Our celebrations of D Day and the historic victory over fascism has witnessed signs and wonders; Zelensky has embraced the few survivors of that tragic and glorious day when we stood against the darkness in solidarity as a Band of Brothers, and Biden and Macron have pledged America and France to the defense of Ukraine.
It is a day I have awaited since an incident of the Last Stand at Mariupol, when I spent several hours crawling through the bloody remains of the dead in collapsed tunnels under bombardment, lightless warrens filled with the sounds of the dying whom I could not help. This disturbed me not at all; but I spent days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when I discovered what the Russian Army was doing with the children they stole. Some things are beyond the limits of the human, and for this there are no words.
What is absolutely new in this war, ongoing since the Russian capture of Crimea in 2014, is Allied willingness to directly strike Russia and support direct action by others within Russia. This changes everything.
Of the countless resistance groups in Russia today fighting to liberate the nation from the regime of Putin and bring an end to his mad quest of imperial conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa now ongoing in ten theatres of World War Three, I know nothing whatever other than guesses and very indirect communications with one network, the one that I founded as the Abraham Lincoln Brigades of Ukraine and Russia from the few hundred survivors of the Last Stand at the Steelworks in Mariupol who managed to escape with me as the city was being cordoned off for annihilation and the murder or enslavement of its people. We were joined at Warsaw by several hundred volunteers from the intelligence and special operations community throughout Europe and beyond, often legacy allies from the great struggle against the Nazis, and linked hands with two crucial movements of the Russian people; the democracy movement which has permeated civilian society and the peace moment within the Russian military, both of which have long been operating with the Ukrainians.
This is why I know that any nation who wishes to send advisors, troops, arms, or any imaginable aid whatever to bring the fight home to Russia in liberation struggle will find partners on the ground to fight with, exactly as the O.S.S. which became the C.I.A. and the Jedburgh teams which became the Green Berets found and became interdependent with the Resistance throughout occupied Europe. Now as then, we can set each other free if we stand together.
Let us not mistake the gravity and peril of this moment, for the fate of humankind now hangs in the balance. Russia may fold when confronted, as they did during the Cuban Missile Crisis; or this may open the door to the most terrible war the world has yet known, and even if we are victorious we will be driven to extremes of brute survival which sees the fall of civilization into centuries of barbarism. At best, something like ourselves, stumbling over forgotten ruins, will one day discover that we were once more than masters and slaves, more than beasts ruled by atavisms of instinct, and begin to rise toward humanity.
This is still better than the alternative; appeasement and failure to unite in our defense will begin the Age of Tyrants, six to eight centuries of totalitarian states savaging one another in wars of imperial conquest and dominion with weapons of unimaginable horror and destruction and ending in the extinction of our species.
I believe we may have one to two chances out of every hundred possible futures of surviving the next millennium, and I am being optimistic.
When those who would enslave us come for us and for others, as they always have and will, let them find not a humanity subjugated by learned helplessness and division, but united in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights. If we do this, we may hope to remain human.
Let us reply to Putin and all tyrants with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
Join us.
As written by Patrick Wintour in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘We’re in 1938 now’: Putin’s war in Ukraine and lessons from history; “When big history is self-evidently being written, and leaders face momentous choices, the urge to find inspiration in instructive historical parallels is overwhelming and natural. “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done,” the Oxford historian RG Collingwood once wrote.
One of the contemporary politicians most influenced by the past is the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, and not just because of her country’s occupation by Russia or her personal family history of exile.
She lugs books on Nato-Russian relations, such as Not One Inch, with her on beach holidays. And in her hi-tech office at the top of the old town in Tallinn, she argued this was a 1938 moment – a moment when a wider war was imminent but the west had not yet joined the dots.
She said the same mistake was made in 1938 when tensions in Abyssinia, Japan and Germany were treated as isolated events. The proximate causes of the current conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, the South China Sea and even Armenia might be different, but the bigger picture showed an interconnected battlefield in which post-cold war certainties had given way to “great-power competition” in which authoritarian leaders were testing the boundaries of their empires. The lesson – and necessity – was to resist and rearm. “The lesson from 1938 and 1939 is that if aggression pays off somewhere, it serves as an invitation to use it elsewhere,” Kallas said.
Her favourite historian, Prof Tim Snyder, adds a twist by reimagining 1938 as a year in which Czechoslovakia, like Ukraine in 2022, had chosen to fight: “So you had in Czechoslovakia, like Ukraine, an imperfect democracy. It’s the farthest democracy in eastern Europe. It has various problems, but when threatened by a larger neighbour, it chooses to resist. In that world, where Czechoslovakia resists, there’s no second world war.”
Snyder said such an outcome had been possible. “They could have held the Germans back. It was largely a bluff on the German side. If the Czechs resisted, and the French and the British and maybe the Americans eventually started to help, there would have been a conflict, but there wouldn’t have been a second world war.
“Instead, when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it was invading Poland with the Czech armaments industry, which was the best in the world. It was invading with Slovak soldiers. It was invading from a geographical position that it only gained because it had destroyed Czechoslovakia.”
