Since the explosion, Lebanon’s financial tailspin, which began in October 2019, has continued. The country is in the throes of a bread crisis, in part because of the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also due to Lebanon’s infrastructural and financial decay. Its economic woes — inflation, ballooning unemployment, mass poverty — continue unabated.
But for many, the successive crises have not overshadowed the memories of the Beirut port blast: the shattered glass that crunched underfoot for weeks afterward; the scenes of overflowing hospital wards; those who perished and those who barely survived. For those seeking justice, the events of 6:07 pm on August 4, 2020 must continue to reverberate until the people responsible are held to account.”
As written by Jamie Prentis in The National, in an article entitled Lebanon marks second anniversary of deadly Beirut port blast; ”Lebanon on Thursday marks two years since the explosion at Beirut’s port that killed more than 215 people, injured thousands and destroyed large parts of the capital.
Families of the victims plan to hold marches in Beirut on Thursday afternoon, as they continue their search for justice, with protests also expected in cities in the US, Europe and elsewhere.
The August 4 explosion occurred after a huge stock of ammonium nitrate, inexplicably left in storage at the port for years, caught fire.
So far, no senior officials have been held accountable over the blast and a judicial investigation has been stalled for eight months. There has been widespread political interference in the probe and two sitting MPs charged in connection with the investigation have refused to attend hearings.
Speaking on the morning of the anniversary, Lebanon’s top Christian cleric Bechara Boutros Al Rai hit out at the government’s handling of the probes. He said it had “no right” to impede the investigations and that “God condemns those officials” who did so.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said there had been “two years without justice”.
“In the name of the dead, among them the son of a UN staff member, I reiterate my call for an impartial, thorough and transparent investigation into the explosion,” he said.
Two-year-old Isaac, the son of UN staffer Sarah Copland, was the youngest person to die in the explosion.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Legal Action Worldwide and other NGOs on Wednesday called on the UN to send a fact-finding mission.
“It is now, more than ever, clear that the domestic investigation cannot deliver justice,” they said.
On the eve of the second anniversary of the deadly blast, Pope Francis said the truth over what happened “can never be hidden”.
The 2020 explosion has been blamed on mismanagement and corruption, and is viewed as a symptom of the country’s many systemic problems.
Compounding the trauma for survivors and relatives of victims is a fire which has blazed for weeks at the port’s grain silos, which were heavily damaged in the blast.
A section of the silos collapsed on Sunday, and there have been warnings that another will fall soon — possibly on Thursday.
The fate of the silos, which shielded parts of Beirut from the blast, remains a deeply sensitive topic. In April, Lebanon’s Cabinet approved their demolition after a survey found they could collapse in the coming months.
But many Lebanese, including families of some of the blast victims, want the silos to remain as a memorial. Some believe the government is using the fire as a pretext to allow the demolition of the silos.
Meanwhile, Lebanon is in the grip of a devastating economic crisis which first became apparent in 2019 and has been described by the World Bank as one of the worst in modern history.”
And in another article in The Nation, Jamie Prentis and Nada Homsi write; ” At least two more silos damaged in the Beirut port blast collapsed on Thursday, as Lebanon marked two years since the massive explosion that killed more than 200 people, injured thousands and destroyed large parts of the capital.
The collapse happened as people were gathering at the site to mark the blast anniversary. Families of the victims held marches in Beirut on Thursday afternoon as they continue their search for justice, with protests also planned in the US, Europe and elsewhere.
A few hundred people began their march at the Qasr El Adel in Adlieh, holding photos of the victims as well as placards with slogans such as, “You will not kill us twice” and “Lebanon is hostage to a criminal regime”. The number of marchers had grown to about 2,000 by the time they reached the port.”
As written by Clement Gibon in Time, in an article entitled The Grieving Families Fighting to Preserve a Crumbling Symbol of the Beirut Blast; “ At Gate 9 of Beirut’s port in mid July, all eyes were on the mammoth, concrete grain silos. There was a blazing fire and plumes of smoke were billowing out of the northern block of silos. Rima Zahed was here at a protest holding a portrait of her brother, Amin, one of the 218 people who were killed in the catastrophic Aug. 4, 2020 explosion at the port, which left the silos a disemboweled shell of their former selves. Zahed feared the additional damage would cause them to collapse—and denounced the Lebanese authorities for not stamping out the blaze.
“The authorities told us that the fire was extinguished despite the fact that it was growing. They could have stopped it,” Zahed said. Her fears were borne out on July 31, when part of the silos collapsed, kicking up thick dust around the port and, for many Lebanese, reigniting trauma from the 2020 blast just days ahead of the two-year anniversary.
Beirut’s port silos were first completed in 1970, and before the explosion they stored some 85% of Lebanon’s grain. Jean Touma, a former director of the silos from 1976-2006, says they had long ensured the country’s food security.
But in April, Lebanon’s cabinet approved the demolition of all of Beirut’s port silos—both the northern and southern ones—located at the site of the 2020 blast. Ever since, the families of the victims of the blast have mobilized to preserve them, and are outraged about Sunday’s partial collapse. Judicial investigations into the explosion, one of the largest non-nuclear ones in history, have been obstructed and stalled by Lebanese authorities for over a year. (An independent report by Human Rights Watch last August found that “multiple Lebanese authorities were, at a minimum, criminally negligent under Lebanese law” over the handling of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored at the port since 2014, which caused the blast after the warehouse where the fertilizers were deposited in caught on fire.)
On July 4, the same day the fire erupted, civil society groups alongside families of the victims launched a solidarity campaign called “The Silent Witness.” The goal still remains to protect the silos—at least now what’s left of them—that are located less than 300 feet from the epicenter of the 2020 explosion, and which absorbed much of the blast’s force thanks to the dense grain that had been stored within them. For Mariana Fodoulian, who lost her 29-year-old sister in the blast, both the collapse and the government’s drive to demolish all of the silos is part of the country’s endemic culture of impunity.
“How could they let the [northern block of silos] collapse just before Aug. 4?” Fodoulian says. If no silos are left standing in the end, “when future generations grow up, no one can tell them what happened.”
A history of amnesia
A culture of impunity has plagued Lebanon since the 1975-1990 civil war—which left at least 120,000 people dead and pushed some 1 million people, more than one-third of the population at the time, to leave the country. The adoption of an amnesty law in 1991 protected those accused of war crimes and allowed them to remain key players in Lebanon’s fractured political scene. No less than 17,000 people are still missing from the war, affecting thousands of families who are still waiting for answers about their fate.
At the same time, key visual reminders of the war have been erased through the demolition of historic downtown areas that saw some of the conflict’s fiercest fighting. Experts say that firms involved in post-war reconstruction—chiefly Solidere, which was overseen by former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri—contributed to that amnesia. Critics say that Solidere further erased memories of the war by tearing down iconic and historical buildings such as the Rivoli cinema and destroying more homes than even the fighting had.
Lebanese authorities have been “trying to repeat the same policies of amnesia that followed the civil war with the silos. They do not want people to remember anything related to the crimes they committed,” says Soha Mneimeh, an urban planning researcher at the Beirut Urban Lab and member of the Order of Engineers and Architects of Beirut.
Families of the victims and activists who have been trying to protect the silos are troubled by the lack of consideration by the government, Mneimeh says. (The government has not launched any public consultations, nor input from the families of the deceased.) The blaze and subsequent collapse has only fueled that anger.
Following the 2020 blast, the government commissioned several studies to assess the damage to the silos. One of the latest, conducted in March by the Swiss firm Ammann Engineering, noted that the northern block would not stand for more than a decade and could collapse within months. The assessment concluded that the southern block, however, was stable and “demolition is not a priority compared to other challenges in Beirut port.”
Mneimeh says the northern block of silos could have been safely reinforced and preserved—a view that was supported by some of the studies. For her, these studies make clear that the decision in April to demolish all of the silos, including the stable southern ones, was ultimately a political one.
Indeed, the government’s plan to rebuild the silos at a new location is an apparent recognition that the blast site could not be easily repurposed for other uses. These 48-meter (157-foot) concrete structures were built on land that was reclaimed from the sea and reinforced with piles. The foundations sitting below can no longer withstand large structures, engineers and architects have said.
A push for remembrance
In June, the families of the victims filed three lawsuits at Lebanon’s Shura council to overturn the government’s decision to demolish all of the silos. They have also requested a stay of execution until the council considers the suits. For Ghida Frangieh, a lawyer who helped draft one of the lawsuits and is a researcher at the NGO Legal Agenda, continuing ahead with such plans would deny victims their rights.
“International standards consider preservation of the crime site to be part of compensation for victims, which includes recognition of the victims’ pain and satisfaction,” Frangieh says. Failure to preserve them “would not only affect their mental health, but also their right to be treated with dignity.”
In addition to legal recourse, the families of the victims have for months tried to register the silos on the UNESCO World Heritage List. These efforts build off Minister of Culture Mohammad Wissam El-Mortada’s decision in March to designate them as heritage buildings.
“The silos are part of the city,” says Mortada. “They also represent a common memory for all the people who were victims of the explosion.”
Mortada soon after withdrew his decision to list the silos as a heritage site, citing a lack of resources to secure their protection. But he says he has been working since then to create a public park with an open museum and a memorial site in collaboration with artist Rudy Rahme on the east side of Beirut’s port.
That there are government plans to rebuild the silos—at a time of soaring wheat prices and global food disruption brought on by the war in Ukraine, not to mention Lebanon’s ongoing economic crisis—at a separate location bolsters the case for preserving what’s left of them, the families say.
Back at the launch of the “Silent Witness” campaign in early July, by the Emigrant statue opposite the port that acknowledges the millions of Lebanese in the diaspora, Elie Hasrouty, who lost his 59-year-old father who was working at the silos at the time of the explosion, is exasperated by the uphill battle to preserve the silos.
“Every day that passes, with the stalling of the investigation and the government’s willingness to demolish the silos, is a continuation of the Aug. 4 crime,” Hasrouty says. He says that he is at a “great loss” when TIME checks in with him after the partial collapse. “It is a place that represented our wounds, and our pain. I am very angry with the behavior of the authorities. It has been two years and nothing has been done to preserve the silos, and make it a place of memory.”
Arabic
4 أغسطس 2021 جنون الموت تجاوز الإضاءة: أنشودة بيروت
يا إخوتي وأخواتي ، إن كوننا ليس دائمًا عقلانيًا أو ذا مغزى من منظورنا ؛ إنها فوضوية وسخيفة وعدائية في كثير من الأحيان. نحن بحاجة إلى المعنى والقيمة ، ولكن كل ما لدينا هو المعنى والقيمة التي نخلقها ونفرضها على العدم. اللانهائي يسخر منا ، ولكنه أيضًا يلهمنا ويتحدىنا لنصبح أفضل.
حل رعب يفوق التصوير في بيروت التي أصبحت مهدمة. انتشرت الحضارة في جميع أنحاء البحر الأبيض المتوسط من هنا منذ آلاف السنين ، ووحدت أوروبا وآسيا وأفريقيا في مجتمع البشرية الذي يتردد صداه من خلال وعينا اليوم.
نحن نبحث عن معنى في الكوارث والأحداث المربكة للحياة التي يرثها الجسد ، ولكن كما في كارثة بيروت ، غالبًا ما تكون هذه الأسباب خارجة عن فهمنا.
أشير هنا الآن إلى سورة 18 من القرآن الكريم ، تسمى الكهف ، الآيات 60-82 ، وهي قصة رمزية فيها الخضر ، الشخصية الإسلامية المخادعة التي هي خالدة وترمز إلى اللون الأخضر لتجسيد جنة الجنة ، التي تعمل كدليل للنفس عبر ألغاز متاهة الحياة التي تقود إليها ، والتي تخاطبنا من خلال الأحلام والرؤى والعلامات.
أنا أعتبره شكل سردي لنظرية وديل. دليل على ضرورة الإيمان ووجود اللانهائي لحدود المعرفة الإنسانية وعبثية الحالة الإنسانية. يتوافق هذا التفسير مع تفسير العالم والمترجم العظيم عبد الله يوسف علي.
كما هو الحال مع تجربة الفكر التأسيسي لأحد معاصري أفلاطون ، الرمح للأرخيتا ، الذي يحدد أفق المعرف باسمه ويلقي بحدود في الهبوط ، والتي نكررها بلا نهاية في الثورات العلمية ، يبقى المجهول واسعًا كما كان من قبل والمحافظة على الجهل. هذا هو المبدأ الأول لنظرية المعرفة. حفظ الجهل.
تلخص القصة القانونية مواضيع ذبيحة إبراهيم التي أود أن أقول أنها تشكل أساس العقيدة الإسلامية ، وفي شوارع بيروت منذ فترة طويلة رأيتها تتكشف مرة أخرى.
في هذه القصة ، يرشد الرجل الأخضر موسى من خلال القيام بثلاثة أشياء إجرامية وغير منطقية ، أشياء لا يمكن فهمها إلا من خلال المعرفة المسبقة للنبوة التي ليست لنا. كما هو الحال مع العدالة ، البصيرة لا تخص الإنسان.
المقطع ذات الصلة هذا ؛ فَأَرَدْنَا أَن يُبْدِلَهُمَا رَبُّهُمَا خَيْرًا مِّنْهُ زَكَاةً وَأَقْرَبَ رُحْمًا ، أو “لذا قصدنا أن يحل ربهم محلهم ابنًا أفضل منه في الطهارة وأقرب إلى الرحمة”. كما أنه يمثل نقطة تشعب تتحول عليها العقود الآجلة المحتملة.
لدي أمل لمستقبل البشرية بسبب ما شاهدته عندما تم عرض هذه القصة الأولية أمامي قبل ثمانية وثلاثين سنة مضت ، وبسببها لم يأس أبداً.
مثل هذه البوابة تقف أو كانت في يوم من الأيام في بيروت ، مثل بوابة راشومون أو بوابة اللانهائي والإمكانيات غير المحدودة للإنسان. قد يكون الآن غبارًا وذكريات ، أو مثل قطة شرودنجر ، كلاهما موجود وغير موجود في وقت واحد ؛ هذا لا يمكنني الإجابة عليه.
لكن يمكنني أن أتكلم كشاهد على التاريخ بأن شيئًا رائعًا حدث هناك في ظلها ، مثل تبادل خضر الشاب بآخر لمنع حدوث شر أكبر في المستقبل ، مفارقة السفر عبر الزمن إذا كان هناك أي شيء ، أدهشني بقوة الوحي.
لقد كان شيئًا غير ذي أهمية في نطاق حصار بيروت ، وحشية واحدة من بين العديد من الفظائع التي تم تجنبها من خلال الخير الفطري لرجل واحد لا يزال اسمه غير معروف ، بطل مأساوي لن أنساه أبدًا ، مجند غير راغب في خدمة حكومته مثل كثيرين آخرين ، الذين قالوا لا للسلطة ولإغواء الشر. إن وجود البشرية محوري في توازن هؤلاء الأفراد ، وهم قليلون جدًا.
رفض هذا الجندي الإسرائيلي ارتكاب انتهاكات وحروق على فتاة فلسطينية تبلغ من العمر اثني عشر عامًا ، تم أسرها لهذا الغرض من قبل ملازم فصيلته ، وهو اختبار ولاء مشترك. خجل عند أول طلب من ضابطه لسخرية زملائه ، هناك في الشارع قبل بوابة القرار الذي يجب أن نواجهه جميعًا ، ثم غضب في الرفض عندما أدرك أنه ليس مزحة ، أن الاحتلال كان عن الإرهاب ونهب وليس كما قيل له. قتله ضابط قيادته حيث وقف برصاصة واحدة في الرأس أثناء هروب الفتاة.
لقد عدت إلى هذا المكان طوال حياتي لألمس الأحجار الملطخة بدمه ، لأنني أتذكر أننا لسنا خارج حدود الخلاص ، وطالما أننا نقاوم السلطة الظالمة فنحن أحرار ، وهناك أمل.
A Map of My Beirut, what remains of it and the ghosts of what it was
Here a great nothingness has swallowed the voices of the past
Yet they live within us, songs of ourselves and the limitless possibilities of becoming human
How can we answer the terror of our nothingness
The flaws of our humanity
And the brokenness of the world?
Here among the ruins of a lost grandeur
Fallen empires and the ghosts and legacies of
Beautiful and terrible histories
I wail in grief, I roar defiance, I demand justice
But my words are devoured by silences
I swear vengeance for a lost history and a ruined city
Without an enemy to bring a reckoning to
For this hammer blow of fate was the act of no saboteur
But only a consequence of our common greed and responsibility shifting
And the labyrinthine bureaucracy that misfiled records
Of a derelict ship full of fertilizer quietly degrading in harbor for years
How many such forgotten existential threats
Now lie waiting to seize and shake us?
Here was once a gate to the Infinite and a shrine of the Impossible
In bloodstains which offered hope and redemption
Where now not a stone stands upon a stone
And the light of Beirut become
Vast and fathomless chasms of darkness
Arabic
خارطة بيروت بلدي وما تبقى منها وأشباح ما كانت عليه
هنا ابتلع العدم العظيم أصوات الماضي
ومع ذلك ، فهم يعيشون في داخلنا ، أغاني من أنفسنا وإمكانيات لا حدود لها في أن نصبح بشرًا
كيف يمكننا الرد على رعب العدم لدينا
عيوب إنسانيتنا
وانكسار الدنيا؟
هنا بين أنقاض العظمة المفقودة الإمبراطوريات الساقطة وأشباح وموروثات
تواريخ جميلة ورهيبة
أبوح حزنًا ، وأصرخ متحديًا ، وأطالب بالعدالة
لكن الصمت يلتهم كلامي
أقسم بالانتقام لتاريخ ضائع ومدينة مدمرة
بدون عدو لجلب الحساب إليه
لأن ضربة القدر هذه كانت فعلاً غير مخرب
ولكن فقط نتيجة لتغير جشعنا المشترك ومسؤوليتنا
والبيروقراطية المتاهة التي أخطأت في ضبط السجلات
من سفينة مهجورة مليئة بالأسمدة تتحلل بهدوء في الميناء لسنوات
كم عدد هذه التهديدات الوجودية المنسية
الآن تكمن في انتظار الاستيلاء علينا وهزنا؟
هنا كانت ذات مرة بوابة إلى اللانهائي وضريح المستحيل
Where the Two Seas Meet: Al-Khidr and Moses—The Qur’anic Story of al-Khidr and Moses in Sufi Commentaries as a Model for Spiritual Guidance, by Hugh Talat Halman
Of the legacies of our history, there are those which must be kept in witness and remembrance, and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
I grew up in a Dutch Reformed Church town from my first day of kindergarten to my graduation night from high school, as there my father’s teaching job held us embedded in amber. A farming town in the central valley of California, an hour’s drive and four centuries from Berkeley and San Francisco, of grim giants with snow white hair like Harry Potter villains whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, who regarded music as sinful and refused to wear buttons as its non Biblical technology, with a school library festooned with South African magazines as they were members of the same Church as the Boers and the Apartheid regime.
In the plus column I grew up with the beautiful and delicious cadences of the King James Bible as everyday speech, which may have made me a natural poet; in the minus I witnessed what I hope was the last witch burning in America, among many other atrocities of force and control in a world out of time in the grip of theocratic terror which America had been founded to escape.
Possibly this allowed me to see clearly the true horror of religion and understand in my bones why our nation had been founded to escape it. Absolutely it helped me understand what I encountered in South Africa years later, in the historic revolution against Apartheid in which I fought.
Such was the balance I found in creating myself anew in my own image as I grew up and emerged from the darkness of history.
May we all of us come to understand the gifts of our private holocausts and the sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others.
World Literature: the Netherlands
History
The Dutch Golden Age: gateway to our modern world, Hans Goedkoop
An Embarrassment of Riches, Rembrant’s Eyes, Simon Schama
Amsterdam, Russell Shorto
The Autumn of the Middle ages, Erasmus and the age of Reformation, John Huizinga
Van Gogh, Steven Naifeh & Gregory White-Smith
Literature
The Erasmus Reader
The Assault, Harry Mulisch
Rituals, In the Dutch Mountains, The Following Story, All Souls Day, Lost Paradise, Cees Nootebaum
Turkish Delight, Jan Wolkers
The Angel Maker, Stefan Brijs
The Vanishing, The Cabe, Tim Krabbe
Threshold of Fire, In the Dark Wood Wandering, The Scarlet City, The Tea Lords, Hella S. Haase
In Lucia’s Eyes, Arthur Japin
Beyond Sleep, William Frederick Hemans
The Ten Thousand Things, Maria Dermot
The Book of Everything, Guus Kuiger
Eline Verse: a novel of The Hague, Louis Couperous
Public Secret, J. Bernlef
No Sale, Patrick Conrad
A Heart of Stone, Without Mercy, The Darkness that Divides Us, Renate Dorrestein
The Storm, The Virtuoso, The Kreutzer Sonata, Margriet de Moor
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
My Seventh Voice or language is Spanish, originally picked up conversationally from the Cuban volunteers with whom I worked from 1983 in Central America through 1989 in Angola and South Africa. as fast upon my Baccalaureate graduation came the horrific Mayan Genocide in Guatemala and other atrocities of the monstrous Reagan regime, and the heroic Resistance of indigenous peoples to America’s imperial conquest of Central America which collapsed with the Iran-Contra Scandal.
