Among the most outrageous and horrific incidents of police terror and racially motivated crimes against humanity in American history is the bombing of the Move commune of Philadelphia on this day thirty-nine years ago.
Our endemic and pervasive racism as a nation and a society combines horrifically with authoritarianism and a militarized police state of force and control according to the counterinsurgency model, force multipliers which serve to dehumanize our nonwhite population, devalue the idea of citizenship, and enforce their subjugation and re enslavement as bond prison labor.
While racism and submission to authority are complex and as social and psychological issues beyond the scope of structural change alone, racist police violence has a simple cure; disarm and demilitarize the police. Without weapons they are rendered harmless.
We must return to our public safety and security services their primary role as guarantors of our universal human rights and providers of public well being.
The bombing of the Move Commune gives the lie to our idea of policing as a public safety service; we must dismantle the carceral state to free ourselves from the legacies of slavery and historical inequalities and injustices, abandon the use of social force, and begin to forge a free society of equals.
As written by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian in an article entitled A siege. A bomb. 48 dogs. And the black commune that would not surrender; “For 40 years, Janine Phillips Africa had a technique for coping with being cooped up in a prison cell for a crime she says she did not commit. She would avoid birthdays, Christmas, New Year and any other events that emphasized time passing while she was not free.
“The years are not my focus,” she wrote in a letter to the Guardian. “I keep my mind on my health and the things I need to do day by day.”
On Saturday she could finally begin accepting the passage of time. She and her cellmate and sister in the black liberation struggle, Janet Holloway Africa, were released from SCI Cambridge Springs in Pennsylvania, after a long struggle for parole.
The release of Janine, 63, and Janet, 68, marks a key moment in the history of the Move 9, the group of African American black power and environmental campaigners who were imprisoned after a police siege of their home in August 1978. The pair were the last of four women in the group either to be paroled or to die behind bars.
The saga of Move was one of the most dramatic and surreal of the 1970s black liberation struggle. Along with their peers, the women lived in a communal house in Philadelphia under group founder John Africa, AKA Vincent Leaphart. All members took the last name Africa to show they considered themselves a family.
A cross between the Black Panthers and west coast hippies, Move campaigned not only for equal treatment for African Americans but also for respect for animals and nature, caring for 48 stray dogs in the house.
Such unconventional attitudes brought them into conflict with neighbours and the Philadelphia police, a notoriously brutal force even by American standards. After a siege lasting several months, on 8 August 1978 officers went in to clear the group from the property. In the melee, officer James Ramp was shot and killed with a single bullet.
Despite the single shooter, and despite the fact that the group always protested that they were unarmed and that Ramp was killed by fire from fellow officers, the five men and four women were each sentenced to 30 years to life.
Janine Africa’s release was bittersweet. While she was in prison, she corresponded over two years with the Guardian. In her letters she talked about the double tragedy of her life.
Two years before the 1978 siege, police turned up at the Move house in Powelton Village and began harassing the group. A scuffle ensued and Janine was knocked over as she held her three-week-old baby, Life, in her arms.
The baby appeared to have been trampled, his skull shattered. He died later that day.
Then on 13 May 1985, by which time Janine Africa had been in prison for seven years, she was told the terrible news that the remaining members of the Move “family” had been assaulted a second time. On this occasion police didn’t just go in guns blazing – they dropped an incendiary bomb from a helicopter.
It caused a fire that destroyed the Move house and 60 other homes in a largely African American neighborhood. Eleven Move members burned to death. They included founder John Africa and five children, one of whom was Janine’s other son, Little Phil, aged 12.
The Guardian asked Janine how she came to terms with having seen two children killed by police brutality.
“There are times when I think about Life and my son Phil,” she wrote, “but I don’t keep those thoughts in my mind long because they hurt. The murder of my children, my family, will always affect me, but not in a bad way. When I think about what this system has done to me and my family, it makes me even more committed to my belief.”
The parole of the two women follows the release last June of Debbie Sims Africa, who was arrested in the 1978 siege when she was eight months pregnant and who went on to give birth to her son, Michael Davis Jr, in a prison cell. A fourth woman, Merle Austin Africa, died in prison in March 1998.
Of the men, three remain in prison: Eddie Goodman Africa, who has recently gone before a parole panel, and Chuck Sims Africa and Delbert Orr Africa. Michael Davis Africa Sr, the father of the boy born in a cell and husband of Debbie, was released in October. Phil Africa died in prison in January 2015.
The attorney for the two released women, Brad Thomson of People’s Law Office, said their parole was a victory not only for them and their loved ones but also for the Move organization and the “movement to free all political prisoners”.
As written by former Mayor W Wilson Goode in The Guardian; “When I was mayor, Philadelphia bombed civilians. It’s time for the city to apologise
Thiry-five years ago, we did something inexcusable. A formal apology is crucial for the healing process, and overdue.
The date 13 May will be forever etched in my mind.
Thirty-five years ago, members of Move, a black liberation and back-to-nature group, barricaded themselves in a row house in west Philadelphia. The situation escalated into an armed standoff with the Philadelphia police. On 13 May 1985, the police dropped an explosive device from a helicopter on to the house. The decision to drop explosives on a house filled with people was indefensible. The bombs ignited a fire which killed 11 people, including five children, and razed 61 homes to the ground.
The event will remain on my conscience for the rest of my life. I was the mayor of Philadelphia at the time. Although I was not personally involved in all the decisions that resulted in 11 deaths, I was chief executive of the city. I would not intentionally harm anyone, but it happened on my watch. I am ultimately responsible for those I appointed. I accept that responsibility and I apologize for their reckless actions that brought about this horrific outcome, even though I knew nothing about their specific plan of action.
This is the fourth time I’ve publicly apologized. My first official apology on behalf of the city came on 14 May 1985 in a televised address to the citizens of Philadelphia, to the Move family and to their neighbors. Today I would like to apologize again and extend that apology to all who experienced, and in many cases continue to experience, pain and distress from the government actions that day. They include the Move family, their neighbors, the police officers, firefighters and other public servants as well as all the citizens of Philadelphia.
There can never be an excuse for dropping an explosive from a helicopter on to a house with men, women and children inside
But there’s something more I want to suggest on this important anniversary. After 35 years it would be helpful for the healing of all involved, especially the victims of this terrible event, if there was a formal apology made by the City of Philadelphia. That way we can begin to build a bridge that spans from the tragic events of the past into our future. Many in the city still feel the pain of that day. I know I will always feel the pain.
There can never be an excuse for dropping an explosive from a helicopter on to a house with men, women and children inside and then letting the fire burn. I will never accept one. Some want me to blame the Move family or their neighbors; that is absolutely wrong thinking and I will never do so. We will never know exactly what happened on 13 May 1985 on Osage Avenue, but I do know there are some things beyond excusing.
I know I can’t change the past by apologizing, but I can express my deep and sincere regrets and call upon other former and current elected officials to do so. I believe this action can be a small step toward healing. I apologize and encourage others do the same. We will be a better city for it.
The Rev Dr W Wilson Goode, Sr served as mayor of Philadelphia from 1984-1992”.
We celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month this May, the triumph of survival and refusal to surrender one’s history and identity against impossible odds and unimaginable horrors, the acts of grace and courage in clawing something of our humanity back from the darkness and the terror of our nothingness, and the countless innovations, primary insights, revolutions of sciences and intellect, praxis of values, and of the reimagination and transformation of our civilization and ourselves in every area of human achievement which this unique people have given humankind and America throughout their long history here, since the first organized Jewish migration to what is now New York in 1654 fleeing the Portuguese conquest of Brazil, and earlier as Texas was founded in 1579 as a colony of exiled Jews by Spain, under the Jewish Governor Luis de Carvajal, founder of Monterrey in what is now Mexico, who ruled it briefly as the dream of a new Sepharad wherein peoples of all races and faiths may live under the same law, until his success attracted the jealousy and avarice of the Inquisition, who burned his entire family at the stake in 1596.
America as a promise of sanctuary has always been conditional and shadowed by hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and we have yet to emerge from the legacies of our history.
From the first America has been founded on freedom of religion and imagined as a place of refuge and beyond the reach of tyrannies and empires, in which all of us are equal before the law and free to pursue our relationship with the Infinite without fear or compulsion by the state. Among the greatest principles of liberty we inherit is that he who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
This primary right of freedom of religion is universal and nonexclusionary, and for this we owe a debt to our Jewish American community no less than that of the Pilgrims and others who escaped to our shores from authoritarian force and control, and together created a free society of equals.
I hope we can prove equal to their example.
Because the personal and the political are interdependent, and we are made of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, I offer here a story from my family history as told to me by my mother of how Jewish people saved us, when no one else would, and without whom none of us would have ever lived.
Upon the docks of America arrived a nine year old girl, alone and without a penny or a word of English. A stranger, with no one waiting to meet her, no family, no friends, nothing. My maternal great grandmother Apollonia this was, with flaming red hair like my mother’s, whose family had arranged her escape from Austria as their home burned, the sole survivor of both her family and her entire city as it no longer exists and has been erased from all history so far as we now know.
She wandered the port asking for help, in five languages of descending likelihood of recognition; French, Austrian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, and finally, in despair and fear that the reaction would be far worse than being abandoned to starve and freeze to death, Yiddish.
This immediately gathered a crowd, to her astonishment not one bearing torches and axes.
So a stranger was taken in and raised by Jewish people, of whom I know nothing, and thus our family’s survival is owed to the entire Jewish community and people.
This happened in 1873, year of the glorious Vienna World’s Fair but also the stock market crash in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War which began a twenty year Depression in Europe and the Jewish persecutions as they were blamed for it; also conflicts between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in their borderlands.
She it was who owned her own rifles and horses by the age of sixteen when she began her career as a hunting guide, and died in the saddle at the age of 95, rifle in her hand, having shot the bear that attacked her horses and killed her. The Indians buried her like the Huns buried Attila, on her horse and with her rifle, like a warrior princess.
I was born within days of her death, and as with all ancestors I bear her onward, literally as DNA and the stories which possess us as the ghosts of other lives; truths written in our flesh.
Historical context and the fact that my ancestor in the direct maternal line knew Yiddish, and lived as a member of that community at minimum until sixteen, makes it possible that we are Jewish by descent and under Jewish law, though my mother never claimed so and moreover was a radical atheist who raised us with no religious traditions at all. In so doing the family faith she liberated herself from was Catholicism, an artifact of her Austrian paternal line who were exiles of the 1919 fall of the Hapsburg Empire after 600 years.
If this is truly a part of our historical identity, it has been lost on the seas of time, or stolen from us, as is true of so many Americans who came here to escape or forget their past. But it also frees us to create new possibilities of becoming human, forged both from those who are different and those alike, and from this perspective the stories of the Jewish people offer us all examples we can use in the creation of ourselves and our uniqueness.
As a teenager immersed in Holocaust literature while working through the trauma of a near death experience in Brazil the summer before high school, my execution by a police death squad while rescuing abandoned street children they were bounty hunting having been prevented by the Matadors, and conversations with my mother as she wrote her study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet medical records and childhood therapy journal of Jerzy Kosinski which he fictionalized as The Painted Bird, I once asked her directly, Are we Jews?
To this she replied; “Everyone is a Jew. Everyone is someone’s Jew, someone’s scapegoat, someone’s Other. The great task of becoming human is to overcome fear of otherness, while embracing our uniqueness.”
To frame this in its literary and historical context, herein I offer you an updated version of the reading list I used for high school American literature classes throughout my teaching career:
Jewish American History and Literature
Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews, The Chosen, The Promise, My Name is Asher Lev, The Gift of Asher Lev, Davita’s Harp, Chaim Potok
Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Carmon & Knizhnik
The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, The Hope, The Glory, Marjorie Morningstar, Herman Wouk
The Origins of Totalitarianism, On Revolution, The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, The Life of the Mind, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Love and Saint Augustine, Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975, The Promise of Politics, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics Civil Disobedience On Violence and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution, The Recovery of the Public World, Responsibility and Judgment, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, Hannah Arendt
The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth, Ken Krimstein
Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, How the World Works, Masters of Mankind: Essays and Lectures, 1969-2013, Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian, Noam Chomsky
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah, The Classic Tales: 4,000 Years of Jewish Lore, Jewish Spirit: Stories & Art, Ellen Frankel
The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book, The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019, Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic, Alicia Suskin Ostriker
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
The Red Tent – 20th Anniversary Edition: A Novel, Day After Night, Anita Diamant
The Rabbi of Lud, Boswell, George Mills, The Dick Gibson Show, Stanley Elkin
The Shawl/Rosa, Envy, or Yiddish in America / The Pagan Rabbi, Collected Stories, The Messiah of Stockholm, The Puttermesser Papers, Antiquities, Heir to the Glimmering World, Foreign Bodies, Art & Ardor, Metaphor & Memory, Quarrel & Quandary: Essays, The Din in the Head, Critics Monsters Fanatics and Other Literary Essays, Portrait Of The Artist As A Bad Character: And Other Essays On Writing Cynthia Ozick
Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The March, World’s Fair, E.L. Doctorow
E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom
Essays, Collected Stories, Grace Paley
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
Anarchy and other writings, Living My Life, Emma Goldman
The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, Collected Stories, There Is Simply Too Much to Think about: Collected Nonfiction, Saul Bellow
Conversations with Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow (Editor), Gloria L. Cronin, Ben Siegel
The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964, The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, Zachary Leader
The Complete Stories, The Natural, The Assistant, The Fixer, Dubin’s Lives, Bernard Malamud
The Ghost Writer, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, The Plot Against America, American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, Philip Roth
Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, I Was Here, The Weight of Ink, Rachel Kadish
Collected Poems, Alan Ginsberg
The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, Jason Shinder ed
Man Walks into a Room, The History of Love, Great House, Forest Dark, Nicole Krauss
A Guide for the Perplexed: a novel, Septimania: a novel, Jonathan Levi
36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love Betrayal and Quantum Physics, The Dark Sister, Strange Attractors: Stories, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, Rebecca Goldstein
Kaddish, Leon Wieseltier
Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Tree of Codes, Here I Am, Eating Animals, The Future Dictionary of America (Editor), New American Haggadah, Jonathan Safran Foer
Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, Under the Sign of Saturn, On Photography, Where The Stress Falls, Sontag on Film, Susan Sontag
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, The Final Solution, Summerland, Gentlemen of the Road, Telegraph Avenue, Moonglow, Manhood for Amateurs, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, Michael Chabon
Poems 1962-2020, American Originality: Essays on Poetry, Louise Glück
The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction, Daniel Morris
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.
A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, Steven Nadler
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, Rebecca Goldstein
The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx
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
Conversations with Kafka, Gustav Janouch
Franz Kafka: a biography, Max Brod
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
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
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)
9 במאי 2024 מורשת של חופש משותפת לכולנו: חודש המורשת היהודית האמריקאית
אנו חוגגים את חודש המורשת היהודית-אמריקאית במאי הקרוב, את ניצחון ההישרדות והסירוב למסור את ההיסטוריה והזהות של האדם כנגד סיכויים בלתי אפשריים וזוועות בלתי נתפסות, מעשי החסד והאומץ בהחזרת משהו מהאנושיות שלנו מהחושך ואימת האין שלנו. , ואינספור החידושים, התובנות העיקריות, המהפכות של המדעים והאינטלקט, פרקטיקה של ערכים ושל הדמיון והטרנספורמציה של הציוויליזציה שלנו ושל עצמנו בכל תחום של הישגים אנושיים שהעם הייחודי הזה העניק למין האנושי ולאמריקה לאורך ההיסטוריה הארוכה שלהם כאן , מאז ההגירה היהודית המאורגנת הראשונה למה שהוא כיום ניו יורק בשנת 1654 בריחה מהכיבוש הפורטוגזי של ברזיל, וקודם לכן טקסס נוסדה בשנת 1579 כמושבת יהודים גולים על ידי ספרד, תחת המושל היהודי לואיס דה קרבחאל, מייסד מונטריי. במה שהיא כיום מקסיקו, ששלט בה לזמן קצר כחלום של ספרד חדש שבו עמים מכל הגזעים והדתות יכולים לחיות תחת אותו חוק, עד שהצלחתו משכה את הקנאה והקמצנות של האינקוויזיציה, ששרפו את כל משפחתו מניות בשנת 1596.
אמריקה כהבטחה למקלט תמיד הייתה מותנית ומוצלת על ידי היררכיות של שייכות והדרה, ועדיין לא יצאנו מהמורשת של ההיסטוריה שלנו.
מלכתחילה אמריקה הוקמה על חופש הדת ודומיינת כמקום מפלט ומעבר להישג ידם של עריצות ואימפריות, שבה כולנו שווים בפני החוק וחופשיים לרדוף אחר מערכת היחסים שלנו עם האינסופי ללא פחד או אילוץ לפי המדינה. בין עקרונות החירות הגדולים ביותר שאנו יורשים הוא שמי שעומד בין כל אחד מאיתנו לבין האינסופי אינו משרת אף אחד מהם.
הזכות העיקרית הזו לחופש הדת היא אוניברסלית וללא הדרה, ועל כך אנו חבים חוב לקהילה היהודית האמריקאית שלנו לא פחות מזה של עולי הרגל ואחרים שנמלטו לחופינו מכוח ושליטה אוטוריטריים, ויחד יצרו חברה חופשית. של שווים.
אני מקווה שנוכל להוכיח שווים לדוגמה שלהם.
מכיוון שהאישי והפוליטי תלויים זה בזה, ואנחנו עשויים מהסיפורים שאנו מספרים על עצמנו, לעצמנו ולאחרים, אני מציע כאן סיפור מההיסטוריה המשפחתית שלי כפי שסיפרה לי אמי כיצד העם היהודי הצילו אותנו, כשאף אחד אחר לא היה עושה זאת, ובלעדיו אף אחד מאיתנו לא היה חי.
אל רציפי אמריקה הגיעה ילדה בת תשע, לבד וללא אגורה או מילה באנגלית. זר, בלי אף אחד שמחכה לפגוש אותה, בלי משפחה, בלי חברים, בלי כלום. סבתא רבא שלי, אפולוניה, מצד אמי, זו הייתה, עם שיער אדום בוער כמו של אמי, שמשפחתה סידרה לה את הבריחה מאוסטריה כשביתם נשרף, הניצולה היחידה עד כמה שאנחנו יודעים עכשיו.
היא שוטטה בנמל וביקשה עזרה, בחמש שפות של ירידה בסבירות להכרה; צרפתית, אוסטרית, הונגרית, סרבו-קרואטית, ולבסוף, בייאוש וחשש שהתגובה תהיה גרועה בהרבה מהפקרת לרעב ולהקפיא, יידיש.
אז אדם זר נקלט וגדל על ידי אנשים יהודים, שאני לא יודע עליהם דבר, ולכן ההישרדות של המשפחה שלנו היא חב לכל הקהילה והעם היהודי.
זה קרה בשנת 1873, שנת התערוכה העולמית המפוארת של וינה אך גם התרסקות שוק המניות בעקבות מלחמת צרפת-פרוסיה שהחלה שפל של עשרים שנה באירופה והרדיפות היהודיות כפי שהואשמו בה; גם סכסוכים בין האימפריה הרוסית והעות’מאנית בארצות הגבול שלהם.
היא הייתה בעלת רובים וסוסים משלה עד גיל שש עשרה כשהחלה את דרכה כמדריכת ציד, ומתה על האוכף בגיל 95, רובה בידה, לאחר שירתה בדוב שתקף את סוסיה. הרג אותה. האינדיאנים קברו אותה כמו שההונים קברו את אטילה, על סוסה ועם הרובה שלה, כמו נסיכה לוחמת.
נולדתי תוך ימים של מותה, וכמו עם כל האבות הקדמונים אני נושא אותה הלאה, ממש כדנ”א והסיפורים שמחזיקים בנו כרוחות רפאים של חיים אחרים; אמיתות שנכתבו על בשרנו.
ההקשר ההיסטורי והעובדה שאבי הקדמון שלי בשושלת האם ידע יידיש מאפשרים שאנחנו יהודים במוצאנו, אם כי אמי מעולם לא טענה זאת ויותר מכך הייתה אתאיסטית רדיקלית שגידלה אותנו ללא מסורות דתיות כלל. בכך, האמונה המשפחתית שממנה השתחררה הייתה הקתוליות, חפץ משושלת האבה האוסטרית שהיו גולים של נפילת האימפריה ההבסבורגית ב-1919 לאחר 600 שנה.
אם זה באמת חלק מהזהות ההיסטורית שלנו, הוא אבד על ימי הזמן, או נגנב מאיתנו, כפי שנכון לכל כך הרבה אמריקאים שהגיעו לכאן כדי לברוח או לשכוח את עברם. אבל זה גם משחרר אותנו ליצור אפשרויות חדשות להיות אנושיות, שנוצרו הן מאלו השונים והן מהדומים, והן מהפי הזה.
בכל מקרה, סיפורי העם היהודי מציעים לכולנו דוגמאות שאנו יכולים להשתמש בהן ביצירת עצמנו וייחודיותנו.
כנער שקוע בספרות השואה בזמן שעבר את הטראומה של חווית כמעט מוות בברזיל בקיץ שלפני התיכון, הוצאתי להורג על ידי חוליית מוות משטרתית תוך כדי הצלת ילדי רחוב נטושים שהם צדו ראשים נמנעה על ידי המטאדורים, ושיחות עם אמי כשכתבה את המחקר שלה על אילמות פסיכוסומטית מתוך הרשומות הרפואיות הסובייטיות וכתב העת לטיפול בילדות של יז’י קוסינסקי, שאותו העלה בדיוני בתור הציפור המצוירת, שאלתי אותה פעם ישירות, האם אנחנו יהודים?
על כך השיבה; “כולם יהודים. כל אחד הוא יהודי של מישהו, שעיר לעזאזל של מישהו, הזולת של מישהו. המשימה הגדולה של להיות אנושי היא להתגבר על הפחד מאחרות, תוך אימוץ הייחודיות שלנו”.
Yiddish
9 מאי 2023 א לעגאַט פון פרייהייט מיט אונדז אַלע: ייִדיש אמעריקאנער העריטאַגע חודש
מיר פייַערן דעם ייִדישן אַמעריקאַנער העריטאַגע חודש דעם מייַ, דער טריומף פון ניצל און אָפּזאָג צו אַרויסגעבן זיין געשיכטע און אידענטיטעט קעגן אוממעגלעך שאַנסן און אַנימאַדזשאַנאַבאַל כאָרערז, די אקטן פון חן און מוט צו צוריקקריגן עפּעס פון אונדזער מענטשהייט פון דער פינצטערניש און די טעראָר פון אונדזער גאָרנישט. און די קאַונטלאַס ינאָווויישאַנז, ערשטיק ינסייץ, רעוואַלושאַנז פון וויסנשאפטן און סייכל, פּראַקסיס פון וואַלועס, און פון די ריימאַדזשאַניישאַן און טראַנספאָרמאַציע פון אונדזער ציוויליזאַציע און זיך אין יעדער געגנט פון מענטשלעך דערגרייה וואָס דאָס יינציק מענטשן האָבן געגעבן מענטשהייַט און אַמעריקע איבער זייער לאַנג געשיכטע דאָ זינט די ערשטע ארגאניזירטע אידישע מיגראציע צו דעם היינטיקן ניו יארק אין 1654 אנטלאפן פון פארטוגעזיש פארכאנג פון בראזיל, און פריער ווי טעקסאס איז געגרינדעט געווארן אין 1579 אלס א קאלאניע פון גלות אידן דורך שפאניע, אונטער דעם אידישן גאווערנאר לואיס דע קארוואדזשאל, גרינדער פון מאנטערי. אין וואָס איז איצט מעקסיקא, וואס רולד עס בעקיצער ווי דער חלום פון אַ נייַ ספאַראַד אין וואָס פעלקער פון אַלע ראַסעס און אמונה קענען לעבן אונטער די זעלבע געזעץ, ביז זיין הצלחה געצויגן די קנאה און קנאה פון די ינקוויסיטיאָן, וואָס פארברענט זיין גאנצע משפּחה אין די פלעקל אין 1596.
אַמעריקע ווי אַ צוזאָג פון מיזבייעך איז שטענדיק געווען קאַנדישאַנאַל און שאַדאָוד דורך כייעראַרקיז פון בילאָנגינג און יקסקלוזשאַן אנדערע, און מיר האָבן נאָך צו אַרויסקומען פון די לעגאַסיז פון אונדזער געשיכטע.
פון דער ערשטער אַמעריקע איז געגרינדעט אויף פרייהייט פון רעליגיע און ימאַדזשאַנד ווי אַ אָרט פון אָפּדאַך און ווייַטער פון די דערגרייכן פון טיראַניז און עמפּייערז, אין וואָס אַלע פון אונדז זענען גלייַך איידער די געזעץ און פריי צו נאָכגיין אונדזער שייכות מיט די ינפאַנאַט אָן מורא אָדער קאַמפּאַלשאַן דורך די שטאַט. צווישן די גרעסטע פּרינסאַפּאַלז פון פרייַהייַט מיר ירשענען איז אַז דער וואס שטייט צווישן יעדער פון אונדז און די ינפאַנאַט דינען ניט קיין.
דאס ערשטע רעכט פון רעליגיעז פרייהייט איז אוניווערסאל און נישט אויסשליסליך, און דערפאר זענען מיר שולדיק א חוב צו אונזער אידישער אמעריקאנער געמיינדע נישט ווייניגער ווי די פון די פילגרימען און אנדערע וואס זענען אנטלאפן צו אונזערע ברעגן פון אויטאריטאריע קראפט און קאנטראל, און צוזאמען האבן באשאפן א פרייע געזעלשאפט. פון גלייַך.
איך האָפֿן מיר קענען באַווייַזן גלייַך צו זייער בייַשפּיל.
ווייַל די פערזענלעכע און די פּאָליטיש זענען ינטעראָפענגיק, און מיר זענען געמאכט פון די מעשיות וואָס מיר דערציילן וועגן זיך, צו זיך און צו אנדערע, איך פאָרשלאָגן דאָ אַ געשיכטע פון מיין משפּחה געשיכטע ווי דערציילט מיר דורך מיין מוטער, ווי די אידישע מענטשן האָבן אונדז געראטעוועט, ווען קיינער אַנדערש וואָלט נישט, און אָן וועמען קיינער פון אונדז וואָלט קיינמאָל געלעבט.