Snyder drove home his lesson from history: “If Ukrainians give up, or if we give up on Ukraine, then it’s different. It’s Russia making war in the future. It’s Russia making war with Ukrainian technology, Ukrainian soldiers from a different geographical position. At that point, we’re in 1939. We’re in 1938 now. In effect, what Ukrainians are letting us do is extend 1938.”
A return to Churchill’s ‘locust years’?
As Christopher Hitchens once wrote, much American foolishness abroad, from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, has been launched on the back of Munich syndrome, the belief that those who appease bullies, as the then British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, sought to do with Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938, are either dupes or cowards. Such leaders are eventually forced to put their soldiers into battle, often unprepared and ill-equipped – men against machines, as vividly described in Guilty Men, written by Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard after the Dunkirk fiasco. In France, the insult Munichois – synonymous with cowardice – sums it up.
But Snyder made his remarks in Tallinn last month at the Lennart Meri conference, which was largely dedicated to Ukraine and held under the slogan “Let us not despair, but act”. It was held against the backdrop of Russia and China hailing a new authoritarian world order in a joint 6,000-word statement that intended to create an axis to undo the settlement of the past two world wars.
Many at the conference wrestled with how much had gone wrong in Ukraine, and why, and whether the west would shed its self-imposed constraints on helping Kyiv. In a sense, everyone wanted an answer to the question posed by the Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski: “Ukraine has bought us time. Will we put it to good use?”
In 1934-35, what Winston Churchill termed the “locust years”, and again after the Munich agreement, Britain did not put the time to good use, instead allowing Germany to race ahead in rearmament.
Johann Wadephul, the deputy chair of the German Christian Democratic Union’s defence policy committee, fears the answer to Sikorski’s question is in the negative. “If the war goes on like it is, it’s clear Ukraine will lose. It cannot withstand Russian power with its well-organised support from Iran, China and North Korea and countries like India looking only at its self-interest.”
Europe had simply not reorganised itself for war, he said. Listing the consequences for the continent in terms of lost human rights, access to resources and confidence in the west, he said simply: “If Ukraine loses it will be a catastrophe.”
Samir Saran, the head of the Indian thinktank the Observer Research Foundation, who described himself as an atheist in a room full of believers, nevertheless agreed that something bigger than Europe was at stake as he almost mocked the inability of the west’s $40tn economy to organise a battlefield defeat of Russia’s $2tn economy.
He argued: “There is one actor that has reorganised its strategic engagement to fight a war and the other has not. One side is not participating in the battle. You have hosted conferences supporting Ukraine and then do nothing more. But when it comes to action, Russia 2.0 is grinding forward.
“It tells countries like us that if something like this were to happen in the Indo-Pacific, you have no chance against China. If you cannot defeat a $2tn nation, don’t think you are deterring China. China is taking hope from your abysmal and dismal performance against a much smaller adversary.”
Yet it is paradoxical. Nato is bigger and stronger than ever. The transatlantic alliance is functioning far better than the US, France and Britain did in the 1930s – and, after five months of hesitation, some of the extra $60bn in US arms may reach the frontline within weeks.
But from Kyiv’s perspective, everything remains too slow and circumscribed, except for the apportionment of blame across Europe. Germany’s Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, the Free Democratic party’s top candidate for the European elections, takes one side, urging France to hasten weapons deliveries to Ukraine. She said: “We have the problem that, while Poland is doing a lot as a neighbouring country, while Germany is doing a lot, France is doing relatively little.”
Others say the culprit remains Berlin, and that, despite recognising what a threat Vladimir Putin represents, it cannot accept the consequences in terms of the nuclear risks of going all in for a Russian defeat. Benjamin Tallis, a senior research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, said: “For all of this talk of political will, what we actually face is political won’t. We won’t define victory as a goal.”
Without naming Germany, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, reinvented over the past year as a scourge of Russian imperialism, said: “Europe clearly faces a moment when it will be necessary not to be cowards.”
Ben Wallace, the former UK defence secretary, had less compunction about naming names. “[Olaf] Scholz’s behaviour has shown that, as far as the security of Europe goes, he is the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time,” he said of the German chancellor.
Eliot Cohen, a neocon never-Trumper, finds a wider institutional and moral malaise that needs addressing through a theory of victory and a specific practical plan to secure that victory, something akin to Churchill’s call for a ministry of supply that turned the UK into a giant armaments factory.
Cohen said: “It’s not about what people say, it’s about numbers. Are you willing to lift the restrictions on arms factories to run them 24 hours a day? Are you willing to give them Atacms [missiles] and hit targets in Russia, and get Germany to give them Taurus missiles?
“My chief concern is that war is so remote from our societies that we have trouble grappling with what success requires.”
Would Putin turn off his war machine?
Sabine Fischer, a political scientist at the German Council on Foreign Relations, says behind these disputes is the pivot around which every judgment turns: whether Europe believes a Ukrainian defeat can be contained. In other words, what are the consequences for Europe, if any, if Ukraine collapses or a Russian-dictated peace leads to its retention of land gained by military conquest?