Guatemala was among the first of my interventions in human history as revolutionary and liberation struggle in the wake of being sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982; he did not, however, provide any guidance regarding how precisely I was to wage Resistance, other than the principle; “Live with grandeur.”
This I had to work out for myself, and during my senior undergraduate year at university in San Francisco I designed a program of action, choosing grounds of struggle, gathering resources, building networks of alliance, and planning strategies of engagement. With the Mayan Genocide in full force, it was at the top of my list, a conflict which for myself was interdependent with those of the Salvadoran Civil War and the Nicaraguan Revolution or civil war.
This theatre of revolutionary struggle includes that of the Zapatistas in the Yucatan years later, an entirely separate conflict within the geographical Central American region and the diaspora of the Mayan peoples. Spanish is a second or trade language for the people with whom I aligned myself, mostly speakers of Yucatec in Mexico or Quiche in the Guatemalan Peten among the Mayan group of over twenty languages, who were rebelling in class war against the Ladino or Spanish speaking elites.
So my fluency in Spanish developed over twenty years of use before I formally studied Spanish from Argentine professors in one of my many graduate school programs to meet a literacy requirement, and its among the languages in which I currently publish.
World Literature: Latin America
History
Memory of Fire Trilogy (Genesis, Faces and Masks, Century of the Wind), Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Mirrors, The Book of Embraces, Voices in Time, Hunter of Stories, Eduardo Galeano
The Complete Stories, Near to the Wild Heart, The Apple in the Dark, The Passion According to G.H., The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector
Reading with Clarice Lispector, Hélène Cixous
Terra Nostra, The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Old Gringo, The Campaign, Christopher Unborn, A Change of Skin, The Eagle’s Throne, The Orange Tree, The Crystal Frontier, Destiny and Desire, Myself with Others: Selected Essays, This I Believe, A New Time for Mexico, Carlos Fuentes
Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar
Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo
Yankee Invasion: A Novel of Mexico City, Ignacio Solares
Texas: The Great Theft, Carmen Boullosa
One Hundred Years of Solitude, The General in His Labrynth, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Love in the Time of Cholera, Of Love And Other Demons, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, Louis de Bernieries
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Buenos Aires Affair, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Heartbreak Tango, Eternal Curse on Reader of These Pages, Blood Of Requited Love, Manuel Puig
Men of Maize, Mirror of Lida Sal: Tales Based on Mayan Myths and Guatemalan Legends, Miguel Asturias
A Plan for Escape, The Invention of Morel, The Dream of Heroes, Diary of the War of the Pig, Asleep in the Sun, Adolfo Bioy-Casares
Leopoldina’s Dream, Thus Were Their Faces,The Promise, Silvina Ocampo
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon, Tereza Batista: Home from the Wars, The War of the Saints, Tent of Miracles, The Discovery of America by the Turks, Showdown, Shepherds of the Night, Home is the Sailor, The Violent Land, Jorge Amado
Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve, Gioconda Belli
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Green House, The Way to Paradise, The Bad Girl, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, The Dream of the Celt, Touchstones, Conversation in the Cathedral, The Feast of the Goat, The Time of the Hero, The War of The End of the World, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, Mario Vargas Llosa
Clara: Thirteen Short Stories and a Novel, The Lizard’s Tail, He Who Searches, The Censors: A Bilingual Selection of Stories, Symmetries, Bedside Manners, Luisa Valenzuela
Sobre héroes y tumbas, Abaddón el Exterminador, El túnel, (Spanish only/untranslated) Ernesto Sabato
Palinuro de Mexico (Spanish only/untranslated), Fernando del Paso
The Fair (Spanish only/untranslated), Juan Jose Arreola
Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enríquez,
Persephone, 1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile, The Lord of the Last Days: Visions of the Year 1000, Eyes to See Otherwise, Time of Angels, Homero Aridjis
The Savage Detective, By Night in Chile, Distant Star, 2666, Woes of the True Policeman, Antwerp, The Unknown University, The Insufferable Gaucho, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003, Last Evenings on Earth, The Return, Roberto Bolano
The Obscene Madame D, Letters From a Seducer, With my Dog Eyes, Hilda Hist
The Art of Flight, The Journey, The Magician of Vienna, Sergio Pitol
Among the Lost, Emiliano Monge
Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Where the Bird Sings Best, The Son of Black Thursday, Albina and the Dog-Men, Alejandro Jodorowsky
Anarchy and Alchemy: the Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky
Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 – 1972, Alejandra Pizarnik
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, Leonora Carrington
When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut
Tender Is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica
Cuba: A Reading List
My Life; a spoken autobiography, Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro Handbook, George Calloway
Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War: Authorized Edition, Ernesto Che Guevara
Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel, and the Improbable Revolution That Changed World History, Tony Perrottet
Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground, Julia E. Sweig
The Real Fidel Castro, Leycester Coltman, Julia E. Sweig
The Yankee Comandante: Love and Death in the Cuban Revolution, Michael Sallah, Mitch Weiss
Persona Non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution, Jorge Edwards, Octavio Paz (Preface)
We Are Cuba!: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World, Helen Yaffe
Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer
The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times, Anthony DePalma
Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution, The Corporation: An Epic Story of the Cuban American Underworld, T.J. English
Cuba: A History, Hugh Thomas
Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution, Socialism in Cuba, Leo Huberman, Paul M. Sweezy
Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence, Phillip Brenner
The Great Game in Cuba: How the CIA Sabotaged Its Own Plot to Unseat Fidel Castro, Joan Mellen
The Cuban Counterrevolution, Jesus Arboleya, Rafael Betancourt (Contributor)
Fighting Over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution, Rafael Rojas
Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971, Lillian Guerra
The Island Called Paradise: Cuba in History, Literature, and the Arts, Philip D. Beidler
The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, Aviva Chomsky (Editor), Barry Carr (Editor), Pamela María Smorkaloff (Editor)
Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion, The Light Inside: Abakua Society Arts and Cuban Cultural History, David H. Brown
Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller
Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Ned Sublette
Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba, Robin D. Moore
La Belle Créole: The Cuban Countess Who Captivated Havana, Madrid, and Paris, Alina García-Lapuerta
Our Woman in Havana: Reporting Castro’s Cuba, Sarah Rainsford
Travelers’ Tales Cuba: True Stories, Tom Miller
The Reader’s Companion to Cuba, Alan Ryan (Editor), Christa Malone (Editor)
Literature
Singing from the Well, The Palace of the White Skunks, Farewell to the Sea: A Novel of Cuba, The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights,
The Assault, Hallucinations: or, The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando, Before Night Falls, Autoepitaph: Selected Poems, Reinaldo Arenas
Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia
The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, Carlos Hernandez
Cobra, Firefly, From Cuba with a Song, Footwork: selected poems, Written on a Body, Christ on the Rue Jacob, Severo Sarduy
The Kingdom of This World, The Chase, Alejo Carpentier
Three Trapped Tigers, Holy Smoke, Mea Cuba, Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Woman in Battle Dress, Sea of Lentils, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, Antonio Benítez Rojo
Cuba and the Tempest: Literature and Cinema in the Time of Diaspora, Eduardo González
The Distant Marvels, Chantel Acevedo
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Beautiful Maria of My Soul, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, A Simple Habana Melody, Thoughts Without Cigarettes, Oscar Hijuelos
In the Cold of the Malecon and Other Stories, Tales from the Cuban Empire, Antonio José Ponte
My Last Name/El Apellido, Nicolás Guillén, Roberto Márquez
The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano, The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist, The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom, Lion Island: Cuba’s Warrior of Words, Dreams from Many Rivers: A Hispanic History of the United States Told in Poems, Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings, Soaring Earth: A Companion Memoir to Enchanted Air, Margarita Engle
Guatemala, a reading list
The President, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Frances Partridge (Translator)
On this day seven years ago, the sixth deadliest incident in our documented history of racist violence was perpetrated against the people of America; the El Paso Massacre. I use the qualifier “documented” because most racial violence in America has gone unrecorded and forgotten, save for the obscene post cards of lynchings widely traded in times past among Confederate sympathizers. The pervasive and ongoing ethnic cleansing and indirect enslavement of Latino persons as migrant labor has in the main gone unheralded and unlamented, other than the horrific atrocities and crimes against humanity of Trump’s ICE force of white supremacist terror and his torture gulags.
It is difficult and uncomfortable to awaken to the fact that we white Americans are the beneficiaries of slave labor, yet this is precisely true. Our economy runs on the relative wealth disparity of invisible and exploitable persons; how else may one characterize such relationships other than as slavery?
The mass murders of Latinos by white supremacist terrorists are a consequence and side effect of a massive and endemic relationship of unequal power; whole sectors of our economy, agriculture, hospitality, child and elder care, food service, and more rely on cheap and unregulated labor. For true parallels to America’s economic system one must look to the migrant African labor in Italy’s agricultural camps; people with no legal existence who may be buried where they die in secret graves, worked without benefits, social security, medical insurance, nothing but their wages which are below the legal minimum. There are no OSHA or other laws which pertain to them, for Latino migrant laborers have no existence on paper.
Migrant labor is slave labor.
Our hegemonic elites, a phrase I gladly appropriate from Antonio Gramsci and Marx, do not actually want to enact genocide, sacrifice a vast pool of quasi slave labor, or to exclude the masses of migrants and refugees at our border; that is incidental and to some degree our concentration camps and abduction and deportation forces, ICE and the Border Patrol, are a Potemkin village display for political advantage; what the plutocrats and oligarchs who own America want differs from the fear-driven motives of the racists and white supremacist terrorists who are their deniable assets and form the voting base of their Republican political managerial class; to maintain the illegality and invisible, exploitable nature of migrant labor.
And there is only one cure for this racist program of enslavement and capitalist exploitation; grant citizenship by declaration to all who so claim membership in our society as co-owners of our government in a free society of equals.
If you’re crazy enough to want to be one of us, who are we to say no?
As I wrote in my post of July 24 2022, In a Free Society of Equals. Who Confers Citizenship? Abolish Borders and Enact Citizenship By Declaration; Along our border with Mexico, concentration camps for nonwhite refugees instead of sanctuary, and a brutal army of slavecatchers and overseers of prison bond labor instead of humanitarian aid and safe conduct.
We will not begin to become human until we build bridges, not walls.
Let us enact diversity and inclusion rather than divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Let us abolish borders and enact citizenship by declaration.
America has drawn a line in the sand to weaponize economic disparity in service to imperial dominion through labor exploitation of peoples with no legal status, for profit requires slavery as an invisible caste with whom one may do anything at all with impunity as if they do not exist. Here in our border with Mexico, its walls and cages, and in the omnipresent bodies of those who pick and serve our food, clean our living spaces, care for our children and elders, like the black clad stage handlers of a kabuki theatre of capitalism, or the Black Gang who stoke the engines of our system with the fuel of their lives as in Eugene O’Neil’s play The Hairy Ape, we find an immediate example of our own complicity in the dehumanization and commodification of those whose labor creates our wealth and services our elite privilege.
For we have made of our world a global prison and slave labor system, an imperial dominion of borders and carceral states of force and control, and of our fellow human beings the parts of a vast machine of wealth and power through theft of public resources.
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 pathologies 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.
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.”
Such is the hope of humankind.
As I wrote in my post of March 16 2020, Walls of Hate, Tyranny, and Empire: America’s Global Borders; As we are inundated with the global awakening to fear of the coronavirus pandemic, it becomes clear that this is a natural triggering stressor which parallels a manufactured one, that of borders and refugee crises, in its behaviors and effects in our social and political environment as leverage for nationalist and fascist tyrannies of force and control in the subversion of democracy and the transformation of our world into a vast prison.
Overwhelming and generalized fear is a necessary precondition of authoritarian regimes, and of violence and the use of social force generally, which together with submission to authority may be regarded as a First Cause of the disease of power in the sense that Thomas Aquinas argued causality and being; ” If there is no first cause, then the universe is like a great chain with many links; each link is held up by the link above it, but the whole chain is held up by nothing.”
Authority and fear also alienate us from ourselves, dehumanize and commodify us as does capitalism as its outer form; for this is about the theft of our identity and power by those who would enslave us.
The first consequence of the emergence of authority and the disempowerment of its subjects is the modern pathology of disconnectedness; and this is the link which binds authority and tyranny together, and its weak point. Here is where resistance and revolution must act to shatter the knot of interdependent and mutually reinforcing systems which rob us of our humanity and our freedom.
We must build bridges not walls, togetherness not isolation, unity not division, and forge a borderless world and a free society of equals.
Todd Miller describes America’s empire of borders in a Jacobin interview; “Since coming into office, the Trump administration has launched unrelenting racist attacks on immigrants and refugees. He seems determined to build his wall by any means necessary and has unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to conduct raids, arrest people, throw them in concentration camps, and deport them.”
“ But, contrary to widespread liberal illusions, Trump did not start this war on migrants, but only intensified it.
In fact, as Todd Miller demonstrates in his new book, Empire of Borders, politicians in both major parties have collaborated over the last few decades to construct a massive border regime that polices migrants not only in the United States but throughout the world. In this interview with Jacobin contributor Ashley Smith, Miller discusses the origins and features of this new imperial strategy — and the international resistance against it.
AS
One of the points you make throughout your book is that this border regime did not begin with Trump but has been a feature of the United States from its founding. How has the US state internationalized its border regime over the last few decades, and how does it operate today?
TM
The US state established its borders through colonization, dispossession, genocide, slavery, and exploitation. This is especially true of its border with Mexico in the nineteenth century.
That violent process of conquest is too often legitimized by mainstream historians when they use innocuous-sounding phrases like “westward expansion,” dress up imperial bullying like the Gadsden Purchase as “agreements,” and craft self-congratulatory accounts of the Mexican-American War.
But there is no way to make the white supremacy of “manifest destiny” palatable. The United States seized land, planted its flag, and killed anyone that resisted, especially indigenous peoples, all in the name of God and European civilization.
It expanded its border regime through its imperial seizure of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines in the 1898 Spanish-American War. By the early twentieth century, the United States had established its territorial border, set up semicolonies, and policed seemingly independent states in its hemisphere with “gunboat diplomacy.”
Even knowing this history, it took me a while to understand that the US border extended well beyond its mainland. I think the first time I grasped this was while covering the migration out of Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010. I quickly realized that this was not a migration story but a border story.
Shortly after the earthquake, as hundreds of thousands of people were still in the rubble of their homes, a US jumbo jet flew overhead blasting out an announcement from the Haitian ambassador. He warned in Creole, “If you think you will reach the United States and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. They will intercept you right in the water and send you back home where you came from.”
Soon after, sixteen Coast Guard cutters came right up to the Haitian shore to stop the flight of any refugees. Then Washington contracted the private prison company GEO Group for “guard services” (presumably in a tent city in Guantánamo Bay) to in effect jail the victims.
At once I saw that the US border was: 1) geographically removed from where I normally had thought it was; 2) elastic and able to extend at will very far from the US mainland; and 3) not passive, but aggressive. In a nutshell, the border was much bigger — much, much bigger — than I ever thought it was.
For example, in 2012, when I was on an investigative trip to Puerto Rico, I learned that the tiny Mona Island — a mere thirty miles from the Dominican shore — was also literally part of the US border.
So when a sinking boat carrying Haitians to another destination crashed onto the shores of that small island, they were absorbed by the US border: detained, arrested, incarcerated, and eventually deported by the US Department of Homeland Security back to Haiti.
This is just one instance. Another is the Dominican Border Patrol, which the United States trained and equipped after its creation in 2007. And a third is Guatemala’s new Chorti border patrol, which the US Embassy, one commander told me, helped create to police its Honduran borderlands.
This wasn’t limited just to the Western Hemisphere. On other trips I found out that US funds created a Kenyan border patrol and a massive surveillance system on the Jordanian-Syrian border. And this is just scratching the surface.
To understand this, I think it’s important to go back to the 9/11 Commission Report’s paradigm-changing statement: “The American Homeland is the planet.” Since 2003, CBP has created twenty-three embassy attaches from Nairobi to Tokyo to Berlin to Brasilia and is at work in nearly one hundred countries through various border programs — creating, essentially, an empire of borders.
While the United States has always had such international border operations, it dramatically expanded them after 9/11. When I asked one CBP official at its Washington headquarters to describe with one word how much they’ve grown since then, he answered: “exponentially.”
AS
So that’s how the United States controls the global flow of people. How do its policies cause migration to begin with?
TM
Washington’s climate, economic, and military policies bear an enormous responsibility for creating the conditions that drive people from their countries. The United States has long been history’s top emitter of greenhouse gases (since 1900 it has emitted nearly seven hundred times more than Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador combined), driving up temperatures, causing desertification, raising sea levels, exacerbating preexisting situations (often of intense poverty, especially in rural areas), effectively making it a force behind displacement.
While borders have been hardened to deter, arrest, incarcerate, expel, and ultimately sort and classify the world’s most vulnerable people, destructive forces that cause migration can go where they please. One example of this is the “open border” policy in place for the US military.
With its forces deployed in over eight hundred bases around the world, Washington has conducted countless military interventions and coups, leading people to flee to other countries for safety. For example, in 1954 the United States intervened in Guatemala to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, resulting in a thirty-six-year armed conflict and brutal military repression.
Another example is Washington-driven neoliberal economics. It has forced indebted countries to privatize state-owned companies, slash their welfare states, and open up their economies to US multinationals. While that made money for local and international capitalists, it wrecked the lives of small farmers and workers, many of whom left their countries for the United States and other advanced capitalist countries to find work as criminalized cheap labor.
And if countries didn’t agree to neoliberalism, the United States often forced it upon them at gunpoint. If you look in Central America, Mexico, all around the world, this convergence of military and neoliberal policies has both done considerable damage and caused massive displacement of people.
As the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman wrote so presciently and unselfconsciously in 1999, for the “hidden hand of the market” to work you need the “hidden fist” of the military to back it up and enforce it. And part of that hidden fist is the border regime that polices the migrants and refugees at its borders.
AS
This border regime, as you argue in your book, has generated a booming new industry in border security. What does this look like, and how does it intensify the attack on migrants in the United States and throughout the world?
TM
The US empire of borders has spawned a whole new dimension of carceral capitalism. It’s raking in enormous profits off the proliferation of walls, surveillance technology, checkpoints, and detention facilities.
When I was traveling in Israel and Palestine in 2017 with an international group, a man from South Africa told me that what we were seeing was worse than apartheid era in his country. He made the point that in South Africa, while it was bad from 1948 to the early 1990s, there weren’t all the checkpoints, walls, armed agents and soldiers, and technologies that we were seeing in the occupied territories.
During that trip we went to one of the biggest weapons and technology conferences in Israel. In the Tel Aviv convention center, Israeli companies pitched “proven” technologies, which they boasted had been tested on Palestinians under occupation, to governments from all over the world to police their own borders and oppressed populations.
At another homeland security expo in Tel Aviv I saw the demonstration of the Orbiter III, which they called the “suicide drone.” The weapons dealer said that it could conduct surveillance on a target, and then, if they so decided, dive-bomb it and utterly destroy it.
Even though Israel is the “homeland security/surveillance capital” of the world, as scholar Neve Gordon put it, the industry has metastasized throughout the world. I have been to similar border regime bazaars in San Antonio, in Paris, and in Mexico City.
This whole industry has boomed as states across the globe have built more than seventy border walls (up from fifteen in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall), spent billions on surveillance technologies, and hired hundreds of thousands of armed agents to guard the jagged frontier of the Global North and Global South. Corporations are profiting off border policing, adding crass capitalist interest to crude state repression.
AS
What are the domestic impacts of the border regime in the United States? How has it created a new caste division in the working class, deepened racial divisions, and built a state more prepared to repress its population?
TM
Border regimes, by their very nature, are systems of exclusion. They are enforced not only by guards but bureaucracies that oversee elaborate rules intended to make noncitizens work hard for their papers as if they were gaining membership to an exclusive club.