זי איז ארומגעפארן אין פארט און געבעטן הילף, אין פינף שפראכן פון אראפנידערן ליקעליקייט פון דערקענונג; פראנצויזיש, עסטרייך, אונגאַריש, סערביש-קראָאַטיש, און ענדלעך, אין פאַרצווייפלונג און מורא, אַז דער רעאַקציע וועט זיין פיל ערגער ווי זיין פארלאזן צו הונגערן און פאַרפרוירן, ייִדיש.
אַזוי אַ פרעמדער איז אַרײַנגענומען געוואָרן און דערצויגן געוואָרן דורך אידישע מענטשן, פון וועלכן איך ווייס גאָרנישט, און אַזוי איז אונדזער משפּחה’ס ניצל צו שולדיג צו דער גאַנצער אידישער קהילה און פאָלק.
דאָס איז געשען אין 1873, יאָר פון דער הערלעכער ווינער וועלט-יריד אָבער אויך דער לאַגער-מאַרק קראַך נאָך דער פראַנקאָ-פּרוסישן מלחמה וואָס האָט אָנגעהויבן אַ צוואַנציק יאָר דעפּרעסיע אין אייראָפּע און די אידישע רדיפות ווי זיי זענען באַשולדיקט געוואָרן דערפאַר; אויך קאנפליקטן צווישן די רוסישע און אטאמאנישע אימפעריע אין זייערע גרענעצן.
זי איז געווען, וואָס האָט פאַרמאָגט אירע אייגענע ביקסן און פערד ביז זעכצן יאָר, ווען זי האָט אָנגעהויבן איר קאַריערע ווי אַ גייעג פירער, און איז געשטאָרבן אין זאָטל אין עלטער פון 95 יאָר, מיט אַ ביקס אין דער האַנט, בעת זי האָט געשאָסן דעם בער וואָס האָט אַטאַקירט אירע פערד און האָט זי דערהרגעט. די אינדיאנער האבן זי באגראבן װי די האנער האבן באגראבן אטילה, אויף איר פערד און מיט איר ביקס, װי א קריגערישע פרינצעסין.
איך בין געבוירן געוואָרן אין טעג נאָך איר טויט, און ווי מיט אַלע אָוועס איך טראָגן איר פאָרויס, ממש ווי דנאַ און די מעשיות וואָס פאַרמאָגן אונדז ווי די גאָוס פון אנדערע לעבן; אמת געשריבן אין אונדזער פלייש.
דער היסטאָרישער קאָנטעקסט און דער פאַקט אַז מיין אָוועס אין דער מוטערלעך שורה קען ייִדיש מאכט עס מעגלעך אַז מיר זענען אידן פון אָפּשטאַמלינג, כאָטש מיין מוטער האט קיינמאָל געטענהט אַזוי און דערצו איז געווען אַ ראַדיקאַל אַטעיסט וואָס האָט אונדז אויפשטיין מיט קיין רעליגיעז טראדיציעס. דערמיט איז די פאַמיליע אמונה פון וואָס זי האָט זיך באפרייט איז געווען קאַטהאָליסיסם, אַן אַרטאַפאַקט פון איר אַוסטריאַן פאָטערלעך ליניע וואָס זענען געווען גלות פון די 1919 פאַלן פון דער האַפּסבורגער אימפעריע נאָך 600 יאָר.
אויב דאָס איז טאַקע אַ טייל פון אונדזער היסטארישן אידענטיטעט, עס איז פאַרפאַלן אויף די ים פון צייַט, אָדער סטאָלען פון אונדז, ווי איז אמת פון אַזוי פילע אמעריקאנער וואָס זענען געקומען אַהער צו אַנטלויפן אָדער פאַרגעסן זייער פאַרגאַנגענהייט. אבער עס אויך פריי אונדז צו שאַפֿן נייַע פּאַסאַבילאַטיז פון ווערן מענטש, פאָרדזשד סיי פון די וואָס זענען אַנדערש און די ענלעך, און פון דעם פּע.
פֿון דעסטוועגן, פאָרשלאָגן אונדז די דערציילונגען פֿון דעם ייִדישן פֿאָלק אַלע ביישפילן וואָס מיר קענען נוצן אין דער שאַפונג פון זיך און אונדזער אייגנארטיקייט.
ווי אַ טיניידזשער געטובלט אין חורבן ליטעראַטור בשעת ארבעטן דורך די טראַוומע פון אַ לעבן טויט דערפאַרונג אין Brazil זומער איידער הויך שולע, מיין דורכפירונג דורך אַ פּאָליצייַ טויט סקוואַד בשעת רעסקיוינג פארלאזן גאַס קינדער וואָס זיי זענען געווען פּריווענטיד דורך די מאַטאַדאָר, און שמועסן. מיט מיין מוטער ווען זי האָט געשריבן איר לערנען וועגן פּסיכאָסאָמאַטיק שטום פון די סאָוויעט מעדיציניש רעקאָרדס און קינדשאַפט טעראַפּיע זשורנאַל פון דזשערזי קאָסינסקי וואָס ער פיקשאַנאַלייזד ווי די פּאַינטעד פויגל, איך אַמאָל געפרעגט איר גלייַך, זענען מיר אידן?
אויף דעם האט זי געענטפערט; „יעדער איז אַ ייִד. אַלעמען איז עמעצער ס ייִד, עמעצער ס קאַפּיטל, עמעצער ס אַנדערער. די גרויס אַרבעט פון ווערן מענטש איז צו באַקומען מורא פון אַנדערשקייט, בשעת אַרומנעמען אונדזער אייגנארטיקייט.
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”, as written by Karl Marx.
Karl Marx transformed the history and evolution of humankind with a unique primary insight, simple to tell though it has many layers; we humans are self created beings, whose souls are artifacts of our civilization as historical and social constructions, interdependent with those of others, and if we change how we relate to each other as systems, narratives of identity, informing, motivating, and shaping forces, if we change the nature of our relationships, we also change the nature of humankind.
Are we not made of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to each other?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for self-ownership.
“The bourgeoisie has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self- interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” So wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, which remains the most impactful revisioning of human relations, being, meaning, and values in the history of civilization.
Celebrate with me today the birthday of Karl Marx, who shaped from the Humanist tradition of the Enlightenment a toolkit for the realization of our potential humanity, of the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and of the liberation of humankind from systems of unequal power, from elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, from divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and from the tyranny and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
An enduring legacy of Karl Marx is his instrumentalization of Socratic method as a tool of understanding unequal power as dialectical process, which can be generally applied in human sciences. This he demonstrated at length in the example of economics because he wanted to place it on a footing as science, much as Freud insisted on defining his new talking cure for madness as medical science to confer authority on it.
Marx helped me process two defining moments of my life, traumas which were transformational both to my identity and to my understanding of the human condition.
I first read his works as a teenager in the wake of a trip to Brazil the summer between eighth grade and high school in 1974, training with a friend as a sabre fencer for the Pan American Games, during which I became aware of the horrific gulf between social classes and races in the wealth disparity between my aristocratic hosts and the vast Black slums beyond their walls. At thirteen I had read Plato and Nietzsche, but never seen poverty or racism, though the brutal tyranny of a city under siege by its police had been enacted before me years earlier in the spectacle of Bloody Thursday in Berkeley, May 15 1969. This was the Defining Moment of my Awakening to the brokenness of the world and the lies and illusions of the gilded cage of my privilege.
My response to this first reading, like my second and third a part of reading through the entire Great Books of the Western World series and the guidebooks by Mortimer J. Adler which collect his famous course at the University of Chicago, was that Marx had reimagined sin as the profit motive in a myth of Exile and Return, in an allegorical fable in which the new Adamic Man would be restored to an Edenic state, being immediately captivated by the multitudes of Biblical symbolism which permeates Das Capital. In this interpretation I was influenced by my context of growing up in a Reformed Church community, where spoken English reflected that of the King James Bible whose rhythms shape my writing still, and the influence of Coleridge and other Romantic Idealists and religious symbolism in medieval art through my mother, who was a scholar of both.
My second reading of Marx was eight years later as a university student after a culinary tour of the Mediterranean ended with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Siege of Beirut, and my exposure to the brutalities of war and Imperialist-Colonialist conquest as a nation fell to ruins around me. This was the Defining Moment of my calling, in which I was sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet.
During this second engagement with Marx, I laughed all the way through it; the first time I didn’t understand the literary references well enough to get the jokes. This time I saw his delightfully wicked Swiftian satire, and realized his true achievement; like Nicholaus of Cusa and Godel, Camus and Sartre, Beckett and Pinter, Marx demonstrates the limits of reason in an Absurd universe free of any meaning or value we ourselves do not create, and the madness of our historical attempts to control fate and nature including our own in a mad world, where security is an illusion, truths are ambiguous, ephemeral, and relational, and our fear has been weaponized globally by carceral states in service to power, the centralization of authority, and our enslavement and dehumanization. In this second unfolding of understanding I found guidance and allyship with fellow revolutionaries and scholars of Marxist thought and its praxis, as we waged liberation struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, American imperialism in Central America, and other theatres of Resistance to tyranny and oppression.
The third time I read Marx was over a decade after my baptism by fire in Beirut, this time as a counselor seeking to better understand and help my clients. I remain as I was then, a scholar of the intersection of literature, psychology, history, and philosophy, whose primary field is the origin of human evil and its consequences as violence, though of course I have been greatly changed by my life experience, and my understanding has changed with me.
My third reading of Marx coincides with my Defining Moment of understanding the Wagnerian ring of fear, power, and force from which evil, violence, and fascist tyranny arise, a Ring of Power which requires the renunciation of love to wield, and a pathology which can be healed by the redemptive power of love. Here Marx helps us to understand the dynamics of unequal power as a system of oppression, a model which can be applied generally to issues including those of gender, race, and class.
We often have difficulty envisioning a therapeutic model of finding balance and harmony in society rather than a coercive one; we may align ourselves on the side of freedom against tyranny and the force and control of the carceral state, but how can we abolish the police and throw open the gates of the prisons, abolish borders and the counterinsurgency model of policing which enforces white supremacist and patriarchal terror, renounce the social use of force and abandon violence and war, cast down law and order from their thrones and forge a civilization of liberty and chaos in its place?
Let me provide you with an example of what that might look like. On my return from adventures abroad, I took a job as a counselor in a program called Vision Quest run through a Native American tribe for court mandated youth, under the flags of the 9th and 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers with the Army’s permission, and with gorgeous Union Army blues parade uniforms.
As described to me, I would lead a group of fifteen boys through the program from a three month impact or boot camp in Arizona near the historic Fort, then ride horses to Denver and Philadelphia, sleeping in a tipi as one of several such teams while they learned riding and parade horse drill, and finish the program on a tall ship in the Florida Keys teaching them to sail. They would earn their GED high school equivalency certificate, and graduates would have served their sentences and be provided with jobs and transitional supervised community based housing. There was no lockdown; just men learning to live together without violence.
This sounded like a grand adventure, and for most of my life if you told me something was going to be an adventure, or as Obi-Wan says in the first Star Wars film “some damn fool idealistic crusade”, I’d likely do it. It’s the part they leave out of the pitch you need to worry about with this kind of quasi-official outfit; what no one told me was that the clients were mainly violent felons with four or five year sentences that would eventually land them in adult prisons if they washed out, with issues like psychotic rage and often highly trained and indoctrinated gang soldiers, cult zealots, and fanatics of political terror as well. It turned out to be both much tougher and much more interesting than I thought it was going to be, and became my entry point into working as a counselor.
America at this time was caught up in a highly politicized racist hysteria over gangs and rising crime, whose emergence was to me clearly a consequence of the failures of capitalism as our civilization began to collapse from the inherent contradictions of our systems of unequal power. One reply to these conditions was to use greater force; the solution of stop and frisk policies, the school to prison pipeline whose design is to create prison bond labor and the re-enslavement of Black citizens, militarization of police, and the universalization of state terror as the counterinsurgency model of policing. This has two problems; it fails to address underlying causes of crime in wealth disparity, and it asks us to throw our children away.
They were some of the toughest and most unreachable boys in our nation, mainly Black and from the ghettos of Chicago and Philadelphia, with issues of abuse, abandonment, and addiction as consequences of structural and systemic inequalities and injustices, internalized oppression, and the legacy of slavery. And they were boys and future citizens our nation had thrown away.
We had a three percent recidivism rate from that program; 97% of our clients had no further contact with the law after completion. This amazing success with teenagers our society had pronounced violent and unreformable criminals began with an awareness that perpetrators are also victims, both and neither good nor evil, and was won by providing a constructive way for them to earn honor and membership; so far like many other programs based on military models of identity construction.
But it was the horses, wild mustangs given to each new client as their own personal mount who had to break and learn to ride them, that allowed them to forge the ability to bond with others, because you can trust a horse and it will never betray you. Teambuilding exercises did the rest, as in the military but without the purpose of violence.
So it was, with The Communist Manifesto in my saddlebag and dreaming with serenity between a former gang enforcer and extremist of Louis Farrakhan’s racial separatist Nation of Islam who had been shot six times in six different gunfights with other Black teenagers and whose joy was to recite poetry from my copy of Rumi, and on the other side a former Jamaican Posse drug lord who had two million dollars in cash in his pockets when his reign of terror in Philly ended in betrayal and arrest and who had discovered a genius for choreography in adapting reggae to parade drill, that I had a primary insight and realization of the nature of violence as a disease of power, of addiction to power and of unequal power, which operates multigenerationally as epigenetic trauma and historical legacies of slavery and racism, and often a result of secret power.
Dehumanization is the end result of commodification; Jean Genet famously called the quest for wealth and power necrophilia for this reason. William S. Burroughs coined the term the Algebra of Need as a metaphor of Capitalism. And with his invention of the philosophy of Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre explored the implications of Marx’s primary insights as a psychology of the consequences of unequal power relations and the mechanical failures of our civilization’s internal contradictions as alienation, falsification, commodification, internalized oppression, and the disfigurement and theft of the soul by hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege and the hegemonic forces of those who would enslave us.
As a systemic and pervasive means of transforming persons into things, capitalism is an enabler which acts as a force multiplier for a host of evils, inequalities of racism and patriarchy, and divisions of exclusionary otherness, touching every aspect of our lives including our identity and social relations and confronting individuals with enormous and weaponized forces with which we must wrestle.
And our best response to these threats is solidarity in refusal to submit or be isolated by our modern pathology of disconnectedness, divided by otherness and identitarian categories of exclusion and privilege and by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and subjugated by authorized identities and the weaponization of overwhelming and generalized fear in service to power; to unite as a band of brothers, sisters, and others and to shelter and protect our humanity and viability through and with others as a United Humankind.
In our revolutionary struggle for our souls, for autonomy and self ownership, for liberty and our uniqueness as self created beings, and for the liberation of humankind, we are each other’s best resource of action.
We are not designed to survive alone, and it can be difficult to get people in crisis to reach out for help, and for our institutions of caregiving to find where help is needed before things spiral downwards into violence, nor can violence be cured with violence or state repression. But this is the great mission of our humanity; to unite across the boundaries of our differences in revolutionary struggle to become better.
Let us defy the malign forces that would divide and enslave us and consume our souls. So I say with Karl Marx, the great visionary of liberty and the limitless possibilities of becoming human; People of the world, unite; we have nothing to lose but our chains.
Today we remember the horrific repression and mass murder by police which numbers among the most brutal and senseless crimes of state terror in our nation’s history, but also the valiant resistance of students throughout America to a government which was and yet remains an unjust and violent perpetrator of crimes against humanity both at home and abroad.
The national student strike which the massacre unleashed was a turning point for American involvement in Vietnam, and remains a model for mass action today. Its primary lesson is simple; to unite everyone, from all classes and stratum of society, in action against an existential threat said threat must be universal as well as clear and direct. Such a universal mass protest now unfolds in the shadow of the Israel Genocide of the Palestinians and the echoes and reflections of the Kent State Massacre.
A parallel student movement for peace and divestiture now engulfs our nation and our world, a clarion call for solidarity with the oppressed in the genocide of the Palestinians and the deaths of thousands of children and civilians paid for by our taxes, as our government and Genocide Joe abandon our ideas of universal human rights and the historic role of America as their guarantor state, and like university peace movement to end the Vietnam War is met not with celebration of our rights of free speech and the co-ownership of the state by all of its citizens, not with a President who joins the protests as the champion of democracy and our universal human rights, but with police terror and repression of dissent.
Our leaders have betrayed us, and in the abandonment of our human rights and of our rights as citizens Biden and the Democratic Party may have handed the next election to Trump and the Republican Party whose mission is the sabotage of democracy and its replacement by a theocratic tyranny of patriarchal and white supremacist terror. For if you sponsor and authorize genocide, I cannot vote for you, and I will fight you; and in this I am far from alone.
We are caught by the horns of a dilemma in this crucial election year, with liberty or tyranny at stake not merely for our nation but for the whole of humankind and throughout the coming millennia. We must bring our dog to heel through Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of Israel until the genocide and the Occupation end, and with it the Netanyahu settler regime of ethnic cleansing and theocratic terror. If we cannot, and choose instead to ally and identify our nation once again with imperial conquest and dominion, state terror and tyranny, and the sacrifice of others lives in service to our own power, those of us who remember what it means to be an American and a human being must refuse to vote for Biden, land Trump wins the Presidency; this is the true motive for Israel’s orchestration of the October 7 tragedy, in dual purpose with creating a casus belli for the Final Solution of the Palestinians and the conquest of the Middle East.
I ask you now, all of us; don’t let complicity in genocide be the reason democracy falls in America.
What lessons can we learn from the Kent State Massacre?
In the words of eyewitness Mike Alewitz writing in Counterpunch; “We were peacefully protesting the US invasion of Cambodia when the Ohio National Guard launched a teargas attack and then opened fire at us.
67 shots in 13 seconds left our campus strewn with dead and wounded. Four dead in Ohio – nine wounded, one paralyzed for life.
Ten days later, 75 Mississippi state police, armed with carbines, shotguns and submachine guns, fired 460 rounds into a dormitory at protesting students at Jackson State. The barrage left two dead and an unknown number of wounded.
And in between, rarely noted, was the largest black uprising in a southern city during the civil rights era.
On May 11, 1970, the black community in Augusta, Georgia rebelled, after the burned and tortured body of an incarcerated 16-year old retarded black youth was dumped by his jailers at a local hospital.
The rebellion left six African-American men dead – all shot in the back.
The invasion of Cambodia and killings at Kent sparked an unprecedented national student strike. Over 400 campuses were shut down and occupied by the students. Millions of people joined street demonstrations demanding an end to the war.
1970 marked a turning point in history as the majority of GIs came to recognize that Washington had knowingly sent them to die in a war that was unwinnable. Our movement became so powerful that, along with the determined resistance of the Vietnamese people, we forced the government to withdraw from Southeast Asia.
Ending the war, on the heels of the civil rights movement, was a tremendous victory for working people. The momentum gave rise to the rebirth of the women’s movement, the gay movement and other social movements that transformed the country.
Today we face an unprecedented medical, ecological, social and economic crisis. We cannot continue to pour trillions of dollars into an insatiable war machine while healthcare workers go begging for masks. While our schools and restaurants are closed. While millions are unemployed. While lines at food pantries stretch for miles.
The finances and resources of society must be changed to go towards healing our planet and ourselves. The memory of the martyrs of Kent and Jackson cries out for us to continue the struggle for which they gave their lives – to demand money for jobs and education, not for war; to put an end to all US wars and occupations and sanctions.”
As described by Steve Early in Jacobin; “In May 1970, 4 million students went on strike across the country, shutting down classes at hundreds of colleges, universities, and high schools and demanding an end to the Vietnam War. Fifty years later, their rebellion remains an inspiration, as radical student politics is back on the agenda.
Over the course of this unprecedented campus uprising, about two thousand students were arrested. After thirty buildings used by the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) were bombed or set on fire, heavily armed National Guards were deployed on twenty-one campuses in sixteen states.
On May 4, at Kent State University in Ohio, Guard members fresh from policing a Teamster wildcat strike shot and killed four students and wounded nine. Ten days later, Mississippi State Police opened fire on a women’s dormitory at Jackson State University, killing two more students”.
“The strike across campuses revealed the power of collective action. Born out of the shutdown, there was an explosion of activity by hundreds of thousands of students not previously engaged in anti-war activity, creating major political tremors across the country, including helping to curtail military intervention in Southeast Asia.”
“Nixon claimed to have a “secret plan” to bring peace to Vietnam and withdraw the five hundred thousand US troops still deployed there.
Once unveiled, Nixon’s plan turned out to be “Vietnamization” — shifting the combat burden to troops loyal to the US-backed government in Saigon, while conducting massive bombing of targets throughout Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. By April 30, 1970, the United States was sending ground troops into Cambodia as well.
Students at elite private institutions long associated with anti-war agitation were among the first to react. Protest strikes were quickly declared at Columbia, Princeton, Brandeis, and Yale, where many students had already voted to boycott class in support of the Black Panther Party, then on trial in New Haven.
Meanwhile, a Friday night riot outside student bars in downtown Kent, Ohio, was followed by the burning of a Kent State ROTC building over the weekend. Ohio governor James Rhodes ordered a thousand National Guard troops to occupy the campus and prevent rallies of any kind.
The Guard came geared with bayonets, tear gas grenades, shotguns, and M1s, a military rifle with long range and high velocity. Chasing a hostile but unarmed crowd of students across campus on May 4, one unit of weekend warriors suddenly wheeled and fired, killing four students.”
“The deaths of Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer, and Bill Schroeder had a powerful impact on hundreds of thousands of students at Kent State and beyond.”
“The resulting calls for campus shutdowns came from every direction. Students at MIT tracked which schools were on strike for a National Strike Information Center operating at Brandeis nearby. Soon the list was ten feet long. Despite its initial association with militant protest, most strike activity was peaceful and legal. It consisted of student assemblies taking strike votes, and then further mass meetings, speeches and lectures, vigils and memorial services, plus endless informal “rapping” about politics and the war.
The strike brought together a wide range of undergraduates, faculty members, and administrators — despite their past disagreements about on-campus protest activity. Thirty-four college and university presidents sent an open letter to Nixon calling for a speedy end to the war. The strike also united students from private and public colleges and local public high schools in working-class communities. On May 8, in Philadelphia, students from many different backgrounds and neighborhoods marched from five different directions to Independence Hall, where a crowd of one hundred thousand gathered outside. City high school attendance that day dropped to 10 percent, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.”
“In a Boston Globe interview on the thirtieth anniversary of this upsurge, Isserman argued that it was “the product of unique circumstances that, not surprisingly, provoked outrage from a generation of students already accustomed to protest and demonstration. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever see a movement quite like this again.”
“Yet over the past two decades, college and high-school students have walked out again, across the country, in highly visible and coordinated fashion. In March 2003, they poured out of 350 schools to protest the impending US invasion of Iraq. Fifteen years later, about 1 million students at 3,000 schools walked out to join a seventeen-minute vigil organized in response to the mass shooting at Parkland High School in Florida. And just last September, hundreds of thousands of students left school to join rallies and marches organized as part of a Global Climate Strike.
Universities and high schools are now experiencing a shutdown of their campuses, albeit of a very different kind. But when these institutions open back up, conditions will require a new set of political demands. A return to normal will not be good enough. When school is back in session, the history of a strike occurring after the shadow of death fell on campuses fifty years ago, thanks to Richard Nixon, may become more relevant to challenging “national policy”.
4 مايو 2024 ثمن السلام: ذكرى مذبحة ولاية كينت في ظل الإبادة الجماعية للفلسطينيين
إننا نتذكر اليوم القمع المروع والقتل الجماعي الذي ارتكبته الشرطة والذي يعد من بين أكثر جرائم إرهاب الدولة وحشية وحماقة في تاريخ أمتنا، ولكننا نتذكر أيضًا المقاومة الشجاعة للطلاب في جميع أنحاء أمريكا ضد الحكومة التي كانت ولا تزال مرتكبة ظالمة وعنيفة. الجرائم ضد الإنسانية في الداخل والخارج.
كان الإضراب الطلابي الوطني الذي أطلقته المذبحة بمثابة نقطة تحول في التدخل الأمريكي في فيتنام، ويظل نموذجًا للعمل الجماهيري حتى اليوم. الدرس الأساسي بسيط. لتوحيد الجميع، من جميع طبقات وطبقات المجتمع، في العمل ضد التهديد الوجودي، يجب أن يكون التهديد عالميًا وواضحًا ومباشرًا. إن مثل هذا الاحتجاج الجماهيري العالمي يتكشف الآن في ظل الإبادة الجماعية الإسرائيلية للفلسطينيين وأصداء وانعكاسات مذبحة ولاية كينت.
إن حركة طلابية موازية من أجل السلام وسحب الاستثمارات تجتاح الآن أمتنا وعالمنا، وهي دعوة واضحة للتضامن مع المضطهدين في الإبادة الجماعية للفلسطينيين ومقتل الآلاف من الأطفال والمدنيين الذين تدفع ثمنهم ضرائبنا، كما فعلت حكومتنا والإبادة الجماعية. يتخلى جو عن أفكارنا حول حقوق الإنسان العالمية والدور التاريخي لأمريكا كدولة ضامنة لها، ومثل حركة السلام الجامعية لإنهاء حرب فيتنام لا تقابل بالاحتفال بحقوقنا في حرية التعبير والملكية المشتركة للدولة من قبل الجميع. مواطنيها، ليس مع رئيس ينضم إلى الاحتجاجات باعتباره بطل الديمقراطية وحقوق الإنسان العالمية، ولكن مع إرهاب الشرطة وقمع المعارضة.
لقد خاننا قادتنا، وبالتخلي عن حقوقنا الإنسانية وحقوقنا كمواطنين، ربما يكون بايدن والحزب الديمقراطي قد سلموا الانتخابات المقبلة إلى ترامب والحزب الجمهوري الذي تتمثل مهمته في تخريب الديمقراطية واستبدالها بحكومة ثيوقراطية. طغيان الإرهاب الأبوي والعنصري الأبيض. لأنه إذا كنت ترعى وتأذن بالإبادة الجماعية، فلا أستطيع التصويت لك، وسوف أقاتلك؛ وفي هذا لست وحدي.