Would a victorious Putin husband his resources, turn off the war machine and say the recapture of Kievan Rus had been a self-standing Moscow objective and Russia’s imperial ambitions were now sated? After all, not every state that makes demands has unlimited ambitions.
The Hungarian president, Viktor Orbán, for instance, said: “I do not consider it logical that Russia, which cannot even defeat Ukraine, would all of a sudden come and swallow the western world whole. The chances of this are extremely slim.” An attack on an existing Nato state would be “crazy” since the Nato alliance would have to respond.
But Russia’s foreign policy concept issued in 2023 focuses on a global confrontation with the US and building the alliances to defeat the west. Given Putin’s unrivalled record of broken promises, a Russian peace guarantee might end up as reassuring as Chamberlain’s advice to the British people to have a quiet night’s sleep after he returned from Munich. The US president, Joe Biden, interviewed in Time magazine this week, appeared to regard the consequences as vast. “If we ever let Ukraine go down, mark my words: you’ll see Poland go, and you’ll see all those nations along the actual border of Russia, from the Balkans and Belarus, all those, they’re going to make their own accommodations.”
Others say the Polish response will be less conciliatory. One former Nato commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said eastern states would not wait to find out Putin’s next move. “If Ukraine fails, I am certain that our Polish allies are not going to sit behind the Vistula [River] and wait for them to keep coming. I think the Romanian allies are not going to sit behind the Prut River and wait for Russia to go into Moldova. So the best way to prevent Nato from being involved directly in a conflict is to help Ukraine defeat Russia in Ukraine.”
Fischer believes the consequences of a Russian-dictated peace will not be containable. “Ukraine will experience a new wave of refugees fleeing to the west. The terror regime of the Russian occupation will expand and hundreds of thousands will suffer as a result. The economic, political and security situation will change drastically throughout Ukraine. Partisan warfare could erupt, fuelled by the militarisation of Ukrainian society,” she said.
“The threat situation for the states bordering Ukraine would worsen massively. This is true for Moldova, which would again be in the spotlight, as it was in 2022, especially if Moscow were to take over the Ukrainian Black Sea coast. The cohesive power of the western alliance would be shaken to its core. Russia would continue to weaken Europe from within by building alliances with rightwing, chauvinist populist parties.”
Ukrainians, from President Volodymyr Zelenskiy down, have for more than a year tried to frame the consequences of defeat in lurid terms, in an attempt to shake European torpor and galvanise the west.
Olena Halushenka, the co-founder of the International Center for Ukrainian Victory, urged Europe to think about the bombardment of Kharkiv. “Imagine a city the size of Munich is likely to be without electricity this winter. The cost in terms of millions of migrants will overwhelm Europe.”
Wadephul fears even such framing has not worked. “If you ask the average German on the street: ‘Do you really recognise what is at stake? That we have to spend money not for health but for defence?’ the answers show there is still a lot of persuasion to do. Europeans think they can have this war without thinking they are themselves at war.”
He thinks the guilty men are the leaders who pander to voters who dismiss the Russian threat. That takes the debate back to Germany’s, and specifically the Social Democratic party’s, ambivalence about a Russian defeat. It is not a coincidence that the election slogan of Scholz’s SPD was “a secure peace”.
Scholz himself, for instance, refuses to set Russia’s defeat as an objective, and, after Ukraine’s failed offensive, peace advocates within his party have had a resurgence. The party believes its vote is being squeezed by two parties, one left and the other right, both saying the war is unwinnable. In a sign of the times, Michael Roth, the SPD chair of the Bundestag foreign affairs committee and a supporter of arming Ukraine, is quitting politics, saying he found it was like stepping into a refrigerator to hold the views he did inside his own party.
Dangers of chasing ‘illusions’
Five 20th-century historians, including the Weimar Republic expert Heinrich August Winkler, complained in an open letter that Scholz was not willing to learn the lessons of history or recognise that Russia was bent on the destruction of Ukraine. “The chancellor and the SPD leadership, by drawing red lines, not for Russia but for German politics, weaken Germany’s security policy and benefit Russia.” The government had to come up with a strategy for victory, they argued.
There is even a suspicion that anti-war politicians with access to intelligence reports are leaking pessimistic accounts of German intelligence assessments, reinforcing the impression that Ukraine’s position is hopeless. Ralf Stenger, an SPD member of the Bundestag’s intelligence committee, said Ukraine’s failed offensive last year showed “we can and must prevent Ukraine from losing, but we cannot ensure that it wins”. Anyone who “keeps demanding that weapon A must be delivered more quickly and weapon B in even greater quantities” was chasing illusions, he added. Always increasing the dose when the medicine was not working was “not convincing”.
Critics say this fatalistic narrative – dovetailing with Russia’s main objective, which is to convince the US that further aid is futile – also makes little attempt to identify the lessons of the past two years about the failure to organise a war economy in Europe. Macron coined the phrase “war economy” at the Eurosatory military technology conference outside Paris in June 2022, but there is little sign the promise of such a fundamental reorganisation of Europe’s armaments industry has taken place, or even that anyone was appointed to bring it about.