In this sense, the border is much more than the international boundary line. In the United States, the border zone, or jurisdiction, extends a hundred miles inland along the 2,000-mile Mexican border, 4,000-mile Canadian border, and both coasts. That’s a good swath of country where Homeland Security forces operates in what the American Civil Liberties Union has called a “constitution-free zone.”
Over 200 million people, approximately two-thirds of the US population, live in this zone, where the Border Patrol can set up checkpoints, do roving patrols, work with local and state police, and racially profile and target people for arrest, detention, and deportation. Over the last twenty-five years, the number of agents has ballooned from 4,000 to 21,000, and annual budgets have gone up from $1.5 billion in 1994 to $23 billion in 2018. Detention centers now exceed 250 and can be found throughout the country.
This massive apparatus is only growing larger and becoming more invasive. For example, the Department of Homeland Security has been testing new small- and medium-sized drones with the ability to “fly unnoticed by human hearing and sight” along a “predetermined route observing and reporting unusual activity and identifying faces and vehicles involved in that activity comparing them to profile pictures and license plate data.”
All of this amounts to a gargantuan, and profitable, exclusion apparatus, effectively creating a modern caste system that extends throughout the country and indeed the globe.
AS
Amid the struggle to close down Trump’s concentration camps, activists are again debating what we should demand. Why should we call for an end to the border regime and open borders?
TM
I was just listening to a podcast featuring Vox founder Ezra Klein, who said that he would be open to an argument for open borders if it were shown that it would not destabilize the country. Of course, Klein isn’t the only one with that view, it’s a mainstream one in many ways.
However, what I think is the exact opposite. Hardened borders exist and are proliferating to police a world precisely because the global situation is already precarious and unstable. As I mentioned before, Washington’s climate, economic, and military policies (and to take it further, those of border-building Western regimes such as the European Union and Australia) have wrecked whole sections of the world.
When the United States responds to these people by militarizing the border, it only exacerbates the instability. It doesn’t solve the causes of migration but locks them in place; creates chaos at the border, especially for migrants; stimulates corporate investment in the border regime; compromises our civil rights and liberties; and encourages demagogues like Trump to whip up xenophobia and racism.
I think of the Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar who, after removing a piece of the US-Mexico border wall near San Diego, said “I will not accept that this wall is in my face.” The whole purpose of Jarrar’s art is not only to dismantle a border apparatus, but also to transform into something more utilitarian.
For example, he pounded a sledgehammer into the concrete wall that separated west from east Jerusalem, took out chunks of cement, and turned them into sculptures of soccer balls and cleats to give back to the kids whose soccer fields the wall had taken away. I often think of Jarrar’s question: why do we accept that these borders are in our face?
It is akin to accepting a global caste system, a system of segregation long rejected by civil rights movements and internationally condemned by anti-apartheid movements. The one silver lining in the age of Trump is that his racist attacks on refugees and migrants has produced a new movement to challenge and dismantle the global border regime.’
Empire of Borders: How the US is Exporting its Border Around the World, by Todd Miller
Peter Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers becomes a song not of the horrors of universalized forever wars, but of liberation from the social use of force by abandoning the hills on which we fly our flags, including the flags of our skins.
We are okay and not in an evacuation zone- but we packed a car for evacuation last night. The Fairview fire rings the massif of Mt St Michaels; we drove up last night, and fires surrounded the monastery. Our hill is near enough to hear the bells when they ring them, separated by Morgan Acres. Our side has a four hundred foot sheer cliff overlooking a woodland ravine with a stream and another stream winding along the secret valley on the back side of our home below terrace gardens, so any firestorm would have to both cross the valley and surmount the cliff. Wetlands secure the other side, where the only road crosses it to the main road through Bigelow Gulch, so escape is unlikely to be cut off.
But we don’t all live in such fortresses, and no fortress can stand against siege by natural forces. We all of us live and die by the viability of our common resources.
We are okay, Dolly and I, but the whole of north Spokane is under evacuation order and will burn today and probably into Monday, though this incident will soon end as the winds are dying to a light breeze. These fires were caused by lightning strikes and driven by several hours of 30 mph winds with gusts up to 50.
Most of the damage in the main fire which began in the wooded suburbia of Indian Trails festooned with McMansions of bourgeois pretensions happened because the fire jumped the Spokane River into the city proper, a river this year suddenly dry throughout much of it as our water table drops. This is the fate which doomed the indigenous agricultural civilization of New Mexico and many others, created the precarity which has driven Yemen into endless civil war, and also created the Sahara Desert. It’s all too real, and its coming for us all now.
Spokane has today sixty thousand evacuated temporary refugees; imagine this on a permanent global scale.
The aircraft that puts fires out were taken out of play all over the West when Trump stole the funds for repair and replacement of the fleet and gave the money to the military for the Iran war instead. In this respect the Spokane fires of August 2026 not only warn us of our future, but provide an example of the real world consequences of political decisions, as Spokane’s local elections this week will choose for us our short term future, and the midterms loom with grim choices in a failed state and a dying world.
The Republicans are trying to burn us all out, all across the solidly Democratic Pacific, and they care nothing for the lives and homes of the American people who will be sacrificed to their wealth and power. Remember this when you vote this week in our elections, and in all our elections everywhere and forever.
We revel in our lost glory as our world dies and ourselves along with it, like the decadent privileged wastrels of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death; but no walls can ever secure us from water scarcity, crop failure, economic collapse, poison gas clouds supplanting the air we breathe, or the firestorms that will turn our cities into ashes.
Like so many of the threats to our civilization and our species, fire is nonexclusionary; when it comes, it comes for us all.
The Fire does not care; not about our color, our language, our nationality, none of it. To the Enemy we are all the same; and this is how we must fight, all of us together, to free ourselves and our future from capture by those who would enslave us.
As I wrote in my post one year ago on August 8 2025, We End In Fire: Case of the Los Angeles Wildfires; One day, sooner than we imagine, the fires will never end, until they meet the rising lifeless seas.
Remote and trackless wilderness for the most part is my corner of the world. I wish it were lost in time as well, beyond reach of the great crises which threaten humankind. But from the consequences of history there is no refuge.
We are witnesses to the Fall of America, democracy, human rights, civilization, and looming human extinction as failing capitalism tries to free itself of its host political system and totalitarian fascism reclaims the world.
Jean Genet was right to call capitalism a kind of necrophilia; capitalism is a pimp at a bus station, an ambush predator waiting to cut the vulnerable out of the herd and convert beauty into profit, life into dead money. And what is money but a belief system, the promise to pay of a government and its value nothing more than the faith of those who trade with it in the reliability of that promise?
It is insubstantial as the wind, its value shifting with the confidence of those who use it, while real things, a leopard, a hornbill, an orchid, a tribal people living in harmony with nature, have intrinsic value which relies on nothing beyond themselves.
Which kind of things shall we value and preserve, the illusionary or the real, the impermanent or the eternal, the living, transcendent, and ineffable or the dead, meaningless, and profitable?
As I wrote in my post of July 17 2023, The World is Mad. And It is On Fire.; The world is mad. And it is on fire.
These existential threats are interdependent faces of a single problem, albeit a Gordian Knot of complex, nuanced, relative and shifting truths, meanings, and values; unequal power.
And both sets of causes and effects which chase each other round in recursion, like the iconic Gahan Wilson cartoon of gleeful devils in pursuit of each other entitled One Damn Thing After Another, are not symptoms of natural processes of change but consequences of political decisions we have made about how to be human with each other.
Extinction and the destruction of earth’s ecosystems and ability to support life is parallel and interdependent with the global subversion of democracy and the dawn of an age of tyrants and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
We cannot work toward solutions to extinction and fascist tyranny separately; they must be taken together as a whole.
I write now in reference to an article by Robin McKie in The Guardian entitled, “World experiences hottest week ever recorded and more is forecast to come: There is a good chance that the month of July will see the highest global temperatures for (the past) 120,000 years.“
Yes, but not for the millennium to follow; it just becomes unsurvivable from here. What creatures in some distant future will sift the dead sands of our world for clues to what doomed it, and why?
It will never be this good again, and one day humankind will become nothing and unremembered.
Because we have failed to purge our destroyers from among us, to seize power and control of our destiny from those who would enslave us and steal our future; elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege now locked in a death spiral of terminal stage capitalism as war on nature and subjugation and commodification of our labor which creates benefits for the few who can buy our time at the cost of dehumanization of the many and the extinction of us all.
We must abandon our addiction to power and its ephemeral, transitory, ultimately meaningless and destructive material signs and vanities, and our reliance on fossil fuels as a strategic resource of dominion and hegemony which is consuming us like a poison or cancer, and the whole twisted project and inverted values of civilization not as a conversation and questioning of ourselves and our universe but as systems of oppression and control of nature; and instead embrace the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
Here follows the McKie essay and Pronouncement of Our Doom:
“The world has just gone through a remarkable experience. It endured the hottest week ever recorded between 3-10 July this year. And meteorologists say there is more to come – a lot more.
Soaring levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and an unusual band of strong winds that have hovered high over the Atlantic have already triggered heatwaves in Texas, Greece, Spain, Italy, and a host of other nations.
Red weather alerts have been issued across Europe; wildfires are raging in Croatia, on the Adriatic coast, and in Navarra in Spain; while tourist targets such as the Acropolis have been closed as temperatures have soared into the forties.
The Earth has not experienced anything like it since instrumental measures of air temperatures began in the 1850s, the World Meteorological Organisation revealed last week. “We are in uncharted territory and that is worrying news for the planet,” said Prof Christopher Hewitt, the WMO’s director of climate services.
This point was backed by Karsten Haustein, a research fellow in atmospheric radiation at Leipzig University. “The chances are that the month of July will be the hottest month ever … ‘ever’ meaning since the Eemian [interglacial period], which is some 120,000 years ago.”
On top of the triggers of the current record-breaking heatwaves, a growing El Niño event in the Pacific is beginning to make its presence felt across the globe.
El Niño is a periodic climatic event that occurs when the circulation of the equatorial Pacific Ocean shifts and its temperature rises, causing knock-on heat impacts around the world.
“A typical El Niño temporarily adds about 0.2C to average global temperature,” said Jeff Knight, manager of climate variability modelling, for the Met Office.
“This increase is dwarfed by the 1.2C that we have seen from climate change since the Industrial Revolution but added to that human-induced warming, a new global temperature record is still likely to be set before the end of next year.”
As a result, many scientists warn that this year or next could see world temperatures pass the 1.5C threshold that was set by the IPCC as being the upper limit for a rise in global warming that would avoid the planet passing through meteorological tipping points that could bring irreversible changes to world weather patterns.
The consequences of a new record heatwave occurring very soon will be profound and dangerous, add scientists. More than 61,000 people are now estimated to have died as a result of the soaring temperatures that gripped Europe last summer.
Given the likelihood of that record being broken this year – or next year at the latest – there is a strong chance that 2022’s grim death toll will be topped very soon with Mediterranean nations such as Greece, Spain and Italy likely to suffer the worst consequences.
According to UN secretary general António Guterres “climate change is out of control”. He warned that if the world persisted in delaying key measures needed to limit fossil fuel emissions, it would move “into a catastrophic situation”.
Many scientists have reacted to this alarm with rueful resignation. They have warned for more than 30 years that continued burning of fossil fuels would trigger the heatwaves that we are now experiencing.
“We should not be at all surprised with the high global temperatures,” Prof Richard Betts, climate scientist at the Met Office and University of Exeter, told the BBC. “This is all a stark reminder of what we’ve known for a long time, and we will see ever-more extremes until we stop building up more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
As I wrote in my post of September 25 2020, Human Extinction Begins in Fire and Flood; Like Nero burning Rome, climate change has been weaponized to destroy the habitat of inconvenient peoples, making way for glorious monuments to the god emperors of America.
Our reliance on fossil fuels as a strategic asset and resource has not only been a political and economic decision which is favorable to elite power structures, but one which has been instrumental to the enormous transfer of wealth from the commons to a corporate plutocracy which has largely superseded nations as a hegemony of power and privilege. So do those who would enslave us hold dominion over the earth and humankind.
Mistake not the true cause and design of our holocaust of fire; the hegemony of unequal power in plutocratic capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
Let the many seize and reclaim what has been stolen from us by the few, and as stewards of the earth and each other discover new possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of August 23 2021, Drought Heat Fire Floods; This summer the world burns once again, and drought begets famine where it does not flood, the ice melts as the polar caps and glaciers begin to vanish, and the dying seas rise to destroy our cities.
Yet we do not rebel against our extinction, not as a species and a united global humankind.
Summer has become a time of horrors and a warning of the day we will have no water to drink nor air to breathe, and the last of us will die with nothing to mourn our passing, proclaiming our glorious supremacy upon a mountain of meaningless wealth.
Summer was once a time of joy, when I would lay in the long grass of a meadow and watch the clouds drift by, and in my imagination looking down at myself from my castle of clouds, master of the world with not a penny that was mine.
We must reclaim our freedom and our dreams, or like Charlie Chaplin in The Factory be caught and consumed in the gears of the machine of profit and death which we serve.
This we must ever resist.
As I wrote in my post of March 28 2021, A Frankenstein Hubris: Climate Change, the Pandemic, and Extinction Are Failures of Our Human Need to Control and Dominate Nature; A Frankenstein hubris: our self destructive drive to control and dominate nature. Ours is a history which recapitulates Adam Naming the Beasts to claim them endlessly, in a Nietzschean hell of Eternal Return, and every act undertaken to impose human order and reason on a universe which is inherently chaotic and irrational sets myriads of other problems in motion, in chains of consequences like the eddies and whirls in Leonardo’s fountain. Is this not a definition of madness, this repetition of the same mistakes in hope of different results?
The poisoning and destruction of the Earth has offered us vivid and inescapable examples of the consequences of the unfaithfulness of our stewardship of nature in the Pandemic, disasters of climate change which include freak tornados and hurricanes, drought and famine, floods and failed harvests, the snows of Texas and the summers as global seasons of fire, the rising seas which will one day swallow most of our cities, and the looming horizon of our extinction.
Yet we do nothing. Nothing to conserve our resources and ensure our survival.
We have built our civilization from the corpses of dinosaurs transformed by time into oil; when we are gone, what beings will power their cities from our remains?
As I wrote in my post of February 17 2021, The Snows of Texas: When Privatization and Deregulation Meet Climate Change as Consequences of Corrupt Oligarchies of Oil; Oil has always been a key strategic resource of political dominion and hegemonies of wealth and power; for the last century, who controls it controls all. This week we witness in the snows of Texas the stormfront of our historic legacy of reliance on fossil fuels combine with our decades of privatization and the looting of the public wealth by nepotistic oligarchs in a spectacular demonstration of our failures in environmental and political systems.
There can be little doubt that the savagery of extractive capitalism has brought us to the brink of extinction in tandem with the concentration of wealth and power in the extreme minorities of plutocratic and oligarchic elites.
Texans are dying in the frozen wastes of a failed system, victims of a performative state government which has handed control of its power grid to its paymasters and sealed the state off from federal help.
The environmental and economic consequences of privatization replicate those which underpin the humanitarian disaster in Yemen; vanishing water supply, failing crops, evaporating jobs. These cases represent our common future if we do nothing to stop the cascade failure of our systems; and come summer the firestorms will return, and the viability of the earth and its living systems will worsen every year.
As I wrote in my post of December 30 2019, What Will You Do When Global Warming Comes For You; Thousands of Australians escape the fires consuming their continent by fleeing into the sea; Where will we hide from a world destroyed by greed? Before the seas rise to annihilate our major cities, before the air we breathe and the water we drink runs out, we must face the fires of our destruction and an arid and lifeless world. For a vision of what our future holds we need look no further than Australia.
Unless we seize ownership of our destiny from the plutocrats who are engineering our extinction. Make no mistake; our choice to allow some of us to capitalize on the death of all of us is a political decision in which we are all complicit.
As I wrote in my post of May 13 2019, Biodiversity and Extinction; Earth is an Ark hurtling through space, filled with precious life among chasms of emptiness.
How shall we answer this nothingness? Will it be with wisdom in maintaining the balance of life in all its subtle and glorious interconnectedness, diversity, and beauty, a dance of joy and of love?
Or will we be defeated and consumed by our own vanity and greed, surrendering to the dark and to despair and turning all we have or ever will into profit until there is nothing left, not water to drink nor air to breathe, and the last of us die with inarticulate brute cries, bloated in toadlike satiation and trumpeting our splendid dominance and rulership of the world?
We must choose who we are to become, we humans; stewards of our homeworld and of one another, or destroyers. Can we find a path forward in coexistence, or will we allow our appetites and desires to drive us to suicidal ruin? For we have but two choices of futures in this; we will be lightbringers or we will annihilate ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of April 1 2020, There Is No Return To Normal; There is no return to normal if and when the Doom of Man pandemic ends. Normal doesn’t live here anymore.
Once there was an illusion of mirrors, echoes, distorted surfaces without meaning, hollow and beautiful like a gossamer web of lies and irresistible as a gingerbread house.
It calls to us, this thing of no escape, this American Dream, with promises of wealth and the power to choose the condition of our own lives. Our songs are of meritocracy, upward mobility, and an inclusive society, but concealed within are harsh realities of unequal power and opportunity.
We are lured with belonging and membership, but offered only identitarian tribalization and exclusionary boundaries of otherness.
We are seduced with the guarantee of our right to the pursuit of happiness, but our society can produce only material diversions which commodify and dehumanize us.
We are offered security from intrusive forces at the price of our freedom and equality, but security is an illusion purchased with submission to authority and tyrannies of force and control.
Throughout history we Americans have ever been a free society of equals, co-owners of our own government, each of us a king of his own life, but only on paper. The American Revolution has yet to be achieved; it is an ongoing process in which each of us must negotiate the alignment and boundaries between the ideal and the real.
In this struggle we are the prize; our agency or enslavement, our authenticity or the capture and limitation of the possibilities of our identity, our liberty both as individuals and as interdependent members of humankind.
And we must act now to save ourselves and our civilization, for we are running out of time. We are in a contest of survival against plutocratic corporate greed and our extinction as a species on one hand and against fascist tyranny and the fall of democracy and global civilization on the other.
Let us free ourselves from the illusions of our normality.
Season of the Emergence From Hibernation 3021
As I read this journal entry from a nearly forgotten and unimaginable time before the death of the seas and the poisoning of the air, before the few surviving enclaves of humanity retreated into self-contained arcologies deep within the earth, undersea, and in near orbit, before even the iron age of the Fourth Reich and other tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, before the centuries of the Third World War and the emergence of the posthuman species, I ask myself a simple question; why?
Why did humankind allow itself to be destroyed by greed? In the end it came down to a handful of oligarchic families and their corporations, ruling hundreds of millions of slaves. Why did the many not cull their destroyers from the herd?
Why was there no resistance?
Hegemon Xotl
Here follows a contextualization and interpretation of Jean Genet’s iconic May Day Speech, as written by Tim Keane in Hyperallergic in an article entitled America Is Trembling: Jean Genet’s Answer to Donald Trump: Jean Genet believed that money was inherently evil and the quest for power was a form of necrophilia; “What is still called American dynamism is an endless trembling.” That is Jean Genet’s prophetic declaration, written for a speech he delivered on May 1, 1970 at Yale University, before an audience of approximately 25,000.
In the wake of November’s election and yesterday’s swearing-in of President Donald J. Trump, this American “trembling” is so resounding that, 46 years on, Genet might slyly smile – or smirk — were he alive to see it.
We felt the trembling straightaway. We heard it in Trump’s racist hysteria about Mexicans in the summer of 2015. We saw it in the new President-Elect’s stupefied anxiety as he sat beside President Barack Obama in the White House on November 10, 2016. And the trembling was everywhere post-election, on the sidewalks and in the subways, in bedrooms and conference rooms, and in the faces of hoodwinked power brokers leaving Trump Tower. Remember wobbly Mitt Romney and the disconcerted Al Gore? The spooked Silicon Valley industry leaders and the humiliated gathering of news anchors?
Even former sycophants like Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie trembled their way off the national stage. And still there is this trembling – a quaking among a docile but perturbed intelligentsia and a shuddering among the increasingly stifled presidential press corps. To say nothing of those legitimately shaking in fear about the potential cancellation of their Obamacare and Social Security and Medicare, or the coming legalized assaults to reverse their hard-earned civil rights, or their possible deportation. And the unspoken trembling about a Tweet-triggered nuclear showdown.