إننا نواجه معضلة في هذا العام الانتخابي الحاسم، حيث الحرية أو الاستبداد على المحك ليس فقط بالنسبة لأمتنا ولكن للبشرية جمعاء وعلى مدى آلاف السنين القادمة. يجب علينا أن نخضع كلبنا من خلال المقاطعة وسحب الاستثمارات وفرض العقوبات على إسرائيل حتى تنتهي الإبادة الجماعية والاحتلال، ومعها نظام نتنياهو الاستيطاني القائم على التطهير العرقي والإرهاب الثيوقراطي. إذا لم نتمكن من ذلك، واخترنا بدلاً من ذلك التحالف وتحديد هوية أمتنا مرة أخرى من خلال الغزو والسيطرة الإمبراطورية، وإرهاب الدولة والطغيان، وتضحيات الآخرين التي تعيش في خدمة قوتنا، فإن أولئك منا الذين يتذكرون ما يعنيه أن تكون دولة يجب على الأميركي والإنساني أن يرفضوا التصويت لبايدن، أرضاً يفوز ترامب بالرئاسة؛ هذا هو الدافع الحقيقي لتدبير إسرائيل لمأساة 7 أكتوبر، بهدف مزدوج مع خلق سبب للحرب من أجل الحل النهائي للفلسطينيين وغزو الشرق الأوسط.
أسألكم الآن جميعاً؛ لا تدع التواطؤ في الإبادة الجماعية يكون السبب وراء سقوط الديمقراطية في أمريكا.
Hebrew
4 במאי 2024 מחיר השלום: יום השנה לטבח במדינת קנט בצל רצח העם של הפלסטינים
היום אנו זוכרים את הדיכוי הנורא והרצח ההמוני על ידי המשטרה, שהם בין הפשעים האכזריים וחסרי ההיגיון של טרור המדינה בתולדות האומה שלנו, אבל גם את ההתנגדות האמיצה של סטודנטים ברחבי אמריקה לממשלה שהיתה ועדיין נותרה עבריין לא צודק ואלים של פשעים נגד האנושות הן בבית והן מחוצה לה.
שביתת הסטודנטים הלאומית שהטבח חולל הייתה נקודת מפנה למעורבות האמריקנית בווייטנאם, והיא נותרה מודל לפעולה המונית כיום. הלקח העיקרי שלה הוא פשוט; כדי לאחד את כולם, מכל המעמדות והשכבות של החברה, בפעולה נגד איום קיומי האיום האמור חייב להיות אוניברסלי וכן ברור וישיר. מחאה המונית אוניברסלית כזו מתרחשת כעת בצל רצח העם הישראלי של הפלסטינים וההדים וההרהורים של הטבח במדינת קנט.
תנועת סטודנטים מקבילה לשלום והסרה בולעת כעת את האומה שלנו ואת העולם שלנו, קריאה מובהקת לסולידריות עם המדוכאים ברצח העם של הפלסטינים ובמותם של אלפי ילדים ואזרחים המשולמים על ידי המסים שלנו, כממשלתנו ורצח העם. ג’ו נוטש את הרעיונות שלנו בדבר זכויות אדם אוניברסליות ותפקידה ההיסטורי של אמריקה כמדינה הערבית שלהם, וכמו תנועת השלום האוניברסיטאית לסיום מלחמת וייטנאם אינה זוכה לחגיגה של זכויות הביטוי שלנו והבעלות המשותפת על המדינה על ידי כולם של אזרחיה, לא עם נשיא שמצטרף להפגנות בתור אלוף הדמוקרטיה וזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, אלא עם טרור משטרתי ודיכוי התנגדות.
המנהיגים שלנו בגדו בנו, ובנטישת זכויות האדם שלנו וזכויותינו כאזרחים, ייתכן שבידן והמפלגה הדמוקרטית העבירו את הבחירות הבאות לטראמפ ולמפלגה הרפובליקנית שמשימתן היא חבלה בדמוקרטיה והחלפתה בתאוקרטיה. עריצות של טרור פטריארכלי ולבן. כי אם אתה נותן חסות ותאשר רצח עם, אני לא יכול להצביע עבורך, ואני אלחם בך; ובזה אני רחוק מלהיות לבד.
אנו נלכדים בקרנות של דילמה בשנת בחירות מכרעת זו, עם חירות או עריצות על כף המאזניים לא רק עבור האומה שלנו אלא עבור המין האנושי כולו ולאורך אלפי השנים הקרובות. עלינו להביא את הכלב שלנו לעקב באמצעות חרם, ביטול וסנקציה של ישראל עד לסיום רצח העם והכיבוש, ואיתו משטר המתנחלים נתניהו של טיהור אתני וטרור תיאוקרטי. אם איננו יכולים, ובמקום זאת בוחרים ליצור ברית ולזהות את האומה שלנו שוב עם כיבוש ושליטה אימפריאלית, טרור מדינה ועריצות, והקרבת חיים של אחרים בשירות לכוחנו, אלו מאיתנו שזוכרים מה זה אומר להיות אמריקאי ובן אנוש חייבים לסרב להצביע עבור ביידן, קרקע שטראמפ יזכה בנשיאות; זהו המניע האמיתי לתזמור של ישראל את הטרגדיה של 7 באוקטובר, במטרה כפולה עם יצירת קאזוס באלי לפתרון הסופי של הפלסטינים ולכיבוש המזרח התיכון.
אני שואל אתכם עכשיו, כולנו; אל תתנו לשותפות ברצח עם להיות הסיבה שהדמוקרטיה נופלת באמריקה.
Social injustice is the crack in the Liberty Bell; as we stand united in solidarity with our brothers and sisters throughout the world in our wonderfully diverse human family, with our essential workers who during the Pandemic, for now it seems held at bay but a threat which may return in new and terrible forms at any time, risked their own lives and those of their families to guarantee basic services to us all, and with our vulnerable populations who bear the true costs of what wealth and hegemony of power and privilege we may enjoy, let us always remember that among the causes and origins of our current problems is the failure of our political and economic systems to realize our founding value of equality.
What is the meaning of the Pandemic? Among other things it has exposed the faultliness of our civilization and the internal contradictions whose mechanical failures now threaten us all with civilizational collapse and extinction as consequences of capitalism and colonialism as systems of unequal power, and of control and dominion of nature as flawed coping strategies for our fear of her as uncontrollable, irrational, chaotic, and free; fear of the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.
For in this failure of our grasp to reach the limits of our vision we have allowed a failing capitalism to try and bring us down with it, to subvert democracy and the structural safeguards of our freedom embodied in our government as a free society of equals, and as our devastation of the environment creates pandemics and poisons our world to threaten our very lives.
When we will say, Enough! When will we reclaim our liberty and ownership of the public resources we have let slip away into the hands of those who would enslave us?
When we think of labor unions, of strikes and the right of workers to organize in defense of fair and safe work, we must think not only of our universal human rights and our duty of care for each other in solidarity, but also of the systems of oppression and unequal power in which such seizures of power become necessary and arise as imposed conditions of struggle. The event we celebrate today of over one hundred years ago, the Seattle General Strike, was such a victory, one which in large part founded organized labor.
From Cal Winslow writing in Jacobin comes an inspirational account of the Seattle General Strike of 1919 in the wake of the 1918 Flu Pandemic and conditions of austerity and worker exploitation much like those today. May we learn from the examples of history how better to meet the challenges of the future.
“The first major general strike in the United States coincided with the last major pandemic. Here’s the full story.
November 11, 1918. The war was finished. There were wild celebrations everywhere — everywhere, that is, in France, Britain, and the United States. Spontaneous demonstrations of relief and happiness erupted, and millions took to the streets of Paris, London, and New York.
In Seattle, the Star pronounced, “War is Over!” The city learned of the armistice on Sunday night, November 10; at once, people took to the streets. In the morning, the mayor was awakened to find the streets filled, his planned proclamation of a holiday irrelevant; his wish for a proper, orderly, patriotic manifestation was superseded.
Revelers celebrated not just the end of the war, but also what they thought to be the end of the so-called Spanish flu. Over the course of that day, makeshift bands appeared, with people banging garbage-can lids and lunch buckets, car horns blasting. Workers abandoned the shipyards, longshoremen quit the waterfront, and the city center was gridlocked. The city’s health authorities, too, were taken aback. There were no masks to be seen; social distancing was defiantly disregarded. They had their own plans in the works, perhaps with some recklessness, to withdraw their edicts, their restrictions on crowds and mandatory masking, and to triumphantly pronounce the influenza beaten.
Sailors, first carriers of the influenza and also its first victims, were ordered into the crowds to ensure that the celebration was official and properly patriotic. The November celebrations were also suggestive of a level of underlying discontent, a prelude to another war coming, to a return of “normalcy” in the nation’s most class-divided, strike-prone city — above all to the great “Seattle Strike.”
“The war to end all wars,” the papers repeated without a blush. Yet 10 million had been lost in the slaughter on the Western Front; millions more were maimed, emotionally as well as physically. In Central and Eastern Europe, there were vast swaths of devastation, the heart of the continent was in ruins, and there were new armies, this time of scavengers and homeless, creatures without hope. The Seattle Star featured a half-page, triumphant Jesus, captioned “Peace on Earth.” Then came the mindless boastings of victory, of “sacred unions,” “homes for heroes,” “democracy at full tilt.” “We won the war!”
The workers of Seattle, however, had never really supported this war, unless one reduced it to “supporting the troops,” the mantra in all wars. Still, they celebrated; especially if it meant an end to long hours, short pay, conscription; to “sedition” charges and “criminal syndicalism” laws; to the red squads, raids, and prison sentences. The killing — nearly 5 million Americans served in World War I, and 53,000 were killed in action — was not restricted to the trenches. On the home front, the influenza killed 675,000, and more than 1,500 deaths were recorded in Seattle.
The Flu Comes to Seattle
In the winter of 1918, much of the city — the schools, and most public places — was still reopening. It remained unclear if the epidemic was, in fact, finished, with a second spike just before Christmas. The heavy rains had begun. The first loggers were drifting back; they joined others — wandering, homeless men on the city’s mean streets, waiting for spring and work to resume. This was ordinary in Seattle in winter. Now, however, newcomers appeared, some still in uniform, wanting work. Some were sick. The Union Record, the city’s union-owned daily newspaper, reported that “peace” abroad was bringing hunger at home. One man, a union representative from the Metal Trades Council (MTC), told reporters that he had been approached “by 15 soldiers in one night, all for bed and board.”
It had taken time for the influenza to reach Seattle. This city of three hundred thousand, situated in the far northwestern corner of the nation, was two mountain ranges and several long days from Chicago by train; it was weeks from the East Coast by the Panama Canal, and still much longer around the Strait of Magellan. Seattle was, in this sense, isolated, yet by war’s end, it had become the center of trade with Asia, two days closer to Vladivostok than its rival to the south, San Francisco. It was the gateway to Alaska and its fisheries. Wheat from the great fields of the Palouse was shipped from its docks.
Seattle had become an imperial outpost. The Puget Sound country bristled with warship building and armed encampments. Camp Lewis, just south of Tacoma, was the largest such base in the West. Bremerton, across the bay, was home port for the navy’s North Pacific fleet. Sailors trained there; warships, meant for the Asian “theater,” were built in its yards. The real war, of course, was an ocean away in the other direction. In spite of this, Seattle’s shipyards — the city’s “basic industry” — produced more ships for the war (ninety in total, steel hulled) than any other shipyard in the country. The yards were “the life” of the city, “pulsing through every [other] industry, affecting all workers.” These yards employed some thirty five thousand men; fifteen thousand more worked in Tacoma’s shipyards.
The influenza, despite its name, originated not in Spain but in Kansas in 1917, settling in Camp Riley. It was well traveled by the following summer’s end. It had first spread eastward, moving from camp to camp, reaching Europe with the arriving American Expeditionary Forces. It swept across Europe, adding a new dimension of horror to the trenches of the Western Front. Then home again to the United States, it returned with soldiers and sailors, killing ferociously. Public health officers in Seattle certainly knew about it and expected it, yet, as elsewhere, they were caught off guard when it actually appeared. It came in late September, by way of infected sailors in Boston dispatched to Philadelphia, then with the 334 of these who set sail from Philadelphia for Puget Sound. On arrival, many were desperately ill.
“In the event the disease appears here,” announced Seattle’s commissioner of health, Dr J.S. McBride, on September 28, “and it is not unlikely that it will, we will endeavor to isolate the first cases and thus try to prevent it becoming an epidemic.” Isolation would begin with places of amusement, theaters, sporting events, restaurants, and saloons. It was also presented as an opportunity to shut down the city’s notorious Skid Row, with its flophouses, saloons, brothels, and various other places of unsavory amusement, including the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies). Industry, however, would carry on, indeed be encouraged — the city’s “interests” were anxious to remain open, free of wartime restrictions, determined to reestablish the “open shop.”
McBride and his staff watched for the first signs of the influenza; these came initially in the Navy’s facilities in Bremerton, then in Camp Lewis with, suddenly, reports of hundreds of cases of a severe influenza. These, the authorities initially insisted, were simply the flu, though noting that, in some cases, this flu quickly became pneumonia. Bremerton reported fourteen deaths. Sailors were ordered to avoid large gatherings. Visitors were banned. Camp Lewis was placed under quarantine.
Still, in Seattle, McBride and staff looked in the wrong places, even when hundreds of cadets at the Naval Training Station at the University of Washington were reported to be suffering from a mild flu. For some reason, they saw the university as set apart. Their demesne was the city; McBride continued to pronounce Seattle influenza-free. Then, on October 4, one cadet was reported dead, hundreds more ill, and four hundred hospitalized. Precious time had been wasted. That night, two influenza cases were reported in the city — each resulting in death.
The next morning, McBride met with the mayor, Ole Hanson, a real estate broker; together they announced to the public that the influenza had found its way to Seattle. McBride ordered all private and public dances prohibited, declared that streetcars and theaters had to be well ventilated, and ordered police to strictly enforce the anti-spitting ordinance. He appealed to the public to practice a voluntary quarantine. Over the next days, however, closings were ordered — first church services, then places of entertainment, then the public schools.
The suddenness of the closures took the public by surprise and sparked some resistance. The superintendent of schools, Frank Cooper, believed them to be unwise: “I consider it more dangerous to have children running around the streets loose than to have them in school where they will be under strict medical supervision.” Crowds of people continued to congregate in the city’s theater district, large numbers of sailors mixing with them, despite police efforts to keep amusements closed. The police organized an “Influenza Squad” to enforce the orders, but results were mixed. Those who could began leaving the city, some to mountain retreats, others further afield. The writer Mary McCarthy’s parents evacuated to Chicago, where they each were stricken, dying before the year’s end, leaving their children orphans. McCarthy was returned to Seattle and put in the care of an aging aunt.
Seattle’s officials singled out the shipyards for attention, though more in keeping with wartime patriotism than with concern for the health of the workers. The yards, after all, far from healthy places, were well known as rough-and-tumble work sites where “men came out covered in soot and red paint, exhausted from wielding thundering riveting guns. Every day or so some unlucky shipyard worker would be carried out in the dead wagon.” Influenza added to this toll. Still, McBride wanted to keep these workers on the job. He believed he could, especially as many of these workers toiled outside, where they were thought to be less susceptible to the disease than other factory workers.
Nevertheless, he sought to inoculate the entire workforce with one of the sera that had been developed. “Let no question of money or men interfere with your work.” When requests came from others, he responded, “Seattle needs all the serum we can grow, and we will share with nobody until our shipyard workers and other citizens have been properly inoculated.” Workers were skeptical; war, the virus, and the brutality of work had produced widespread fatalism, a realism in the face of calamity in all quarters. The numbers of the sick and the dead rose, and by mid-October, four thousand cases had been reported; no evidence ever appeared to suggest the sera had been of use.
Hanson and McBride were stubbornly confident that isolation and closures would work. Hanson maintained to the end that the influenza was really just a form of the flu, a “grippe.” He believed that it would last no more than a week. They were wrong. In no large American city was the influenza contained quickly.
Within days, the flu reached all sections of Seattle, though “south of Yesler” and the Rainier Valley, home to Seattle’s slums and the cheap housing of the workers, suffered most. Frustrated, the authorities blamed a noncompliant public for the influenza’s persistence. They continued to work to see that the closure orders were widened and enforced. On October 28, McBride issued new orders, including mandatory wearing of flu masks. These were worn reluctantly; they came to be the symbols of Seattle besieged. Streetcar conductors were ordered to bar people not donning a face covering. Hanson told commuters that they had better find a mask and wear it, “or tomorrow morning they will walk to work.” In late October, however, the numbers of new cases of infection leveled off and then began to fall.
Strike Town
Seattle’s shipyard workers believed they had sacrificed unreasonably for the sake of the war. Their hours had been long, their work grueling. Hulet Wells, the onetime socialist president of the Seattle Central Labor Council (CLC), also president of the state’s Socialist Party, while awaiting sentencing for opposing conscription, found work at Skinner & Eddy, the largest of the yards. There he encountered a; “howling bedlam . . . a wilderness of strange machines, whirling belts and belching fires . . . The human ant heap boiled with all the specialists that fit into the modern shipyard. Everywhere there was deafening noise, boilers rang, planers screamed, long white-hot rods were smashed into bolt machines. Here was the angle-bending floor where black men beat a tattoo with heavy sledges, and here a steam hammer thumped its measured blows . . . [as well as] the wrenching scenes of the injured, the sirens of the ambulances, and the dying or dead being carted off into the chaos of the waterfront roadways.”
In 1917 and 1918, the city’s unions increasingly felt pressure from the federal government and its shipping board. The shipyard workers had worked with standards set nationally by labor boards in Washington, DC, even when believing themselves punished by these standards. It was indisputable that prices were higher on the West Coast — above all in Seattle — than in the East. The unions were especially intent on raising the wages of the unskilled and semiskilled, an immediate necessity in breaking down divisions in the shops. However, wage demands were repeatedly rejected. Seattle’s workers, inheritors of a decade of intense conflict, by the war’s end, believed themselves betrayed by the government. They had been lied to, they believed, by the president, the shipping board, and the city’s health officials. They were bitter, angry, and itching for a fight. They voted to strike in December. The January strike was inevitable.
The men walked out on the morning of January 21, 1919. There were women scattered through their ranks, as well as black workers, though they were few and their union status unclear. Virtually all the AFL’s international unions in these trades barred women and blacks. A. E. Miller, the chairman of the MTC, announced the strike “absolutely clean,” meaning that thirty-five thousand workers struck en masse, and none came to take their places. They showed “splendid solidarity and great enthusiasm,” undaunted by the winter rain. Tacoma and Aberdeen quickly followed. Speaking on behalf of the workers, John McKelvey defied the owners. The “shipyard millionaires have been getting all the credit for the ships we have built. Oh yes, they’re ship builders. If they think they can build ships let ’em go ahead and build them!”
The Union Record brought news of the strikers’ plight to its fifty thousand subscribers, supporting the strike without qualification. Next to its front-page lead on January 2, “45,000 Men Out in Sound Cities,” it ran an article titled, “Tremendous Profits Made by Seattle Shipbuilding Firms,” revealing the businesses’ costs, sales, and profits. The day’s editorial, “A Great Strike,” explained: “The whole question of wages is bound up in the tremendous increase in the cost of living in Seattle.”
The strike, however, was not just a symptom — real enough in itself — but an indication as well of deeper frustrations and dissatisfactions. The strike wave of the war years — “an epidemic of strikes” — was both national and international, inspired in part by syndicalism. Seattle was both a strike center and a radical center, a stronghold of working-class socialism; its unions’ commitment to workers’ control ran deep, and support for the Russian Revolution was widespread. Kate Sadler, the workers’ “Joan of Arc,” had led Seattle’s delegation to the Mooney conference. Crystal Eastman in the Liberator reported that Sadler led her city’s “wild ones,” who insisted on a general strike no later than May Day to free the framed San Francisco union man. “Russia Did It!” would be the lead of a leaflet penned by the young Harvey O’Connor (illustrated with a brawny worker and a fat capitalist in a coffin — twenty thousand were distributed).
At the same time, Seattle was filling up with unemployed, homeless, demobilized young men, and it was still not entirely free from the flu. In response, the MTC packed the Hippodrome with thousands to announce the formation of a “Soldiers, Sailors and Workers Council.” The meeting went forward despite the authorities, who surrounded the hall with military police. Thousands gathered in Tacoma as well, with Camp Lewis soldiers, no longer under quarantine, in attendance.
It was increasingly clear that unions did not know with whom they were to negotiate: the national board or the local employers. In either case, the employers refused to budge, as did the eastern board members, the shippers, and their allies in the national AFL unions. The MTC thus turned to Seattle’s Central Labor Council (CLC), the federation of 110 local unions — the organization that, in defiance of the AFL, was built from the bottom up, that championed industrial unions, supported sympathy strikes, cooperated with the IWW, and was led by socialists — with a request for the strike.
“The idea of a general strike swept the ranks of organized labor like a gale,” wrote O’Connor. On January 22, in an assembly of the CLC, in the Labor Temple, the metal workers made their case, requesting that Seattle’s workers join them in a general strike. The aim would be not only to win their demands but also to present a show of force in the face of the employers’ renewed open-shop campaign. They believed that the fate of the organized labor movement itself was at stake. Representatives of the city’s local trade unions and rank-and-file militants packed the Labor Temple. According to O’Connor, “Every reference to the general strike was cheered to the echo; the cautions of the conservatives . . . were hooted down” or interrupted by shouting, clapping, and singing.
The CLC proposed a referendum on the strike, which passed unanimously. The enthusiasm that evening brought with it high rhetoric, emotion, even tears. Then came a cornucopia of demands; appetites grew, delegates revealing their own grievances and aspirations, hopeful that these, too, might be addressed. The metal workers, however, insisted that the strike’s demands be limited to those of the shipyard workers already out — what they wanted was a “clean-cut demonstration of the economic power of organized labor.”
The meeting ended in an uproar when delegate Fred Nelson unfurled a banner showing a soldier and a sailor in uniform with a worker in overalls and the slogan “Together We Will Win.” This was followed by “a storm of applause which lasted several minutes,” abating only when delegate Ben King of the Painters, just returned from the Mooney Congress in Chicago, recounted “sleeping between soldiers and sailors and they are all with us.” The applause “broke out afresh.”
America’s First General Strike
On February 6, 1919, Seattle’s workers — all of them — struck. In doing so, they literally took control of the city. They brought the city to a halt — a strange silence settled on the normally bustling streets, and on the waterfront, where “nothing moved but the tide.” The CLC’s Union Record reported sixty-five thousand union members on strike. It was a general strike, the first of its kind in the United States. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand working people participated — the strikers were joined by workers not in unions, unemployed workers, and family members. The city’s authorities were rendered powerless — there was indeed no power that could challenge the workers. There were soldiers in the city and many more at nearby Camp Lewis, not to mention thousands of newly enlisted armed deputies, but to unleash these on a peaceful city? The regular police were reduced to onlookers; the generals hesitated.
Rank-and-file workers, union by union, elected the strike leadership, a strike committee. The strike committee elected an executive committee. Meeting virtually nonstop, they ensured the health, welfare, and safety of the city. Garbage was collected, the hospitals were supplied, babies got milk, and the people were fed, including some thirty thousand a day at the strikers’ kitchens.
The streets were safe, rarely safer, patrolled by an unarmed labor guard of workers. It was reported that crime abated. Nevertheless, the rich, those who could not or would not escape to Portland or California, armed themselves. The Seattle Star asked, “Under which flag?” — the red, white, and blue, or the red. The mayor, Hanson, claimed the latter and warned that a revolution was underway. The AFL piled on, denouncing the strikers and sending emissaries by the hundreds. The general strike was not a revolution. It was a coordinated action in support of the city’s shipyard workers. Still, there had never been anything quite like it. The strikers left their jobs amid the great strike wave of the First World War years and an international crisis that was, in fact, revolutionary in some places — a crisis evolving in the shadow of revolution in Russia.
It was no wonder, then, that revolution was in the air — terrifying some, inspiring others. Then, too, no one knew for certain just how far this strike might go. The strike was simple and straightforward for many, a powerful statement of solidarity and nothing more. But others did indeed want more: all-out victory for the shipyard workers, for example. Some wanted much more, but surely no one could know, not on that cold February morning, not with any certainty, just what lay ahead. Hence the Union Record’s February 6 editorial, written by Anna Louise Strong: “ON THURSDAY AT 10 A.M. There will be many cheering and there will be some who fear. Both of these emotions are useful, but not too much of either. We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead — NO ONE KNOWS WHERE! We do not need hysteria. We need the iron march of labor.”
Seattle’s streets were quiet, and some thought this a problem. “Seattle Strikers Too Polite,” led the Appeal to Reason, the Midwestern Socialist newspaper. But this missed the point. The strikers feared provocation and had good reason to — it had been used time and again in the war against the Wobblies. Where the workers gathered, however, in the “feeding stations,” the union halls, the co-op markets, or the neighborhoods where workers and their families lived, it was another story.
The “feeding stations” were showcases of self-organization. They may have been authorized by the strike committees; on the ground, they depended on the creativity of ordinary people. Thousands of volunteers took on the strike’s tasks, including running the kitchens, organizing milk distribution, and policing the city. The process of handing out milk was elaborate. “The dairies supplied by the milk dealers were only eleven in number, [and] so located that it would have been impossible for the mothers of Seattle to secure milk unless they owned automobiles.” The milk wagon drivers therefore “chose 35 locations spaced throughout the city, secured the use of space in stores, and proceeded to set up neighborhood milk stations.” Strong asked if the kitchens ever gave away meals. “Lots of them,” was the response. “We don’t refuse anyone, union or non-union if they can’t pay.” The strike may well have been the only occasion, before or since, when no one in Seattle went hungry.
On Saturday night, the strikers held a dance, and as late as Monday, they organized massive strike rallies. In the Georgetown neighborhood, the crowd was so large that the building sank somewhat and had to be evacuated. The meeting reconvened, and with “great enthusiasm . . . it was decided to make the meetings a regular weekly event . . . it was unanimous that the strike should continue until a living wage had been obtained by the shipyard workers. . . . Many of those present expressed the opinion that the scope of the meetings should be enlarged to include the wives and daughters of the workers, and to make them real community gatherings for the discussion of questions in which all are concerned.”
In all these places, the strike was the topic. It was analyzed, criticized, extolled, and debated, and when the workers’ representatives packed the rowdy, emotion-filled strike committee meetings, they came prepared; they were making history, and they knew it. The general strike served notice that Seattle’s workers had become a class “for themselves” — class conscious and “there at the creation,” as the late historian E. P. Thompson put it. “Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never just the same way,” he wrote in The Making of the English Working Class.