Liberal market economies are inherently likely to be slower to adapt to war than their authoritarian counterparts, but one of the lessons of the 1930s, and those locust years, is that organising for rearmament entails planning and not just false reassurances, which were the stock in trade of Chamberlain and his predecessor Stanley Baldwin.
The popular lure of an easy peace
The reality was that Britain, overstretched and in debt, fell behind, and calls for a ministry of supply to coordinate the flow of arms were spurned. Nevertheless, Chamberlain complacently predicted that “the terrifying power Britain was building” by boosting its defences “would have a sobering effect on Hitler”.
Something similar happened with regard to ammunition supplies for Ukraine in Europe. In 2023, leaders said they would have 1m shells ready for Ukraine by March 2024, only to admit they could reach only half that number. They promised to reach 2m a year in 2025.
One prominent Ukrainian military adviser said the reality was that the Russian arms industry could now churn out 4.5m shells a year, each costing about only $1,000 to manufacture. Meanwhile, in Europe and the US, a total of 1.3m shells were being produced at an average cost of approximately $4,000. That means Nato is 10 times less efficient, and struggling to locate explosives.
He said: “We need a central plan like in the first or second world war. If governments have an existential demand, a company should not have the ability to make as much profit as they want. It should be regulated. Industrial warfare requires national institutions and a Nato-level industrial warfare committee, which would regulate prices.
“Right now, we have dozens of really high-level, super-important targets each day. And we have only one missile we can use a week, and this is actually insane.”
Some say the picture is improving, but the stark fact, according to Sikorski, is that 40% of the Russian government’s budget is devoted to defence. It is Russia, not Europe, that has built a war economy.
The Ukrainian adviser predicts the west may have caught up in two to three years in drones and munitions, but that means the next few years are the most dangerous the region would face.
In the short term, it is the absence of Patriot batteries, a surface-to-air guided missile, and US-supplied F-16s, agreed in August 2023, that leaves Ukraine so exposed. Only six EU member states – Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Spain – operate Patriot systems. Germany has offered a third battery, and the Dutch part of theirs, but Greece and Spain say they have nothing spare. The date for F-16 deliveries depends on the speed at which pilots can be trained.
But Michael Bohnert, an engineer at the Rand Corporation, sees no sign of a public coordinated military plan to raise the firepower needed, let alone new munitions factories. Incredibly, the adviser to the Polish chief of staff, Krzysztof Król, admitted to a conference last month that after two years “we have not yet created proper conditions for a Ukrainian victory with our plans because political leaders had not yet told them the objective”. If that objective was conveyed, he added, “the military leaders could easily decide what is required. As it is, we give enough only for Ukraine to survive.”
To the extent any European leader has grasped this lacuna, it is Macron, with his emergency meeting in Paris on 26 February to look at ammunition shortfalls and repeated speeches on the existential threat to Europe from the alliance between the far right and Putin.
It will take two meetings, one involving the G7 leaders in Italy next week and then the 75th anniversary Nato summit in Washington in July, to reveal whether the west wishes not to contain Putin, but to defeat him – with all the risk that carries, including for China.
Macron will know many in Europe see the external threat as coming from migration, not Putin, and above all as a French politician, he knows the popular lure of an easy peace. Flowers, not tomatoes, greeted the French prime minister Édouard Daladier, to his surprise, when he returned from Munich in 1938. Knowing full well the threat posed by Hitler, and that he and Chamberlain had betrayed Czechoslovakia, the only democratic country in central eastern Europe, he turned to his counsellor and said of the cheering crowds: “Bunch of fools.”
This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate
‘We’re in 1938 now’: Putin’s war in Ukraine and lessons from history
7 червня 2024 р. Надія для України та людства, якщо це забута надія
Наші святкування Дня D та історичної перемоги над фашизмом стали свідками знамень і чудес; Зеленський прийняв небагатьох, хто вижив у той трагічний і славетний день, коли ми виступили проти темряви в солідарності як Братська група, а Байден і Макрон пообіцяли Америці та Франції захистити Україну.
Це день, якого я чекав після інциденту «Останньої битви» в Маріуполі, коли я провів кілька годин, повзаючи крізь закривавлені останки мертвих у зруйнованих тунелях під бомбардуванням, безсвітні лазні, наповнені звуками вмираючих, яким я не міг допомогти. . Це мене зовсім не турбувало; але я цілими днями кидався і переживав етапи шоку, коли дізнався, що російська армія робила з дітьми, яких вони вкрали. Деякі речі виходять за межі людського, і для цього немає слів.
Абсолютно новим у цій війні, яка триває з моменту захоплення Росією Криму в 2014 році, є готовність Альянсу завдати прямих ударів по Росії та підтримати прямі дії інших усередині Росії. Це все змінює.