Still Genet’s comments from 1970 go further than predicting the current American trembling. This fearfulness, this state of general cowardice, is in his view, part of the reason why morons and goons end up running things: “Everyone [in America] trembles before everyone else” adding, “the strongest before the weakest and the weakest before the most idiotic.” If there’s a cure implied here, it’s that the strong need to stop cowering so that the weak and the foolish can be thrown out of power.
But since the very opposite has just happened, it might make for a distracting and instructive parlor game to imagine what Jean Genet would make of the ongoing American trembling he detected back in 1970.
There are clues throughout his work. In his incendiary wartime novel Funeral Rites (1948), the collaborator Riton is willingly sodomized by a Nazi lover on a rooftop in occupied Paris, a national debasement Genet echoes years later in an interview in which he ridicules Adolph Hitler as the “Austrian corporal,” who brings a cowardly France to its knees. Genet’s drama The Balcony (1957), about the playacting and masochism of authority figures, is set in a posh brothel during a revolution in an unnamed country. Watching the news these days seems like watching that play’s revival. What would Genet make of an ingenious con man from Queens, the hapless scion of a racist developer, sworn in as President of the United States? How would he render, for the theater of the absurd, this bankrupt innkeeper who got a second chance by roleplaying his fictitious alter-ego on national television and then cashed in on his celebrity to take over the executive branch of the U.S government, as if that prize were some second-rate New York hotel? And Genet could easily unpack Trump’s fixations — about President Obama’s Kenyan patrimony, about the appeal of a Russian autocrat, and even about Trump’s self-mythologizing link between small hands and large genitalia. Most fitting for a Genet-like takedown is Trump’s messy empire, expertly tailored by its maker to showcase late capitalism’s ritualized sadism — from its pencil tower buildings and power neckties to his beauty contest carnivals and reality TV puppet shows.
Genet’s writings uncover the perverse anarchies that operate within well-ordered hierarchies. He thought money was inherently evil and that the quest for power was a form of necrophilia. Many writers also had their finger on the overlooked diseases underlying postwar Western culture. But Genet, when he first visited the United States, was an internationally famous writer approaching the age of sixty who had a range of personal experiences that especially qualified him to detect America’s trembling.
Born in 1910, Genet was the orphaned son of a prostitute, the former ward of the French state, an erstwhile thief, vagrant and hustler who had spent nearly six years off and on doing time in various prisons, surviving, inside and outside their walls, among the most elaborate and dangerous of what we would today simply call “bullies”: jailhouse rapists, renegade Nazis, cross-dressing murderers. Genet’s highly stylized, sexually explicit works in memoir, fiction and playwriting transformed each of those genres, scandalizing readers and audiences and turning him into one of the most exasperating and profound moralists of the twentieth century. Late in his career, facing a decade-long writer’s block, his writing was reborn, first by engaging with the visual arts and, later, through writing about aspiring revolutionary groups who were fighting power from the margins. Little wonder, then, that by the late 1960s he was drawn to the trembling that was shaking the United States.
And so, in the summer of 1968, he entered the country illegally through Canada to cover, along with Terry Southern and William Burroughs, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago for Esquire. According to Edmund White’s biography, among many audacious acts, the older Genet, caught up in the state violence against protestors, stared down a rifle-toting National Guardsman and reassured the injured victims, many of them white kids who had never encountered police aggression. Covering the extended fiasco, Genet was a witty provocateur, denouncing the political convention as “gaudy and meaningless,” dismissing the Yippie icon Abbie Hoffman as “not bad for a professional” and, to Esquire’s outraged countercultural readership, praising the “divine” and “athletic” musculature of Chicago cops.
Two years later, when Genet again entered the US illegally, the reactionary winds were blowing even stronger. This time he came mainly to advocate on behalf of the Black Panthers. And while a degree of homoerotic attraction fueled Genet’s initial interest in the Panthers’ paramilitary aesthetics, by 1970 Genet was savvier about American-style forms of power and state violence than he had been two years earlier. And the context of that time resembles the possibilities America faces after yesterday’s inauguration.
The law-and-order, paranoiac US President Richard Nixon had defeated a splintered Democratic Party in the ‘68 election and, by the time Genet returned in ‘70, Nixon had secretly escalated the war in Vietnam and begun blacklisting members of the press. Opponents were being spied upon; dissenters were labeled “terrorists.”
Genet, too, was on Nixon’s radar. Even when he was in Paris, the FBI had been monitoring the writer’s associations with American civil rights leaders. Under the supervision of Vice President Spiro Agnew and COINTELPRO, the Black Panthers were being targeted for elimination and the Party members were engaged in deadly shoot-outs with local police forces. The Party’s leader, Eldridge Cleaver, was living abroad in Algeria. One of its founding members, Bobby Seale, the sole African-American, was one of the original “Chicago Eight” before he was charged with contempt and removed from the proceedings, reducing the number to the “Chicago Seven.” Seale had been disgracefully bound, gagged and trussed in the courtroom in full public view. And it was at the height of this turbulence that Genet delivered his May Day speech at Yale University.
The speech, read in its English translation by a founding Black Panther member, Elbert “Big Man” Howard, consists of a rousing appeal on behalf of Bobby Seale, who was then on trial in New Haven for murder (the charges were eventually dropped). Genet’s oratorical strategy, a full-scale assault on the toxic apathy of white liberals, remains prophetic.
Genet blames the prevalence of racism on his Yale audience. “It is very clear that white radicals owe it to themselves,” he declares, “to behave in ways that would tend to erase their privileges.” Closing on a provocative note, he further goads the audience by comparing universities to “comfortable aquariums […] where people raise goldfish capable of nothing more than blowing bubbles.” Reread in light of the response to controversial police killings of African Americans in Charlotte, Ferguson, and elsewhere, Genet’s words bluntly spell out the diplomatically stated ideas coursing through the Black Lives Matter movement.
As relevant as those remarks on racism are to today’s situation, Genet’s extended “appendix” to the May Day Speech, first published in a special edition by City Lights Books, represents a wider confrontation with white neoliberals and their snug institutions.
In the appendix, Genet broadens his offensive, declaring that the United States must acknowledge an inbuilt national “contempt” dating back to the country’s founding. Unless the nation owns up to this contempt, which “contains its own dissolving agent,” then that denial will cause “American civilization” to, quite soon, “disappear.”
And then he calls out those he sees as the enablers of this ongoing American contempt. First in his line of fire is an American press so prone to “lies by omission, out of prudence or cowardice” that even “New York Times lies” and “the New Yorker lies.”
As for colleges — those supposed hotbeds of tenured radicals — Genet presciently observes that inside American universities, the “only recognized values are quantitative” and thus our schools “turn [students] into a digit within a larger number” and cultivate in them “the need for security, for tranquility and quite naturally [professors] educate you to serve your bosses and beyond them, your politicians, although you are well aware of their intellectual mediocrity.”
And beyond this liberal collaboration with a culture of contempt, Genet sees an increasingly armed and alienated police force who “provoke fear” and yet who themselves “tremble” within this overall American shuddering.
No trait was more nauseating or, as Genet would have pointed out, more pompously flaunted by Trump’s presidential campaign than its unadulterated contempt: for women, for non-whites, for the disabled, for the press, and, ultimately, for the US Constitution. And yet it was the disdain of prosperous neoliberals for underpaid workers and the working poor that made Trump’s more schematized hatred more enthralling to his voters.
Genet’s May Day Speech offers no direct solutions to our current nightmare cycle of contempt. Certainly his analysis proved immediately true in 1970. Three days after Genet delivered his speech and fled the country, students protesting Nixon’s widening of the Vietnam war into Cambodia were killed by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University. The rest of Nixon’s vulgar legacy is well-known and its wretched example inspires a good deal of the current President’s crude and effective stagecraft.
Perhaps Genet, being an avid reader of both Mikhail Bakunin and Marcel Proust, and thus both an anarchist’s anarchist and a writer’s writer, left the solutions for America’s trembling to the country’s own imagination.
Maybe, as an expert con artist, Jean Genet assumed that language, if used with the right combination of refinement and cogency, could elicit a reckoning, just as his writing’s resolute, lyrical reenactments of real and imagined experiences validated his existential truths. If so, then, we might mimic Genet’s aggressive exactitude and ask ourselves questions that go deeper than the banalities of Sunday morning chat shows or yesterday’s forgotten tempests in a tea pot. Structural questions like: what kind of knowledgeable electorate can a nation cultivate while its primary news channels remain owned and overseen by entertainment empires such as 21st Century Fox, Time Warner, Walt Disney and Facebook? And what forms of confrontation could undo the insanity of the US Supreme Court’s decision to legalize political bribery through its Citizens United ruling?
And, finally, how to replace a two-party system representing a single power structure manipulated by financiers and bankers, one that recently fielded, on the one hand, a former childhood poverty advocate turned Wall Street motivational speaker and, on the other, a real-estate magnate who still produces a television show designed to fulfill its viewers’ need to normalize and enjoy a dehumanized economy?
Genet, a playwright and a hustler, could have easily seen through theatrics as cheap and nihilistic as Trump’s. Forced into that spectacle for the foreseeable future, the nation trembles at the potentially horrifying absence behind the role the man has been playacting. “The essence of theatre is the need to create not merely signs,” Genet writes, “but complete and compact images masking a reality that may consist in absence of being.”
Spokane Fire Complex 2026, Severe Weather USA
Oregon & Washington — 18 New Large Fires in ONE DAY, Season Hits 142% of Average, Disaster Watch USA
A fast-moving wildfire has broken out in the inland foothills north-east of Los Angeles hours after another blaze tore through the city’s Pacific Palisades neighbourhood along the coast, destroying many homes and prompting evacuation orders for tens of thousands. The Eaton fire in Altadena started near a nature reserve
It is possible that under Jewish law I am a Jew through my maternal great grandmother, who was adopted and raised by a Jewish community in America. She had been put on a ship by her family and arrived on the docks at the age of nine alone and without a penny to her name, and not a word of English; she tried asking for help in her languages in descending order of likelihood of being understood, French, Austrian, Hungarian, and Serbo-Croatian without luck, then in desperation and fear of violence which might be worse than freezing and starving tried Yiddish. This like a magic spell drew a crowd immediately, and not one bearing torches and axes; and so it was that I grew up with bits of Yiddish words and phrases in my home language through my mother, who greatly admired and even venerated Jewish people because we would have never survived without them, though she did not identify our family as Jewish.
I once asked her directly; “Are we Jews?” She replied; ”Everyone is a Jew. Everyone is someone’s Jew, someone’s scapegoat, someone’s Other. The trick of being human is to embrace the uniqueness of Others as we do our own.”
World Literature: Jewish People
History
Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews
The Story of the Jews Volume One: Finding the Words 1000 BC-1492 AD, Volume Two: Belonging: 1492-1900, Simon Schama
Jerusalem: The Biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore
Personal Witness: Israel, Abba Iban
Israel, Gilbert
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom, The Murderers Among Us, Krystyna: The Tragedy of the Polish Resistance, Simon Wiesenthal
Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman
Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City, Andrew Lawler
Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, Barnavi ed
Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations, A History of Judaism, Martin Goodman
Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Moshe Arens
Auschwitz, Laurence Rees
Treblinka, Jean-François Steiner, Simone de Beauvoir (Preface), Terrence Des Pres (Introduction)
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari
Homage to Chagall, Amiell ed
An Empire of Their Own: how the Jews Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler
I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, Sylvie Simmons
The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature, The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century, Come and Hear: What I Saw in My Seven-And-A-Half-Year Journey Through the Talmud, Adam Kirsch
Literature
The Schoken Bible: The Five Books of Moses
The Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides
Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, The Ineffable Name of God: Man, Abraham Joshua Heschel
Siddur Leshabbat Veyom Tov: Prayer Book for Sabbath & Festivals with Torah Readings, Philip Birnbaum
On The Bible, Tales of the Hasidim, Vols 1-2 (Bonny V. Fetterman Editor, Chaim Potok Foreword), I and Thou, Between Man and Man, Martin Buber
Martin Buber, Diamond
The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology, Steven Kepnes
Learning Through Dialogue: The Relevance of Martin Buber’s Classroom, Kenneth Paul Kramer
Zohar: The Book of Splendor: Basic Readings from the Kabbalah, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, Kabbalah, Origins of the Kabbalah, The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, The Fullness of Time: Poems by Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914-1982, Gershom Scholem
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Understanding Brecht, Walter Benjamin
The Five Books of Miriam, Ellen Frankel
Congregation, Rosenberg ed
The Essential Kabbalah, Daniel Matt
Sages and Dreamers, A Passover Haggadah, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters, All RIvers Run To The Sea: Memoir, Night Trilogy ( Night, Dawn, Day), The Trial of God: as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod, A Beggar in Jerusalem, Elie Wiesel
Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, Ariel Burger
Survival in Auschwitz, Auschwitz Report, The Reawakening, The Drowned and the Saved, Moments of Reprieve, If Not Now When?, Periodic Table, The Mirror Maker: Stories and Essays, The Monkey’s Wrench, Collected Poems, Primo Levi
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy, Sergio Luzzatto
Holiday Tales of Scholom Aleichem
The World of Scholom Aleichem, Samuel
Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
Days of Awe, S.Y. Agnon
Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, Paul Celan, John Felstiner trans.
The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, Slavoj Žižek
A Companion to Marx’s Capital, David Harvey
The Freud Reader Peter Gay (Editor), Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay
Man’s Search for Meaning, The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, Recollections: An Autobiography, Viktor E. Frankl
Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, Specters of Marx, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida
The Trial, The Castle, The Complete Stories, The Zürau Aphorisms, Franz Kafka
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari
The Nightmare of Reason: Kafka, Pawel
The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, Bruno Schulz
Elsewhere Perhaps, Fima, Amos Oz
The Chosen, Davita’s Harp, The Promise, My Name is Asher Lev, The Gift of Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, Dalia Ravikovitch
City of Many Days, The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East, Shulamith Hareven
Mr Mani, Yehoshua
Apples From The Desert, Savyon Liebrecht
The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Alter ed
The Writing of Yehuda Amichai: A Thematic Approach, Glenda Abramson
An Impossible Life, David Black
Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism, Voices Within The Ark, Lilith’s Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural, Miriam’s Tambourine, Leaves from the Garden of Eden: One Hundred Classic Jewish Tales, Gabriel’s Palace: Jewish Mystical Tales, Invisible Kingdoms: Jewish Tales of Angels, Spirits, and Demons, A Palace of Pearls: The Stories of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, Reimagining the Bible: The Storytelling of the Rabbis, Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets, Howard Schwartz
The Complete Stories, Near to the Wild Heart, The Apple in the Dark, The Passion According to G.H., The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector
Reading with Clarice Lispector, Hélène Cixous
Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser
Gimpel the Fool and other stories, Shadows on the Hudson, In My Father’s Court, Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side (with Bruce Davidson), The Spinoza of Market Street, A Friend of Kafka and other stories, A Crown of Feathers and other stories, The Family Moskat, Isaac Bashevis Singer
Where the Bird Sings Best, Albina and the Dog-Men, The Son of Black Thursday, Alejandro Jodorowsky
Anarchy and Alchemy: the Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky
The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, Sarit Yishai-Levi
Jerusalem: A Family Portrait, Boaz Yakin, Nick Bertozzi (Illustrations)
We remember this second anniversary of the trial of Our Clown of Terror, Rapist In Chief, and Pedo-predator of the United States Traitor Trump indicted on four counts of attempts to overturn the 2020 election and seize control of the state as a tyrant of the Fourth Reich’s white supremacist terror and theocratic-patriarchal sexual terror.
This anniversary is shadowed by Trump’s July 31 2024 performance of his signature Theatre of Cruelty in an interview with Black journalists, where his contempt for women and nonwhite people and for the ideals, values, and institutions of democracy was on full display, along with his vacuous idiocy, arrogance, trivial bluster, entitlement and delusions of grandeur; but by now I believe we can stipulate the psychopathy of Trump the rapist, Nazi revivalist, human trafficking syndicate boss and money launderer for Russian oligarchs and crime lords, and Russian agent who would be king.
But if there is darkness which seethes among us like an annihilating leprous swarm of Christian Identity fascism, there is also light and hope for the Restoration of America; and the sanctity of our nation’s founding principle that all human beings “are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has been re-established. Herein I signpost that nowhere in this are such inherent human rights restricted to citizens.
There can be no greater and more clear and immediate image of the choices we now face in the streets in the battle against ICE white supremacist terror and forces of occupation, and in our future elections in choosing a vision of a future America; of liberty and tyranny, loyalty and treason, good and evil, Democrat or Republican versions of ourselves.
Let us act in Solidarity as guarantors of each others freedoms as citizens and universal human rights, to forge a free society of equals which upholds our uniqueness in a diverse and inclusive civilization, and bring regime change to the captured state of Vichy America now under the tyranny and terror of the Fourth Reich.
We must now wage War to the Knife for our liberty in Resistance and liberation struggle, but we must not abandon the field of electoral and legislative politics nor the instrument of lawfare.
Let us choose not masters and tyrants to subjugate us, but champions to liberate us. And let us be those champions for others.
As I wrote in my post of August 2 2023, Strike Three For Trump and the Party of Treason; We remain a chiaroscuro of darkness and light; we Americans, we human beings. Such boundaries define us, written in blood; I hope that one day these may also become interfaces.
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2021, Profiles in Treason and Terror; The dishonorable and the mad, the delusional and the sadistic epicures of brutality and perversions, the feral predators hooting and champing before the gallows and guillotines they have brought to murder members of congress with and their partners in uniform unleashing racist terror and gun violence in the streets, and the amoral and predatory grifters and puppetmasters of fascism who have subjugated and enslaved them and stolen their honor and their souls; these are among the idolators of Traitor Trump who conspired, enabled, and collaborated in his plot to subvert democracy and overthrow America in the January 6 Insurrection which attempted to seize Congress and execute its members, which like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch on which it was modeled was intended to decapitate the government of the people in a single stroke.
As details emerge of the internal operations and massive scale of the plot against America, in terms of its central coordination and logistics under direct operational command of Trump and his cabal of conspirators, we are offered not only the spectacle of his aberrance and monstrosity as a mad idiot Clown of Terror drooling and gloating in bestial depravity at the destruction of our values and institutions, the violation of our ideals and the endless suffering he has caused, but of those of his freakish and degenerate followers as well.
As I wrote in my post of June 13 2023, The Monster Brought to Judgement; Rejoice with me in the spectacle of the monster brought to judgement, his numberless crimes and perversions and those of his treasonous and dishonorable minions and collaborators in a loathsome regime of patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror as theocratic fascism and tyranny, designed and perpetrated for the purposes of infiltration and subversion of democracy and capture of the state, are displayed before the stage of history and the world as defining limits of the human and branded into the soul of America.
Like the thief’s brand of Milady de Winter in Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, may the actions of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, forever remind us who the enemies of Liberty truly are, regardless of the masks they wear and the web of lies in which they seek to trap us as the raw material of their power.
Saboteurs of our justice system and agents of the Fourth Reich have conspired to deny us a public viewing of the trial, a trial whose functions are not limited to the espionage of one Russian agent and ex President, but include the restoration of the legitimacy of the justice system, of America as both state and idea, and of democracy globally.
We must see the monster disempowered to harm us, exposed and cast out, if we are to find catharsis in this morality play, for Trump is a figure of the diseased heart of America as a Sin Eater for all of his followers and those who voted for him and his policies of division and theft of the soul. We must purge our destroyers from among us; most especially those who once believed his lies and enabled him as voters and co-conspirators including the whole of the Republican Party must now be granted the chance to disavow him and free themselves of their subjugation to theocratic fascism, or be judged with him by history.
This process of catharsis and the Restoration of America is by now two and a half years along since the January 6 Insurrection marked the high tide and collapse of fascism in America, progress we can measure by the few supporters who came to the trial in response to Trump’s dogwhistled orders to storm the court as a demonstration of power, as compared to the masses who perpetrated the storming of Congress in the Insurrection. Trump is still proclaiming madness and issuing terroristic commands, but almost no one is listening anymore.
The tide of fascist tyranny and terror in America has turned, and now is the time to bring a Reckoning for its evils.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of March 30 2023 ,Victory For America and Democracy: the Indictment of Traitor Trump; Jubilation and dancing in the streets erupts across America as the most dangerous foreign agent to ever attack our nation in the capture of the state with the Stolen Election of 2016 is indicted for illegal hush money payoffs to a prostitute; not yet for his trafficking of the stolen migrant children, the political assassination of our Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl, the abduction and torture of Black Lives Matter protestors by Homeland Security’s army of occupation, his six coup attempts ending with the January 6 Insurrection, or treason in the subversion of democracy, but such a Reckoning will come.