Stopping Short
Alas, “The exhilaration from the marvelous display of solidarity experienced Thursday and Friday began to give way to apprehension,” wrote O’Connor. By the third day of the strike, they realized that the Seattle labor movement stood alone. The strike had not spread down the coast to California, nor was there support from across the nation. There was little, O’Connor observed, “to give aid and comfort, even verbally, to the labor movements of Seattle and Tacoma. Seattle, unfortunately, was all too unique in its militancy.” And, against them, the response of the authorities was unrelenting, especially the fearmongers. They frantically forecast a terrible future at hand: Bolshevism, anarchy.
Hanson, egged on by the papers, denounced the strike as “un-American” and refused to negotiate. The Post-Intelligencer observed: “The big fact that stands out from the temporary confusion of business is that Seattle, given a brief time for readjustment, would be well off, if not better than before, if the whole of its striking population [were] suddenly withdrawn from the city.” Hanson threatened martial law if the strike were not ended by 10 a.m. on Saturday. The “interests” in New York and Washington, DC, joined the chorus. The AFL denounced the strike, with the Teamsters Joint Council ordering the strikers back to work. There were telephone calls and telegrams, and a deluge of intimidation, threats, and vilification from the international offices.
The AFL censored the Central Labor Council and would later take credit for defeating its “strike.” Then the international officers arrived in person, threatening to rescind charters, seize union properties, and fire staff. Meanwhile, the shipyards in the East and California carried on as usual. The risk of the owners permanently shutting down the Seattle yards now seemed only too real — deliberative, political deindustrialization.
On Saturday, February 8, several unions returned, though this was by no means a stampede. The Executive Committee voted eleven to two to end the strike. They chose Jimmy Duncan, president of the CLC, not a delegate, to speak to the strike committee for them. He tried to convince those in attendance that continuing the walkout was futile. He failed. The strike committee, infuriated by Hanson’s threats and still committed to victory, overwhelmingly voted to continue the strike, as did the longshoremen and the Metal Trades unions. The divide increasingly became one between the rank and file, on the one hand, and the executive committee, on the other.
Then on Monday, with more unions yielding, Duncan returned to the strike committee. He recommended ending the strike on Tuesday at noon. He requested that those unions that had returned to their jobs come back out so that the strikers could return united; as they had left on Thursday, they would return on Tuesday. The shipyard strikers remained out one month longer.
A Class in Conflict
How is this strike to be assessed? Harvey O’Connor wrote, “For the majority of Seattle unions, there was no sense of defeat as the strike ended. They had demonstrated their solidarity with their brothers in the yards, and the memory of the great days when labor had shown its strength glowed in their minds.”
This sentiment was widely shared among Seattle’s workers. The CLC’s minutes are laden with messages of congratulations: the Metal Trades Council in Aberdeen commended Seattle’s workers “for the excellent conduct of the successful general strike [and urged] one big union and a 24-hour strike on May 1st to demonstrate our solidarity.” From the Astoria Central Labor Council came a communiqué “complimenting Organized Labor for the excellent conduct of the successful general strike.” Mine Workers Locals No. 2917, 1044, 1890, and 4309 sent resolutions “condemning the attitude of the ‘Star’ upon the strike and expressing willingness to lay down tools if conditions warrant.” The King County Pomona Grange pledged support by furnishing produce and finances to the strikers, while cash and expressions of solidarity came from local businesses.
Others concurred. The Socialists’ New York Call wrote:
Whatever may be said of the Seattle strike, it certainly is not a case of ‘blind striking,’ as the Journal of Commerce affirms. It has been calculated and prepared and is one of the finest examples of sacrifice and solidarity that workingmen have displayed in many years. It is a sympathetic strike participated in by workers who have no grievance of their own, at least none that they are raising at this time. They have walked out in support of another group of workers, with the view of aiding the latter to secure a speedy victory.
Max Eastman, editor of the Liberator, had visited Seattle that winter. What he may have contributed to the cause there, if anything, is not recorded. He did, however, record his evaluation: “The General Strike in this city of Seattle filled with hope and happiness the hearts of millions of people in all places of the earth. . . . You demonstrated the possibility of that loyal solidarity of the working class which is the sole remaining hope of liberty for mankind.”
The academic version of this story, which remains widely accepted, comes via the work of Robert L. Friedheim. “The first major general strike in the United States ended quietly at noon on February 11, 1919,” he wrote, adding without evidence, “Somewhat sheepishly, Seattle’s workers returned to their jobs in shops, factories, mills, hotels, warehouses and trolley barns. The strike had been a failure, and they all knew it. In the days ahead, they were to learn that it was worse than a failure — it was a disaster.” The CLC’s own strike committee, however, and to its great credit, commissioned a committee to produce a history of the strike. Anna Louise Strong at once penned her own findings:
The vast majority [of workers] struck to express their solidarity . . . and they succeeded beyond their expectations. They saw the labor movement come out almost as one man and tie up the industries of the city. They saw the Japanese and the IWW and many individual workers join in the strike, and they responded with a glow of appreciation. They saw garbage wagons and laundry wagons going along the streets marked “exempt by strike committee.” They saw the attention of the whole continent turned on the Seattle shipyards. They learned a great deal more than they expected to learn — more than anyone in Seattle knew before. They learned how a city is taken apart and put together again. They learned what it meant to supply milk to the babies of the city, to feed 30,000 people with a brand-new organization. They came close for the first time in their lives to the problems of management.
In the course of the strike’s five days, there had been no lockouts or significant dismissals. There had been no strikebreakers, no “replacement” workers needing protection. No mass arrests, thus no search for lawyers, no defense funds to build. There had been no violence — hence no funerals, no wakes, no widows with children to support. The leaders of the strike committee and the Central Labor Council worked to get the strike’s handful of victims — casualties were few — back to work. They remained quite capable of achieving this.
The fact was that the employers dared not test the workers, not in the short run. Seattle remained a union city. There was, of course, a sense of things getting back to normal, the exception being the waterfront, where the roller-coaster conflict continued. The shippers imposed the open shop, only to have this reversed in August. Now, at last, the ILA achieved job control and a single, alphabetical list. Seattle’s workers remained “strike prone,” among the most combative in the nation right into 1920–21. Wages remained relatively high in the city, as did the cost of living, leveling off but remaining above national averages through 1921.
Seattle’s workers had formed themselves as a class in conflict — in struggles that took place in the forests, on the waterfront, in cafés, and in laundries. They forged their class identity in the long, hard fight for industrial unions and the closed shop, and in the fight for workers’ power. At an early moment, the utopians of the Cooperative Commonwealth had taught socialism and attempted to practice what they preached. Later, the IWW and the Socialist Party fought for it, with the CLC, one step at a time, intent on implementing it.
The 1910s had been a decade of organizing, cooperating, and striking, the most basic weapons of working people in battles that were sometimes won and sometimes lost. Consciousness arose in the utopian colonies, in logging camps and mills, in free speech fights, and on the waterfront, in war and in dissent, in strikes of the “telephone girls,” waitresses, hotel maids, “lady barbers,” and laundry workers, in co-ops and in working-class neighborhoods.
Seattle’s workers transformed a world of war, of sickness, death, and grief, into a great celebration of the living, if only for five days. The general strike was, for Seattle’s workers, a giant step toward a future that might be theirs. This aspiration was surely valid in terms of their own experience. They insisted that their vision was by no means the “pie in the sky” of the preachers and the politicians. A better world was possible. It still is.”
Cal Winslow places the General Strike in the context of the birth of America’s labor movement in Seattle in his article in Jacobin entitled
Seattle, “the Soviet of Washington”; “Decades before Amazon dominated the city, Seattle was the fiery site of labor unrest, radical action — and the US’s only true general strike.
Seattle gleams under the grey skies that characterize its climate. Container ships from China wait in Elliott Bay to unload, while tour boats head out to Alaska’s shrinking glaciers. The Great Wheel towers over Pier 57, and there are tourists everywhere. Two gigantic sports arenas dominate the southern end of the waterfront, where in times past seamen brawled and the longshoremen struck the great ships — losing in 1916, winning at last in 1934. The football stadium is the prize of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who obtained the public funding for its construction. The best seats in the house sell for more than $1,000 and the approaches are lined with upscale bistros and bars. Just south of Lake Union, Allen’s Vulcan real estate company is building a head-office complex for another tech firm, Amazon, complete with interlinked spherical glasshouses enclosing a miniature rainforest. Facebook and Google are also moving in. Powered by these new developments, the Emerald City has the fastest growing population of any major urban area in the US. The world’s two richest men, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, both reside here.
Seattle flourishes, then — it is an important place. But can we ask: what sort of place? A stage set, perhaps, for the new Gilded Age, in which corporate wealth and “vibrant” street life can distract the eye from all manner of social contradictions. Seattleites don’t mind the rain; in fact, they love the outdoors. However, public space is at a premium and access to its beaches severely restricted. Tech workers take great pride in Seattle’s high rating for “livability,” yet the cost of housing is rising even quicker than in the Bay Area and the traffic is often unbearable. Hundreds sleep on the street each night. Tent cities appear, reminiscent of the 1930s “Hooverville” shanty town erected in the mud flats south of the business district, and just as unwelcome to the authorities. Meanwhile elsewhere in the city, second homes abound.
Still, there are ghosts dwelling here: old memories — dimly held, to be sure. Here is Yesler Way, once better known as Skid Road because of the logs rolled downhill along its course to Henry Yesler’s sawmill on the shore. Nowadays a nondescript thoroughfare dotted with cafes frequented by tourists, including a branch of the city’s ubiquitous Starbucks chain, it used to heave with disreputable saloons, brothels, and flophouses, making Skid Road synonymous with any district where the down-and-out may gather: places that are rough, sometimes radical. The Industrial Workers of the World put down roots in this quarter among loggers, itinerant farm workers, and miners bound for the Yukon, as well as the shipyard workers who led the Seattle General Strike of February 6–10, 1919, the only true general strike in US history and the one occasion when American workers have actually taken over the running of a city — the sort of endeavor which earned this state, now given over to the billionaires of the new economy, the appellation “the Soviet of Washington.”
Pacific Hub
Seattle is situated on a vertical strip of land between Puget Sound — an “inland sea” off the northern Pacific — and the freshwater Lake Washington. Nonindigenous settlement began with the arrival of a couple of dozen migrants from Illinois in 1851, a few years after the Oregon Treaty fixed the border between the United States and British America at the 49th parallel. The incomers named the township after Chief Sealth of the area’s Duwamish and Suquamish tribes. Upon incorporation by the Washington Territorial legislature in 1869, the city had just two thousand inhabitants. This figure would swell to eighty thousand by the turn of the century. As places of note, Seattle and Tacoma, thirty miles to the south, were the warring creations of competing northern railroads. Two days closer than California to Vladivostok and Asian markets, Seattle became the main distribution hub for the northern Pacific Rim, usurping San Francisco’s former hegemony over the entire Pacific Slope. In addition to its command of Washington State’s forests and the great wheat belt of the Palouse steppe, Seattle also dominated the trade and fisheries of Alaska, whose economy was boosted by an influx of prospectors during the Klondike gold rush. Jobs in distributive and wholesale trades, as well as shipbuilding, attracted migrants fleeing slums, unemployment, and poverty in the East — blacklisted railroad workers, redundant miners, famished wheat farmers. When the mayor of Butte, the class battleground in Montana, visited Seattle in 1919 he recognized large numbers of ex-copper miners working in its shipyards. If Minnesota and neighbouring farm states appealed to the more prosperous Scandinavian immigrants, Swedes above all, western Washington with its extractive industries drew in the much poorer Norwegians and Finns, though core activists in the General Strike came from the British Isles.
The timber economy of Western Washington was dominated by the Weyerhaeuser Lumber Trust, which mounted a full-scale assault on the vast stands of ancient cedar, western hemlock, and Douglas fir forest. Timber from Washington State would buttress the copper mines of the West, underpin its railroad lines, and build its rapidly expanding cities, above all in California. The loggers toiled for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and slept in company shacks. Conditions in the mills were neither easier nor safer: giant saws, deadly belts, horrific noise, dust, smoke and fire. When the heavy winter rains came, the lumberjacks wrapped up their bindlestiffs and fled to Skid Road. There they would remain, sinking into debt, until job sharks and lumbermen herded them back to the woods. They were despised by Seattle’s bourgeoisie as “timber beasts.”
The well-to-do lived away from Skid Road on the leafy boulevards of First and Capitol hills, along Magnolia Bluff and overlooking the lake in Madrona and Washington Park. They boasted a flourishing cultural life, including a fine university built in the French Renaissance style in Union Bay. The politicians and their newspapers might feud — what to do with the infamous Skid Road? — but Seattle was staunchly progressive: women’s suffrage, co-operatives, municipal ownership, growth. As it expanded from a low-lying base around Pioneer Square, the tops of surrounding hills were lopped off — “regraded” — for the benefit of developers. The neighboring town of Ballard was annexed in 1907 and the harbor municipalized four years later, a blow for the big railway and shipping interests struck on behalf of small manufacturers, minor shipping lines, and farmers anxious to force down rates. The new Port of Seattle developed some of the best waterfront facilities in the country, including the sort of moving gantry crane still used in container terminals today. The construction of a ship canal connecting Puget Sound with Lake Washington also commenced in these years.
In the 1890s, utopian land-settlement schemes in Seattle’s vicinity drew in idealists and free-thinkers. Harry Ault, Union Record editor, spent his teenage years in Equality Colony, Skagit County, in a family of disenchanted Populists. He recalled his mother feeding workers in Coxey’s Army of the unemployed as it passed through Cincinnati in 1894. In the 1910s, Seattle’s established working-class communities — Ballard, “South of Yesler,” and into Rainier Valley — were blighted by poor housing, threadbare amenities, and lack of access to the Sound, the green forests, or the great mountain ranges beyond — all that the city cherished, and still does. This rarely registered as a problem, however, among municipal reformers.
Manual labor was dangerous as well as poorly rewarded: wrote one labor activist at the time, “Every day or so some unlucky shipyard workers would be carried out in the dead wagon.” When the US Commission on Industrial Relations held hearings in the city in 1914, Wisconsin’s great labor specialist, John Commons, noted a “more bitter feeling between employers and employees than in any other city in the United States.” Seattle’s workers fought back against their oppressors as a class — and as a class, created a culture of their own: unions that were “clean,” not run by gangsters; a mass-circulation labor-owned newspaper, the Union Record — it became a daily in 1918, the only one of its kind; its circulation topped one hundred thousand in the aftermath of the strike. Socialist schools ran lectures indoors and out; IWW singing groups; community dances, and picnics. Milwaukee may have had its socialist congressman, Victor Berger; Los Angeles almost had a socialist mayor, Job Harriman; but Seattle’s socialists were working class and “Red.” Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs judged Washington State the “most advanced” and long suspected that it might be the first to achieve socialism. Electoral success proved elusive, but Washington claimed several thousand paid-up adherents, ranking second only to Oklahoma in the proportion of party members per head of population. The Left took control of the party in Seattle in 1912 after a protracted factional struggle. Proponents of industrial unionism, they were thorns in the side of national party officials who supported Samuel Gompers, conservative president of the craft-based American Federation of Labor. Seattle workers overwhelmingly supported the principle of industrial unions — and by implication, workers’ control. “I believe that 95 per cent of us agree that the workers should control industry,” wrote Ault. Still, most unions retained their affiliation to the AFL. Progressives were critical of craft divisions but thought the IWW impractical and wanted to remain in the “mainstream.” They looked to James Duncan, chair of the Seattle Central Labor Council, for leadership. A metal worker born in Fife, Scotland, clearly influenced by syndicalism, his compromise formula came to be known as “Duncanism.” The city’s labor movement was centralized around the SCLC, which coordinated rather than supplanted the craft unions to ensure that all contracts for crafts within a particular industry ran concurrently, allowing for bargaining as a unit. Though a consistent critic of the IWW which challenged the AFL from the left, Duncan nevertheless acknowledged it as “a pacesetter.” In this environment, social democracy and revolutionary unionism could intermingle. Seattle was an IWW no less than a Socialist Party stronghold, home to its western newspaper, the Industrial Worker, and scene of free-speech fights ending in mass arrests, beatings, and victories. “Two card” workers were commonplace: an AFL card for the job, an IWW card for the principle.
Class solidarity wasn’t all-embracing, however. As late as September 1917, the Daily Call reported that one of the issues in a meatpackers’ strike was the workers’ demand for a white cook. Alice Lord, talented organizer of the city’s women workers, above all its waitresses, was a committed exclusionist. The relatively few black workers in Seattle at this point, just 1 percent of the population, took what work they could, including as strikebreakers in the longshoremen’s strike of 1916. There were, however, signs of a shift in attitudes among the white majority. Seattle’s most popular street speaker, the socialist’s firebrand Kate Sadler, talked at black churches and was a scathing critic of exclusion and shop-floor segregation. The Union Record likewise insisted on the need “to break down racial barriers in the West.” Ault told a congressional hearing on Japanese immigration that he had “little patience with racial prejudice,” recalling his early childhood in segregated Kentucky.
Voyage of the Verona
The opening of the Panama Canal in August 1914 lifted West Coast trade, offsetting the recession which had hung over the States since the previous year. Seeking a share of the shipping companies’ profits, longshoremen struck on June 1, 1916 for a closed shop, higher wages, and a nine-hour day. Workers in San Francisco quickly settled, but Seattle and Tacoma stayed out. When Andrew Furuseth, head of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, defended the San Francisco leadership at an SCLC meeting in September, he was chased from the hall with shouts of “coward” and “quitter.” The strike shook Seattle. The Washington National Guard deployed along its harbor, which “resembled a battleground. Non-union men went uptown looking for fights. Union longshoremen beat up scabs on docks and ship. There were fist fights, knife fights, docks bombed, pier fires, shots fired and murders.” By the strike’s end on October 4 — Tacoma and a number of smaller locals held out longer — there were 850 scabs working the docks and the longshoremen had lost control of the waterfront. They returned to work under the open shop plus the “fink hall” which screened out the International Longshoremen’s Association and IWW.
The shingle weavers of Everett, the “City of Smokestacks” thirty miles to Seattle’s north, were engaged in their own desperate strike — victims of nothing short of a reign of terror. “At every stage the Everett police and the private lumber guards took the initiative in beating and shooting workers for speaking on their streets,” recalled Anna Louise Strong, who reported on the unrest for the New York Evening Post. On November 5, 1916, three hundred Wobblies embarked on the steamships Verona and Calista bound for the mill town. No one aboard expected a warm welcome from the authorities, but murder was not foreseen. On its arrival, the Verona was met with gunfire from lawmen and vigilantes. At least five workers were killed, all of them unarmed, and dozens injured. Two “citizen deputies” were also slain, although the fatal shots were fired from the shore, seventy-four people aboard the Verona were charged with murder. The Everett massacre was in some ways a Pacific Northwest Peterloo: an assault on free speech, fair play, and the very notion of “rights.” Disbelief, then anger, coursed through Seattle’s working-class districts. The IWW turned Everett into a cause célèbre, stumping the West on behalf of the accused. “These seventy-four men represent the migratory worker, the element that while necessary is ferociously exploited in this Western country,” declared IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at a dozen rallies. “They want the good things in life as much as any other member of the human race and they are organizing in the IWW to get them.” There was a sea change in popular opinion, a massive swing to the left. The SCLC persuaded Seattle lawyer George Vanderveer, “Attorney for the Damned,” to assist the Verona defendants. He secured their acquittal the following spring. The Daily Call reported that IWW membership had risen to twenty thousand and that the Wobblies now employed a dozen paid organizers — exaggerated figures, perhaps, but after the serious setback on the docks the IWW had undeniably gained fresh impetus.
The Wobblies took this forward momentum into the woods: a general strike involving some fifty thousand loggers and mill workers. “They breathe bad air in the camps. That ruins their lungs. They eat bad food. That ruins their stomachs. The foul conditions shorten their lives and make their short lives miserable,” lumber organizer James Thompson told the Industrial Commission during hearings in Seattle. The IWW had always idolized the itinerant workers of the West. They set out from Seattle to organize them and succeeded. Their demands were typically straightforward: an eight-hour day, no work on Sundays or public holidays, sanitary kitchens and satisfactory food, single spring beds with clean bedding, no workers under sixteen in the mills, no discrimination against IWW members. In July 2017, the IWW held a mass rally of 3,500 workers at Seattle’s Dreamland Rink. The meeting began with the singing of “Solidarity Forever.” Kate Sadler and IWW organizer J. T. “Red” Doran were the featured speakers.
The police, sheriffs, National Guard, and US Army responded to the strike with savage repression. The jails filled up; prisoners were beaten. Strike leader James Rowan and twenty IWW members were arrested in a single swoop in the city of Spokane. The federal government organized a rival organization, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen. As the strike spluttered, the Wobblies adjusted their tactics: a “strike on the job,” the loggers working their desired eight-hour shifts. The conclusion, in March 1918, was a sensation: the eight-hour day won and a long list of improvements in the camps. It was one of the IWW’s greatest accomplishments and a source of class pride well beyond the ranks of the IWW. Duncan drew the obvious moral: “the terribly effective force which takes the name of IWW … is largely made up of men who consider regular trade unionism ‘too slow.’” It was, he acknowledged, a “threat to the prestige of trade unionism on the Coast.”
Nevertheless, traditional unionism also thrived amid the industrial boom stoked by federal military procurement as Woodrow Wilson took the US into the First World War. “A red-letter year in the history of organized labour,” Duncan celebrated in July 1917. “A dozen new unions have been organized and all of the Seattle unions are flourishing.” He singled out the streetcar men whose membership had risen to 1,600; the telephone operators with nearly 1,100. Industrial action by the laundresses in particular had struck fear into Seattle’s respectable classes. Within a week, all the city’s major laundries had more or less closed down. Hotels and clubs began to run short of clean linen. The bourgeois Seattle Times fretted that the “family washtub would emerge from oblivion in thousands of Seattle homes.” The laundry workers took their case into the neighborhoods: a fair in Fremont, a parade in Rainier Valley. Stung by hostile public opinion, the employers rapidly capitulated. But if such triumphs deepened working-class consciousness, they brought down fierce repression, foretelling worse to come. William Preston, Jr, has revealed that “the lumber operators of the Northwest provided the initial impetus in the evolution of federal policy” — that is, the “Red Scare” and the Palmer raids. The workers’ movement in Seattle was strong, certainly, but not in Gramsci’s sense hegemonic. US entry into the European bloodbath in April 1917 turned dissent into treason. Gloves off, the federal government moved decisively against the IWW, indicting its top leadership. In Chicago, 101 members were tried and convicted of a range of alleged conspiracies. State vigilantism was visited upon Seattle, regarded as a center of both pro-German and pro-Bolshevik sentiment. The Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. despised the city’s workers as “the scum of the earth” who recognized “no law and no authority save the policeman’s night stick or physical violence.” There were police raids, ransacked offices, mass arrests. Emil Herman, state secretary of the Socialist Party was charged with violations of the Espionage Act and imprisoned in the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. Hulet Wells, a former president of the SCLC, was sentenced to two years in federal prisons for passing out “No Conscription” handbills, along with Sam Sadler, one-time president of the longshoremen.
Feting the Shilka
In this extraordinarily tense atmosphere, the revolution came to Seattle on the Friday before Christmas, 1917. The Russian cargo vessel Shilka, red flags flying, steamed into Elliott Bay. Seattle’s socialists, its Wobblies, its dockers, metal workers, waitresses and shingle weavers, scrambled to the docks to greet the newcomers, as did naval officers and city police wary that the ship might contain Bolshevik gold, even perhaps munitions. In fact, the Shilka carried only beans and peas in its hold, and simply needed to refuel. But the arrival of a soviet of Russian sailors was momentous in itself. For the workers, its arrival greatly added to the festive mood. The sailors were fêted. There were testimonials, speeches and spontaneous singing — the “Marseillaise,” also the “Red Flag.” Hundreds of Seattleites jammed into the IWW Hall on Second Avenue where they greeted a young sailor, Danil Teraninoff, on stage with rapturous applause. “Never in Seattle has there been such a demonstration of revolutionary sentiment as at the moment the Russian fellow worker ascended the platform,” reported the socialist Daily Call. The visit of the Shilka sealed the extraordinary romance of Seattle’s working people with the October days, their passionate sympathy and solidarity with the revolution unparalleled in an American context. According to the late Philip Foner, “no labour body was a more consistent defender of the Russian revolution than the Seattle Central Labor Council.” Seattle delegates to AFL national conventions pressed for official recognition of the fledgling workers’ state, to no avail. The longshoremen intercepted railroad cars with loads labeled “sewing machines,” unearthing rifles and ammunition bound for Admiral Kolchak’s White armies on the Siberian front. The IWW resolved that they would “rather starve than receive wages for loading ships on a mission of murder.” The authorities, alarmed when not hysterical, “discovered,” among other things, Bolshevik conspiracies which trade unionists had every practical reason to deny. Until recently historians tended to accept these denials at face value, in so doing diminishing these remarkable events. On the contrary, the Russian Revolution was indeed a factor — a contradictory one, yes: inspiring the Left while terrifying the upper classes — in Seattle’s General Strike.
The political culture of Seattle in these years was shaped not only by its own tumultuous industrial-relations history but also by currents sweeping through working-class movements internationally. The Union Record published letters from Lenin including his “Letter to American Workers”; the Industrial Worker reported on a Labour socialist conference in Leeds where Ramsey MacDonald, flanked by Tom Mann, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Bertrand Russell, “hailed” the Russian Revolution. The new spirit of industrial radicalism spread far beyond its natural home in the IWW. Even where issues with management were “pure and simple,” bitter conflicts ensued. The AFL also felt the heat, its collaboration with employers and strict insistence on the sanctity of contracts, jurisdictional division by craft, and the authority of national officials rejected by growing numbers of workers.
The celebrations of 1917 were the prelude, then, to the great strikes of 1919. Seattle workers saw in the October Revolution their own image, the embodiment of what they were fighting for at home. “No single event,” wrote Duncan, “throughout the whole world today can, from the standpoint of workers everywhere, compare in importance with the successful piloting of the Russian Soviet Republic past the treacherous rocks of international capitalist greed and the determination of these plunderers to ruin what they cannot rule.” When two thousand longshoremen, overflowing their hall, celebrated the second anniversary of the Revolution on November 7, 1919, they rose in “tremendous cheering,” as the IWW’s J. T. Doran walked from the vestibule to the rostrum and began to speak. Doran, free on bail from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, delivered, according to Magden, a rousing speech in which he described the workers’ revolution in Russia as “the most stupendous event since the fall of feudalism.”