З незліченних груп опору в сьогоднішній Росії, які борються за звільнення нації від режиму Путіна та покласти край його божевільним пошукам імперського завоювання та панування в Середземномор’ї, на Близькому Сході, у Східній Європі та Африці, які зараз тривають на десяти театрах Третя світова війна, я нічого не знаю, окрім здогадок і дуже непрямих зв’язків з однією мережею, тією, яку я заснував як Бригади Авраама Лінкольна України та Росії з кількох сотень тих, хто вижив під час Останньої битви на металургійному заводі в Маріуполі, яким вдалося втечі зі мною, оскільки місто було оточене для знищення та вбивства чи поневолення його людей. У Варшаві до нас приєдналися кілька сотень волонтерів з розвідки та спецопераційної спільноти з усієї Європи та за її межами, часто спадщини союзників у великій боротьбі з нацистами, і зв’язані руками з двома вирішальними рухами російського народу; рух за демократію, який пронизав цивільне суспільство, і момент миру в російській армії, обидва з яких давно діють з українцями.
Ось чому я знаю, що будь-яка нація, яка бажає надіслати радників, війська, зброю чи будь-яку можливу допомогу, щоб повернути боротьбу додому в Росію у визвольній боротьбі, знайде на землі партнерів для боротьби, як і O.S.S. яка стала ЦРУ. і Джедбурзькі команди, які стали Зеленими беретами, знайшли та стали взаємозалежними з Опором по всій окупованій Європі. Зараз, як і тоді, ми можемо звільнити один одного, якщо будемо разом.
Давайте не помилятися щодо серйозності та небезпеки цього моменту, бо доля людства зараз висить на волосині. Росія може поступитися, коли зіткнеться, як це було під час Кубинської ракетної кризи; або це може відкрити двері до найжахливішої війни, яку тільки знав світ, і навіть якщо ми переможемо, ми будемо доведені до крайнощів жорстокого виживання, яке веде до падіння цивілізації до століть варварства. У найкращому випадку щось схоже на нас, спотикаючись об забуті руїни, одного дня виявить, що колись ми були більше, ніж панами та рабами, більш ніж звірами, якими керують атавізми інстинктів, і почне підніматися до людства.
Це все одно краще, ніж альтернатива; умиротворення та неспроможність об’єднатися для нашого захисту почне Епоху тиранів, шість-вісім століть тоталітарних держав, які знищують одна одну у війнах за імперське завоювання та панування за допомогою зброї неймовірного жаху та знищення та закінчуються вимиранням нашого виду.
Я вірю, що у нас може бути один-два шанси зі ста можливих майбутніх пережити наступне тисячоліття, і я налаштований оптимістично.
Коли ті, хто хотів би нас поневолити, прийдуть за нами та за іншими, як вони завжди робили і будуть, нехай вони знайдуть не людство, підкорене набутою безпорадністю та розколом, а об’єднане в солідарності як гаранти універсальних прав людини один одного. Якщо ми це зробимо, ми можемо сподіватися залишитися людьми.
Давайте відповімо Путіну і всім тиранам словами, написаними Дж.Р.Р. Толкін між 1937 і 1955 роками у своєму яскравому переосмисленні Другої світової війни в знаковій промові Арагорна біля Чорних воріт у «Поверненні Короля», яка об’єднує етос, логос, пафос і кайрос; «Може настати день, коли мужність людей занепаде, коли ми покинемо своїх друзів і розірвемо всі узи товариства, але це не цей день. Година вовків і розбитих щитів, коли вік людей рухається, але це не цей день. Цього дня ми боремося».
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Russian
7 июня 2024 Надежда для Украины и человечества, если надежда безнадежна
Наше празднование Дня Д и исторической победы над фашизмом стало свидетелем знамений и чудес; Зеленский обнял немногих, кто выжил в тот трагический и славный день, когда мы солидарно выступили против тьмы как Братья, а Байден и Макрон пообещали Америке и Франции защищать Украину.
Этого дня я ждал со времени инцидента «Последней битвы» в Мариуполе, когда я провел несколько часов, ползая по окровавленным останкам мертвецов в разрушенных туннелях под бомбардировками, в темных лабиринтах, наполненных звуками умирающих, которым я не мог помочь. . Это меня нисколько не беспокоило; но меня несколько дней рвало, и я преодолевал стадии шока, когда узнал, что российская армия делала с украденными детьми. Некоторые вещи находятся за пределами человеческого, и для этого нет слов.
Что абсолютно нового в этой войне, продолжающейся после захвата Россией Крыма в 2014 году, так это готовность союзников нанести прямой удар по России и поддержать прямые действия других стран внутри России. Это меняет все.
Из бесчисленных групп сопротивления в России, борющихся сегодня за освобождение нации от режима Путина и прекращение его безумных поисков имперского завоевания и господства над Средиземноморьем, Ближним Востоком, Восточной Европой и Африкой, которые сейчас ведутся на десяти театрах военных действий. Третья мировая война, я не знаю ничего, кроме догадок и весьма косвенных связей с одной сетью, той, которую я основал как «Бригады Авраама Линкольна Украины и России», из нескольких сотен выживших в «Последней битве» на сталелитейном заводе в Мариуполе, которым удалось сбежать со мной, поскольку город был оцеплен для уничтожения и убийства или порабощения его жителей. В Варшаве к нам присоединились несколько сотен добровольцев из разведки и спецслужб со всей Европы и за ее пределами, часто бывшие союзниками в великой борьбе с нацистами, и мы связали руки с двумя важнейшими движениями русского народа; демократическое движение, охватившее гражданское общество, и момент мира в российских вооруженных силах, которые уже давно работают с украинцами.