This is the first step of Trump’s descent into hell, where he will join his buddy Epstein and his idol Hitler.
I will remember always the moment when I realized Trump is actually an enemy agent and not merely a vile buffoon; watching as he took his Oath of Office swearing to uphold the Constitution and defend America from all enemies foreign and domestic, while Russian bombs fell on the American servicemen he had abandoned to their deaths in Syria.
Of Trump’s regime and the Fourth Reich we may say as Mark Twain did of the French Revolution and the epochal system of unequal power as monarchy which it overthrew; “THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
How shall future histories of the American Fourth Reich and the tyranny and terror of Traitor Trump’s Russian puppet regime remember and characterize him as its figurehead?
As I wrote in my post of June 29 2020, Traitor Trump, Bad Monkey William Barr, and the Subversion of the Rule of Law; Bad Monkey Barr gibbers and champs in his cage, rattling the bars and hurling scoops of his poo at the visitors. Trump the Incorrigible Brat makes faces and taunts him, spurring him on to displays of vicious foulness and depravity, alike in their embrace of the power to hurt others and thereby elevate themselves in vainglorious drooling dominance through fear.
Trump the Clown of Terror and his pet beast of pain and despair William Barr; carnival sideshow freaks of like nature, Trump upon his golden toilet of self-aggrandizement and Barr scampering at his feet and uttering perversions for treats.
Stay well back from the cage, children; the President grabs. His every action is calculated to generate helplessness from his victims, his strategies of politics an elaborate ritual of personal superiority through the submission of others which he offers to the demons which possess him, whispering their incantations of violation and depravity in the hollow rottenness beneath his orange painted husk of illusions and lies.
Such is the true purpose and intention of Trump’s psychopathic game of power as the figurehead of a fascist tyranny of white supremacist terror, misogynistic patriarchy and theocratic Gideonite fundamentalism, and plutocratic disaster capitalism, of authoritarian force and control and the subversion of democracy, in his monstrous acts of treason against our values and institutions of freedom, equality, truth, and justice; the destruction of America and of liberty and the universal human rights we are heir to throughout the world and from the future possibilities of becoming human.
Trump and his fascist conspirators and enablers want nothing less than to devour our souls and enslave us, beginning with the capture of America as a Theatre of Cruelty and the abandonment of our historic role as a guarantor of democracy and the Rights of Man.
In the darkness of his warrens beneath the White House, Trump howls and lashes out in rage through his proxies like William Barr, who with somersaults of avarice joins him in a delirium of madness and evil. From his lair and cabal of intimates Trump’s Sith-like influence ripples out through networks of master-disciple relationships to engulf our nation and our world in a vast web of deceit, and this network of secret power must be fought on its own terms with exposure and mass action.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2023, We Celebrate the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets; How do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Take a moment to savour with me the indictment of Trump for the crime of espionage. Ahhh, the bliss.
A commentator on MSN’s Eleventh Hour this night pronounced the magic words which I hope will awaken our nation from the long nightmare of capture by the Fourth Reich; “I think Trump is done.”
It has been a fairytale from which we may learn many kinds of morals, a story which begins in the 1980 capture of the Republican Party by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement as a fundamentalist theocracy and the Presidency of its figurehead Ronald Reagan and the Mayan Genocide they unleashed together, and found its true form in the Presidency of a pedophile rapist and Russian agent who for years slept with a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible.
Here in the trial of Traitor Trump is a morality play which is also a Rashomon Gate of our possible futures, for it is more than a legal last stand of the rule of law and the idea of democracy in America against a rigged electoral process which offers capture of the state to its enemies, but also a trial of democracy in America and of our infiltrated and subverted justice system whose court of ultimate appeal is a Supreme Court which is become a whorehouse.
What is the meaning of the Trump regime in the story of America and our future possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals?
As I wrote in my post of November 5 2020. Trump’s Last Coup Attempt and Subversion of Democracy as His Ship of Fools Sinks in Pathetic Failure; As Trump’s Ship of Fools comes apart at the seams and sinks beneath the waves in pathetic failure, our Clown of Terror collapses in infantile tantrums and tries to take democracy down with him, a final gesture of madness and idiocy in his delusional quest to subvert our values and institutions of liberty and seize tyrannical power.
We must never forget how close we came to a repeat of the 1933 German Federal Election that set Hitler on the path to a tyranny of absolute power; this is clearly the most important electoral event in the history of humankind since then, and the two elections are terrifyingly parallel. Trump tried three times to use the Black Lives Matter protests to create fear and legitimize the federal occupation of America under the pretext of re-establishing law and order in an exact duplication of Hitler’s successful strategy using the Reichstag Fire, and failed.
We have escaped the jaws of the Fourth Reich which have held us fast for four years, since the Stolen Election of 2016, while Trump and his cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and plutocratic robber barons have violated everything about America which is noble and true, plundered the public wealth, dehumanized and divided us, sabotaged and subverted the institutions of our freedom, equality, truth, and justice, betrayed our allies and emboldened our foes, lost the American hegemony of global power and privilege and our position as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us never forget the bottomless depravities, treasons, and amoral predation and greed of Trump’s many enablers and conspirators in the Fall of America as we struggle in the years ahead to reclaim our nation and our souls. We must hold them to account, but we must also reimagine our society and the many systemic and structural flaws by which we came to this broken and lost state.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2022, The Greatest Show on Earth: Presenting the January 6 Committee; Tonight our puppets will dance upon the stage of history and our imaginations, while a chiaroscuro of light as truth and democracy versus darkness as fascist tyranny and falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, conspiracy theories and propaganda play for the kingdom of our souls and the fate of America and the world.
Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a prison planet of masters and slaves?
Now begins a great Reckoning, and we shall see.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2021, Treason, Tyranny, and Terror on Trial: As the Second Impeachment of Traitor Trump Begins, I Submit Charges Before the People’s Tribunal of Crimes Against Humanity for Which Trump and His Collaborators Should Now Be On Trial; Among the many crimes against humanity for which Traitor Trump and his collaborators should be on trial but are not yet include the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Mexican and other nonwhite migrants, the concentration camps at our border, the orphaning and torture of children, and the state tyranny and terror of fascist and racist violence as national policy perpetrated by the ICE and Border Patrol components of Homeland Security, forces of repression which are antidemocratic by their nature and which should be abolished as a top priority of the Restoration of America.
Just as villainous and reprehensible is the parallel program of racist police violence and the carceral state to re-enslave Black American citizens and enforce systemic forms of inequality and injustice through state terror, repression of dissent, the force of a militarized police and the counterinsurgency model of policing which has transformed our security services into an army of occupation with primarily political objectives, and the control of pervasive and endemic surveillance and propaganda, lies, illusions, and subversions of the truth.
Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his circus of fools, degenerates, and barbarians, his enablers and collaborators both within the government and his shadow forces rallying under the Confederate flag to bring violence and insurrection to our nations capital and to the streets of our cities throughout America, are co-conspirators and instigators in the murders of every Black American killed by police shooting or other racist violence since its authorization by Trump in the wake of Charlottesville.
And every missing child kidnapped by the state and disappeared into what abominable slavery or human trafficking designed in the diseased imagination of Trump and his Epstein buddies we know not of, every migrant of the huddled masses yearning to be free who died in the quest to reach the safety of America because the water caches had been intentionally sabotaged by criminals in the uniform of our nation who were “just following orders” like their counterparts in the SS during the Holocaust, every prisoner who died in custody because they were denied water or medical care; the blood of these and countless other victims of Trump’s narcissistic self-aggrandizement and regime of fascist corruption, racism, and patriarchal sexual terror is on the hands of every Republican who voted for him and fails now in this trial to repudiate him publicly and renounce his works as among those of the devils which he serves.
For in his actions Trump has been not only a foreign agent and Putin’s puppet whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America, but also a slave of Moloch the Seducer, Demon of Lies, in that he is not merely a pathological liar but also an idiot madman who cannot distinguish truth from lies, and who has weaponized his delusions and psychopathy as instruments of our falsification and subjugation in his quest for tyrannical power.
The bizarre and lurid dark fairytales of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, like the charges of the Inquisition and the Nazis which othered witches and Jews on which QAnon is constructed, serves as deflection from Trump’s loathsome perversions and sexual terrorism. What terrors did he conceal behind the beauty pageant and modeling syndicate he once controlled?
His Stop the Steal campaign is a similar deflection which shields him from inquiry into the Stolen Election of 2016 and the fact that his Presidency was entirely illegitimate and due to Russian interference; it was also the rhetorical and organizational basis of his final attempted coup on January 6, for which he is now being impeached for the second time.
We must cast out the monsters from among us, the racists and white supremacist terrorists, the Gideonite fundamentalists and patriarchs of Christian Identity fascism and sexual terror, and the amoral forces of repression of those who would enslave us and who enforce hegemonies of elite power and privilege and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness armed with guns and badges and the authority of a government which has been infiltrated by the Fourth Reich, an implacable and relentless enemy which has come just short of seizing us in its jaws.
We must give fascism no second chances.
As written by Nick Visser in Huffpost, in an article entitled 7 Key Takeaways From Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 Indictment; “ormer President Donald Trump has been indicted over his attempt to remain in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election, yet another moment of reckoning amid a torrent of criminal charges.
Trump faces four felony charges as part of a sweeping, 45-page indictment filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Special counsel Jack Smith’s team of investigators accused the former president of multiple conspiracies to defraud the United States, to obstruct an official proceeding and to deprive people of their right to vote and have that vote counted under the Constitution.
1. Trump knew his claims were false but spread them anyway to create an “intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger.”
Prosecutors note that Trump, like every American, had the right to speak publicly about the election “and even to claim, falsely,” that there had been “outcome-determinative fraud.”
But his efforts became unlawful when he moved to defraud the United States and attempt to subvert the process of collecting, counting and certifying the election results. That plan, the indictment says, included a multi-prong approach to spread lies, install slates of fake electors in swing states and convince election officials and then-Vice President Mike Pence to subvert the will of the people.
“Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power,” the indictment says.
2. The indictment identifies six co-conspirators.
Trump was aided in his effort to overturn the 2020 election by six unnamed co-conspirators, the indictment says.
Five of them are identifiable through details and information provided in the filing documents:
1. Rudy Giuliani is listed as “an attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims and pursue strategies that the Defendant’s 2020 re-election campaign attorneys would not.”
2. John Eastman is listed as “an attorney who devised and attempted to implement a strategy to leverage the Vice President’s ceremonial role overseeing the certification proceeding to obstruct the certification of the presidential election.”
3. Sidney Powell is listed as “an attorney whose unfounded claims of election fraud the Defendant privately acknowledged to others sounded ‘crazy.’”
4. Jeffrey Clark is identified as “a Justice Department official who worked on civil matters and who, with the Defendant, attempted to use the Justice Department to open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud.”
5. Kenneth Chesebro is listed as “an attorney who assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.”
6. The sixth co-conspirator is so far unknown but is identified as “a political consultant who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.”
3. People in Trump’s orbit repeatedly told him there was no evidence of voter fraud.
The indictment alleges Trump and his co-conspirators made repeated, “prolific” claims of election fraud despite knowing they were false. Prosecutors say that Trump was repeatedly told by his inner circle his claims were untrue but that he “deliberately disregarded the truth.”
Smith’s team pointed to conversations Trump had with Vice President Mike Pence, senior leaders at the Justice Department, the director of national intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security and many aides, White House attorneys and campaign staffers, all of whom said his claims were unsubstantiated.
4. Trump acknowledged claims about election fraud and voting machines pushed by a co-conspirator sounded “crazy.”
The indictment notes that even as Trump’s legal advisers were working to undercut election results in Georgia, he knew the claims were unfounded and even described Co-Conspirator 3’s plan as “crazy.”
That sentiment spread through Trump’s close advisers as the effort to install slates of fake electors in swing states began in force in an effort to obstruct a true count of the Electoral College votes.
“Here’s the thing the way this has morphed it’s a crazy play so I don’t know who wants to put their name on it,” Trump’s deputy campaign manager at the time texted to other aides. No one agreed to put their name on the plan as they couldn’t “stand by it.”
5. Trump pressured the Justice Department to support him and threatened to remove those who refused to go along with his plan.
Trump repeatedly tried to get the Department of Justice to support his false claims of election fraud, “thus giving the Defendant’s lies the backing of the federal government.” But the acting attorney general and acting deputy attorney general both refused, saying the agency would not and could not change the outcome of the election.
“Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump replied, the indictment says.
The former president then attempted to install Co-Conspirator 4 as acting attorney general to help further the plot. Trump backed down after many in the White House threatened a mass resignation.
6. Pence’s notes helped the special counsel craft his case.
Trump heavily pressured Pence to support his effort to remain in power and reject the ceremonial certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the election.
Prosecutors pieced together details of Trump’s conversations and thinking around the time using Pence’s “contemporaneous notes” in the days leading up to Jan. 6.
The vice president rejected Trump’s attempts, telling him to his face that he didn’t believe he had the authority to do what Trump asked.
Trump later told Pence that he would have to publicly criticize him, the indictment says, which prompted his chief of staff to inform the Secret Service about fears for Pence’s safety.
7. Trump waited and watched on TV as his supporters stormed the Capitol.
The indictment claims Trump exploited the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and resisted pleas from his aides and supporters to speak out as the insurrection grew.
“When advisors urged the Defendant to issue a calming message aimed at the rioters, the Defendant refused, instead repeatedly remarking that the people at the Capitol were angry because the election had been stolen,” the document says.”
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter of August 2; “There have been more developments today surrounding yesterday’s indictment of former president Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding as he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install himself in office over the wishes of the American people.
Observers today called out the part of the indictment that describes how Trump and Co-Conspirator 4, who appears to be Jeffrey Clark, the man Trump wanted to make attorney general, intended to use the military to quell any protests against Trump’s overturning of the election results. When warned that staying in power would lead to “riots in every major city in the United States,” Co-Conspirator 4 replied, “Well…that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
The Insurrection Act of 1807 permits the president to use the military to enforce domestic laws, invoking martial law. Trump’s allies urged him to do just that to stay in power. Fears that Trump might do such a thing were strong enough that on January 3, 2021, all 10 living former defense secretaries signed a Washington Post op-ed warning that “[e]fforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”
They put their colleagues on notice: “Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.” Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo recalled today that military leaders told Congress they were reluctant to respond to the violence at the Capitol out of concern about how Trump might use the military under the Insurrection Act.
Political pollster Tom Bonier wrote: “I understand Trump fatigue, but it feels like the president and his advisors preparing to use the military to quash protests against his planned coup should be bigger news. Especially when that same guy is in the midst of a somewhat credible comeback effort.”
On The Beat tonight, Ari Melber connected Trump Co-Conspirator John Eastman to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). Just before midnight on January 6, 2021, after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Eastman wrote to Pence’s lawyer to beg him to get Pence to adjourn Congress “for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations, as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount of illegal activity that has occurred here.” On the floor of the Senate at about the same time, Cruz, who voted against certification, used very similar language when he called for “a ten-day emergency audit.”
An email sent by Co-Conspirator 6, the political consultant, matches one sent from Boris Epshteyn to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, suggesting that Epshteyn is Co-Conspirator 6. The Russian-born Epshteyn has been with Trump’s political organization since 2016 and was involved in organizing the slates of false electors in 2020. Along with political consultant Steve Bannon, Epshteyn created a cryptocurrency called “$FJB, which officially stands for “Freedom. Jobs. Business.” but which they marketed to Trump loyalists as “F*ck Joe Biden.” By February 2023, Nikki McCann Ramirez reported in Rolling Stone that the currency had lost 95% of its value.
Since the indictment became public, Trump loyalists have insisted that the Department of Justice is attacking Trump’s First Amendment rights to free speech. Indeed, if Giuliani’s unhinged appearance on Newsmax last night is any indication, it appears that has been their strategy all along. Aside from the obvious limit that the First Amendment does not cover criminal behavior, the grand jury sidestepped this issue by acknowledging that Trump had a right to lie about his election loss. It indicted him for unlawfully trying to obstruct an official proceeding and to disenfranchise voters.
Today, Trump’s former attorney general William Barr dismissed the idea that the indictment is an attack on Trump’s First Amendment rights. Barr told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “As the indictment says, they’re not attacking his First Amendment right. He can say whatever he wants. He can even lie. He can even tell people that the election was stolen when he knew better. But that does not protect you from entering into a conspiracy. All conspiracies involve speech. And all fraud involves speech. Free speech doesn’t give you the right to engage in a fraudulent conspiracy.”
As written by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian, in an article entitled The 45 pages that skewer Trump’s bid to destroy American democracy; “More than 1,000 people charged over the US Capitol riot, millions of pages of evidence compiled by the House January 6 committee, hundreds of hours of depositions of key players – all this has finally been boiled down to a 45-page indictment that accuses Donald Trump of attempting to destroy American democracy.
“Why didn’t they do this 2.5 years ago?” the former president asked peevishly on Tuesday, shortly before the indictment came down. The answer lies in the document itself: in its painstaking command of detail and in the cool, crisp legal language deployed by special counsel Jack Smith to make his case.
This is the third time that Trump has been criminally indicted, and to some extent the shock value has worn off. Much of the content of the grand jury indictment filed in a federal court in Washington DC is familiar.
But no one can doubt the significance of its contents. For the first time in US history, legal charges have been brought against a president for attempting to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power that until 6 January 2021 had stood as a pillar of American values since a defeated John Adams quietly snuck out of the capital on 4 March 1801.
It’s taken two and a half years, sure, but Smith wastes no time in getting to the point. The second sentence of the indictment reads: “The defendant lost the 2020 presidential election”, taking us straight to that place where Trump so consequentially refused to go – the acceptance that he was a loser.
By the fourth sentence, it is clear that Smith has no intention of mincing his words. He rolls out the L-word – “lies” – with an ease which belies the months of angst that the editors of American newspapers went through before they felt comfortable enough to attach it to Trump.
Later, he accuses the former president of “fraud”, a charged word given the sequence of events. It was precisely that word that Trump used as the foundation stone of his bid to overturn the election – his lie that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud –and now it was being directed back at him.
Smith portrays the former president as a man who was prepared to tear down everything to stay in office. “Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power.”
The Trump who emerges from the 45 pages is a frustrated man who, together with his unnamed and as yet uncharged co-conspirators, unleashed a concerted, relentless and fully conscious plan to subvert the 2020 election. Smith dates the plot to 14 November 2020, the day after Trump’s campaign lawyers had conceded defeat in court in Arizona, signalling that he had lost the presidential election.
That day, Trump turned to “Co-Conspirator 1” – a clear description of his lawyer Rudy Giuliani who is referenced at least 40 times – and who “executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states to impair, obstruct and defeat the federal government function”.
“Knowing deceit” is critical, as it speaks to Trump’s state of mind that is likely to be a key legal battleground if and when the case goes to trial. Smith devotes pages to the subject, repeatedly underlining the allegation that Trump made “knowingly false claims” of fraud in the casting and counting of votes.
“These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” the document reads. It goes on to list the many people and institutions that directly informed Trump that there was no evidence of fraud, from Vice-President Mike Pence down.
Familiar though they are, some of the details remain just too delicious for Smith – and by extension the Guardian – not to recount. He recalls that during the notorious call between Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which the president asked him to “find” 11,780 votes, the defendant also claimed that 5,000 dead people had voted.
“The actual number were two,” Raffensperger replied. “Two. Two people that were dead that voted.”
The indictment largely follows the roadmap set out by the January 6 committee in its relatively elephantine 845-page final report. It traces the story of the fake electors who were convened in key battleground states lost by Trump in an effort to send illegal false electoral certificates to Congress.
Smith emphasises the extraordinary lengths to which Trump and his co-conspirators went, filing a petition to the US supreme court from Arizona on 11 December 2020 “as a pretext to claim that litigation was pending in the state”. Giuliani was concerned, the indictment alleges using his “Co-Conspirator 1” moniker, that it “could appear treasonous for the AZ electors to vote if there is no pending court proceeding”.
Sure enough, all 16 fake electors in Michigan have now been charged by the state attorney general, and further criminal counts are expected soon against some of the fake electors in Georgia.
The lengths to which the conspirators would go is another searing theme running through the indictment. In a previously untold tableau, we see Co-Conspirator 4, clearly identifiable as the former justice department official and Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark, confronting a White House lawyer who warned him that if Trump refused to leave the presidency there would be “riots in every major city”.
“That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” Clark is alleged to have replied, alluding to the 1807 provision that empowers the US president to deploy the military to suppress civil disorder.