Union City
By the end of the First World War, trade union membership in Seattle had quadrupled since 1915 to create, in effect, a closed-shop city. The General Strike would require no pickets, since there were no strikebreakers. Prejudice toward minorities eased, challenging management’s ever-ready divide-and-rule tactic. On the eve of the strike, Japanese unions appealed to the SCLC to join the strike committee and were accepted. “Even in the midst of strike excitement, let us stop for a moment to recognize the action of the Japanese barbers and restaurant workers who, through their own unions, voted to take part in the General Strike,” commented the Union Record. “The Japanese deserve the greater credit because they have been denied admission and affiliation with the rest of the labor movement and have joined the strike of their own initiative. We hope that this evidence of labor’s solidarity will have an influence on the relations between the two races in the future.” Black workers were accepted as full members of Seattle’s unions later the same year. The General Strike began with an appeal from the shipyard workers to the SCLC for support in a pay dispute following a period of wartime wage repression. There were thirty-five thousand shipyard workers in Seattle out of a total population of around three hundred thousand — fifteen thousand more in Tacoma. The industry fused together the two sectors of the local working class, the seasonal lumber and harvest workers and the city’s skilled trades, in a potent combination. Seattle had delivered more vessels to the Navy than any other port, even though its labor movement was strongly anti-war. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand workers, including many unemployed, answered the General Strike Committee’s call. For the best part of a week, they fed the people, patrolled the streets, and celebrated workers’ power as a lived reality, until the combined weight of the forces ranged against them — the police and the special constables drafted in by Seattle’s belligerent mayor, Ole Hanson; the federal troops deployed by Secretary of War Newton Baker; the big newspapers; and the national leaders of the AFL and its affiliates — broke the striking unions’ resolve.
At the outset of the hostilities, Anna Louise Strong wrote that a Seattle walkout wouldn’t in itself greatly trouble the big commercial combines in the East. “But, the closing down of the capitalistically controlled industries of Seattle, while the workers organize to feed the people, to care for the babies and the sick, to preserve order — this will move them, for this looks too much like the taking over of power by the workers.” Stirred by the Everett case, Strong had taken a job as second-in-command at the Union Record. Probably an IWW member, she lived and worked in Socialist circles, also retaining acquaintances from her earlier life — including Russian émigrés, one a friend of Lenin’s. She organized much of the paper’s international coverage, notably a Russia department, and also wrote its editorials; as often as not she was the voice of the General Strike.
Against a remarkable backdrop of communist uprisings in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, red flags on the Clyde, and the hot summer in Turin, the Seattle strike fired the starting pistol for an extraordinary year of working-class rebellion in the States, the like of which has not been seen since: the Boston police strike; industry-wide action in steel, coal mining, and textiles. The subsequent era of working-class retreat began with the shattering of the IWW, the splintering and demise of the Socialist Party, and the employers’ counterrevolution — the American Plan. In Seattle itself, the Emergency Fleet Corporation cancelled orders for new vessels, forcing thousands of shipyard workers into redundancy, while the Waterfront Employers’ Association reintroduced the open shop. But labor radicalism didn’t die after 1919. The General Strike and IWW militancy lived on, if underground; also in the vivid recollections of old Wobblies and in the battles of young socialists in the 1930s. Along with an underlay of Scandinavian progressivism, this legacy laid the foundation for Washington’s Cooperative Commonwealth movement, which brought an alliance of CIO unions and progressive farmers to power in Olympia and elected the communist Hugh DeLacy to Congress. In governing circles, the strike wasn’t forgotten. It was in 1936 that FDR’s postmaster general, David Farley, would ironically raise a glass to “the forty-seven states and the Soviet of Washington,” a phrase later popularized in the writings of Mary McCarthy.”
As I wrote in my post of September 20 2023, Our Best, Last Hope For Democracy and the Survival of Humankind: Unions As A Model Of An Ideal Society and An Instrument Of Nonviolent Seizure Of Power; In what ways will such class struggles between capital and labor define our nation, democracy, and the fate of humankind?
In this moment we test and observe enormous forces of history in the crucible of America, this absurd experiment in which one human being is as good as any other, and of equal value as an inherent quality of our humanity.
What a revolutionary notion; and possibly the origin of all true revolution.
Among the vast systems of dehumanization we must wrestle with to achieve a free society of equals, privatization and theft of the commons has unleashed a death spiral of capitalism wherein all wealth accumulates at the top embodied in a few apex predators and oligarchs in an increasingly narrow hegemonic elite of wealth, power, and privilege, as those whose labor creates that wealth and power become nearer to true slaves under forces of falsification, commodification, and theft of the soul.
This is late stage capitalism, as it reaches the point of civilizational collapse, as we are witnessing now with the hollowing out of the middle class and the emergence of a mass precariat in the shadow of plutocratic extravagance and decadence.
So for the political and social threats we now face; and all of this dovetails horrifically with civilization as war on nature which of late has in fires and floods sent us signs of our impending doom and the existential threat of a dying earth and the extinction of our species.
Yet we have ready examples at hand of different paths we may take, we human beings, and of how we may choose to be human together.
Here I am thinking of the courageous and glorious history of organized labor and of the 1919 Seattle General Strike which shaped labor unions in America, which seeks to change the relationships between capitalist and labor classes.
On this day we remember the anniversary of the destruction of Guernica in 1937 by the Nazis, vividly commemorated by Picasso as a witness of history, and situated within the special context of the Spanish Resistance, and of the Humanist values of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man which the atrocity violated, but also a universal testament, lament, and cry of defiance against the horror of war.
The horrors of the Nazi annihilation of the civilization of Europe is being recapitulated today in the destruction of Ukraine by Russia and of Palestine by Israel, with Mariupol and Gaza echoes and reflections of Guernica, as it will whenever we forget the lessons of our history and are doomed to repeat it.
When I founded the Abraham Lincoln Brigades of Ukraine and Palestine with my fellow American volunteers in liberation struggle, it was not only to recall the glorious International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War as our true forebears, but also in recognition that both Putin’s Russia and Netanyahu’s Israel have modeled their obscene and criminal wars of imperial conquest and dominion on Guernica and the idea of Total War as developed in the Spanish Civil War by the fascist regimes of Hitler and Franco; and that we must reply to them as Resistance and by any means necessary.
All Resistance is war to the knife.
Evil never sleeps, nor must our vigilance in guardianship of each other.
War is an evil born of many things, including fear and the dehumanization of others, and of the pathology of disconnectedness and failure of empathy. It is also an instrument of government and authority which exists because it is enormously profitable for those in power.
The family fortune of the Bush dynasty was made by the first President Bush’s grandfather, who personally handed Adolf Hitler the cash to finance the Beer Hall Putsch. Why? He was the exclusive New York banker for Thyssen-Krupp, the arms manufacturer of Germany, and there was profit to be made as a Nazi agent. The American invasion of Iraq as an instrumentalization of the 911 terror attack in imperial conquest and dominion and the centralization of power to a carceral state with the counterinsurgency model of policing becomes horrifically clear in its design when considered as a seizure of power by multigenerational Nazi ideologists of the Fourth Reich.
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us to beware of the military-industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address, he diagnosed the cause of our enslavement by wealth and power, and a primary subversive threat to democracy.
To the horror of war, as to fascism, there can be but one reply; Never Again.
In the words of Cal Winslow writing in Jacobin; “Guernica represented the first instance of a new kind of war. The Blitz followed it, then Dresden and the firebombing of Tokyo. Then Hiroshima. The “saturation” bombing of Vietnam — a nation virtually defenseless from the air — left millions dead. Now we have watched Fallujah and Aleppo and Mosul, while today the United States bombs seven countries simultaneously: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya.
And so Guernica remains, alas, timely, timeless, universal. A decade ago, T. J. Clark concluded his magisterial Picasso and Truth with this tribute to Picasso’s “astounding feat”:
Life, says the painting [Guernica], is an ordinary, carnal, entirely unnegotiable value. It is what humans and animals share. There is a time of life, which we inhabit unthinkingly, but also a time of death: the two may be incommensurable, but humans especially — from the evidence of Paleolithic burials it seems a human defining trait — structure their lives, imaginatively, in relation to death. They try to live with death — to keep death present, like the ancestors whose bones they exhume and re-enter.
But certain kinds of death break that human contract. And this is one of them, says Guernica. Life should not end the way it does here. Some kinds of death, to put it another way, have nothing to do with the human as Picasso conceives it — they possess no form as they take place, they come from nowhere, time never touches them, they do not even have the look of doom. They are a special obscenity, and that obscenity, it turns out, has been a central experience for seventy years.”
Trailer for the Film Picasso with Antonio Banderas
26 de abril de 2024 Guernica: el horror de la guerra
En este día recordamos el aniversario de la destrucción de Guernica en 1937 por los nazis, vívidamente conmemorado por Picasso como testigo de la historia, y situado en el contexto especial de la Resistencia española, y de los valores humanistas de la Ilustración y los Derechos. del Hombre que la atrocidad violó, pero también un testamento universal, un lamento y un grito de desafío contra el horror de la guerra.
Los horrores de la aniquilación nazi de la civilización de Europa se recapitulan hoy en la destrucción de Ucrania por Rusia y de Palestina por Israel, con Mariupol y Gaza ecos y reflejos de Guernica, como sucederá siempre que olvidemos las lecciones de nuestra historia y están condenados a repetirlo.
Cuando fundé las Brigadas Abraham Lincoln de Ucrania y Palestina con mis compañeros voluntarios estadounidenses en la lucha por la liberación, no fue sólo para recordar a las gloriosas Brigadas Internacionales de la Guerra Civil Española como nuestros verdaderos antepasados, sino también para reconocer que tanto la Rusia de Putin como la de Netanyahu Israel ha modelado sus guerras obscenas y criminales de conquista y dominio imperial sobre Guernica y la idea de Guerra Total desarrollada en la Guerra Civil Española por los regímenes fascistas de Hitler y Franco; y que debemos responderles como Resistencia y por todos los medios necesarios.
Toda Resistencia es guerra al cuchillo.
El mal nunca duerme, ni tampoco debe hacerlo nuestra vigilancia para protegernos unos a otros.
La guerra es un mal que nace de muchas cosas, incluido el miedo y la deshumanización de los demás, y de la patología de la desconexión y la falta de empatía. También es un instrumento de gobierno y autoridad que existe porque es enormemente rentable para quienes están en el poder.
La fortuna familiar de la dinastía Bush fue hecha por el abuelo del primer presidente Bush, quien personalmente entregó a Adolf Hitler el dinero en efectivo para financiar el golpe de estado de la cervecería. ¿Por qué? Era el banquero exclusivo en Nueva York de Thyssen-Krupp, el fabricante de armas de Alemania, y como agente nazi se podían obtener beneficios. La invasión estadounidense de Irak como una instrumentalización del ataque terrorista del 11 de septiembre en la conquista y el dominio imperial y la centralización del poder en un estado carcelario con el modelo policial contrainsurgente se vuelve terriblemente clara en su diseño cuando se la considera una toma del poder por parte de los ideólogos nazis multigeneracionales. del Cuarto Reich.
Cuando el presidente Dwight D. Eisenhower nos advirtió que tuviéramos cuidado con el complejo militar-industrial en su discurso de despedida de 1961, diagnosticó la causa de nuestra esclavitud por la riqueza y el poder, y una principal amenaza subversiva a la democracia.
Al horror de la guerra, como al fascismo, sólo puede haber una respuesta; Nunca más.
Survival and resistance, the price of liberty and the necessity of solidarity, the fragility of power and the futility of tyrannies of force and control before the unanswerable power of refusal to submit or obey, the redemptive power of love as community and the alliance of autonomous peoples in a free society of equals, and the transformational nature of freedom as the choice to remain unconquered; on this day of the twin anniversaries of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and Italian Liberation Day we celebrate the glorious triumph of our forebears as antifascists and the lessons we can learn from our history.
In the glorious victory for all humankind of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, which we celebrate today in Portugal and throughout her former colonies also liberated by this historic act of solidarity by the citizens of a colonial empire with the peoples of her dominion, we find affirmation of our universal human rights of sovereignty, independence, and self-determination, of our humanity, of the inevitability of liberation under imposed conditions of struggle of force and control, falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and the strategies of division of those who would enslave us.
Here upon the stage of history and the world, unerasable and indelibly written in our flesh as truths we have together dreamed and made real, the people of Portugal have demonstrated for us all the power of solidarity.
What can we learn from the Carnation Revolution as antifascists, revolutionaries, truth tellers, and bearers of the Promethean Fire which is democracy?
The great secret of power is that it is fragile and brittle; force and control fail at the point of disobedience and disbelief.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just Authority.
Who cannot be compelled by force is free. In resistance and refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered.
To resist is to be free, and this is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us. Refusal to submit is the defining human act and seizure of power, and this is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
In this we are all brothers, sisters, and others; all of us a United Humankind with a duty of care for each other beyond all differences.
Time to make an end to the age of empires, to monarchies and to tyrannies of force and control, to hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege, to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and to divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness; let us throw open the gates of our prisons and our borders, and be free.
As written by Fernando Camacho Padilla in The Conversation, in an article entitled The 50th anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution – the peaceful uprising that toppled a dictatorship and ended a decade of colonial war; “Across Portugal, a number of photography exhibitions are currently on display that commemorate the ousting of the Estado Novo, the dictatorial, authoritarian and corporatist political regime that had ruled the country since 1933.
The work of photographer Alfredo Cunha features prominently in many – he authored a book compiling the most emblematic images of this period. Many of those who organised the revolution are still alive today and have been present at events to mark the anniversary.
The roots of the revolution
In April 1974, over a decade of colonial wars had left Portugal’s army fatigued, yet Marcelo Caetano – who succeeded prime minister António de Oliveira Salazar in 1968 – was still unwilling to let go of African territories. This led a section of the country’s army to rise up.
Carlos de Almada Contreiras, a captain in the Portuguese navy, played a prominent role in the revolution. It was he who instructed that the song “Grândola Vila Morena”, an ode to fraternity, be the signal to commence the military operation that morning.
De Almada Contreiras has said that the idea of using a song as a signal to the troops came from the coup staged by Pinochet in 1973, which they had learned about from the Libro Blanco del cambio de gobierno en Chile (White Paper on the Change of Government in Chile). This document had just been published by the Chilean armed forces to justify their actions against Salvador Allende’s democratic government on 11 September 1973.
Interestingly, the reforms implemented in Portugal from the revolution on 25 April 1973 to November of the same year bore many similarities to the Popular Unity movement in Chile (1970-1973), especially its agrarian reforms.
International support
Though the Portuguese revolution caused uproar and turmoil in Spanish society, there has been little reflection on Salazar’s relationship with Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Some researchers have recently published books on Spanish-Portuguese relations before and during the revolution which demonstrate its historical impact and relevance. María José Tiscar, for example, argues that Franco repaid Salazar’s help during the Spanish civil war with political, military and diplomatic support during the Portuguese colonial war (1961-1974), sometimes covertly.
Even less attention has been paid to Cuba’s role in the Carnation Revolution: while the Caribbean nation was not directly involved in the events, it did play an indirect part. From 1965 onward, Cuba provided support in training guerrilla forces from the colonial liberation movements fighting the Estado Novo, first in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, and then in Angola and Mozambique.
In addition, around 600 Cuban internationalists fought alongside the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) in Guinea Bissau against the Portuguese army, and a smaller group in Angola for a short period.
In 1969, Cuban army captain Pedro Rodríguez Peralta was captured by Portuguese paratroopers near the border with Guinea-Conakry, and was transferred to Lisbon shortly after. He remained there until the fall of the Estado Novo, when he was released and allowed to return to Cuba.
Several members of the armed wing of the Portuguese Communist Party, known as the Armed Revolutionary Action (ARA), were also trained in Cuba. The ARA committed several attacks and acts of sabotage in Portugal in the early 1970s.
A year after the final departure of Portuguese troops from Africa in 1976, the Portuguese far-right, with the support of the CIA, bombed the Cuban embassy in Lisbon, claiming the lives of two diplomats. This was done in revenge for Cuban actions against the Estado Novo.
Celebrating peace
In recent weeks, Lisbon has been plastered with countless posters commemorating the 50th anniversary of the revolution. Images abound of young soldiers with carnations in their rifles, and of the joyous faces of those celebrating the fall of the Estado Novo. The city’s streets and boulevards are also adorned with many murals paying tribute to the events of 25 April 1974.
Such celebration is unique in Western Europe. No other country in the region has so recently experienced a revolution that gave way to its current democratic government.
Unlike other countries that had conservative dictatorships after the Second World War, the Portuguese Right shows little nostalgia for the days of António de Oliveira Salazar, or for the Estado Novo. This lack of nostalgia is reflected in actions such as the opening of archives housing the dictatorship’s documents to the public.
The only exception can be found among certain leaders of the extremist far-right party Chega, which recently had its strongest ever electoral performance in March this year.
Democratic revolution
Five decades after the revolution erupted, Portugal has followed a unique path to democracy.
Once the Estado Novo and its apparatus of oppression had been dismantled, power was swiftly handed over to civilians, and military officials ceased to hold political positions.
Portugal also fulfilled its pledge to grant full independence to its colonial territories. There were no attempts to establish a system of neocolonial rule which could have allowed the country to maintain political influence, or to grant Portuguese businesses control over sectors of the economy in former colonies.”
Portugal’s Carnation Revolution not only exorcised the ghosts of fascism and dethroned a brutal regime, but did so explicitly in the context of liberating its colonies. A coup led by soldiers who refused to fight for the profits of the wealthy or to oppress their fellow workers in Portugal’s African colonies was embraced by workers in Portugal itself and became a true democratic revolution.
As explained by Raquel Varela in a Jacobin interview with David Broder; “The country spent thirteen years fighting against the anticolonial revolutions in Guinea, Mozambique, and Angola, with more than one million troops mobilized, over eight thousand dead on the Portuguese side and one hundred thousand dead on the African side.”
“What began on April 25 as a coup d’état led immediately to the complete dismantling of the dictatorship’s political regime, but more than that, it was also the seed of a social revolution.
What happened in Portugal in 1974-5 was the last revolution in Europe to call into question the private ownership of the means of production. According to official data, it resulted in a considerable shift in the balance of class forces — some 18 percent of national income was transferred from capital to labor. It achieved gains like the guarantee of the right to a job, living wages (above the level of subsistence or biological reproduction alone), and equal and universal access to education, health, and social security.
What differentiates Portugal’s revolutionary period from a democratic transition process like Spain’s was not the staging of elections or their results, but rather the overall dynamic visible in this period. The holding of elections was, obviously, a major achievement, after forty-eight years of dictatorship: the first contest saw 95 percent of the people turn out to vote! But what sets a revolution apart from other processes is the way the population get stuck in, and directly take their lives into their own hands.
Paul Valéry used to say that politics is the art of turning the citizens away from their own lives. A revolution is precisely the opposite, a unique moment in history. We enacted one of the twentieth century’s most important revolutions. The right to vote was one of its elements, but its most crucial feature was that for nineteen months, three million people directly took part in workers’, residents’, and soldiers’ councils, which decided what to do on a daily basis. People voted and discussed what to do for hours and hours. All of this made it possible for our revolution to accomplish wonderful things. To take just one example, look at the women organized in the residents’ councils, who together with Carris (Lisbon public transport) drivers rerouted the buses so that social housing districts distant from the city center would finally be served by public transit.
The banks were nationalized and expropriated with no compensation whatsoever. And the right to free time was absolutely pivotal. Take the case of the demonstration by bakers working long hours, whose slogan was “we want to sleep with our wives.” As a slogan, it is very interesting, because nowadays we take it for granted that at eleven at night there are people selling socks in supermarkets or working on Volkswagen assembly lines. People won not just price freezes so that they could have decent meals, but the right to leisure and culture. They also won the right to housing, indeed by occupying vacant houses that were destined for speculation. Even judges sometimes backed them, as in the city of Setúbal. I’ll remind you that today in Portugal there are seven hundred thousand vacant houses, owned by real-estate funds, which do not pay taxes.
As well as four thousand workers’ councils there were 360 companies managed by their own workers. Dryland farming areas tripled, as peasants occupied the land. These occupations are obviously in contrast with what we have today: the stalling of production during the crisis. Amid mass unemployment, people are instead paid to stop producing.
1979 would also see the creation of a National Health Service. However, the unification of a universal health system was introduced on the aftermath of April 25. The first person in charge of that was an absolutely wonderful figure within the Armed Forces Movement, Cruz Oliveira. He took the hospitals out of the charities’ hands and turned them into a single service, and banned the selling of blood — since then, the blood used in hospitals has been donated. All of this happened with the people on the streets, demanding that health access should not be a commodified good, but rather a universal right.”
“Never in Portuguese history have as many people spoken for themselves as they did in those months. Politics ceased to be separated between elites and people, and there was a close connection between manual and intellectual work, between Africa and Europe, between doctors and nurses, men and women, students and teachers.”
“In these two years, human beings were reunited with their humanity. This legacy still lasts today. And it is the only one that can save us from the abyss of the present.”
The 50th anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution – the peaceful uprising that toppled a dictatorship and ended a decade of colonial war
25 de Abril de 2024 50º Aniversário da Revolução dos Cravos em Portugal
A sobrevivência e a resistência, o preço da liberdade e a necessidade de solidariedade, a fragilidade do poder e a futilidade das tiranias de força e controle diante do poder irrespondível da recusa em submeter-se ou obedecer, o poder redentor do amor como comunidade e a aliança de forças autônomas. povos numa sociedade livre de iguais, e a natureza transformacional da liberdade como a escolha de permanecer invicto; neste dia dos dois aniversários da Revolução dos Cravos em Portugal e do Dia da Libertação Italiana, celebramos o glorioso triunfo dos nossos antepassados como antifascistas e as lições que podemos aprender com a nossa história.
Na gloriosa vitória para toda a humanidade da Revolução dos Cravos de Portugal, que hoje celebramos em Portugal e em todas as suas ex-colónias também libertadas por este acto histórico de solidariedade dos cidadãos de um império colonial com os povos do seu domínio, encontramos a afirmação da nossa direitos humanos universais de soberania, independência e autodeterminação, da nossa humanidade, da inevitabilidade da libertação sob condições impostas de luta de força e controle, falsificação, mercantilização e desumanização, e as estratégias de divisão daqueles que nos escravizariam .
Aqui, no palco da história e do mundo, inapagáveis e indelevelmente escritas na nossa carne como verdades que juntos sonhamos e tornamos realidade, o povo de Portugal demonstrou-nos todo o poder da solidariedade.
O que podemos aprender com a Revolução dos Cravos como antifascistas, revolucionários, contadores da verdade e portadores do Fogo Prometeico que é a democracia?
O grande segredo do poder é que ele é frágil e quebradiço; a força e o controle falham no ponto da desobediência e da descrença.
A lei serve o poder, a ordem se apropria e não existe Autoridade justa.
Quem não pode ser compelido pela força é livre. Na resistência e na recusa em nos submeter à autoridade, tornamo-nos Invictos.
Resistir é ser livre, e esta é uma espécie de vitória que não nos pode ser tirada. A recusa em submeter-se é o ato humano definidor e a tomada do poder, e esta é a primeira revolução na qual todos devemos lutar; a luta pela propriedade de nós mesmos.
Nisto somos todos irmãos, irmãs e outros; todos nós, uma Humanidade Unida, com o dever de cuidar uns dos outros, além de todas as diferenças.
É hora de pôr fim à era dos impérios, às monarquias e às tiranias de força e controle, às hegemonias de riqueza, poder e privilégios das elites, aos fascismos de sangue, fé e solo, e às divisões de elite pertencentes e excludentes. alteridade; abramos as portas das nossas prisões e das nossas fronteiras e sejamos livres.
Survival and resistance, the price of liberty and the necessity of solidarity, the fragility of power and the futility of tyrannies of force and control before the unanswerable power of refusal to submit or obey, the redemptive power of love as community and the alliance of autonomous peoples in a free society of equals, and the transformational nature of freedom as the choice to remain unconquered; on this day of the twin anniversaries of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and Italian Liberation Day we celebrate the glorious triumph of our forebears as antifascists and the lessons we can learn from our history.
What can we learn from the Liberation of Italy, and from all liberations from fascist regimes throughout history and the world, as antifascists, revolutionaries, truth tellers, and bearers of the Promethean Fire which is democracy?
The great secret of power is that it is fragile and brittle; force and control fail at the point of disobedience and disbelief.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just Authority.
Who cannot be compelled by force is free. In resistance and refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered.
To resist is to be free, and this is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us. Refusal to submit is the defining human act and seizure of power, and this is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
In this we are all brothers, sisters, and others; all of us a United Humankind with a duty of care for each other beyond all differences.
Time to make an end to the age of empires, to monarchies and to tyrannies of force and control, to hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege, to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and to divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness; let us throw open the gates of our prisons and our borders, and be free.
As I wrote in my post of April 25 2020, Anniversaries of the Italian Victory Over Fascism and End of the Italian Civil War and the Carnation Revolution of Portugal; Celebrate with me today the twin anniversaries of the Italian victory over fascism and the Carnation Revolution which liberated Portugal from fifty years of tyranny. Together these two historical events and processes provide us with exemplary models of effective action in the struggle toward democracy and the true equality of humankind.
Three decades of Antifascism in Italy, culminating in the twenty months of Resistance to the German Occupation, not only shaped the Allied victory and the Liberation of Europe, but was also a struggle to transform the cultural basis from which fascism arose; authoritarianism, patriarchy, nepotism and graft, and the networks of patron-client relationships which have persisted as the formal basis of European society since the Roman Empire. As Stephanie Prezioso writes in Jacobin “the Resistance was not only a war of national liberation, but also a civil war and a class war — a social war that implicated the population itself.”
But what is most relevant to us today is the way in which this multifaceted war was waged and won; for it was anarchic and destructured, self-organizing and embodying forms of mutualism, nonhierarchical and democratic in the best sense of free societies of equals. As the people of Hong Kong say of their art of revolution, “Be like water”. Again as described by Stephanie Prezioso; “Autonomy, anti-bureaucratic demands, voluntarism, “free initiative from below,” and the role of the individual – not of the “mass” – were the inner secrets to this libertarian and revolutionary liberalism, attached to social revolution”.