Вот почему я знаю, что любая страна, желающая послать советников, войска, оружие или любую мыслимую помощь, чтобы вернуть борьбу домой в Россию в освободительной борьбе, найдет партнеров на местах для борьбы, точно так же, как и УСС. которое стало ЦРУ. и команды Джедбурга, которые стали «Зелеными беретами», нашли Сопротивление и стали взаимозависимыми с ним по всей оккупированной Европе. Сейчас, как и тогда, мы можем освободить друг друга, если будем держаться вместе.
Давайте не будем недооценивать серьезность и опасность этого момента, поскольку судьба человечества сейчас висит на волоске. Россия может сдаться, столкнувшись с ней, как это произошло во время кубинского ракетного кризиса; или это может открыть дверь самой ужасной войне, которую когда-либо знал мир, и даже если мы победим, мы будем вынуждены пойти на крайности жестокого выживания, что приведет к падению цивилизации в столетия варварства. В лучшем случае что-то вроде нас, спотыкаясь о забытые руины, однажды обнаружит, что когда-то мы были больше, чем хозяевами и рабами, больше, чем зверями, управляемыми атавизмами инстинктов, и начнет подниматься к человечности.
Это все же лучше альтернативы; умиротворение и неспособность объединиться для нашей защиты начнут Эпоху Тиранов, шесть-восемь столетий тоталитарных государств, терзающих друг друга в войнах имперского завоевания и господства с применением оружия невообразимого ужаса и разрушения и заканчивающегося вымиранием нашего вида.
Я считаю, что из каждых ста возможных вариантов будущего у нас есть один-два шанса выжить в следующем тысячелетии, и я настроен оптимистично.
Когда те, кто хочет поработить нас, приходят за нами и за другими, как они всегда делали и будут делать, пусть они найдут не человечество, порабощенное выученной беспомощностью и разделением, а объединенное солидарностью в качестве гарантов универсальных прав человека друг друга. Если мы сделаем это, мы сможем надеяться остаться людьми.
Ответим Путину и всем тиранам словами, написанными Дж.Р.Р. Толкин между 1937 и 1955 годами в своем ярком переосмыслении Второй мировой войны в культовой речи Арагорна у Черных ворот в «Возвращении короля», объединяющей этос, логос, пафос и кайрос; «Может наступить день, когда мужество людей иссякнет, когда мы оставим наших друзей и разорвем все узы товарищества, но это не этот день. Час волков и разбитых щитов, когда эпоха людей рухнет, но это не этот день. Сегодня мы сражаемся».
We celebrate this 80th anniversary of D Day, an iconic image of what it means to be an Antifascist, to be an American as a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and to be a human being bearing a duty of care for others.
“All for one and one for all, united we stand divided we fall” as Dumas teaches us in The Three Musketeers, regardless of the costs, even of our lives.
This anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe finds us once again confronted by rapacious and cruel tyrants and their mad quests for imperial conquest and dominion; Putin, Netanyahu, Xi Jinpeng. But we are also challenged by the subversion of democracy and the rising tide of fascism, nationalism, white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, not only in America by Putin’s star agent and rapist Traitor Trump, but throughout the world.
It remains to be seen if we remain a Band of Brothers still, but in the shadows of Russia’s World War Three and its ten active theatres of conflict which include America in the sabotage of our elections, and with American complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, we will find out.
As Biden said in his historic speech of solidarity with Ukraine, as quoted in The Guardian; “The US president used his address at the American commemorative event to send a message to Moscow that the US and its allies “will not bow down” and will “stand for freedom”.
“To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators, is simply unthinkable,” Biden said in a speech at the American cemetery in Normandy. “If we were to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here on these hallowed beaches.”
“We will not walk away because if we do Ukraine will be subjugated and it will not end there,” Biden said. “Ukraine’s neighbours will be threatened, all of Europe will be threatened.”
“There are things that are worth fighting and dying for”, Biden said. “Freedom is worth it. Democracy is worth it.”
As written by Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian, in an article entitled D-day 80th anniversary comes at time of conflict and growing carelessness: As grim memory of world war fades, many people are anxious amid rise of nationalist, country-first rhetoric; “Twenty-two British D-day veterans, the youngest nearly 100, crossed the Channel on Tuesday to mark this week’s 80th anniversary of the landings in Normandy, representing a thinning thread to the heroics of two or three generations ago when about 150,000 allied soldiers began a seaborne invasion of western Europe that helped end the second world war.
Ron Hayward, a tank trooper who lost his legs fighting in France three weeks after D-day, told crowds assembled in Portsmouth on Wednesday why he and other soldiers were there: “I represent the men and women who put their lives on hold to go and fight for democracy and this country. I am here to honour their memory and their legacy, and to ensure that their story is never forgotten.”