There are other surprises in the document. In the passage on the pressure applied on Pence in the run-up to his ceremonial counting of the electoral college votes on January 6, Smith nonchalantly drops in a mention that prosecutors have obtained the former vice-president’s contemporaneous notes.
That’s a revelation that should send a shiver down the spines of Trump’s defence team.
We learn, too, that on the day of the US Capitol riot, Trump and Giuliani continued to exploit the violence by calling lawmakers to implore them to delay certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Giuliani was badgering US senators even as late as 7.18pm.
The one argument that is absent here, significantly perhaps, is any suggestion that Trump personally orchestrated the uprising on January 6. It’s a striking omission, given some of the evidence that was heard by the House committee, including the sensational claim that Trump had tried to grab the wheel of his security vehicle and drive towards the Capitol building as the uprising was under way.
Its absence, though, points to the careful, cautious tone of the indictment, and to its purpose. Unlike the January 6 committee report, the job of this document is not to lay down a record for history.
Its task is to make a watertight legal case that Trump committed criminal acts that cut to the quick of the American experiment. There’s a lot riding on it: next year’s presidential election, the future of American democracy and that other consideration – a maximum sentence of 55 years in federal prison.”
As written in The Guardian’s editorial, entitled The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s new indictment: America needs this trial: A healthy body politic cannot allow its core values and principles to be trashed with impunity; “he indictment served on Donald Trump on Monday marks the beginning of a legal reckoning that is desperately required, if American democracy is to properly free itself from his malign, insidious influence. Mr Trump already faces multiple criminal charges relating to the retention of classified national security documents and the payment of hush money to a porn star. But the gravity of the four counts outlined by the special counsel, Jack Smith, is of a different order of magnitude.
Mr Trump stands accused of conspiring, in office, to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. Following Joe Biden’s victory, the indictment states, Mr Trump “knowingly” used false claims of electoral fraud in an attempt “to subvert the legitimate election results”. A bipartisan congressional committee report last year came to similar conclusions and provides much of the basis for the charges. But this represents the first major legal attempt to hold Mr Trump accountable for events leading up to and including the storming of the Capitol by a violent mob on 6 January 2021.
The stakes could hardly be set higher. Democratic elections and the peaceful transfer of power are the cornerstones of the American republic. The testimony given to Congress indicates that Mr Trump used his authority to try to bully federal and state officials into supporting his claims that the election had been “stolen” from him. Repeatedly told that his assertions were baseless, he then mobilised a hostile crowd on 6 January to intimidate lawmakers charged with ratifying Mr Biden’s victory.
It is inconceivable that Mr Trump should not be made to answer for actions that imperilled the constitutional and democratic functioning of the United States. The prosecutors’ case will hinge on their ability to prove that he knew his claims of a stolen election were bogus. But beyond the trial itself, it would be foolish to underestimate Mr Trump’s ability to turn even this situation to his own political advantage.
The legal fronts on which Mr Trump is now engaged will drain his financial resources. But a narrative of victimhood and persecution has become, and will remain, the galvanising theme of his campaign. Two previous criminal indictments saw his poll ratings lift, helping him to establish a huge lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination for 2024. Whatever the evidence to the contrary, a sizable proportion of American voters will continue to back Mr Trump’s self-serving version of reality.
One of the most dangerously polarising elections in US history thus looms as, over the next 15 months, Mr Trump uses political cunning to evade the legal net that is closing around him. Through his lawyers, he will do all he can to delay matters, hoping eventually to dictate the course of events from the White House. For his part, Mr Smith said on Monday that the justice department will seek “a speedy trial”.
It is in the interests of American democracy, to which Mr Trump represents a clear and present danger, that the justice department gets its wish. A healthy body politic cannot allow its founding values and core principles to be trashed with apparent impunity. Prosecutors will need to proceed with care and be alert to the complex political dynamics. But this climactic reckoning in court needs to take place before Mr Trump gets the chance to besmirch the country’s highest office all over again.”
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s indictment proves he might not be bright, but he is dangerous: Donald Trump’s frantic, cynical and preposterous attempts to hang on to power after losing the 2020 election were a dark moment in US history; “In the 1976 political drama All the President’s Men, Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward meets the secretive FBI source, Deep Throat, in a parking garage to ask him what he knows about the Watergate break-in. Deep Throat – in real life, the FBI deputy director Mark Felt – is ominous and taciturn, refusing to say all that he knows. “I have to do this my way,” he tells Redford. “You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm.” But he offers a blunt assessment of the inner workings of the Nixon administration. “Forget the myths that the media has created about the White House,” Deep Throat tells Woodward. “The truth is these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
Few moments in history, including the Watergate scandal, have done so much to puncture the dignified mystique of American government as Donald Trump’s frantic, cynical and preposterous attempts to hang on to power after losing the 2020 election. The indictment against him related that effort, unsealed on Tuesday by the office of special counsel Jack Smith, charges Trump with engaging in three conspiracies: to defraud the United States in seeking to overturn the election, to obstruct the government in seeking to derail the January 6 proceedings, and perhaps most meaningfully, to deprive American voters of their right to have their votes counted. The charges are serious; the violence was deadly. But every one of the indictment’s 45 pages evokes Deep Throat’s words: these are not very bright guys.
The document unsealed on Tuesday charges only Trump. But it also implicates six co-conspirators. These include a justice department official, probably the then assistant attorney general Jeff Clark, along with an unidentified political consultant. Also implicated are four Republican lawyers, seemingly including Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani; the law professor John Eastman, who concocted the false theory that the vice-president had the authority to intervene in the electoral vote counting ceremony; Ken Chesebro, an author of the fake electors scheme; and the quack pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell.
It was with these accomplices that the special counsel alleges that Donald Trump embarked on a series of frauds, fabrications and cockamamie schemes to reverse the election outcome between November 2020 and early January 2021. That project had multiple successive fronts, with the conspirators moving on to new strategies as the previous ones failed. They tried to use the justice department to pursue frivolous and fraudulent allegations of election malfeasance; then they tried to conscript state officials into advancing false claims of election fraud; then they tried to send fake electors to congress; finally, they tried to stop congress from certifying the election results on January 6.
All the while, they flooded the media with what the indictment calls “knowingly false” claims that the election was stolen, in the hope of creating public distrust in the election outcome and pressure on the officials who they believed could reverse it. None of these schemes were especially well-thought-out, and none would have been plausible without both a willingness by many Republican officials to lie on Trump’s behalf, and a willingness by many Trump supporters to commit violence. But those, sadly, are not in short supply.
That Trump and his co-conspirators failed in their effort to subvert the election was largely a matter of luck; that they are now being charged in this most significant of Trump’s crimes was not at all guaranteed.
Much of what is recounted in the indictment is not new. The facts presented by the special counsel hew closely to those laid out by the House January 6 committee in a series of televised hearings last year, and Smith, like that committee, spends a great deal of time eradicating any doubt about Trump’s state of mind or his certainty that his own statements about the election were false. But the indictment does contain new tidbits of information gleaned from the special counsel’s investigation, ones that make both the incompetence and the malice of the conspiracy plain. Copious testimony and contemporaneous notes provided by Mike Pence, for example, make it clear the extent to which Trump’s former vice-president, against whom he incited a murderous mob, is cooperating with the special counsel. Emails obtained by the investigation also add texture to the story of the election subversion effort. One campaign adviser, tasked with encouraging false claims of election fraud in Georgia, wrote in an email that the allegations being advanced by the Trump camp were “conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership”. Not exactly the words of a man convinced of the righteousness of his own cause.
More disturbingly, the indictment reveals the extent to which Trump and his co-conspirators were conscious of the possibility that their actions might lead to violence, and that violence might be required to achieve their goals. This does not seem to have disturbed them, or even to have prompted much hesitation.
Pence’s lawyers allegedly told John Eastman that if the vice-president usurped the January 6 certification ceremony as Eastman wanted him to, the result would lead to a “disastrous situation” in which the election would “have to be decided in the streets”. On 3 January, just days before the riot, a member of the White House counsel’s office told Jeff Clark that if the president tried to remain in office as planned, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States”. To which Clark allegedly replied: “Well, that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.” Clark was referring to a law that empowers the sitting president to deploy the military to suppress unrest.
It has long been clear that far-right extremist militia groups, such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, planned for violence at the Capitol on January 6; it has been less clear the extent to which the Trump camp communicated with these groups, if at all, about the event and that possibility. It was a connection that has long been speculated about, but which the House committee on January 6 did not firmly make, and the special counsel’s indictment doesn’t, either.
In December 2020, just weeks before Clark’s conversation, the leader of the Oath Keepers had called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. This rhyming thinking doesn’t indicate coordination, but it does suggest a sympathy of mind, and of tactics, between the extremist groups and the Trump camp. It is an affinity that will only become clearer if Trump becomes the Republican nominee again, as he is all but certain to. These are not very bright guys, but they’re still quite dangerous ones.”
What happens next, as Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, fundraises off his indictment and uses it to centralize power in his domination of the Republican Party for his campaign to recapture the state in our next election, and move us nearer to a civil war?
As written by Robert Reich in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump is gearing up for his ‘final battle’. So should we; “Not once has Donald Trump veered from his core campaign theme.
Recall the first rally of his 2024 election campaign on 25 March in Waco, Texas – exactly 30 years after a deadly siege between law enforcement and the Branch Davidians resulted in the deaths of more than 80 members of that religious cult and four federal agents.
He opened with a choir of men imprisoned for their role in the January 6 insurrection singing “Justice for All”, intercut with the national anthem and with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with his hand on his heart. Behind, on big screens, was footage from the Capitol riot.
Trump then repeated his bogus claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”. He praised the rioters of January 6.
He raged against the prosecutors overseeing multiple investigations into his conduct as “absolute human scum”. He told the crowd that “the thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system will be defeated, discredited and totally disgraced.”
He then declared:
“Our enemies are desperate to stop us and our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and to break our will. But they failed. They’ve only made us stronger. And 2024 is the final battle, it’s going to be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and America will be a free nation once again.”
Since then, as indictments have piled up against him and his poll numbers among Republicans have risen, Trump’s “final battle” comes into ever sharper focus: it is a battle against the rule of law and democracy.
The mega indictment we have all been waiting for – the indictment against Trump for his attempted coup against the United States – will be announced very soon.
Trump is prepared to use it in his final battle.
Tuesday, on an Iowa radio show, he warned it would be “very dangerous” if Special Counsel Jack Smith put him in jail, since his supporters have “much more passion than they had in 2020”.
Unfortunately for the nation, the Republican party is uniting behind Trump’s side of this battle line.
If not defending the January 6 rioters outright, Republican lawmakers are attacking Special Counsel Jack Smith, the justice department, the Manhattan district attorney, and other current and prospective prosecutors seeking to hold Trump accountable.
A Trump indictment for attempting the overthrow of the constitutional order and the verdict of the electorate will guarantee that 2024 will be more of a referendum on Trump than a referendum on Biden, as was the 2020 election.
It will make it harder for Republican candidates across the nation to focus on their fake nemeses – “woke” teachers and corporations, trans youth, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants and “socialism” – and force them instead to defend Trump’s side in the final battle.
Trump and the Republicans will lose this battle. Even if they win Republican primaries, they will lose the general election.
Recall that last November, virtually every 2020-election-denying Republican who sought office in a truly contested election went down to defeat.
Those who care about democracy and the rule of law should welcome the battle, and not just because it will help Biden and the Democrats.
It will also help clarify what’s at stake for the nation in 2024 and beyond.
It will show how eager Trump and the Republican party are to abandon democracy and the rule of law in order to gain power. It will show that the vast majority of Americans reject their position.
Americans hold different views about many things, but most of us oppose authoritarianism. We reject fascism.
We value the constitution and the Bill of Rights. We are committed to democracy, even with its many flaws. We support the rule of law.
We want to live in a nation where no one is above the law. We want to be able to sleep at night without worrying that a president might unleash armed lackeys to drag us out of our homes because he considers us to be his enemy.
The pustule of Trump has been growing since 2016, and the authoritarian impulses underlying this infection have been allowed to fester for decades.
Folks, it is finally time to lance this boil. It is time to decidedly rescue democracy and the rule of law. It is time to defeat Trump and his enablers who are determined to defy the core values of America.
Let the battle begin.”
As I wrote in my post of June 15 2022, Act Three of the Greatest Show on Earth: Where Do We Go From Here?; Where do we go from here?
Democracy in America survived its most terrible moment of peril from internal threat in the January 6 Insurrection, yet here we are, witness to the public exposure of the plot and its treasonous conspirators on television as Congress brings a Reckoning to the Fourth Reich.
Like the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 on which it was modeled, it failed; but in doing so also achieved all of its strategic goals, moving our great enemy nearer to victory by staging a Lost Cause which established the fascist counternarrative as iconography that Trump remains our legitimate President. Next time, and there will always be a next time, we may not be so lucky.
Not only do the forces of fascism remain an active threat, through open allegiance to the Lost Cause which echoes horrifically with that of the Confederacy and the KKK whose adherents are among the networks of deniable assets now among us as they were at the Capitol on that fateful day, but the vast resources of wealth and power at their command after seventy years of infiltration of global elites and governments remain undiminished.
But none of this is relevant to the true threat which fascism poses to us all today; for America has been divided against itself, and as we are warned by Abraham Lincoln in 1858 in his House Divided speech in reference to the synoptic Gospels of Luke 11:17, Mark 3:25, and Matthew 12:25; “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.
We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed –
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
As we are taught with the lyrics of the song Where Do We Go From Here?, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7 of season 6, Once More With Feeling, possibly the greatest musical episode of any telenovela yet created;
“Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
The battle’s done,
And we kinda won.
So we sound our victory cheer.
Where do we go from here.
Why is the path unclear,
When we know home is near.
Understand we’ll go hand in hand,
But we’ll walk alone in fear. (Tell me)
Tell me where do we go from here.
When does the end appear,
When do the trumpets cheer.
The curtains close, on a kiss god knows,
We can tell the end is near…
Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
Where do we go
from here?”
Here is an elegy for the Fall of America, a hymn to a dying hope and the lost grandeur of a fallen nation. When in a distant future the artifacts of our civilization begin to puzzle whatever beings arise from our carrion, and they ask who were the Americans, I hope such music as this lamentation remains to guide their questions.
Yet hope remains when all is lost, and whether it becomes a gift or a curse is in our hands. These lyrics speak of the modern pathology of disconnectedness, of the division and fracture of our Solidarity, of subjugation through learned helplessness and the dominion of fear. But this is not the end of the story, nor of ours.
Once More With Feeling ends not with abjection, but with The Kiss, between the Slayer and Spike, one of the monsters she hunts. A very particular kind of monster, who is also the hero of the story in its entire seven year arc; one who is made monstrous by his condition of being and forces beyond his control, against which he struggles for liberation and to recreate and define himself as he chooses, a monster who reclaims his humanity and his soul. This is why we continue to watch the show twenty years after its debut; we are all Spike, locked in titanic struggle for the ownership of ourselves with authorized identities and systemic evils, a revolution of truths written in our flesh against imposed conditions of struggle and orders of human being, meaning, and value.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an allegory of Sartrean freedom in a world without inherent value or meaning, of the joy of total freedom versus the terror of our nothingness, and above all a song of the redemptive power of love to return to us our true selves.
This is how we defeat fascist tyranny in the long game, after we bring a Reckoning for its crimes against humanity and its subversion of democracy; let us answer hate with love, division with solidarity, fear with hope, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
America dances with our addiction to power;
Liberty and Fascist Tyranny, Hope and Fear,
The terror of freedom and the ecstasy of submission
Hozier – Take Me to Church, Art-project Inspiration. Choreography and directed by Helga Geller
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 6 episode 7- Once More, with Feeling – Where Do We Go From Here?
Incredulous laughter, audible gasps: Trump’s performance at Black journalists’ panel left him exposed
Japanese was a second language for me from the age of nine, when I began formal study of martial arts including traditional Jiu Jitsu, Kenjutsu, and Iaijutsu, but also shakuhacki or bamboo flute, inkbrush calligraphy, and the literature of Zen. This I continued for nearly seventeen years, until the death of my teacher.
I claimed Zen Buddhism as my religion on official documents through my twenties, lived at times in Kyoto, and was so enraptured by Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North that I trekked the route to see where he had written it.
World Literature: Japan
History
A History of Japan, Revised Edition, R.H.P. Mason, J.G. Caiger
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989: The Emergence of the World’s Greatest City, Edward G. Seidensticker
Wrong About Japan, Peter Carey
A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, Pico Iyer
Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes
A Tokyo Romance, Behind the Mask, Ian Buruma
Lost Japan, Another Kyoto, Alex Kerr
Kyoto: Seven Paths to the Heart of the City, Old Kyoto: A Guide to Traditional Shops, Restaurants and Inns, Diane Durston
The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan, The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan, Ivan Morris
Japanese Inn, Japanese Pilgrimage, Oliver Statler
The Floating World in Japanese Fiction, Hibbet
Shogun: The Life of Tokugawa Ieyasu, Japanese Plays: Classic Noh, Kyogen and Kabuki Works, Ten Foot Square Hut and Tales of the Heike, A.L. Sadler
Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World 1852-1912, A History of Japanese Literature Series: Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century, World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600-1867, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era; Fiction, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era; Poetry, Drama, Criticism, Donald Keene
Shōgun, James Clavell
No Barrier: Unlocking the Zen Koan – A New Translation of the Zen Classic “Wumenguan” (Mumonkan), Wumen Huikai, Thomas Cleary (Editor), Classics of Buddhism and Zen, Volumes 1-5: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary
A First Zen Reader, A Second Zen Reader: The Tiger’s Cave and Translations of Other Zen Writings, Trevor Leggett (Translation), Japanese Chess: The Game of Shogi, Trevor Leggett
Living And Dying In Zazen: Five Zen Masters Of Modern Japan, The Grass Flute Zen Master: Sodo Yokoyama, Arthur Braverman
Susumu’s Saga: A Boy’s Journey from Rural Japan to Manchuria and Revolutionary Russia, Junichi Saga, Shinya Yamaguchi (Editor), Avi Landau (Translator)
The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945, John Toland
Storm Clouds over the Pacific, 1931–41, Japan Runs Wild, 1942–1943, Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze, Peter Harmsen
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W. Dower
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, Herbert P. Bix
Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, Eri Hotta
The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, Pearl Harbor and the Coming of the Pacific War: A Brief History with Documents and Essays, Akira Iriye
Japan at War: An Oral History, Haruko Taya Cook, Theodore F. Cook
Dancing Into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, and Japan, Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy, Sondra Fraleigh
Art, Riot, Terror: The 60s Tokyo Avant-Garde: Mishima, Hijikata, Oshima, Hijikata: Revolt of the Body, Stephen Barber
Geisha, All Japan Catalog, Liza Dalby
Samurai and SIlk, Reischaur
The Emperor and the Wolf: Kurosawa and Mifune, Galbraith
Something Like An Autobiography, Kurosawa
Japanese Demon Lore: Oni from Ancient Times to the Present, Noriko T. Reider
Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and Anime, Yoshiko Okuyama
Something Wicked from Japan: Ghosts, Demons & Yokai in Ukiyo-e Masterpieces, Ei Nakau
Shodo: The Quiet Art of Japanese Zen Calligraphy, Shozo Sato
The Sound of One Hand: Paintings and Calligraphy by Zen Master Hakuin, Audrey Yoshiko Seo
The Art of Haiku: Its History through Poems and Paintings by Japanese Masters, The Art of Zen: Paintings and Calligraphy by Japanese Monks 1600-1925, Stephen Addiss
Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga, Frederik L. Schodt
Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, Susan J. Napier
Anime: A History, Jonathan Clements
Interpreting Anime, Christopher Bolton
Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku, William J. Higginson
Literature
Showa: A History of Japan, volumes 1926-1939, 1939-944, 1944-1953, 1953-1989, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, Shigeru Mizuki
The Essential Haiku, Haas ed.