How does the history of the Italian Antifascist Resistance continue to shape and inform our struggle today? Here we must dive into the deep well of memory, and situate our moment in the context of the century which has unfolded since our origins in the world’s first Antifascist Resistance, that of the Arditi del Popolo founded in 1921 to resist Mussolini and the rise of Fascism. The Aditi del Popolo, a worker’s army whose defense of the communes at the Barricades of Parma became legendary, arose in mutual interdependence with the anarcho-syndicalism of Bakunin’s comrade Enrico Malatesta and the Free State of Fiume of the poet and General Gabriele D’Annunzio, the latter of which continues to influence the global Autonomous Zones movements today.
When we founded the first of the current network of such, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, having seized the business and state government district, I had a copy of Bruce Sterling’s novelization of D’Annunzio’s Fiume, Pirate Utopia, from which I read to the masses who seized the police headquarters. A cautionary tale as well as an inspiring and romantic model, for in the Free State of Fiume D’Annunzio both established an iconic anarchist-syndicalist commune but also created Fascism; it is a foundational study of the recursive forces of fear, power, and force and why revolutions become tyrannies. In centering my idea of Living Autonomous Zones in a critique of the historical emergence of Fascism from the Anarchist total rejection of state power and of nationalism from internationalist socialism, I question the social use of force as a ground of struggle intrinsic to all human exchange in the duality of its forms as fear and belonging.
As I wrote in my post of June 11 2023, Remembering the Glorious Seattle Autonomous Zone; Strange and unknown remains the Undiscovered Country, as Shakespeare called the future, for it is a thing of relative and ambiguous truths, ephemeral and in constant motion and processes of change, and limitless possibilities of becoming. “An undiscovered country whose bourne no travelers return—puzzles the will”, as the line in Hamlet goes, in reference to death and what may lie beyond the limits of human being and knowing.
But it applies equally to the myriads of futures from which we must choose, shaped by our histories and systems of being human together as imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle and by our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value.
The emergence of the Autonomous Zones as a spontaneous adaptation to universal conditions of unequal power and brutal repression by carceral states was in part an echo and reflection of the Occupy Movement which began in New York’s Zuccotti Park on September 17 2011; by October nearly a thousand cities in 82 nations and in 600 American communities had ongoing and sustained sister protests and Occupy movements. The Black Lives Matter movement began in July of 2013 in protest against the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, and in 2020 with the death of George Floyd ignited the Summer of Fire; some 26 million Americans joined protests in 200 cities, joined by sister protests in two thousand cities in sixty nations. The Autonomous Zones were a prodigy of the harmonic convergence of these two global movements of social justice, as shaped by influences of the #metoo antipatriarchal movement and Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strike and other global ecological movements.
In the Autonomous Zones global protest movements against white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, tyranny and state terror both as democracy movements and as the police abolition movement, recombined and integrated as an agenda of revolutionary struggle against systems of unequal power.
And as we brought a Reckoning for systemic evils, epigenetic trauma, and the legacies of our histories, we also sought to launch humankind on a total revisioning of our being, meaning, and value, and the reimagination and transformation of the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Here is a journal entry of mine speaking as a witness of history to that time of revolutionary struggle and liberation; as I wrote in my post of June 11 2020, Utopia Now: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone; Marvels and jubilation in the streets, a carnival of transgressions of the Forbidden and masquerades of possible identities and futures of becoming human, anarchy and chaos and joy, running amok and being ungovernable, and the frightening of the horses; come and dance with us, America. Come find your heart and be free.
Whosoever remains unconquered is free. For each of us who defies injustice and tyranny, who resists subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement, who questions, mocks, and challenges authority, becomes an agent of Liberty who cannot be silenced, and who passes the torch of freedom as an uncontrollable catalyst of change to everyone with whom we interact, and thereby can never be truly defeated.
Each of us who in resistance becomes Unconquered and a bearer of Liberty are also become a Living Autonomous Zone, and this is the key to our inevitable victory. We ourselves are the power which state terror and tyranny cannot conquer.
The people of Seattle have answered brutal repression and police violence, an attempt to break the rebellion against racial injustice and hate crime enacted by Homeland Security and the police throughout America and the world led by Trump and his white supremacist terrorists both within the police as a fifth column and operating in coordination with deniable forces like the gun-toting militias now visible everywhere, by storming the citadel of city government with waves of thousands of citizens demanding the right to life and liberty regardless of the color of our skin.
The people have seized control of six city blocks, including the police precinct and City Hall, and established the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, a name which rings with history and reflects the Paris Commune and the Italian Anarcho-Syndicalists of the 1920s, Rojava in Syria and Exarcheia in Athens, but was directly modeled on the ideals, methods, and instruments of the Occupy Movement founded in New York’s Wall Street.
Such beautiful resistance by those who will not go quietly to their deaths. To all those who tilt at windmills; I salute you.
Let us take back our government from our betrayers, and our democracy from the fascist tyranny of blood, faith, and soil which has attempted to steal our liberty and enslave us with divisions of exclusionary otherness.
When the people have reclaimed the government of which they are co-owners and this new phase of protest, a movement to occupy City Hall in defiance of tyranny, has seized every seat of power in the nation and restored democracy to America, we can begin the globalization of the Revolution and the reforging of our society on the foundation of equality and racial justice, and of our universal human rights.
Let us join together in solidarity and restore America as a free society of equals, and liberate all the nations of the world now held captive by the Fourth Reich.
There can be but one reply to fascism and state terror; Never Again.
As written by David Broder in Jacobin, in an article entitled The Lost Partisans; “Today Italy celebrates Liberation Day. But the true spirit of the antifascist resistance has long been obscured.
Italy’s April 25 bank holiday marks the anniversary of the country’s liberation from fascism. This day in 1945, antifascist partisan units freed the northern industrial centers of Milan and Turin from the grip of Hitler and Mussolini’s remaining loyalists, after Allied forces had swept through the country. Just three days later, in a humiliating epitaph to the twenty-year regime, partisans captured and executed il Duce and his entourage, hanging them upside down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.
Marking the partisans’ victory over both German occupation and Italian fascism, April 25 is a patriotic holiday that honors the deeds of an armed minority. The festival was first celebrated in 1946, as the parties of the National Liberation Committee (CLN) from Christian Democrats to Socialists and Communists sought to identify themselves with “universal” values of freedom, democracy, and national unity.
Tellingly, Liberation Day would be celebrated on the day that the CLN for upper Italy declared its power, not the date of the Allies’ final liberation of Italian territory.
However, while the CLN parties’ claim to represent “a whole people in arms” delimited a broad national community excluding only the last fascist loyalists — held to be German stooges, and not true patriots — April 25 has never really lived up to its pretentions of national unity.
This is not only because the remaining battalions of the far right have their own war commemorations at Mussolini’s Predappio hometown, but also because the armed resistance has always been principally identified in popular culture with Italy’s once-mass Communist Party (PCI).
Although still today presidents and prime ministers commemorate April 25 as a founding moment of Italian democracy, the street rallies marking this holiday above all represent the politics that did not shape the postwar republic.
Whereas 60 percent of partisans fought in PCI-organized units, the Communist Party shared the CLN’s political leadership with Christian Democrats, liberals, socialists, and others; and as the intense antifascist mobilization turned into the foundation of a parliamentary democracy, old elites soon reasserted their control over the state.
Indeed, if the CLN parties governed Italy in coalition after liberation — together drafting a constitution and founding a republic — by May 1947 Cold War pressures forced the PCI out of office. As justice minister in 1946, the Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti had issued a sweeping amnesty applying even to fascists, in order to pacify social tensions; yet as the Left was sidelined, partisans themselves became the target of political trials pursued by ex-fascist judges and policemen.
The gap between the partisan fighters and the postwar establishment was further symbolized on April 25, 1947, with the dissolution of the second-most resistance force, the republican-socialist Action Party.
The anticommunist counteroffensive following liberation peaked in July 1948, with an assassination attempt against Togliatti. The far-right assailant’s attack not only sparked an unruly general strike but was also a trigger for many ex-partisans who had held onto their weapons, who mounted widespread armed occupations of workplaces and police stations in subsequent days.
Frightened PCI leaders feared provoking a civil war like in Greece, where British-backed royalists bloodily crushed the Communist partisans after 1945. With the party thus reining in its more adventurist members, and Italy becoming a founder member of NATO in 1949, the hope of resistance turning into revolution quickly dissipated.
Having been the main resistance party, the PCI was thus condemned to an ambivalent relationship with the state born of April 25, and whose constitution it helped to write. The country’s second party — securing between 22 and 34 percent of the vote in every election until its 1991 collapse — the PCI was barred from power-sharing by Italy’s strategic position in the Western bloc, even despite leader Enrico Berlinguer’s 1970s efforts to reach a “historic compromise” with Christian Democracy.
Indeed, if April 25 is still today marked by rallies appealing to the constitution’s promise of a “democracy founded on labor,” for four decades the state was more than anything based on structural Christian Democratic dominance, the anticommunist linchpin of all Italian governments until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Although the Christian Democrats had been the PCI’s partners in the CLN and then in government in 1943–47, they had made a much lesser military contribution to the resistance, and on anniversaries like April 25 tended to emphasize the US Army’s role in liberating Italy far more than did the Communists.
Without doubt, the partisan war was greatly less important to Christian Democratic identity: a big-tent party of many factions, but also strong anticommunist tendencies, its further right-wing shore tended to portray the resistance as a bloody endeavor essentially unnecessary to the Allies’ success in freeing the country.
As such, whereas the Christian Democrats’ internal cohesion and claim to political authority in Cold War Italy was heavily premised on their binary opposition to the PCI, the Communists’ central means of asserting their democratic legitimacy was the commemoration of their non-sectarian, patriotic record in the war against Nazism.
This stemmed from resistance strategy itself: the Communist-led working class played the leading role in mobilizing for the patriotic struggle, but, as Togliatti explained in an April 1945 circular, PCI partisans establishing CLN authority in each location should not “impose changes in a socialistic or communist sense,” even if acting alone. The PCI had committed to a common antifascist cause, not sought to enforce its own control.
The party had thus used mass mobilization to secure itself a place in institutional life, but without antagonizing other democratic forces. Indeed, the PCI press of 1943–45 (and later party mythology) cast even the most evidently class-war aspects of the resistance — mass strikes, land occupations, draft resistance — in “patriotic” terms, a mass working-class contribution to a progressive national movement more than an assertion of workers’ anticapitalist class interests.
It was this conjugation of patriotism, democracy, and a sense of workers’ centrality to national reconstruction that informed the constitutional promise of a “democratic republic founded on labor.” In this same productivist spirit, in the 1945–47 coalition the PCI backed wage freezes and implemented an effective strike ban, the better to rebuild Italian industry.
That said, while the PCI portrayed its gradualist, institution-centric “Italian road to socialism” as an extension of Antonio Gramsci’s thinking, it in fact tended to invert Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, as leading socialist Lelio Basso emphasized in a 1965 piece for Critica Marxista.
“Notwithstanding the working-class movement’s organizational preponderance in the resistance, it was our opponents who managed to hegemonize it politically,” he explained. “National or antifascist unity had a sense in terms of the pure goal of winning the war,” but “only with a tighter working-class unity over immediate postwar goals could the workers’ movement have really hegemonized the liberation struggle, imposing its own spirit, stamp and will, its own ideology and objectives upon it.”
Founded on Labor
Indeed, by the time of Basso’s article the PCI strategy of a gradually expanding “progressive democracy” had begun to ring hollow, the party’s commitment to republican legality clashing with its Cold War reduction to an oppositional role.
Christian Democracy reigned supreme, and the far right was also seemingly on the rise, with Prime Minister Fernando Tambroni’s 1960 effort to form government resting on fascist MSI support, as well as the provocative attempt to stage an MSI congress in antifascist Genoa that same year. If violent protests blocked these efforts to rehabilitate the far right, the “democratic republic founded on labor” was not living up to the promise of the resistance.
The weakening of the PCI dream of progressive democracy also coincided with changes in the shape of the working class, with the high industrial growth rates of Italy’s 1950s-1960s “economic miracle” drawing masses of workers from the underdeveloped south to the factories of the north.
These workers, on the fringes of the traditional labor movement and suffering a semi-racialized discrimination, were central to the attentions of the 1960s New Left arising off the back of the PCI’s impasse.
Young and coming from a south little-marked by the resistance, these workers had a profound cultural split from the largely older, more skilled northern workers for whom the antifascist strikes of March 1943 represented a key moment of collective memory and class pride.
Tellingly, the operaista and autonomist literature (broadly conceived) of this period, breaking with the Communist Party’s rhetorical preoccupations, was notable for its lack of interest in resistance history, tending to see April 25 as a kind of PCI jamboree attached to patriotic-institutional politics, distant from the interests of the workers they sought to influence.
To the extent that the resistance did enter into the extra-parliamentary left’s consciousness, this was above all thanks to armed-struggle groups and their efforts to replicate the most spectacular military actions of 1943–45, also inspired by a wider veneration of guerrilla struggles in Vietnam and elsewhere.
Not only the Red Brigades’ invocation of the “continuing resistance” but also Giangiacomo Feltrinelli’s creation of Gruppi d’Azione Partigiana (GAP) consciously imitating the similarly named wartime PCI terrorist cells reflected the desire to recapture the militancy of that period.
What rarely went considered in any of this was the political critique of the PCI strategy that had already in the 1940s been advanced by the most radical wing of the Italian resistance. Indeed, even the 1970s extra-parliamentary left tended to invoke the most militant forms of struggle from the war period (mass strikes, sabotage, terrorism) as abstract evidence of the potential for social change, rather than recover the history of those movements who had sought (and failed) to challenge the politics of national unity as such.
This was the reason why even a 1970s Guevarist paramilitary group like the GAP could copy the name of 1940s partisan units that were in fact entirely PCI-controlled and subordinate to its patriotic alliance strategy.
It seems that these groups were little aware that in 1943–45 there had also been revolutionary antifascist forces outside of the CLN, involved in armed struggle yet excluded from institutional resistance memory. Certainly, in a broad sense we could say that the symbolism of even PCI-led partisans (with their Bella Ciao, Bandiera Rossa, Fischia il Vento, red neckerchiefs . . .) and resistants’ individual motives for joining the struggle often reflected hope in some sort of socialist change, even if defined in vague terms.
But there were also thousands-strong 1940s movements who organized with this explicit political perspective, rejecting national unity in favor of class warfare — from Stella Rossa in Turin to Rome’s Bandiera Rossa and Naples’s “red” CGL union.
These were no minoritarian sects: in fact, Bandiera Rossa was the largest resistance force in Wehrmacht-occupied Rome. Arising from clandestine groups that had formed in the fascist period while PCI leaders were still in exile, and combining militant antifascism with an almost millenarian faith in imminent revolution, this autodidact-led movement built something of a mass base in the capital’s borgate slums in winter 1943–44, waging nine months of urban warfare at the cost of some 186 fatalities.
Believing that Red Army successes on the Eastern Front reflected the world-historic advance of socialism (“turning war into revolution like Lenin in 1917”) this curiously ultra-Stalinist movement ultimately entered into bitter clashes with the official PCI, which sought to infiltrate and destroy its organization.
Indeed, the movement’s radicalism threatened not only the PCI’s internal discipline, but also the orderly transition to democracy itself: as one military police report warned the Allied forces approaching the Italian capital in May 1944, Bandiera Rossa had “the secret aim, together with the other far-Left parties, of seizing control of the city, overthrowing the monarchy and government, and implementing a full communist program while the other parties are preoccupied with chasing out the Germans.”
The subversive threat these communists posed saw their militias (deemed by British intelligence to have been “mainly drawn from the criminal classes”) immediately banned upon the Allies’ liberation of the capital.
The suppression of Bandiera Rossa’s incendiary press and the forcible disarming of its partisans was no isolated case: the state’s assertion of a monopoly of violence and criminalization of its opponents was, in a sense, the founding act of republican legality, with the Allies combining with the CLN parties simultaneously to liberate territory and to impose a quick return to social peace.
The state born of the resistance was, therefore, also a state born of the neutering of the resistance; the channeling of antagonistic class warfare into working-class representation in the state via the Communist and Socialist parties. Such was the democratic republic “founded on labor.”
Postmodern April 25
Today the PCI, self-declared “party of the resistance,” is dead, much like its Socialist and Christian Democratic counterparts. The collapse of the USSR exploded the Italian system’s Cold War binary in 1991, with the removal of the Communist threat finally detonating the rotten corruption networks that had so long flourished in its Christian-Democratic rival. If April 25 still lives on as a day of memorialization, it does so absent of the parties who actually took part in the struggle.
With ever-reduced ranks of surviving veterans, and the Left in a dire state of collapse, the resistance’s role in Italian public life seems to be on the wane. Indeed, the end of the once mass PCI has clearly handed the initiative to the long-time opponents of the antifascist cause.
Not only have revisionist historians increasingly sought to establish an equivalence of the crimes perpetrated by each side in the “civil war,” but the last Berlusconi government even toyed with getting rid of the Liberation Day bank holiday.
Simultaneous to this, resistance memory is also undermined from within, as former PCI-ers adapt the old slogans to their now neoliberal politics, as in president Giorgio Napolitano’s April 25 intervention in 2013. Speaking at a former SS prison, the ex-Communist called on the incoming government to show “the same courage, resolve, and unity that were vital to winning the resistance battle” in dealing with the country’s economic crisis.
The coalition he was orchestrating was a lash-up of the centrist Democrats with Silvio Berlusconi and Goldman Sachs technocrat Mario Monti; national unity had now became the banner of austerian collective belt-tightening.
No wonder, then, that April 25 seems increasingly distant from the concerns of today’s unemployed and precarious youth — the “national day” instead living on mainly in the memory of the various fragments of the former PCI.
Yet with that party’s hegemonic project dead, it seems unlikely that talk of “defending constitutional values” or invoking “national unity” or the “republican ethics” of seventy years ago can play any role in the regeneration of the Left.
If anything, it is dissecting and questioning this legacy that can return the memory of the partisans to its proper place, turning April 25 from a day of national unity into a day of anti-institutional antagonism.”
As written by STEFANIE PREZIOSO in Jacobin, in an article entitled The Anti-Fascist Revolution: Remembering the Action Party, one of Italy’s biggest anti-fascist partisan movements.; “Over the last two decades, the Italian Resistance has been a subject of sharp public debate, with both political and historical efforts “radically to repudiate the role and significance” of anti-fascism in Italy’s contemporary history. As Pier Giorgio Zunino wrote in 1997, “for the Italian history of the second half of the twentieth century, anti-fascism is the villain.”
Indeed, most often simply identified with its Comintern (Communist International) variant, the anti-fascism of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s is branded “anti-democratic” because of its “blind[ness]” to the other “enemies of democracy,” as the Italian revisionist Renzo de Felice put it. Attacks on the twenty-month-long Resistance are essentially concentrated on its minoritarian character (thus seeing the anti-fascist parties as a mere second edition of the National Fascist Party itself) and the “cruelty” of the “violence” committed during the civil war and the months following Liberation.
Italy is a country where the “negative memory” of this experience fuses with the political uses made of that memory. In this context, what is especially challenged “decade after decade” is the central, epoch-defining character of this period for the history of the dominated.
This is because, between September 8, 1943 — the date that the Badoglio’s post-fascist government signed an armistice with the Allies, triggering a German occupation of northern-central Italy — and April 25, 1945 — the date of the final liberation of Italy’s great northern cities — the Resistance was not only a war of national liberation, but also a civil war and a class war — a social war that implicated the population itself.
Of course, not all “the people” were in the “maquis,” as the title of Communist leader Luigi Longo’s Un popolo alla macchia might suggest. But a large part of the Italian population thought that the end of fascism should mean a challenge not just to the regime itself, but also to the Italian state as it had formed after the Risorgimento [national unification struggle of the mid-nineteenth century], and indeed, to bourgeois society as a whole. In this sense, anti-fascism really represented a positive struggle, with a political and social charge that projected itself into the future.
In this context of a radical challenge to the existing order, the Action Party (Partito d’Azione or Pd’A), throughout its brief existence, played a very specific role. Created in 1942 and dissolved in 1947, over the twenty months of civil war the Pd’A was an advocate for the radical transformation of Italian society.
This advocacy also translated into practice; in the war of Resistance that raged, especially in Northern Italy, from September 1943 onward, the Action Party made a relatively unparalleled contribution, offering the greatest number of combatants to the armed struggle. Giovanni de Luna captured this reality with his reference to the “party of the shot.” The Pd’A made a major contribution to the insurrections of April 1945, in particular in Turin.
The living embodiment of a revolutionary “wind from the North,” azionismo also laid down a lasting system of values founded on anti-fascism. It considered anti-fascism not only in conjunctural terms — as a fight against the regime Mussolini had established from 1922 onward — but as a perpetual duty.
This was summarized in April 1934 by Carlo Rosselli, founder of the secular, non-communist Justice and Liberty (Giustizia e Libertà or GL) movement. A figure whose memory was forever part of the Pd’A after his 1937 murder by fascists, Rosselli spoke of anti-fascism as “a struggle for eternity.”
“We Are at War”
Azionismo was rooted in the anti-fascism of the liberal revolutionary Piero Gobetti, who died in 1926 under the blows of the fascist squadristi; as well as its early 1930s political actualization by GL, the movement of the revolutionary socialist Carlo Rosselli and, among others, Emilio Lussu, a member of the Sardinian Partito d’Azione. Based in Paris in the 1930s, Rosselli and Lussu were both escapees from the island of Lipari, where they had been confined by the Fascist regime.
For Piero Gobetti, fascism was “the autobiography of the nation.” On November 23, 1922, in a famous article entitled “Eulogy to the guillotine,” he wrote:
Fascism… has been the autobiography of the nation. A nation that believes in class collaboration; a nation that renounces political struggle, on account of its own sloth…. Fascism in Italy is a catastrophe, and it is an indication of a decisive infantileness, for it marks the triumph of facility, of confidence granted, of optimism, of enthusiasms.
This interpretation emphasized the elements of continuity between liberal Italy and fascist Italy and the idea of a missed Risorgimento – meaning an unaccomplished process of political unification and economic modernization. From this perspective, fascism was the result of this missing liberal/bourgeois revolution, and the expression of a backward and “uncultured” country whose only political experience was one of systems of government that combined clientelism, paternalism, transformism and authoritarianism.
Fascism was thus the expression of “an old ill, rooted in the distant past of Italian history.” This interpretation combined with the idea that it was necessary to fight not only fascism itself, but all that had made it possible. This emphasized the role of the Italian ruling class in the affirmation and stabilization of the regime.
During the 1930s, this line of interpretation would develop, in the context of an anti-fascist struggle waged in secrecy and exile. This fight now confronted a clearly established regime and a regimented country, in years that the revisionist historian Renzo de Felice described in terms of “consensus.”
The revolutionary socialist Carlo Rosselli developed his own analysis of fascism based on Gobetti’s reflections, among others, discussing the development of what he from the early 1930s called “the anti-fascist revolution,” and refining its repertoires of action.
In January 1932, the first issue of the Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà asserted the need to pass from “the phase of a negative and indistinct anti-fascism” to that of the affirmation of a “constructive anti-fascism that understands and transcends the fascist experience and the experiences of post-[World War I] Europe.”
Founded on the combined Mazzinian imperatives of “thought and action,” in a March 1931 circular addressed “To the Workers,” GL presented itself as a “revolutionary movement” aimed at overthrowing fascism by insurrectionary means. Carlo Rosselli and the members of GL conceived their political engagement as a radical rupture from fascism, but so, too, from pre-fascist Italy.
In this sense, they constantly repeated that there could be no question of fighting to return to “l’Italietta di Facta” [referring to pre-Mussolini liberal prime minister Luigi Facta]. What united the militants of GL was “the revolt against the men, the mentality, and the methods of the pre-fascist political world” (“Per l’unificazione politica del proletariato,” GL, May 14, 1937).
It also targeted the Italian Socialists, who had reduced themselves to impotence. We might particularly note the rather severe analysis Emilio Lusso gave of the Socialists’ collapse faced with the rise of fascism in his February 1934 article “Orientamenti”:
The masses were brilliantly guided toward catastrophe… It took just a few mercenary brigands, gathered in such little time, to destroy the results of forty years of proletarian organization. It took not a flurry of machine-gun fire but only the rumble of a milk truck to disband what ought to have been the revolutionary army.
The renewal of socialism and the anti-fascist struggle were thus envisaged as two interdependent and inextricably linked phases. GL advocated the defeat of pre-fascist political configurations, presenting itself in terms of “unity of action” among socialists, republicans, and liberals, and seeking to revive the struggle on Italian territory, if necessary using illegal and violent means.
From 1930 onward, GL cells formed mainly in the towns of Northern Italy and in intellectual circles. This was the only non-Communist movement to construct a real network, and the Pd’A [formally constituted in 1942] would base itself on this, as it built its forces around such figures as Riccardo Bauer, Ernesto Rossi, Francesco Fancello, Nello Traquandi, Umberto Ceva, Vincenzo Calace, Dino Roberti, Giuliano Viezzoli, Ferruccio Parri, and many others. While this social and militant base was principally among intellectuals, this small circle would become a hardened troop, ready to take up arms.
GL, the Pd’A, and the Revolution
Indeed, fascism placed the young (liberal and/or socialist) intellectuals, as the basis of GL, and the Pd’A in a paradoxical situation. The regime established by Mussolini seemed to position the “rearguard” fight for the defense of democratic freedoms as the order of the day. There is no doubt that the anti-fascist engagement of liberals like Ernesto Rossi or Riccardo Bauer was built precisely around this primary revolt, more moral than political.
Yet it was at precisely this moment that the fight for freedom emancipated itself from the historical and theoretical frameworks in which it had emerged. It broke away from the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it adopted more complex notions that resolutely anchored it in the era beginning in October of 1917.
Piero Gobetti was again at the heart of this way of conceiving anti-fascism, which combined liberalism with exhortations to revolution. Over the course of his short life, he consistently emphasized that his liberalism was rooted in the concrete experience of the struggles of the downtrodden, with the Turin factory councils of 1919-20 and the soviets in Russia in his view marking their most complete expression.
Gobetti thus saw the workers’ movement as “freedom on the way to establishing itself” and the October Revolution as “an affirmation of liberalism” because it broke “a centuries-long slavery” in creating an “agrarian democracy,” a state in which “the people have faith.”