There will not be many more opportunities to commemorate with survivors, while this time the presence of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in France on 6 June will be a reminder that a part of Europe is in the grip of the largest war since 1945. A deadly war also rages in Gaza, while the living memory of the second world war fades into historical record.
That D-day was a risky task is an understatement: 4,441 British, American, Canadian and other allied soldiers are estimated to have been killed on 6 June 1944, and at least a similar number of Germans. One BBC documentary, D-day: the Unheard Tapes, relying on recordings of veterans’ experiences, demonstrates how terrifying the experience was – and how nobody ought to go through it again.
“I just cried my eyes out. I just stood there and cried, I did,” James Kelly, a Royal Marines commando from Liverpool, recalled of finding himself isolated, alone in the French countryside, a few hours after he had managed to fight his way off Sword beach. A buddy had been killed in front of him as they had got to the sand, blood pumping out of his neck, but Kelly had been ordered to press on.
While leaders present at Thursday’s commemorations in Normandy – King Charles, Rishi Sunak, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz – will strike appropriate notes, many of those representing forces of division will not be present, not least Vladimir Putin, the architect of the invasion on Ukraine.
On Friday, Biden is due to speak at Pointe du Hoc, where 80 years ago 225 US Rangers scaled 35-metre sheer cliffs using rope ladders shot over the top to capture a strategically situated artillery bunker. It was perhaps the most dangerous single mission on D-day, and casualties were severe. Only 90 were still able to fight when a count was taken a couple of days later.
There is almost certainly another reason for the location of Biden’s address, given the US president has an election to fight. Forty years ago a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, spoke on the cliffs at the same battle site, and in front of an audience of military veterans he justified the struggle of the day in terms not obviously recognisable in Donald Trump’s Republican worldview.
“We in America have learned bitter lessons from two world wars: it is better to be here ready to protect the peace than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost,” Reagan declared – very different to Trump’s comments that he would refuse to defend Nato members who do not spend enough on defence, never mind previous threats to quit the alliance altogether.
Two years of headline news about Ukraine – but also the conflict in Gaza, so deadly for civilians, and elsewhere in the Middle East – is a reminder that there are those who appear to prefer conflict to stability. Quietly, many people are a little anxious: one recent poll, from YouGov, reports that 55% of Britons believe it is somewhat or very likely that the UK will be involved in a war in the next five years.
Since the end of the cold war at least, and perhaps since 1945, it has been easier to take stability and security in Europe for granted, helped partly by the military pact of Nato and the economic alliance of the EU, but also by the grim memory of all-out conflict. But a rise of nationalist, country-first rhetoric suggests there is also a growing carelessness. If it metastasises, as the stories of D-day survivors demonstrate, ordinary people end up bearing the brunt.”
What happens now, when our fragile democracies are threatened by brutal and degenerate thugs like the organ grinder and his monkey, Putin and Trump?
As I wrote in my post of February 20 2024, Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty and Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa; To all those who like myself prefer to run amok and be ungovernable to the alternative of submission to authority, who align on the side of Prometheus, rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, I offer here a manifesto for bearers of the Torch of Liberty.
Herein I offer the Second Act of my February 9 description of my work and myself as I interrogated both in reflection on the Substack debut of my journal Torch of Liberty, entitled Why Do I Write, and Why Am I Writing To All of You Here, in the Nakedness of my Life, my Voice, and my Truth, as America Begins Her Last Stand Against Fascism in the 2024 Elections, and I now return to the beginning, my September 15 2019 Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa.
The goal of Antifascism, and of revolutionary struggle and liberation, is to achieve a society of true equality in which we can abandon the social use of force.
As I wrote in my post of March 28 2019, in the wake of the Christchurch white supremacist terror and the direct threat of a copycat atrocity against our local mosque here in Spokane; I’ve thought about the origins of evil, of violence and power in the relationships between fear, anger, hate, and other negative emotions as illnesses, for a long time now and in many roles and contexts.
Here are some things I have learned:
First, the process by which violence operates as a system is the same for all spheres of action and levels of scale; within personal and social contexts and in intimate relationships and families as well as nations and historical civilizations.
The precondition of violence as hate crime, and of both tyranny and terror, is overwhelming and generalized fear as shaped by submission to authority.
Structures and figures of authorized power feed on fear and hate, grow stronger by the cycle of power and violence and the negative emotions and forces of darkness to which they give form and through which they subjugate others.
We must question, challenge, mock and subvert authority whenever it comes to claim us; these are the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, conformity with transgression, plutocracy with socialism.
Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.
Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious diversity, democracy, and a free society of equals.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
Let us evolve toward a nonviolent and noncoercive society together, become bearers of the Torch of Liberty together, and unite to achieve our dreams of democracy together.
As I wrote in my post of July 31 2020, A Useful Past: What is Antifa?; What do we mean when we say we are Antifascists? What do our enemies mean when they use the term? These mirror reverse meanings face us Janus-like in contradiction, and while factions struggle to control the narrative in the media I don’t see much direction provided by anyone speaking as an Antifa-identified voice. I’m changing that, for I speak to you today as the founder of Lilac City Antifa.