Basho’s Narrow Road, Sato trans
Matsuo Bashō, Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa, The Path of Flowering Thorn: The Life and Poetry of Yosa Buson, Makoto Ueda
One Hundred Leaves: A new annotated translation of the Hyakunin Isshu, Frank Watson translator
The Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda: Japan’s Beloved Modern Haiku Poet: Includes a Translation of Santoka’s “Diary of the One-Grass Hut”, Sumita Oyama (Author), William Scott Wilson (Translator)
River of Stars: Selected Poems, Yosano Akiko
I Wait for the Moon: 100 Haiku of Momoko Kuroda, Momoko Kuroda, Abigail Friedman (Translator)
Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World, Kamo no Chōmei
An Introduction to Zen Buddhism C.G. Jung (Foreword), Zen and Japanese Culture, Zen Koan as a Means of Attaining Enlightenment, The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind: The Significance of the Sūtra of Hui-Neng, Essays in Zen Buddhism (three volumes), D.T. Suzuki
Discovering the True Self: Kodo Sawaki’s Art of Zen Meditation,
Kodo Sawaki, Arthur Braverman (Translation)
Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice,
Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary, The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo, Kosho Uchiyama
Transmission of Light: Zen in the Art of Enlightenment by Zen Master Keizan, Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record: Zen Comments by Hakuin and Tenkei,
Thomas Cleary (Translation)
A Guide to Zen: Lessons from a Modern Master, Two Zen Classics: The Gateless Gate and the Blue Cliff Records, Katsuki Sekida
Gateless Barrier: Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, Zenkei Shibayama
Eloquent Silence: Nyogen Senzaki’s Gateless Gate and Other Previously Unpublished Teachings and Letters, Like a Dream Like a Fantasy: The Zen Teachings and Translations of Nyogen Senzaki, Nyogen Senzaki
To Meet the Real Dragon, Master Dogen’s Shinji Shobogenzo, Three Philosophies and One Reality & NHK Radio Talks, A Heart to Heart Chat on Buddhism with Old Master Gudo, Gudo Wafu Nishijima
Kojiki, Phillippi Trans.
Tales of Ise, Peter Macmillan (Translator, Commentary), Donald Keene (Foreword)
Legends of the Samurai, Sato
Japanese Noh Dramas, Tyler trans
Kabuki, Gunji
The Tale of Genji, The Diary of Lady Murasaki, Murasaki Shikibu
The Tale of Murasaki, Liza Dalby
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan, Michitsuna no Haha, Edward G. Seidensticker (Translator)
An Artist of the Floating World, The Unconsoled, Never Let Me Go, The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
Way Of The Samurai, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Sea of Fertility Tetralogy: (Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel, Yukio Mishima
Yoshitsume; a 15th century chronicle, McCullough trans.
The Historical Literature of Mori Ogai, Dilworth & Rimer eds.
Musashi, Taiko: An Epic Novel of War and Glory in Feudal Japan, The Heike Story: A Modern Translation of the Classic Tale of Love and War, Eji Yoshikawa
A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy, Miyamoto Musashi, Victor Harris (Translator)
The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi, William Scott Wilson
Kafu the Scribbler, Seidensticker trans.
The Samurai, The Sea and Poison, Silence, Scandal, Shusaku Endo
The Art of Peace, Morihei Ueshiba, John Stevens (Translator)
Kokoro, I Am A Cat, Grass Pillow, Botchan, To the Spring Equinox and Beyond, Inside My Glass Doors, Soseki Natsume
The House of the Sleeping Beauties and other stories, Snow Country, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, The Old Capitol, Thousand Cranes, The Master of Go, Beauty and Sadness, Dandelions. The Dancing Girl of Izu and other stories, Yasunara Kawabata
The First of August marks the Anniversary of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, an object lesson of the horrors of war and the grandeur of Resistance against impossible odds. In a world where the Resistance now combats fascist tyranny in so many arenas and theatres, the Warsaw Uprising remains a song of the glories of antifascist action, revolutionary struggle, and liberation movements, and a cautionary tale of its dangers and points of failure.
For sixty-three days, nearly a million civilians trapped in the city under Nazi occupation were savaged in this war of survival, a tragic and glorious Resistance doomed by the political implications of an independence movement which was timed to liberate Poland before the advancing Soviet forces with the goal of keeping Poland free rather than trading the Nazi Occupation for a Soviet one, which explains why it failed while the parallel Paris Uprising coordinated with the Allied Liberation succeeded. Had the leaders of the Warsaw Uprising forged an alliance and coordinated with the Soviet tanks on the far side of the river to break the Nazis, and negotiated who was in control of what later, results could have been very different.
This is one of the great lessons of the Warsaw Uprising; always communicate before taking action. Another is the value of solidarity; who stands alone, dies alone. Most important of all is a lesson I would hope is obvious; win first, settle accounts and divide the spoils later.
A campaign of disruption, ambush, and sabotage, using the confusion of political mass action as concealment and a unifying narrative, can make mischief behind enemy lines and in cities under occupation, and can be very useful in coordination with an army which can challenge an enemy directly, especially as scouts, but this is not the kind of war the Warsaw Uprising chose to fight. Much like Hamas in the Gaza War, they fought a campaign of total war for control of the city, with the city itself and the lives of all its people in the balance, with horrific consequences.
Yet they fought, without regard to the cost, in a campaign both absurd and noble, tragic and glorious, a last stand against a nihilistic barbarian modernity of fascist tyranny and terror, doomed and beautiful as was the defense of the Great Siege of Malta, and bearing to the last the only title that matters, that of Invictus.
Here I reference the great poem Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. “
This was an international campaign waged by volunteers which, as reported by Transnational Resistance, included “several hundred and represented at least 15 countries – Slovakia, Hungary, Great Britain, Australia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, the United States of America, the Soviet Union, South Africa, Rumania and even Germany and Nigeria.”
Today it finds echo and reflection in the International Brigades defending Ukraine both as forces integrated into her military and as independent volunteers like myself and my friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and those operating within Russia as allies of the peace movement now pervasive throughout the Russian military and the civilian democracy mass movement, which include the many Polish patriots and Resistance fighters who rallied to the cause of liberty under threat of nuclear annihilation and imperial conquest by Russia in answer to the call for volunteers by myself and the few hundred Defenders of Mariupol who escaped with me as the city was being sealed off for destruction on April 18, a new Polish Resistance founded in the meeting of which I wrote in my post of April 20 2022, What is the Meaning of Mariupol? Address to the Volunteers in Warsaw on April 20 in Warsaw.
The circumstances of Mariupol, Rafah and all of Palestine, and Warsaw in 1944 are comparable; so also with the crimes against humanity of the enemy. Here was the re-enactment of Guernica which established the fascist doctrine of Total War.
Himmler’s SS retaliated massively in the Wola Massacre, during which two hundred thousand civilians were murdered and Warsaw destroyed by explosives. His orders read; ”The non-fighting part of the population, women, children, shall also be killed. The whole city shall be razed to the ground”.
The entire story is told in Norman Davies’ book Rising ’44 The Battle for Warsaw. Admire them as heroes, our antifascist brothers and sisters. but also learn from their mistakes, and avoid allowing the innocent to bear the cost of your nobility of purpose.
We fight for a humankind united as guarantors of each other’s universal rights and humanity, though we must do so in a world not yet of transcendent and glorious ideals but of ambiguous, ephemeral, and relative truths and values, wherein imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle leave us as few chances for stands on principle which do not threaten risks of ideological fracture as they do for debate and negotiation with those who would enslave us.
Resistance is always war to the knife.
As the iconic photo below is described in ExecutedToday; “One legacy was eerily and unknowingly captured by a LIFE magazine photographer in 1948, of a young girl in a school for disturbed children in Poland. Her face a scramble of innocence and madness as it peers into the lens, she illustrates her “home” as an incoherent chalk vortex. It wasn’t known until many years after this photo became emblematic of a generation wracked by horror, but “Tereska” — Teresa Adwentowska — was an orphaned survivor of Wola.”
7 sierpnia 2026 Dziedzictwo oporu: Rocznica Powstania Warszawskiego 1944
Pierwszego sierpnia przypada rocznica Powstania Warszawskiego 1944, lekcja poglądowa o okropnościach wojny i wielkości ruchu oporu przeciwko niemożliwym przeciwnościom. W świecie, w którym Ruch Oporu walczy teraz z faszystowską tyranią na tak wielu arenach i teatrach, Powstanie Warszawskie pozostaje pieśnią o chwale antyfaszystowskiej akcji, walki rewolucyjnej i ruchów wyzwoleńczych oraz ostrzegawczą opowieścią o jego niebezpieczeństwach i punktach niepowodzenia.
Przez sześćdziesiąt trzy dni prawie milion cywilów uwięzionych w mieście pod nazistowską okupacją było atakowanych w tej wojnie o przetrwanie, tragicznym i chwalebnym ruchu oporu skazanego na polityczne implikacje ruchu niepodległościowego, który miał wyzwolić Polskę przed nacierającymi siłami sowieckimi mając na celu utrzymanie Polski wolnej, a nie zamianę okupacji nazistowskiej na sowiecką, co wyjaśnia, dlaczego się nie powiodła, podczas gdy równoległe Powstanie Paryskie koordynowane z Wyzwoleniem Aliantów odniosło sukces. Gdyby przywódcy Powstania Warszawskiego zawarli sojusz i skoordynowali się z sowieckimi czołgami po drugiej stronie rzeki, aby rozbić nazistów i negocjować, kto będzie kontrolował, co później, wyniki mogłyby być zupełnie inne.
To jedna z wielkich lekcji Powstania Warszawskiego; zawsze komunikuj się przed podjęciem działań. Inną jest wartość solidarności; kto stoi samotnie, umiera samotnie. Najważniejsza ze wszystkich jest lekcja, która, mam nadzieję, jest oczywista; najpierw wygrywaj, rozliczaj się, a później rozdzielaj łupy.
Kampania zakłócania porządku, zasadzki i sabotażu, wykorzystująca zamieszanie politycznej akcji masowej jako ukrycie i jednoczącą narrację, może zrobić krzywdę za liniami wroga i w okupowanych miastach i może być bardzo przydatna w koordynacji z armią, która może rzucić wyzwanie wróg bezpośrednio, zwłaszcza jako harcerze, ale nie na taką wojnę zdecydowało się Powstanie Warszawskie. Toczyli kampanię totalnej wojny o kontrolę nad miastem, z samym miastem i życiem wszystkich jego mieszkańców w równowadze, z przerażającymi konsekwencjami.
A jednak walczyli, bez względu na koszty, w kampanii zarówno absurdalnej, jak i szlachetnej, tragicznej i chwalebnej, o ostatni bastion przeciwko nihilistycznej barbarzyńskiej nowoczesności faszystowskiej tyranii i terroru, skazanej na zagładę i pięknej, jak obrona Wielkiego Oblężenia Malty, i nosząc do końca jedyny tytuł, który ma znaczenie, tytuł Invictus.
Odwołuję się tu do wielkiego wiersza Invictus, co po łacinie oznacza Niezwyciężony, autorstwa Williama Ernesta Henleya.
„Z nocy, która mnie okrywa,
Czarny jak dół od bieguna do bieguna,
Dziękuję jakimkolwiek bogom mogą być
Za moją niepokonaną duszę.
W upadłym szponach okoliczności
Nie skrzywiłem się ani nie płakałem na głos.
Pod ciosami przypadku
Moja głowa jest zakrwawiona, ale nie pochylona.
Poza tym miejscem gniewu i łez
Krosna, ale horror cienia,
A jednak groźba lat…
Znajdzie i znajdzie mnie bez lęku.
Nie ma znaczenia, jak cienka brama,
Jak obciążony karami zwój,
Jestem panem swojego losu:
Jestem kapitanem mojej duszy. “
Była to międzynarodowa kampania prowadzona przez wolontariuszy, która, jak donosi Transnational Resistance, obejmowała „kilkaset i reprezentowała co najmniej 15 krajów – Słowację, Węgry, Wielką Brytanię, Australię, Francję, Belgię, Holandię, Grecję, Włochy, Stany Zjednoczone Ameryki, Związku Radzieckiego, RPA, Rumunii, a nawet Niemiec i Nigerii”.
Dziś odbija się to echem i odbiciem w międzynarodowych brygadach broniących Ukrainy zarówno jako siły zintegrowane z jej wojskiem, jak i jako niezależni ochotnicy, tacy jak ja i moi przyjaciele z Brygady Abrahama Lincolna, oraz jako sojusznicy ruchu pokojowego wszechobecnego w Rosji. masowy ruch wojskowy i cywilnej demokracji, w skład którego wchodzi wielu polskich patriotów i bojowników ruchu oporu, którzy zjednoczyli się na rzecz wolności pod groźbą nuklearnej zagłady i imperialnego podboju przez Rosję w odpowiedzi na apel o wolontariat przeze mnie i kilkuset Obrońców Mariupola który uciekł ze mną, gdy miasto było pieczętowane na zagładę 18 kwietnia, nowy polski ruch oporu założony na spotkaniu, o którym pisałem w poście z 20 kwietnia 2022 r. Jakie jest znaczenie Mariupola? Przemówienie do Wolontariuszy w Warszawie 20 kwietnia w Warszawie.
Okoliczności Mariupola i Warszawy w 1944 r. są porównywalne; podobnie też ze zbrodniami przeciwko ludzkości wroga.
SS Himmlera masowo zemściło się w masakrze na Woli, podczas której zamordowano dwieście tysięcy cywilów, a Warszawa zniszczono materiałami wybuchowymi. Jego rozkazy czytały; „Niewalcząca część ludności, kobiety, dzieci też ma zostać zabita. Całe miasto zostanie zrównane z ziemią”.
Całą historię opowiada książka Normana Daviesa Rising ’44 The Battle for Warsaw. Podziwiaj ich jak bohaterów, naszych antyfaszystowskich braci i siostry. ale także ucz się na ich błędach i unikaj pozwalania niewinnym ponosić koszty twojej szlachetności celu.
Walczymy o ludzkość zjednoczoną jako gwarancje swoich uniwersalnych praw i człowieczeństwa, chociaż musimy to robić w świecie jeszcze nie transcendentnych i chwalebnych ideałów, ale dwuznacznych, efemerycznych i względnych prawd i wartości, w którym narzucone warunki rewolucyjnej walki pozostawiają nam równie mało szans na stanowisko co do zasad, które nie grozi złamaniem ideologicznym, jak na debatę i negocjacje z tymi, którzy chcą nas zniewolić.
Opór jest zawsze wojną na nóż.
Jak opisano poniżej kultowe zdjęcie w ExecutedToday; „Jedna ze spuścizny została sfotografowana w dziwny i nieświadomy sposób przez fotografa magazynu LIFE w 1948 roku, przedstawiająca dziewczynkę ze szkoły dla niespokojnych dzieci w Polsce. Jej twarz to szał niewinności i szaleństwa, gdy spogląda w obiektyw, ilustruje swój „dom” jako niespójny kredowy wir. Nie było wiadomo, aż wiele lat po tym, jak to zdjęcie stało się symbolem pokolenia dręczonego horrorem, ale „Tereska” — Teresa Adwentowska — była osieroconą ocaloną z Woli”.
April 20 2022 What is the Meaning of Mariupol? Address to the Volunteers in Warsaw
As we gather and prepare to take the fight to the enemy in direct action against the regime of Russia itself, against Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs and elites who sit at the helm of power and are now complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity both in Ukraine and her province of Crimea in the imperial conquest of a sovereign and independent nation and in Russia in the subjugation of their own citizens, and in the other theatres of this the Third World War, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and in the capture of the American state in the Stolen Election of 2016 which put Putin’s treasonous and dishonorable agent and proxy Donald Trump, Our Clown of Terror, in the White House to oversee the infiltration and subversion of democracy by the Fourth Reich, we are confronted with countless horrific examples of the future that awaits us at the hands of Putin’s regime, and we have chosen Resistance as the only alternative to slavery and death.
As we bring a Reckoning for tyranny, terror, and the horrors of war, in the crimes against humanity by Russia in Ukraine which include executions, torture, organized mass rape and the trafficking of abducted civilians, the capture of civilian hostages and use of forced labor, cannibalism using mobile factories, genocidal attacks, erasure of evidence of war crimes using mobile crematoriums which indicates official planning as part of the campaign of terror and proof that the countless crimes against humanity of this war are not aberrations but by design and at the orders of Putin and his commanders, threats of nuclear annihilation against European nations sending humanitarian aid, and the mass destruction of cities, we are become a court of last appeal in the defense of our universal human rights and of our humanity itself.
The Russian strategy of conquest opens with sustained and relentless bombardment and destruction of hospitals, bomb shelters, stores of food, power systems, water supply, corridors of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of refugees; anything which could help citizens survive a siege. Once nothing is left standing, a campaign of terror as organized mass rape, torture, cannibalism, and looting begins, and any survivors enslaved or executed. This is a war of genocide and erasure, and to fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
In this war which is now upon us, Putin’s goal is to restore the Russian Empire in the conquest of the Ukraine and the Black Sea as a launchpad for the conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; but he has a parallel and far more dangerous purpose in the abrogation of international law and our universal human rights. The true purpose of the Fourth Reich and its puppetmaster Vladimir Putin in this war is to make meaningless the idea of human rights.
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?
As you know, my friends and I come to you from the Siege of Mariupol, a battle of flesh against unanswerable force and horror, of solidarity against division, of love against hate, and of hope against fear.
Here, as in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which we celebrated yesterday, the human will to freedom is tested by an enemy who exults in the embrace of the monstrous, whose policies and designs of war as terror gladly and with the open arrogance of power instrumentalize utter destruction and genocide, a war wherein atrocities and depravities are unleashed as tactics of shock and awe with intent of subjugation through learned helplessness and overwhelming and generalized fear.
In Mariupol now as in Warsaw then, we affirm and renew our humanity in refusal to submit or to abandon our duty of care for each other. The Defenders of Mariupol who have sworn to die together and have refused many demands for surrender make their glorious Last Stand not as a gesture of defiance to a conqueror and tyrant, or to hold the port to slow and impede the Russian campaign in the Donbas now ongoing and prevent the seizure of the whole seaboard and control of the Black Sea, though these are pivotal to the liberation of Ukraine, but to protect the hundreds, possibly thousands, of refugees who now shelter in the tunnels of the underground fortress at the Azovstal and Ilyin Steel and Iron Works, especially the many children in makeshift hospitals who cannot be moved.
This is the meaning of Mariupol; we stand together and remain human, regardless of the cost. This is what it means to be human, how it is achieved, and why solidarity is important. Among our values, our duty of care for others is paramount, because it is instrumental to everything else, and all else is contingent on this.
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.
This brings us to my purpose in speaking to you today, for one of you has asked a question which is central to our mission of the Liberation of Russia and Ukraine, and to the solidarity of the international community in this our cause; how can ordinary people like ourselves hope for victory over the unanswerable force and overwhelming power of tyranny, terror, and war?
There are two parallel and interdependent strategies of Resistance in asymmetrical warfare; the first and most important is to redefine the terms of victory. This is because we are mortal, and the limits of our form impose conditions of struggle; we must be like Jacob wrestling the angel, not to conquer this thing of immense power but to escape being conquered by it. We can be killed, imprisoned, tortured; but we cannot be defeated or conquered if we but refuse to submit.
Power without legitimacy becomes meaningless, and authority crumbles when met with disbelief. This is why journalism and teaching as sacred callings in pursuit of truth are crucial to democracy, and why the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
What of the use of police in brutal repression by carceral states? The social use of force is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disobedience. When the police are an army of Occupation and the repression of dissent, they can be Resisted on those terms; my point here is simply that victory against unanswerable force consists of refusal to submit.
Who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled becomes Unconquered and is free. This is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us.
Second is our strategy for survival against an enemy who does not regard us as human, and will use terror to enforce submission through learned helplessness. By any means necessary, as this principle is expressed in 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.
In Mariupol I began referring to this in its oldest form, war to the knife. Its meaning for us is simple; those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none.
The question to which I speak today in reply intrigued me, because it was nearly identical to a line which sets up one of the greatest fictional military speeches in literature, Miles Vorkosigan’s speech to the Maurilacans in The Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold.
In this story, Miles has just led a mass prisoner of war escape, from a prison which like all fascist tyrannies is fiendishly designed to produce abjection, as described by Julia Kristeva in her famous essay, in circumstances of horror such as those which my friends here and I have just survived, and in which we now find ourselves like the Marilacans having achieved an army, and about to take the fight to the enemy on his own ground.
One of the volunteers says, ”The defenders of Mariupol had those crazy Cossack warriors, swearing an oath to die rather than surrender, professional mercenaries from everywhere, all of them elite forces and utterly fearless. We just can’t fight on those terms; its been seventy years since we fought a total war of survival, and most of us here are professionals and university intellectuals. Poland is civilized, maybe too civilized for what’s coming our way.”
To this I answer with Miles; “Let me tell you about the defenders of Mariupol. Those who sought a glorious death in battle found it early on. This cleared the chain of command of accumulated fools.
The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win and win and win. And for whom nothing, not comfort nor security, not family nor friends nor their immortal souls, was more important than victory.
They were not supermen or more than human. They sweated in confusion and darkness.
And with not one half the resources Poland possesses, Ukraine remains unconquered. When you’re all that stands between liberty and tyranny, freedom and slavery, life and death, between a people and genocide, when you’re human, there is no mustering out.”