Autonomy, anti-bureaucratic demands, voluntarism, “free initiative from below,” and the role of the individual – not of the “mass” – were the inner secrets to this libertarian and revolutionary liberalism, attached to social revolution and fully anchored in the twentieth century. GL drew on this same thread in the 1930s. Thus, the question posed was “reconciling the political and social potential of the Russian Revolution with the scientific, humanistic, liberal legacy of the West.”
If fascism reflected Italians’ moral, political, and cultural immaturity – in short, a “lack of character” – then building a new political order must inevitably proceed via a revolutionary struggle. This was a struggle in which active minorities would play an exemplary role, and which would “then spread among wide layers of the population.”
One of the challenges this posed was how to envisage a revolutionary process in a country that had never seen any large-scale revolutionary phenomenon, the “popular and revolutionary Risorgimento” having been swept aside by the monarchy, the clergy, agrarian feudalism, and finance.
From this perspective, the anti-fascist revolution could be a “social and moral” second Risorgimento, which would result in the emancipation of the workers. Over the 1930s – for GL’s Carlo Rosselli in particular – the revolution became more clearly proletarian, and anti-fascism became synonymous with anti-capitalism.
This was not an abstract anti-capitalism, but a “concrete and historical” one founded on the observation and the conviction that liberal democracy had exhausted its historical role. The post-World War I crisis of democracy and the crisis of capitalism thus became potent factors in the interpretation of the struggle that must now be fought.
The Pd’A structured itself around themes linked to the origins of fascism and the anti-fascist revolution, questions which Carlo Rosselli in particular had posed within GL. While the onset of World War II broke up the networks constituted in exile (especially in France) it would also constitute the terrain in which these new political orientations could be tested in practice.
As Leonardi Paggi put it, we can here see “the war’s absolutely leading role not only as a factor for the destruction of the old order, but also as the site of the reconstruction of a new one.”
Indeed, “the fascist war” (from 1940–43) would play a fundamental role in driving the rise of a properly anti-fascist social and political consciousness, taking on ever wider proportions. The strike wave of March 1943 and the outpourings of joy on July 25 of that same year, as Italians greeted the news of Mussolini’s downfall, each bore witness to this.
Moreover, during the civil war of 1943 to 1945, the anti-fascism that had built up over twenty years of fascism and that etched itself on the body of a devastated, “marytred” country, now transformed into a real movement driven by men and women and by their hopes and expectations. The immediate trigger for the formation of the Action Party was, of course, the war. Yet it was also driven by the heartfelt need for an unremitting struggle, by and through the war, against everything in the process of modern Italy’s construction that had led to disaster.
From its creation in June 1942, the Pd’A presented itself as the rallying point for the diverse elements of non-Communist anti-fascism of both socialist and liberal orientations. The Pd’A was, first of all, composed of members of the liberal-socialist movement founded among young intellectual circles in central Italy in 1937 by Guido Calogero and Aldo Capitini, whose 1940 program called for the formation of a “common front for freedom.”
In July 1943, this current was joined by the militants of GL, which became a socialist unity movement under the direction of Emilio Lussu after the 1937 assassination of Carlo Rosselli. On March 3, 1943, GL, the Socialist Party, and the Communist Party signed a pact for unity in action, advocating “a national insurrection to smash fascism’s policy of war.”
As Giovanni de Luna emphasizes in his book (which is sadly yet to be translated), the different souls of the Action Party were nonetheless united by the conception of politics its militants constructed – a politics considered inextricably linked to morality – and by the constant search for means of action to respond to Italy’s concrete needs, particularly those of its peasant, worker and intellectual layers, in order to radically change the social and political order.
Hence the party’s “republican prejudice” and its calls for change in Italy’s state structure and its economy. Among the seven points of the Pd’A’s June 1942 political program, we might mention: decentralization of power to the local level; the nationalization of monopolies; land reform; trade-union freedom; and the separation of church and state. The Italian historian Claudio Pavone thus recalled how the “Action Party spoke in its program of its intent to establish a socialism for new times” and how this party had expressed a “utopia, as the aspiration for the utmost.”
The question of the means of struggle was at the center of the debates at the Pd’A’s national congress on September 5-7, 1943 – a congress held before the armistice [between the post-coup Badoglio government and the Anglo-Americans] was declared, and with German troops having spread across Italian territory from July to September. The idea of a war of national liberation here translated into the understanding that it would now be necessary to wage a large-scale war. The GL brigades would now constitute the Pd’A’s armed wing, under Ferruccio Parri’s command.
These brigades were conceived as sites for the consolidation and/or emergence of a social and political consciousness, even if recruitment for the Pd’A brigades was a lot more selective than that which took place in the Communist-led Garibaldi brigades. Dante Livio Bianco wrote:
[T]rue political work in partisan formations consisted not so much of giving ‘lectures’ or of forcing partisans to read the political press, as of touching (and that was how it was – even only touching) on the key points, uncovering them and bringing them out of the generic, the confused, the indistinct, and instead proposing these points – even in their most basic form – to the individual consciousness, thereby drawing out new motives for action.
But the debate also concerned the definition of the struggle itself: was this a struggle for national liberation and/or a “democratic” revolution? For the militants of the Pd’A, the one necessarily went hand-in-hand with the other, but the contents of this democratic revolution were differently defined even within the party – more radically so among former GL militants, and in more liberal terms among others.
Yet all agreed on an intransigent opposition to Badoglio’s post-fascist regime under the “Kingdom of the South” [ruling Allied-occupied regions after September 1943], and on a relentless search for unity in action among the parties of the Left. Throughout the Resistance war, the azionisti thought that Italy’s concrete situation could result in processes “of a revolutionary character.”
“You are either for revolution or for reforms,” Pd’A secretary for Northern Italy Leo Viliani wrote, “and we are for revolution.” The “revolution” even became a “permanent revolution,” “whose goals can never be determined once and for all, but rather are continually redefined.”
However, the Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti’s return to Italy in late 1944 and the international realignment of the Allied forces – who were now clearly focused on the future of Western Europe’s reconstruction – marked the end of the “revolutionary” hopes of azionismo and the anti-fascist revolution. Palmiro Togliatti’s speech at Salerno would mark their swansong.
In this Southern town, the Communist leader asserted the need for the unity of anti-fascists of whatever political or religious orientation, and proposed that the institutional question (monarchy or republic?) be put off until after the war. Azionismo’s revolutionary and Jacobin anti-fascism had truly resonated with the aspirations of the popular, peasant, and working-class layers of Northern Italy, but this would now be defeated by the new situation of Allied “diplomatic” anti-fascism, to which Togliatti’s Communist Party added decisive impetus, shortly before the Allies reached Rome in June 1944.
There now began to emerge the image of a “betrayed” or at least “unfinished” Resistance, meaning “the incompletion of an ideal that was never fully realized, but nonetheless continued to feed hopes and to awaken stresses and energies for renewal.” As Marco Revelli wrote, “…the true mortal sin of anti-fascism consisted in its struggle against the roots, against the tradition of Italy, in its destructive charge dissolving the fundamental aggregations of fatherland and family.”
And azionismo’s “mortal sin” was not only that it kept this memory alive, but that it was able to transmit this experience over time, as well as the questions it posed to the Italy of the past, their own present, and the future. This was especially the case of Piero Calamandrei (a father of the 1948 Italian Constitution), Giorgio Agosti, Leo Valiani, Aldo Garosci, and Alessandro Galante Garrone.
Of course, the Pd’A’s was a short experience, doubtless linked to its variety of political souls and its inability to provide a common substance to the anti-fascist revolution that it considered so necessary. But azionismo remains a thorn in the side of those who hope to see the subversive potential of the Resistance experience die away as the years pass.
And indeed, with the commemorations every April 25, what is put on the agenda anew is the fact that this past can again become a force in the present. Without doubt, this is the sense in which azionismo and its “anti-fascist revolution” remain a rallying point for the oppositional Italian left today. The slogan “Now and always, Resistance!” was chanted once more on April 25, 2017, renewing the subversive potential of militant azionismo and the living force of its “permanent revolution.”
And where are we now, on this glorious anniversary of victory over fascism?
As I wrote in my post of July 22 2022, Now Is the Time of Monsters; Hope and Despair: Italy on the Cusp of Change; The government of Italy has collapsed, an act of sabotage by fascist revivalists who have abandoned the political coalition which has thus far prevented it from tumbling off the edge of a precipice into the abyss, an existential threat to the survival of her peoples and the basic services of any state which include healthcare.
But if the abyss holds terrors of a precariat held hostage by death and the material needs of survival, the abyss is also where hope lies, for here the balance of power may be changed in revolutionary struggle.
In this liminal time of the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human, of seizures of power and the performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen, Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, let us look to our glorious past in the Resistance which was victorious in the Liberation of Italy on April 25 and the hanging of Mussolini on April 28 1945.
As Slavoj Zizek’s favorite saying goes, a French mistranslation or paraphrase of Antonio Gramsci’s line in his Prison Notebooks “La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati”, literally “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”, as “Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”, which introduces the idea of monstrosity, referential to the historical development of the idea in Michel de Montaigne, Michel Foucault, and Georges Canguilhem’s work The Normal and the Pathological, a dialectical process of mimesis which results in the form of the principle as; “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
Meanings shift, adapt, and change as they transgress boundaries, inhabit public and private spaces, and unfold over vast gulfs of time, and so must we.
“What is to be done?”; as Lenin asked in the essay which ignited the Russian Revolution.
As I wrote in my post of August 30 2022, Centenary of the Barricades of Parma and the Antifascist Resistance of Guido Picelli and L’Ardito del Popolo;
One hundred years ago this August, the antifascist resistance of Guido Picelli and L’Ardito del Popolo fought a glorious battle for the soul of humankind and the fate of the world against the tide of fascism and Mussolini’s blackshirts in Parma, prelude to the March on Rome which opened the door to the Holocaust and World War Two, so very like our own January 6 Insurrection which threatens us still with the return of fascism as the Fourth Reich.
Now as then, and in every generation of humankind, we are defined by how we face those who would enslave us and the darkness within ourselves which threatens to consume us, the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world; in solidarity as a band of brothers and a United Humankind, or subjugated through hierarchies and divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, as a free society of equals or with fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
For Antifa and the Resistance the Arditi are an important historical ancestor, but also for all who love Liberty, where ever men hunger to be free.
Here also is a cautionary tale, of the necessity of Solidarity and the dangers of ideological fracture, for the Arditi failed to defeat fascism at its birth for the same reasons Rosa Luxemburg and the Social Democrats of Germany were unable to counter the ascendence of Hitler.
To this pathology of disconnectedness and the terror of our nothingness, to division and despair in the face of overwhelming force, I make reply with Buffy the Vampire Slayer quoting the instructions to priests in the Book of Common Prayer in episode eleven of season seven, Showtime, after luring an enemy into an arena to defeat in battle as a demonstration to her recruits; “I don’t know what’s coming next. But I do know it’s gonna be just like this – hard, painful. But in the end, it’s gonna be us. If we all do our parts, believe it, we’ll be the one’s left standing. Here endeth the lesson.”
Here Endeth the Lesson: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season seven, episode eleven
August 23 2023 Anniversary of the 1922 Founding of Antifa: the Barricades of Parma and the Antifascist Resistance of Guido Picelli and L’Ardito del Popolo
June 11 2020 Utopia Now: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone
June 11 2023 Remembering the Glorious Seattle Autonomous Zone
Pirate Utopia, Bruce Sterling
Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War, Lucy Hughes-Hallett
The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism, by Peter D. Thomas
Gramsci and the History of Dialectical Thought, by Maurice A. Finocchiaro
Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School, by Peter Ives
Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment, by David M. Kreps
Italian
25 aprile 2024 Festa della Liberazione Italia: lezioni dalla storia per antifascisti, rivoluzionari, sinceri e portatori del fuoco prometeico che è la democrazia
Sopravvivenza e resistenza, il prezzo della libertà e la necessità della solidarietà, la fragilità del potere e l’inutilità delle tirannie della forza e del controllo di fronte al potere incontestabile del rifiuto di sottomettersi o di obbedire, il potere redentore dell’amore come comunità e l’alleanza di persone autonome. i popoli in una società libera di eguali e la natura trasformativa della libertà come scelta di rimanere invincibili; in questo giorno del gemello anniversario della Rivoluzione dei garofani in Portogallo e della Festa della Liberazione italiana celebriamo il glorioso trionfo dei nostri antenati come antifascisti e le lezioni che possiamo imparare dalla nostra storia.
Cosa possiamo imparare dalla Liberazione dell’Italia, e da tutte le liberazioni dai regimi fascisti nel corso della storia e del mondo, come antifascisti, rivoluzionari, rivelatori di verità e portatori del Fuoco Prometeico che è la democrazia?
Il grande segreto del potere è che è fragile e fragile; la forza e il controllo falliscono al punto di disobbedienza e incredulità.
La legge è al servizio del potere, l’ordine si appropria e non esiste un’Autorità giusta.
Chi non può essere costretto con la forza è libero. Nella resistenza e nel rifiuto di sottometterci all’autorità diventiamo Invitti.
Resistere è essere liberi, e questa è una sorta di vittoria che non ci può essere tolta. Il rifiuto di sottomettersi è l’atto umano determinante e la presa del potere, e questa è la prima rivoluzione in cui tutti dobbiamo combattere; la lotta per la proprietà di noi stessi.
In questo siamo tutti fratelli, sorelle e altri; tutti noi un’Umanità Unita con il dovere di prenderci cura l’uno dell’altro al di là di tutte le differenze.
È tempo di porre fine all’era degli imperi, alle monarchie e alle tirannie basate sulla forza e sul controllo, alle egemonie di ricchezza, potere e privilegio delle élite, ai fascismi di sangue, fede e suolo e alle divisioni di appartenenza ed esclusione delle élite. alterità; spalanchiamo le porte delle nostre prigioni e dei nostri confini e siamo liberi.
Come ho scritto nel mio post del 25 aprile 2020, Anniversari della vittoria italiana sul fascismo e fine della guerra civile italiana e della rivoluzione dei garofani in Portogallo; Celebrate con me oggi il gemello anniversario della vittoria italiana sul fascismo e della Rivoluzione dei garofani che liberò il Portogallo da cinquant’anni di tirannia. Insieme, questi due eventi e processi storici ci forniscono modelli esemplari di azione efficace nella lotta verso la democrazia e la vera uguaglianza del genere umano.
Tre decenni di antifascismo in Italia, culminati nei venti mesi di resistenza all’occupazione tedesca, non solo determinarono la vittoria degli Alleati e la liberazione dell’Europa, ma furono anche una lotta per trasformare la base culturale da cui sorse il fascismo; autoritarismo, patriarcato, nepotismo e corruzione, e le reti di rapporti cliente-cliente che sono persistite come base formale della società europea fin dall’Impero Romano. Come scrive Stephanie Prezioso in Jacobin “la Resistenza non fu solo una guerra di liberazione nazionale, ma anche una guerra civile e una guerra di classe – una guerra sociale che coinvolse la stessa popolazione”.
Ma ciò che è più rilevante per noi oggi è il modo in cui questa guerra dalle molteplici sfaccettature è stata condotta e vinta; poiché era anarchico e destrutturato, auto-organizzato e incorporante forme di mutualismo, non gerarchico e democratico nel miglior senso di società libere di eguali. Come dicono gli abitanti di Hong Kong della loro arte rivoluzionaria: “Sii come l’acqua”. Ancora una volta come descritto da Stephanie Prezioso; “L’autonomia, le rivendicazioni antiburocratiche, il volontarismo, la “libera iniziativa dal basso” e il ruolo dell’individuo – non della “massa” – erano i segreti interiori di questo liberalismo libertario e rivoluzionario, legato alla rivoluzione sociale”.
In che modo la storia della Resistenza antifascista italiana continua a plasmare e informare la nostra lotta oggi? Qui dobbiamo tuffarci nel profondo pozzo della memoria e situare il nostro momento nel contesto del secolo che si è svolto fin dalle nostre origini nella prima Resistenza antifascista mondiale, quella degli Arditi del Popolo fondati nel 1921 per resistere a Mussolini e all’ascesa del movimento Fascismo. Gli Aditi del Popolo, esercito operaio la cui difesa dei comuni sulle Barricate di Parma divenne leggendaria, nacque in reciproca interdipendenza con l’anarcosindacalismo del compagno di Bakunin Enrico Malatesta e lo Stato Libero di Fiume del poeta e generale Gabriele D’Annunzio. , quest’ultimo dei quali continua ancora oggi a influenzare i movimenti globali delle Zone Autonome.
Quando fondammo la prima dell’attuale rete, la Zona Autonoma di Capitol Hill a Seattle, dopo aver occupato il quartiere degli affari e del governo statale, avevo una copia del romanzo di Bruce Sterling del Fiume di D’Annunzio, Pirate Utopia, da cui lessi alle masse che hanno sequestrato la questura. Un racconto ammonitore oltre che un modello ispiratore e romantic, , poiché nello Stato Libero di Fiume D’Annunzio entrambi fondarono un’iconica comune anarchico-sindacalista ma crearono anche il fascismo; è uno studio fondamentale sulle forze ricorsive della paura, del potere e della forza e sul perché le rivoluzioni diventano tirannie. Nel centrare la mia idea di Zone Autonome Viventi in una critica dell’emergere storico del fascismo dal rifiuto totale anarchico del potere statale e del nazionalismo dal socialismo internazionalista, metto in discussione l’uso sociale della forza come terreno di lotta intrinseco a ogni scambio umano in la dualità delle sue forme come paura e appartenenza.
Come ho scritto nel mio post dell’11 giugno 2023, Ricordando la gloriosa zona autonoma di Seattle; Strano e sconosciuto rimane il Paese da scoprire, come Shakespeare chiamava il futuro, perché è una cosa di verità relative e ambigue, effimere e in costante movimento e processi di cambiamento e possibilità illimitate di divenire. “Un paese sconosciuto dal quale nessun viaggiatore ritorna – lascia perplessi la volontà”, come recita il verso dell’Amleto, in riferimento alla morte e a ciò che può trovarsi oltre i limiti dell’essere umano e della conoscenza.
Ma si applica ugualmente alle miriadi di futuri tra cui dobbiamo scegliere, modellati dalle nostre storie e dai nostri sistemi di essere umani insieme come condizioni imposte di lotta rivoluzionaria e dalla nostra visione poetica nella reimmaginazione e trasformazione dell’essere umano, del significato e del valore.
L’emergere delle Zone Autonome come adattamento spontaneo alle condizioni universali di disuguaglianza di potere e di brutale repressione da parte degli stati carcerari è stato in parte un’eco e un riflesso del movimento Occupy iniziato allo Zuccotti Park di New York il 17 settembre 2011; a ottobre quasi mille città in 82 nazioni e in 600 comunità americane avevano proteste sorelle e movimenti Occupy in corso e sostenuti. Il movimento Black Lives Matter è iniziato nel luglio del 2013 per protestare contro l’assoluzione dell’assassino di Trayvon Martin, e nel 2020 con la morte di George Floyd ha acceso l’estate del fuoco; circa 26 milioni di americani si sono uniti alle proteste in 200 città, a cui si sono aggiunte proteste sorelle in duemila città di sessanta nazioni. Le Zone Autonome sono state un prodigio della convergenza armonica di questi due movimenti globali di giustizia sociale, modellati dalle influenze del movimento antipatriarcale #metoo e dello sciopero scolastico Fridays for Future di Greta Thunberg e di altri movimenti ecologici globali.
Nelle Zone Autonome i movimenti di protesta globali contro il terrore suprematista bianco, il terrore sessuale patriarcale, la tirannia e il terrore di stato sia come movimenti democratici che come movimento per l’abolizione della polizia, ricombinati e integrati come un’agenda di lotta rivoluzionaria contro sistemi di potere ineguale.
E mentre portavamo una resa dei conti per i mali sistemici, i traumi epigenetici e le eredità delle nostre storie, abbiamo anche cercato di lanciare l’umanità verso una revisione totale del nostro essere, significato e valore, e la reimmaginazione e trasformazione delle illimitate possibilità di divenire. umano.
Ecco un mio articolo di diario che parla come testimone della storia di quel periodo di lotta rivoluzionaria e di liberazione; come ho scritto nel mio post dell’11 giugno 2020, Utopia Now: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone; Meraviglie e giubilo nelle strade, un carnevale di trasgressioni del Proibito e mascherate di possibili identità e futuri di divenire umani, anarchia, caos e gioia, impazzire ed essere ingovernabili, e lo spavento dei cavalli; vieni a ballare con noi, America. Vieni a trovare il tuo cuore e sii libero.
Chi rimane non vinto è libero. Ciascuno di noi che sfida l’ingiustizia e la tirannia, che resiste alla sottomissione, alla disumanizzazione e alla schiavitù, che mette in discussione, deride e sfida l’autorità, diventa un agente della Libertà che non può essere messo a tacere e che passa la fiaccola della libertà come catalizzatore incontrollabile di cambiare per tutti coloro con cui interagiamo, e quindi non potrà mai essere veramente sconfitto.
Ognuno di noi che resistendo diventa Invitto e portatore di Libertà diventa anche una Zona Vivente Autonoma, e questa è la chiave della nostra inevitabile vittoria. Noi stessi siamo il potere che il terrore di stato e la tirannia non possono conquistare.
La popolazione di Seattle ha risposto alla brutale repressione e alla violenza della polizia, nel tentativo di spezzare la ribellione contro l’ingiustizia razziale e i crimini d’odio messi in atto dalla Homeland Security e dalla polizia in tutta l’America e nel mondo guidata da Trump e dai suoi terroristi suprematisti bianchi sia all’interno della polizia che come gruppo quinta colonna e operando in coordinamento con forze negabili come le milizie armate ora visibili ovunque, assaltando la cittadella del governo cittadino con ondate di migliaia di cittadini che chiedono il diritto alla vita e alla libertà indipendentemente dal colore della nostra pelle.
Le persone hanno preso il controllo di sei isolati, compreso il distretto di polizia e il municipio, e hanno istituito la Zona Autonoma di Capitol Hill, un nome che risuona di storia e riflette la Comune di Parigi e la A italiana narco-sindacalisti degli anni ’20, Rojava in Siria ed Exarcheia ad Atene, ma fu modellato direttamente sugli ideali, i metodi e gli strumenti del movimento Occupy fondato a Wall Street a New York.
Che bella resistenza da parte di coloro che non andranno tranquillamente incontro alla morte. A tutti coloro che lottano contro i mulini a vento; Ti saluto.
Riprendiamoci il nostro governo dai nostri traditori e la nostra democrazia dalla tirannia fascista del sangue, della fede e della terra che ha tentato di rubare la nostra libertà e di schiavizzarci con divisioni di alterità escludente.
Quando il popolo avrà rivendicato il governo di cui è comproprietario e questa nuova fase di protesta, un movimento per occupare i municipi in spregio alla tirannia, avrà conquistato ogni sede del potere nella nazione e riportato la democrazia in America, potremo iniziare la globalizzazione della Rivoluzione e il riforgiamento della nostra società sul fondamento dell’uguaglianza e della giustizia razziale e dei nostri diritti umani universali.
Uniamoci insieme in solidarietà e ripristiniamo l’America come una società libera di eguali e liberiamo tutte le nazioni del mondo ora tenute prigioniere dal Quarto Reich.
Non può esserci che una risposta al fascismo e al terrore di stato; Mai più.
E dove siamo adesso, in questo glorioso anniversario della vittoria sul fascismo?
Come ho scritto nel mio post del 22 luglio 2022, Now Is the Time of Monsters; Speranza e disperazione: l’Italia sull’orlo del cambiamento; Il governo italiano è crollato, un atto di sabotaggio da parte dei revivalisti fascisti che hanno abbandonato la coalizione politica che finora gli ha impedito di precipitare dall’orlo del precipizio nell’abisso, una minaccia esistenziale alla sopravvivenza dei suoi popoli e dei fondamentali servizi di qualsiasi Stato che includano l’assistenza sanitaria.
Ma se nell’abisso si nasconde il terrore di un precariato tenuto in ostaggio dalla morte e dai bisogni materiali di sopravvivenza, nell’abisso è anche il luogo della speranza, perché qui gli equilibri di potere possono essere cambiati nella lotta rivoluzionaria.
In questo momento liminale di reimmaginazione e trasformazione delle nostre possibilità di diventare umani, di presa di potere e di adempimento dei quattro doveri primari di un cittadino, interrogare l’autorità, esporre l’autorità, simulare l’autorità e sfidare l’autorità, guardiamo al nostro passato glorioso nella Resistenza che vinse con la Liberazione dell’Italia il 25 aprile e l’impiccagione di Mussolini il 28 aprile 1945.
Come dice il detto preferito di Slavoj Zizek, una traduzione errata o parafrasi francese del verso di Antonio Gramsci nei suoi Quaderni del carcere “La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati”, letteralmente “La crisi consiste proprio nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere, in questo interregno compaiono una grande varietà di sintomi morbosi”, come “Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”, che introduce l’idea di mostruosità, riferimento allo sviluppo storico dell’idea nell’opera Il normale e il patologico di Michel de Montaigne, Michel Foucault e Georges Canguilhem, un processo dialettico di mimesi che sfocia nella forma del principio come; “Il vecchio mondo sta morendo e il nuovo mondo fatica a nascere; ora è il momento dei mostri”.
I significati cambiano, si adattano e cambiano mentre trasgrediscono i confini, abitano spazi pubblici e privati e si dispiegano su vasti abissi di tempo, e così dobbiamo fare noi.
“Che cosa si deve fare?”; come chiedeva Lenin nel saggio che infiammò la Rivoluzione russa.
Come ho scritto nel mio post del 30 agosto 2022, Centenario delle Barricate di Parma e della Resistenza Antifascista di Guido Picelli e L’Ardito del Popolo;
Cento anni fa, in agosto, la resistenza antifascista di Guido Picelli e L’Ardito del Popolo combatteva a Parma una gloriosa battaglia per l’anima dell’umanità e il destino del mondo contro l’ondata del fascismo e delle camicie nere di Mussolini a Parma, preludio alla Marcia sul Roma che ha aperto le porte all’Olocausto e alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale, così simile alla nostra insurrezione del 6 gennaio che ci minaccia ancora con il ritorno del fascismo come Quarto Reich.
Ora come allora, e in ogni generazione dell’umanità, siamo definiti dal modo in cui affrontiamo coloro che vorrebbero schiavizzarci e l’oscurità dentro di noi che minaccia di consumarci, i difetti della nostra umanità e la frattura del mondo; solidali come un gruppo di fratelli e un’umanità unita, o soggiogati attraverso gerarchie e divisioni di appartenenza alle élite e alterità escludenti, come società libera di eguali o con fascismi di sangue, fede e terra. Come recita il giuramento di resistenza prestatomi da Jean Genet a Beirut; “Giuriamo lealtà gli uni agli altri, di resistere e di non cedere, e di non abbandonare i nostri simili”.
Per Antifa e la Resistenza gli Arditi sono un importante antenato storico, ma anche per tutti coloro che amano la Libertà, ovunque gli uomini abbiano fame di essere liberi.
Qui c’è anche un avvertimento sulla necessità di Solidarnosc e sui pericoli di frattura ideologica, poiché gli Arditi non riuscirono a sconfiggere il fascismo alla sua nascita per le stesse ragioni per cui Rosa Luxemburg e i socialdemocratici tedeschi non furono in grado di contrastare l’ascesa di Hitler.
A questa patologia della disconnessione e al terrore del nostro nulla, alla divisione e alla disperazione di fronte a una forza soverchiante, rispondo con Buffy the Vampire Slayer citando le istruzioni ai sacerdoti nel Book of Common Prayer nell’episodio undici della settima stagione, Showtime , dopo aver attirato un nemico in un’arena per sconfiggerlo in battaglia come dimostrazione alle sue reclute; “Non so cosa succederà dopo. Ma so che sarà proprio così: duro, doloroso. Ma alla fine saremo noi. Se tutti facciamo la nostra parte, credeteci, saremo quelli che rimarranno in piedi. Qui finisce la lezione”.
The beauty and grandeur of anticolonial resistance and liberation struggle unto death, against impossible odds, and of solidarity in action which affirms our humanity under tyranny and state terror as imposed conditions of struggle; the 1916 Easter Uprising speaks to us of resilience and the limitless capacity of humankind to overcome unequal systems of power by refusal to submit.
Here is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us, and like Dorothy’s Magic Ruby Slippers bears the power to send us home and confer ownership of ourselves and realization of those truths written in our flesh.
The 1916 Easter Uprising was both tragic and glorious; tragic because it was answered not with brotherhood and solidarity by the English people as a united front with the Irish against systemic oppression versus divisions of language, faith, history, and national identity weaponized for centuries by the British Empire in service to power, but by forces of reaction and the Occupation. Glorious, because the Uprising was a Defining Moment which turned the tide of history and created the Republic of Ireland as a sovereign and independent nation, and because the Irish people fought on beyond hope of victory or survival.
This is where freedom is born. In the words of Max Stirner; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
As I wrote in my post of February 8 2020, Hope for the Union of Ireland: Sinn Fein Wins a Place at the Table; Today we celebrate with triumphant joy the electoral victory of Sinn Fein, the Irish party of liberation and social justice, which puts Union back on the table, the glorious dream of freedom from the colonial imperialist tyranny of England, which squats like a toad of foulness on the shores of Northern Ireland.
What if all the former colonies of the British Empire sent troops to aid the people of Ireland in their struggle for liberty? How then can tyranny survive?
Imagine with me a United Humanity of Free Peoples and Army of Liberation comprised of former slaves and victims of oppression with a historic mandate to export the revolution and bring justice to all humankind, India and America, Zimbabwe and Malaysia, Australia and Eqypt, Israel and Singapore, and so many others. Such a force would be unstoppable, would sweep across hierarchies of authoritarian force and control like the Black soldiers of the Union Army who liberated Richmond and brought the Confederacy to submission or the Allied victory over fascism in the Second World War.
Liberty is a dream resonant with historic momentum and power; we need only harness it to ride to victory on its tides.
So I wrote three years ago, and with electoral victory of May last year we moved a step nearer to our goal of Union; Northern Ireland with Ireland as one sovereign and independent nation. So very like the Thousand Day War in which the people of Vietnam liberated themselves from colonial Occupation and reunited their nation; the imposed conditions of struggle may yet force a return to such strategies as Vietnam used to win independence, but for now the peace holds and the struggle is limited to the arena of electoral politics. This too I celebrate; voting is always better than shooting.
Here in Ireland we play what in chess is called a Long Game, in which the sacrifices we make along the way to liberation become our stepping stones to victory. And with the issue of trade as leverage, and all of the intractable issues signified by the term Brexit, as our civilization begins to collapse from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions amid a changing world order, we now have unique opportunities for revolutionary struggle and for independence.
As Guillermo Del Toro teaches us in Carnival Row; “Who is Chaos good for? Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
As I wrote in m y post of September 23 2021, When Things Fall Apart and the Center Cannot Hold, Embrace Change; Transformative change and the forces of Chaos lie at the heart of our universe, a reality and medium of being characterized by illusion and impermanence, destruction and recreation, as its central motive principle.
Chaos is a forge of creation which endlessly generates contradictions and paradoxes as the forking points of universes, of multiplicities and relative truths, a wellspring of life and the realization of unknowns but also of our darkness born of attachment to that which is by its nature ephemeral and transitory, and moreover a world filled with falsifications of ourselves, echoes and reflections like the distorted images in funhouse mirrors which multiply into infinity as a theft of our uniqueness and our souls.
The trauma of death and of life disruptive change, and our immersion in a sea of grief, despair, and terror; when the anchorages and truths we cling to have shifted and cast us adrift into topologies of the unknown, when we dare to look behind the curtain and the figures of our faith are revealed to be lies and instruments of our subjugation, when these existential threats and crises of hope, trust, and faith combine as they have this past year with the loneliness of our modern pathology of disconnectedness, how shall we answer our nothingness?
To this I say, how can we not embrace Chaos and transformative change, when it is endless and ongoing, and challenges us to live in the eternal now? Why fix and react wholly to its negative aspects as death and destruction, when it offers us equally possibilities of liberation from order and authority, self-creation, autonomy, and unknowns to explore, and a space of free creative play?
Here is Yeats great and visionary poem The Second Coming, written in the wake of three successive mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order and oppression from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917. It is a song of rage against the dying of the light, of the embrace of our darkness, and of warning that the lies and illusions which enforce authority and our subjugation are and must always fail with cataclysms, but for myself it is also a song of hope.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
As I wrote in my post of January 30 2022, Fifty Year Anniversary of Bloody Sunday; Fifty years ago the massacre of Irish citizens by the British Army, an atrocity of state terror known throughout the world as Bloody Sunday, shifted American and global public and official support to the cause of Irish nationalism and reunification and like the brutal repression of Gandhi’s Salt Tax Protest delegitimized the British Empire. We have not yet fully emerged from the shadows of our imperial and colonial histories, but in the last century since the collapse of civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions in World War One and the revolutions and liberation movements which swept the world the tides have begun to turn.
Such is the terror and ruin of the age in which we live, and of its hope and glories as a liminal time of the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
The people of a nation are living echoes, reflections, consequences, and bearers of its histories, and the people of Ireland are no different in this from any other, our songs of survival, resistance, and triumph over those who would enslave us acting like forces of nature, like the winds and the tides, to shape us as informing and motivating sources. So national identities are formed from the legacies of our stories, both as epigenetic and multigenerational trauma and harms and as freedom and the ownership of ourselves.
History, memory, identity; we are prochronisms, histories expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation over vast epochs of time, truths written in our flesh like the shells of fantastic sea creatures.
What has been written in our lives has all too often been a tale of tyranny and repression, imperial conquest and colonialism, the theft of the soul by carceral states of force and control, and the consequences of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by the state as organized violence and enslavement by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and divisions of exclusionary otherness by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
And this we must resist, by any means necessary. To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again.
When those who would enslave us and steal our souls come for us, let them find not a humankind subjugated by police terror and the control of false histories and propaganda, abjection and learned helplessness, but united in solidarity and refusal to submit.
Whosoever refuses to submit becomes Unconquered and free, and this power of self ownership cannot be taken from us. Here also is the moment of decision wherein the tide turns and tyrannies of force and control break; for the social use of force is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disobedience. This great truth is the keystone of my art of revolution, and why liberation movements will eventually be victorious when applied as disruptive forces to systems of unequal power which will inevitably fail from their internal contradictions.
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those others tell about us. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Tyrants may own the monstrous shadows of the past, but the future is ours.
Liam Neeson reads WB Yeats’ Easter 1916
Michael Collins’ speech, in the film starring Liam Neeson
1916: The Easter Rising (Episode 1 – Tom Clarke)
the global brotherhood of nations liberated from the British Empire
Each year we commemorate the eight Days of Remembrance of the Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust, in Israel with moments of silence as whole cities pause while air raid sirens warn of impending attack, lest we forget and think the danger is long past and we ourselves safe, and throughout the world those engaged in revolutionary struggle against brutal tyrannies and in resistance to the force and control of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil reflect on the example of our sacred dead and their glorious Last Stand in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which affirms our common human being, meaning, and value.
I wonder now, on the eighty first anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, if we have learned its lessons; of vigilance against fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and tyrannies of force and control, especially which may arise within ourselves as atavisms of instinct and fear shaped by submission to authority and systems of unequal power, of divisions of exclusionary otherness and belonging, and the existential threats of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and of solidarity in resistance and our duty of care for others.
We see the lines of fracture in our systems as we struggle to birth a true free society of equals and emerge from the legacies of our history and from elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and nowhere on earth are we free from our addiction to power and its manifold consequences. Yet we resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows, as the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet goes; and this is the hope of humankind.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
All over the world, those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, will remember and rise again to claw their way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand.
Who resists and refuses to submit to force cannot be conquered or subjugated. This is the great lesson of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and why we remember it; because we must if we are to remain human, owners of ourselves if nothing more, and free.
To disambiguate between our two days of remembrance, the United Nation’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27 marks the day in 1945 when the Soviet Red Army liberated the Auschwitz–Birkenau concentration camp; an achievement of liberation struggle and international solidarity, a good and noble cause to celebrate. But Israel and the United States have chosen the Yom HaShoah date of Nisan 27 on the Hebrew calendar for the 8-day DRVH commemoration something else entirely; the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Not the rescue of the Holocaust’s victims, but the resistance unto death and solidarity with each other of a people who refused to submit to unjust authority, tyranny, and state terror.
In Resistance we become Unconquered and free.
It began with a teenage girl who threw a Molotov cocktail at the Nazis as they marched into the Ghetto. One little girl, with no weapons and no training, who said no.
As described by the only surviving commander of the Uprising, Dr. Marek Edelman, author of Resisting the Holocaust: Fighting Back in the Warsaw Ghetto, who fought on as the city was burned around them, they fought against impossible odds not to escape, for there was nowhere to escape to in occupied Poland, nor to buy time, for no help was coming, but only “to pick the time and place of our deaths”.
This I dispute, for the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising did far more than to claim their own freedom in seizing ownership of their lives in challenge to authority and refusal to obey force and control; they showed the rest of us how to live, and how to become free.
In the words of Max Stirner; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
As written by Ben Cohen in the Jerusalem Press, in an article entitled ‘From Every Floor, From Every Window:’ Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; “Now something unprecedented took place. Three officers with lowered machine pistols appeared. They wore white rosettes in their buttonholes – emissaries. They desired to negotiate with the Area Command. They proposed a 15-minute truce to remove the dead and the wounded. They were also ready to promise all inhabitants an orderly evacuation to working camps in Poniatow and Trawniki, and to let them take along all their belongings. Firing was our answer. Every house remained a hostile fortress. From every floor, from every window, bullets sought hated German helmets, hated German hearts.”
There are many inspiring stories from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, the 80th anniversary of which is being marked this week, but the passage quoted above is probably the one that left the deepest impression upon me.
I first read it many years ago, when I picked up a copy of “The Ghetto Fights,” a memoir by Marek Edelman, who was a leader of the Bund, the pre-war Jewish Socialist party, and who participated in the uprising against the Nazi occupiers. Edelman was describing the aftermath of the epic battle that commenced on April 19, 1943, when the Germans attempted to liquidate the ghetto with columns of troops, armored vehicles and tanks, and with heavy artillery pieces placed outside its walls. But the Jewish resistance fighters inside had anticipated their arrival; in the ensuing combat, the Germans became trapped at the intersection of Mila and Zamenhofa Streets, with their intended path to a safe retreat fatally exposed to the guns wielded by the fighters of the ZOB and the ZZW, the two Jewish military organizations in the ghetto. “Not a single German left this area alive,” wrote Edelman.
At the same time, further German units were pinned down in Nalewki and Gesia streets. “German blood flooded the street,” Edelman recalled. “German ambulances continuously transported their wounded to the small square near the Community buildings. Here the wounded lay in rows on the sidewalk awaiting their tum to be admitted to the hospital.” By 2 p.m. that same day, the Jewish fighters realized that they had won a key battle over their oppressors.
The Germans returned to the ghetto walls 24 hours later and were again met with hails of bullets and deadly attacks using what we now call Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). It was at this point that the three German officers described by Edelman came begging for a ceasefire, in order to collect their dead and wounded. In that precise moment, the role of the Jew and the German, of the “Untermensch” and the “Aryan”—cemented over the previous decade by the growing power of the Third Reich—was utterly inverted. Every bullet fired at the Germans was a riposte to the grotesque slogan carved into the gates of Auschwitz, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Makes You Free”). And every German who fell while attempting to rescue his wounded comrades was a sign that the humanity of the Jews had not been extinguished—that they were real agents making real decisions, including the decision to deny the enemy any form of mercy or regard amid the heat of the fighting.
The energy and the intensity shown by the 700 poorly armed young Jewish fighters reflected the understanding, deep in their hearts, that the battle for the ghetto was not ultimately one in which they would prevail. “We knew we couldn’t win,” wrote Mira Fuchrer, just 21 years old, one of the women fighters who came from the ranks of the Labor Zionist Hashomer Hatzair organization.
“We fought so we could die with dignity.” For Fuchrer’s boyfriend, the 22-year-old commander of the ZOB, Mordechai Anielewicz, the sheer fact of the uprising was a fillip to Europe’s Jews in their darkest hour, and therefore in itself a victory. “The dream of my life has risen to become fact,” he reflected at the height of the fighting. “Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts! I have been a witness to the magnificent, heroic fighting of Jewish men of battle.”
Like other aspects of the Holocaust and World War II more generally, the details of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising have become richer and more complicated with further research over time. Critically, thanks largely to the painstaking work of the late Moshe Arens, a former Israeli cabinet minister, we now know that there was not just one—as was assumed for several decades—but two military groups in the ghetto. As well as the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), which drew supporters of the non-Zionist Bund and left-wing Zionists such as Dror and Hashomer Hatzair, there was the Jewish Military Union (ZZW), commanded by Pawel Frenkel and rooted in the Revisionist Zionist Betar movement of Vladimir Jabotinsky.
The political divide between these two organizations was unmistakable, as was the internal split within the ZOB between those leftists who supported the creation of a Jewish state and those who saw Zionism as a needless deviation from the proletarian class struggle (but not, I should emphasize, as a “racist,” “colonialist” project in the manner of those who define themselves as anti-Zionists today). Yet the imperative of defeating the Germans was overwhelming, and so the ZOB and the ZZW, Betarniks and Bundists alike, forged a strategic alliance. The ZOB distributed its fighters at different points around the ghetto while the ZZW concentrated its forces in Muranowska Square, flying a blue-and-white Zionist flag alongside a Polish one from its headquarters as it pushed back against the German advance.
The vicious urban fighting lasted for nearly a month before the Germans were able to declare victory. “The former Jewish Quarter in Warsaw is no more,” announced the SS Commander Jurgen Stroop in a May 16, 1943 cable to his superiors in Berlin.
In the event, the ghetto was razed, and most of the surviving fighters committed suicide rather than face capture and humiliation at the hands of the Germans. The 42,000 Jews who still remained in the ghetto two years after the Germans began the mass deportation of the community were transported either to the Majdanek concentration camp or the labor camps at Poniatow and Trawnicki. Most of them were murdered at those locations during a two-day mass shooting operation in November 1943.
“Never say that you are walking the final road/Though leaden skies obscure blue days,” the ghetto fighters would sing. “The hour we have been longing for will still come/Our steps will drum—we are here!”
Eighty years later, as their descendants wrestle with a resurgence of antisemitism (albeit in far more favorable circumstances—the existence of a Jewish state, full civil and political rights in most countries where Jews live) we should not only wish that their memory remains a blessing. Let it strengthen us, too.”
Montage From The Pianist film, set to music by Matt Maltese, As the World Caves In
On Genocide: Commentary On the film The Pianist
Hebrew
19 באפריל 2024 לעולם לא עוד: ימי הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה
בכל שנה אנו מציינים את שמונת ימי הזיכרון לחללי הקדושים וגיבורי השואה, בישראל ברגעי דממה כאשר ערים שלמות עוצרות בזמן שסירנות תקיפות אוויר מזהירות מפני תקיפה צפויה, שמא נשכח ונחשוב שהסכנה עברה מזמן ואנחנו בעצמנו. בטוחים, וברחבי העולם העוסקים במאבק מהפכני נגד עריצות אכזרית ובהתנגדות לכוח ולשליטה של פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה משקפים את הדוגמה של המתים הקדושים שלנו ועמידתם האחרונה המפוארת במרד גטו ורשה. מאשר את האדם המשותף, המשמעות והערך שלנו.
אני תוהה עכשיו, במלאת 80 שנה למרד גטו ורשה, אם למדנו את לקחיו; של ערנות מפני פשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה ועריצות של כוח ושליטה, במיוחד שעלולים להתעורר בתוכנו כאטביזם של אינסטינקט ופחד המעוצבים על ידי כניעה לסמכות ולמערכות של כוח לא שוויוני, של חלוקות של אחרות ושייכות מוציאות, ו האיומים הקיומיים של זיוף ודה-הומניזציה ושל סולידריות בהתנגדות וחובתנו לדאוג לזולת.
אנו רואים את קווי השבר במערכות שלנו כאשר אנו נאבקים להוליד חברה חופשית אמיתית של שווים ולצאת ממורשת ההיסטוריה שלנו ומהגמוניות עילית של עושר, כוח וזכות, ובשום מקום על פני כדור הארץ איננו חופשיים מההתמכרות שלנו. לכוח ולהשלכותיו הרבות. אולם אנו מתנגדים ואינם מפסיקים, ואינו נוטשים את חברינו, כפי שנאמרת שבועת ההתנגדות שניתנה לי על ידי ז’אן ז’נה; וזוהי התקווה של האנושות.
בסופו של דבר, כל מה שחשוב הוא מה אנחנו עושים עם הפחד שלנו, ואיך אנחנו משתמשים בכוח שלנו. תעשה משהו יפה עם שלך.
בכל רחבי העולם, אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי הארץ, חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והמחוקים, יזכרו ויקומו שוב כדי לצאת מהחורבות ולעשות עוד דוכן אחרון.
מי שמתנגד ומסרב להיכנע לכוח אי אפשר לכבוש או להכניע. זהו הלקח הגדול של מרד גטו ורשה, ומדוע אנו זוכרים אותו; כי עלינו להישאר אנושיים, הבעלים של עצמנו אם לא יותר, וחופשיים.
כדי לבלבל בין שני ימי הזיכרון שלנו, יום הזיכרון הבינלאומי לשואה של האו”ם, 27 בינואר, מציין את היום בשנת 1945 שבו שחרר הצבא האדום הסובייטי את מחנה הריכוז אושוויץ-בירקנאו; הישג של מאבק שחרור וסולידריות בינלאומית, מטרה טובה ואצילית לחגוג. אבל ישראל וארה”ב בחרו את תאריך יום השואה כ”ז בניסן בלוח העברי להנצחת DRVH בת 8 ימים משהו אחר לגמרי; יום השנה למרד גטו ורשה ב-1943. לא הצלת קורבנות השואה, אלא התנגדות למוות וסולידריות זה עם זה של עם שסירב להיכנע לסמכות בלתי צודקת, לעריצות ולטרור המדינה.
בהתנגדות אנו הופכים ללא כבש וחופשי.
זה התחיל בילדה מתבגרת שזרקה בקבוק תבערה לעבר הנאצים כשצעדו לגטו. ילדה אחת קטנה, בלי נשק ובלי הכשרה, שאמרה לא.
כפי שתיאר המפקד היחיד שנותר בחיים של המרד, ד”ר מרק אדלמן, מחבר הספר “התנגדות לשואה: נלחם בחזרה בגטו ורשה”, שנלחם בזמן שהעיר נשרפה סביבם, הם נלחמו כנגד סיכויים בלתי אפשריים לא לברוח, שכן לא היה לאן לברוח בפולין הכבושה, וגם לא לקנות זמן, כי שום עזרה לא הגיעה, אלא רק “לבחור את הזמן והמקום של מותנו”.
על זה אני חולק, שכן גיבורי מרד גטו ורשה עשו הרבה יותר מאשר לתבוע את חירותם בעצמם בכיבוש הבעלות על חייהם תוך אתגר לסמכות וסירוב לציית לכוח ולשליטה; הם הראו לכולנו איך לחיות, ואיך להיות חופשיים.
במילותיו של מקס סטירנר; “לא ניתן להעניק חופש; יש לתפוס אותו.”
Polish
19 kwietnia 2024 Nigdy więcej: Dni Pamięci o Męczennikach i Bohaterach Holokaustu
Każdego roku upamiętniamy osiem Dni Pamięci Męczenników i Bohaterów Holokaustu w Izraelu chwilami ciszy, gdy całe miasta zatrzymują się, podczas gdy syreny alarmowe ostrzegają przed zbliżającym się atakiem, abyśmy nie zapomnieli i nie pomyśleli, że niebezpieczeństwo już dawno minęło, a my sami bezpieczni, a na całym świecie ci, którzy angażują się w rewolucyjną walkę przeciwko brutalnej tyranii oraz w opór wobec siły i kontroli faszyzmu krwi, wiary i ziemi, zastanawiają się nad przykładem naszych świętych zmarłych i ich chwalebną ostatnią walką w powstaniu w getcie warszawskim, które potwierdza naszą wspólną istotę ludzką, znaczenie i wartość.
Zastanawiam się teraz, w 80. rocznicę powstania w getcie warszawskim, czy wyciągnęliśmy z niego wnioski; czujności wobec faszyzmu krwi, wiary i ziemi oraz tyranii siły i kontroli, zwłaszcza tych, które mogą powstać w nas jako atawizmy instynktu i strachu ukształtowane przez poddanie się władzy i systemom nierównej władzy, podziałom wykluczającej inności i przynależności oraz egzystencjalne zagrożenia fałszerstwem i dehumanizacją, solidarnością w oporze i naszym obowiązkiem troski o innych.
Widzimy linie pęknięcia w naszych systemach, gdy walczymy o narodziny prawdziwie wolnego społeczeństwa równych i wyłaniamy się z dziedzictwa naszej historii oraz z elitarnych hegemonii bogactwa, władzy i przywilejów, i nigdzie na ziemi nie jesteśmy wolni od naszego uzależnienia władzy i jej wielorakich konsekwencji. Jednak opieramy się i nie przestajemy, i nie opuszczamy naszych towarzyszy, jak mówi Przysięga Oporu dana mi przez Jeana Geneta; i to jest nadzieja ludzkości.
Ostatecznie liczy się tylko to, co zrobimy z naszym strachem i jak wykorzystamy naszą moc. Zrób coś pięknego ze swoim.
Na całym świecie ci, których Frantz Fanon nazwał Nędznikami Ziemi, bezsilni i wywłaszczeni, wyciszeni i wymazani, będą pamiętali i powstaną ponownie, by wydostać się z ruin i stoczyć kolejną Ostatnią Bastion.
Kto stawia opór i odmawia poddania się sile, nie może zostać pokonany ani ujarzmiony. To jest wielka lekcja powstania w getcie warszawskim i dlaczego ją pamiętamy; ponieważ musimy, jeśli mamy pozostać ludźmi, właścicielami samych siebie i wolnymi.
Aby ujednoznacznić nasze dwa dni pamięci, Międzynarodowy Dzień Pamięci o Holokauście ustanowiony przez ONZ, 27 stycznia to dzień wyzwolenia przez Armię Czerwoną obozu koncentracyjnego Auschwitz-Birkenau w 1945 roku; osiągnięcie walki wyzwoleńczej i międzynarodowej solidarności, dobry i szlachetny powód do świętowania. Ale Izrael i Stany Zjednoczone wybrały datę Yom HaShoah 27 Nisan w kalendarzu hebrajskim na 8-dniowe obchody DRVH na coś zupełnie innego; rocznica powstania w getcie warszawskim 1943 r. Nie ratowanie ofiar Holokaustu, ale opór aż do śmierci i wzajemna solidarność narodu, który nie poddał się niesprawiedliwej władzy, tyranii i państwowemu terrorowi.
W Ruchu Oporu stajemy się Niezwyciężeni i wolni.
Zaczęło się od nastolatki, która rzuciła koktajlem Mołotowa w nazistów maszerujących do getta. Jedna mała dziewczynka, bez broni i bez wyszkolenia, która powiedziała nie.
Jak opisał jedyny żyjący dowódca Powstania, dr Marek Edelman, autor Resisting the Holocaust: Fighting Back in the Warsaw Ghetto, który walczył dalej, gdy wokół nich płonęło miasto, walczyli z niemożliwymi szansami, by nie uciec, bo w okupowanej Polsce nie było dokąd uciec, ani kupić czasu, bo pomoc nie nadchodziła, a jedynie „wybrać czas i miejsce naszej śmierci”.
Kwestionuję to, ponieważ bohaterowie powstania w getcie warszawskim zrobili znacznie więcej niż tylko domaganie się własnej wolności, przejmując odpowiedzialność za swoje życie, rzucając wyzwanie władzy i odmawiając posłuszeństwa wobec siły i kontroli; pokazali reszcie z nas, jak żyć i jak stać się wolnymi.
Słowami Maxa Stirnera; „Wolności nie można przyznać; trzeba go przejąć”.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, a reading list
Resisting the Holocaust: Fighting Back in the Warsaw Ghetto, Marek Edelman,
Barry Carr (Editor)
Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Hanna Krall, Marek Edelman, Lawrence Weschler (Translator), Joanna Stasinska (Translator)
A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Barbara Harshav (Translator), Yitzhak (“Antek”) Zuckerman
Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter, Kazik (Simha Rotem), Barbara Harshav
(Editor)
Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Israel Gutman
The Bravest Battle: The Twenty-eight Days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,
Dan Kurzman
Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto, Samuel D. Kassow