To this wonderful speech of a fictional hero who simply refuses to stay down to the fictional survivors of the very real horror of being held captive and powerless by a tyrant, whether as prisoners of war or citizens of an occupied city, I must add this; how if Poland and Ukraine stand together, with all of Europe and America united in Resistance?
And if you are telling me you could not today fight a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, this I do not believe. Nor would you do so alone, for during this Passover as the Jewish community remembers the story of the Exile, the world also remembers; we watch it in our news every day, enacted once again in Ukraine. This, too, is a Haggadah, in which all of humankind can share, and which yet again teaches us the necessity of our interdependence and solidarity.
As written by Alan Moore in V For Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
Here is a truth to which all of us here today can bear witness.
But there is a thing which tyrants never learn; the use of force and violence obeys the Third Law of Motion, and creates resistance as its own counterforce. And when the brutality and crimes against humanity of that force and violence are performed upon the stage of the world, visible to all and a history which cannot be erased, part of the story of every human being from now until the end of our species, which no washing of hands may deny as demonstrated by Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth, repression finds answer in reckoning as we awaken to our interdependence and the necessity of our solidarity and duty of care for each other.
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet on that fateful day in 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, after we refused to surrender; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
An unusual fellow, but behind the concealment of his literary notoriety he remained the Legionnaire he had once been, and after spying on the Nazis in Berlin in 1939 had returned to Paris to make mischief for her unwelcome guests, and there in 1940 repurposed the oath of the Foreign Legion for what allies he could gather. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole.
My hope is that I have lived and written at the beginning of the story of humankind, and not at its end.
What is the meaning of Mariupol?
Here we may look to its precedents as Last Stands, battles, and sieges; Thermopylae, Malta, Washington crossing the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton, Gallipoli, Stalingrad, and its direct parallel the Siege of Sarajevo. Moments of decision wherein the civilization of humankind hung in the balance, and with it our future possibilities of becoming human.
Who do we want to become, we humans; slaves and tyrants or a free society of equals? And how much of our humanity are we willing to trade for the chance of such futures?
What of ourselves can we not afford to lose, without also losing who we are? 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, 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?
Let us reply 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.”
Join us.
This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate
20 באפריל 2022 מה המשמעות של מריופול? כתובת למתנדבים בוורשה
בעודנו מתאספים ומתכוננים לקחת את המאבק אל האויב בפעולה ישירה נגד משטר רוסיה עצמה, נגד ולדימיר פוטין והאוליגרכים והאליטות שלו היושבים בראש השלטון וכעת שותפים לפשעי מלחמה ופשעים נגד האנושות אוקראינה ומחוז קרים שלה בכיבוש האימפריאלי של אומה ריבונית ועצמאית וברוסיה בהכנעת אזרחיהם, ובשאר התיאטראות של זה מלחמת העולם השלישית, סוריה, לוב, בלארוס, קזחסטן, נגורנו קרבאך , ובתפיסה של המדינה האמריקנית בבחירות הגנובות של 2016, שהכניסה את סוכנו ובוגדתו של פוטין וחסר הכבוד דונלד טראמפ, ליצן הטרור שלנו, בבית הלבן כדי לפקח על חדירתה וחתרנות הדמוקרטיה על ידי הרייך הרביעי, אנו מתמודדים עם אינספור דוגמאות מחרידות לעתיד המצפה לנו בידי משטרו של פוטין, ובחרנו בהתנגדות כאלטרנטיבה היחידה לעבדות ומוות.
כאשר אנו מביאים חשבון לעריצות, טרור וזוועות המלחמה, בפשעים נגד האנושות על ידי רוסיה באוקראינה הכוללים הוצאות להורג, עינויים, אונס המוני מאורגן וסחר באזרחים חטופים, לכידת בני ערובה אזרחיים ושימוש בכפייה עבודה, קניבליזם באמצעות מפעלים ניידים, התקפות רצח עם, מחיקת עדויות לפשעי מלחמה באמצעות משרפות ניידות המעידות על תכנון רשמי כחלק ממסע הטרור והוכחה לכך שאינספור הפשעים נגד האנושות של מלחמה זו אינם סטיות אלא בתכנון ובתכנון. פקודות של פוטין ומפקדיו, איומים בהשמדה גרעינית נגד מדינות אירופה ששולחות סיוע הומניטרי, והשמדה המונית של ערים, הפכנו לבית משפט של ערעור אחרון בהגנה על זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו ועל האנושות שלנו עצמה.
אסטרטגיית הכיבוש הרוסית נפתחת בהפצצה מתמשכת ובלתי פוסקת ובהרס של בתי חולים, מקלטים, מאגרי מזון, מערכות חשמל, אספקת מים, מסדרונות של סיוע הומניטרי ופינוי פליטים; כל דבר שיכול לעזור לאזרחים לשרוד מצור. ברגע ששום דבר לא נשאר עומד, מתחיל מסע טרור כמו אונס המוני מאורגן, עינויים, קניבליזם וביזה, וכל ניצול משועבד או מוצא להורג. זוהי מלחמה של רצח עם ומחיקה, ולפשיזם יכולה להיות רק תשובה אחת; לעולם לא שוב!
במלחמה זו אשר כעת עלינו, מטרתו של פוטין היא להחזיר את האימפריה הרוסית בכיבוש אוקראינה והים השחור כנקודת שיגור לכיבוש ושליטה של הים התיכון, אירופה, אפריקה והמזרח התיכון; אבל יש לו מטרה מקבילה ומסוכנת הרבה יותר בביטול החוק הבינלאומי וזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו. המטרה האמיתית של הרייך הרביעי ומנהל הבובות שלו ולדימיר פוטין במלחמה זו היא להפוך את רעיון זכויות האדם לחסר משמעות.
זוהי מלחמת עריצות ופשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה נגד הדמוקרטיה וחברה חופשית של שווים, על הרעיון שלכולנו יש משמעות וערך שהם ייחודיים שלנו ונגד שיעבוד וגניבת נפשנו.
בתוך גבולות הצורה שלנו, של פגמי אנושיותנו ושבירת העולם, אנו נאבקים להשיג את האדם; שלנו היא מהפכה של תיקון עולם, ביטוי עברי שמשמעותו תיקון העולם, המתייחס לתלות ההדדית ולחובת הזהירות שלנו זה לזה כשווים החולקים אנושיות משותפת.
אני בטוח שכולנו כאן יודעים למה התכוון שלמה ברדין כשחיזר את הביטוי מקובלת לוריא ומהמדרש, אבל למה אני מתכוון בזה?
ישנם רק שני סוגים של פעולות שאנו בני האדם מסוגלים לבצע; אלה שמאשרים ומעלים אותנו, ואלה שמבזים ומבטלים אותנו.
אנו חיים בצומת של היסטוריה שעשוי להגדיר את גורל הציוויליזציה שלנו ואת האפשרויות העתידיות להיות אנושיות, במאבק בין עריצות לחירות ובין סולידריות לפילוג, ועלינו כל אחד מאיתנו לבחור למי ברצוננו להיות, אנו בני אנוש; אדונים ועבדים, או חברה חופשית של שווים?
כפי שאתם יודעים, חברי ואני באים אליכם מהמצור על מריופול, קרב של בשר נגד כוח ואימה שאין להם מענה, של סולידריות נגד פילוג, של אהבה נגד שנאה ושל תקווה נגד פחד.
כאן, כמו במרד גטו ורשה שחגגנו אתמול, נבחן הרצון האנושי לחירות על ידי אויב המתמוגג בחיקם של המפלצתיים, שמדיניותו ותכנוני המלחמה שלו כטרור בשמחה וביהירות הגלויה של הכוח מכשירים באופן מוחלט. הרס ורצח עם, מלחמה שבה זוועות וקללות משתחררים כטקטיקות של הלם ויראה מתוך כוונה להכניע באמצעות חוסר אונים נלמד ופחד מוחץ ומוכלל.
Polish
20 kwietnia 2022 Co oznacza Mariupol? Adres do Wolontariuszy w Warszawie
Gdy zbieramy się i przygotowujemy do podjęcia walki z wrogiem w bezpośredniej akcji przeciwko reżimowi samej Rosji, przeciwko Władimirowi Putinowi oraz jego oligarchom i elitom, które zasiadają u steru władzy i są teraz współwinne zbrodni wojennych i zbrodni przeciwko ludzkości zarówno w Ukraina i jej prowincja Krym w imperialnym podboju suwerennego i niepodległego narodu, a w Rosji w ujarzmieniu własnych obywateli, a w innych teatrach tej III wojny światowej, Syrii, Libii, Białorusi, Kazachstanie, Górskim Karabachu , a także w zdobyciu państwa amerykańskiego w skradzionych wyborach 2016, które umieściły zdradzieckiego i niehonorowego agenta Putina i pełnomocnika Donalda Trumpa, naszego klauna terroru, w Białym Domu, aby nadzorować infiltrację i niszczenie demokracji przez Czwartą Rzeszę, my mamy do czynienia z niezliczonymi przerażającymi przykładami przyszłości, która czeka nas z rąk reżimu Putina, a my wybraliśmy Ruch Oporu jako jedyną alternatywę dla niewolnictwa i śmierci.
Kiedy wprowadzamy rozliczenie za tyranię, terror i okropności wojny, w zbrodniach przeciwko ludzkości dokonanych przez Rosję na Ukrainie, które obejmują egzekucje, tortury, zorganizowane masowe gwałty i handel uprowadzonymi cywilami, schwytanie cywilnych zakładników i użycie sił pracy, kanibalizm z wykorzystaniem mobilnych fabryk, ludobójcze ataki, wymazywanie dowodów zbrodni wojennych z wykorzystaniem mobilnych krematoriów, co wskazuje na oficjalne planowanie w ramach kampanii terroru i dowód, że niezliczone zbrodnie przeciwko ludzkości w tej wojnie nie są aberracją, ale celowo i na rozkazy Putina i jego dowódców, groźby nuklearnej zagłady narodów europejskich wysyłających pomoc humanitarną oraz masowe niszczenie miast, stajemy się ostatnim sądem apelacyjnym w obronie naszych uniwersalnych praw człowieka i samego naszego człowieczeństwa.
Rosyjska strategia podboju rozpoczyna się ciągłym i bezlitosnym bombardowaniem i niszczeniem szpitali, schronów bombowych, magazynów żywności, systemów zasilania, zaopatrzenia w wodę, korytarzy pomocy humanitarnej i ewakuacji uchodźców; wszystko, co mogłoby pomóc obywatelom przetrwać oblężenie. Gdy nic nie zostanie ocalone, rozpoczyna się kampania terroru, polegająca na zorganizowanych masowych gwałtach, torturach, kanibalizmie i grabieży, a wszyscy, którzy przeżyli, zostają zniewoleni lub straceni. To jest wojna ludobójstwa i wymazywania, a na faszyzm może być tylko jedna odpowiedź; Nigdy więcej!
W tej wojnie, która teraz nad nami, celem Putina jest przywrócenie Imperium Rosyjskiego w podboju Ukrainy i Morza Czarnego jako platformy startowej do podboju i panowania nad Morzem Śródziemnym, Europą, Afryką i Bliskim Wschodem; ale ma on równoległy i znacznie bardziej niebezpieczny cel, polegający na uchyleniu prawa międzynarodowego i naszych uniwersalnych praw człowieka. Prawdziwym celem Czwartej Rzeszy i jej marionetkowego mistrza Władimira Putina w tej wojnie jest uczynienie bezsensownej idei praw człowieka.
To jest wojna tyranii i faszyzmów krwi, wiary i ziemi przeciwko demokracji i wolnemu społeczeństwu równych, o ideę, że my wszyscy mamy sens i wartość, która jest wyłącznie nasza i przeciwko zniewoleniu i kradzieży naszych dusz.
W granicach naszej formy, wad naszego człowieczeństwa i zepsucia świata, walczymy o osiągnięcie człowieczeństwa; nasza jest rewolucją Tikkun Olam, hebrajskiego wyrażenia oznaczającego naprawę świata, które odnosi się do naszej współzależności i obowiązku troski o siebie nawzajem jako równych, którzy mają wspólne człowieczeństwo.
Jestem pewien, że każdy z nas tutaj wie, co miał na myśli Shlomo Bardin, gdy zmienił frazę z Kabały Lurii i Midraszu, ale co mam przez to na myśli?
Są tylko dwa rodzaje działań, które my, ludzie, jesteśmy w stanie wykonać; te, które nas utwierdzają i wywyższają, oraz te, które nas poniżają i odczłowieczają.
Żyjemy na skrzyżowaniu historii, które mogą określić los naszej cywilizacji i przyszłe możliwości stania się człowiekiem, w walce między tyranią a wolnością oraz między solidarnością a podziałem, i każdy z nas musi wybrać, kim chce się stać, ludzie; panowie i niewolnicy czy wolne społeczeństwo równych?
Ukrainian
20 квітня 2022 Що означає Маріуполь? Звернення до волонтерів у Варшаві
Збираючись і готуючись до боротьби з ворогом у прямих діях проти режиму самої Росії, проти Володимира Путіна та його олігархів та еліт, які сидять біля керма влади і зараз є причетними до військових злочинів і злочинів проти людства як у Україна та її провінція Крим в імперському завоювання суверенної і незалежної нації і в Росії в підкоренні власних громадян, а на інших театрах цієї Третьої світової війни, Сирії, Лівії, Білорусі, Казахстану, Нагірного Карабаху , а також під час захоплення американської держави на викрадених виборах 2016 року, коли зрадницького й безчесного агента Путіна та довіреної особи Дональда Трампа, нашого клоуна терору, у Білий дім для нагляду за проникненням і підривом демократії Четвертим рейхом, ми ми стикаємося з незліченною кількістю жахливих прикладів майбутнього, яке чекає на нас від рук режиму Путіна, і ми обрали Опір як єдину альтернативу рабству і смерті.
Оскільки ми приносимо розплату за тиранію, терор і жахи війни, за злочини проти людства, зроблені Росією в Україні, які включають страти, катування, організовані масові зґвалтування та торгівлю викраденими цивільними особами, захоплення цивільних заручників та використання примусових праця, канібалізм з використанням пересувних фабрик, напади геноциду, знищення доказів військових злочинів за допомогою мобільних крематоріїв, що вказує на офіційне планування як частину кампанії терору та доказ того, що незліченна кількість злочинів проти людства цієї війни не є відхиленнями, а задумом і накази Путіна та його командирів, загрози ядерного знищення європейських країн, які надсилають гуманітарну допомогу, і масове знищення міст, ми стаємо останньою апеляційною інстанцією у захисті наших універсальних прав людини та нашого людства.
Російська завойовницька стратегія починається з постійних і невпинних бомбардувань і руйнувань лікарень, бомбосховищ, складів продовольства, енергосистем, водопостачання, коридорів гуманітарної допомоги та евакуації біженців; все, що могло б допомогти громадянам пережити облогу. Після того, як нічого не залишиться, починається кампанія терору як організовані масові зґвалтування, тортури, канібалізм та мародерство, а будь-які вижили поневолені або страчені. Це війна на геноцид і стирання, і на фашизм може бути лише одна відповідь; Ніколи знову!
У цій війні, яка зараз на нас, мета Путіна — відновити Російську імперію у завоювання України та Чорного моря як стартовий майданчик для завоювання та панування Середземномор’я, Європи, Африки та Близького Сходу; але він має паралельну й набагато більш небезпечну мету — скасування міжнародного права та наших універсальних прав людини. Справжня мета Четвертого рейху та його маріонетка Володимира Путіна у цій війні – позбутися сенсу ідеї прав людини.
Це війна тиранії та фашизму крові, віри та ґрунту проти демократії та вільного суспільства рівних за ідею, що всі ми маємо сенс і цінність, яка є унікальною, а також проти поневолення та крадіжки наших душ.
У межах нашої форми, вад нашої людяності та зламаності світу ми боремося за досягнення людського; наша – це революція Тіккуна Олама, єврейської фрази, що означає відновлення світу, яка стосується нашої взаємозалежності та обов’язку піклуватися один про одного як рівних, хто об’єднує спільне людство.
Я впевнений, що всі ми тут знаємо, що мав на увазі Шломо Бардін, коли переробив фразу з Каббали Лурія і Мідраш, але що я маю на увазі під цим?
Є лише два види дій, які ми, люди, здатні виконувати; ті, що стверджують і підносять нас, і ті, що принижують і дегуманізують нас.
Ми живемо на перехресті історії, яка може визначити долю нашої цивілізації та майбутні можливості стати людиною, у боротьбі між тиранією та свободою, між солідарністю та поділом, і кожен із нас має вибрати, ким хоче стати, ми люди; панів і рабів, чи вільне суспільство рівних?
Russian
20 апреля 2022 Что такое Мариуполь? Обращение к волонтерам в Варшаве
Пока мы собираемся и готовимся принять бой с врагом в прямом действии против самого режима России, против Владимира Путина и его олигархов и элит, которые сидят у руля власти и ныне причастны к военным преступлениям и преступлениям против человечности как в Украина и ее провинция Крым в имперском завоевании суверенной и независимой нации и в России в подчинении собственных граждан, и на других театрах этой Третьей мировой войны, Сирия, Ливия, Беларусь, Казахстан, Нагорный Карабах , а также в захвате американского государства на украденных выборах 2016 года, когда изменнический и бесчестный агент и доверенное лицо Путина Дональд Трамп, наш клоун террора, попал в Белый дом, чтобы наблюдать за проникновением и подрывом демократии Четвертым рейхом, мы столкнулись с бесчисленными ужасными примерами будущего, которое ожидает нас от рук путинского режима, и мы выбрали Сопротивление как единственную альтернативу рабству и смерти.
Поскольку мы приносим расплату за тиранию, террор и ужасы войны, за преступления против человечности, совершенные Россией на Украине, включая казни, пытки, организованные массовые изнасилования и торговлю похищенными гражданскими лицами, захват гражданских заложников и применение насильственных труд, каннибализм с использованием передвижных заводов, акты геноцида, стирание доказательств военных преступлений с использованием передвижных крематориев, что указывает на официальное планирование как часть кампании террора и доказательство того, что бесчисленные преступления против человечности в ходе этой войны не являются отклонением от нормы, а являются преднамеренными и преднамеренными приказы Путина и его командиров, угрозы ядерного уничтожения европейским странам, отправляющим гуманитарную помощь, и массовое разрушение городов, мы становимся судом последней инстанции в защиту наших универсальных прав человека и самой нашей человечности.
Российская стратегия завоевания начинается с непрерывных и безжалостных бомбардировок и разрушений больниц, бомбоубежищ, складов продовольствия, энергосистем, водоснабжения, коридоров гуманитарной помощи и эвакуации беженцев; все, что может помочь гражданам пережить осаду. Как только ничего не остается, начинается кампания террора с организованными массовыми изнасилованиями, пытками, каннибализмом и грабежами, а все выжившие порабощаются или казнятся. Это война геноцида и стирания, и фашизму может быть только один ответ; Больше никогда!
В этой войне, которая сейчас надвигается, цель Путина состоит в том, чтобы восстановить Российскую империю путем завоевания Украины и Черного моря в качестве стартовой площадки для завоевания и господства в Средиземноморье, Европе, Африке и на Ближнем Востоке; но у него есть параллельная и гораздо более опасная цель в отмене международного права и наших универсальных прав человека. Истинная цель Четвертого рейха и его кукловода Владимира Путина в этой войне состоит в том, чтобы лишить смысла идею прав человека.
Это война тирании и фашизма крови, веры и почвы против демократии и свободного общества равных, за идею о том, что у всех нас есть смысл и ценность, которые принадлежат только нам, и против порабощения и кражи наших душ.
В пределах нашей формы, недостатков нашей человечности и разбитости мира мы боремся за достижение человеческого; наша — это революция Тиккун Олам, фразы на иврите, означающей восстановление мира, которая указывает на нашу взаимозависимость и обязанность заботиться друг о друге как о равных, разделяющих общую человечность.
Я уверен, что все мы здесь знаем, что имел в виду Шломо Бардин, когда он переделал фразу из Каббалы Лурии и Мидраша, но что я имею в виду под этим?
Есть только два вида действий, которые мы, человеческие существа, можем совершать; те, которые утверждают и возвышают нас, и те, которые унижают и дегуманизируют нас.
Мы живем на перекрестке истории, который может определить судьбу нашей цивилизации и будущие возможности стать людьми, в борьбе между тиранией и свободой, между солидарностью и разделением, и каждый из нас должен выбрать, кем мы хотим стать, мы люди; господа и рабы или свободное общество равных?