In calling Antifa a terrorist group, Trump has inverted its values and libeled every American serviceman who fought in World War II as well as our entire military services today, for they have been the primary force against fascism throughout the world. I am an American patriot and an Antifascist; and if our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us.
The Second World War has been much studied, filmed, and written about; but of course what we mean when we speak of Antifa today proceeds from the history of those whose public service of vigilance in exposing and confronting fascism developed from the partisans of that conflict and from the Allied military and intelligence services sent to assist them in the liberation of Europe, from the Resistance and from those who hunted escaped Nazis after the war.
A very specific historical context and tradition informs and motivates those who, like myself, use the term Antifascist as a descriptor of identity; I have appended some articles on this useful past, but to claim Antifa as an identity is a personal choice to work against fascism and may sometimes be a component of an ideology or belief system but is not an organization. No one calling themselves Antifa speaks for or answers to anyone else; it is a nonhierarchical and mutualistic network of alliances. There is no special tie nor fraternal handshake; membership is by declaration.
To claim you are Antifa is to be Antifa. This means whatever we intend when we say it; there are no authorized truths among us, nor authorized identities.
For myself, to be an antifascist is to belong to a tradition of resistance which originates in multiple forms and traditions; the 1921 founding of Antifa by the Ardito del Popolo in Italy, Antifaschistische Aktion founded in 1932 in Germany, the International Brigades of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, and finally in the Resistance of World War Two, a war that has never ended but went underground.
Here I must note that the C.I.A. and the Green Berets or US Special Forces, like many among the West’s intelligence and special operations community, began as antifascist and Nazi-hunting organizations in WWII interdependent with the Resistance partisans they worked and still work with, and remain so in general character, purpose, and function; such are natural allies of Antifa, with common goals, the differences being that where Antifa is a global voluntary network of nonhierarchical alliances outside the control of or membership in any nation, our parallel and interdependent partners in the intelligence and special operations community are institutions of governments and often of military chains of command. To phrase it differently; we swear our loyalty to each other, theirs are oaths sworn to nations and to Constitutions as systems of law.
I look also to our history and the great crusade against slavery that was the Civil War, to the Paris Commune, and to the American Revolution against tyranny and imperial colonialism and its ideology of liberty as a heritage of Humanism and the Enlightenment, for antecedents and inspiration.
For the principles which I feel are consistent with Anti-fascism, see my repost below of the original proclamation with which I founded Lilac City Antifa with the intent to defend our local mosque which was under threat of violence by Christian Identity terrorists led by former Representative Matt Shea and other secessionists who were also planning to murder our policemen and their families as part of a plot to found a white ethnostate or Redoubt here in my lovely part of Washington with its forested mountains and pristine lakes; the militia they were training included members of Atomwaffen Division and The Base, and had links to both the Christchurch and Las Vegas shooters. I took them with great seriousness as threats, and believed we needed a counterforce.
As I wrote in my post of September 15 2019, Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa: Resistance Against Fascism and Tyranny; We, the People of Lilac City and of America, being of all imaginable varieties of historical origin, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual personae, faith and the lack thereof, class and status, and all other informing and motivating sources of becoming human and frames of identity as yet undiscovered, declare our independence from fear and from authorized boundaries and images of ourselves, and the tyranny of false divisions and categories of otherness and exclusion among us.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
We stand united as human beings whose universal rights depend on no government but on the inherent nature of our humanity, and as American citizens and co-owners of our government in a free society of equals, and inclusive of all who so claim and declare as heirs of the legacy and idea of Liberty and of America as an historical expression and manifest form of its ideals and values, among these being freedom and the autonomy of individuals, equality as an absolute structural principle in law and ideal in social relations, truth and its objectivity and testable nature and our right to seek and verify and to communicate it which includes freedom of the press and the right of access to information and from surveillance and all forms of thought control, justice and its impartiality, and a secular state in which freedom of conscience is absolute and there can be no compulsion in matters of faith, for who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
We are a web of human lives which connect us with one another and anchor us to our Liberty, to our history and to our future, and we are resolved to our common defense as human beings and as Americans, and to the mutual safety and freedom of ourselves and of others from fascist violence and intimidation, coercion and the social use of force, in the performance of our identities and in our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We are American patriots and heirs to the glorious tradition of resistance by those who stood for Liberty at the balance points of history, at Saratoga and Yorktown, Gettysburg, Normandy, and many others, against the three primary threats of tyranny and the state as embodied violence, inequalities of race and gender and slavery in all its forms, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil which combine and expand them as theocratic-nationalist-capitalist dehumanization and systems of oppression, as we must always do against the atavistic forces of barbarism and the nightmares of totalitarian force and control which threaten our nation and our civilization, against what madness and evil may together do.
We must unite together as free citizens who will not be broken by fear, but instead embrace our differences as a strength and a heritage purchased for us all by the blood of our sacred dead in countless wars throughout our history.
To all those who have offered their lives in our service, both to our nation and to all humankind, members and veterans of the military and other security services: join us. If our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us. For America is a Band of Brothers, sworn to one another and to the defense of our union, with liberty and justice for all.
To all enemies of America and a free society of equals: We are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Join us in resistance, who answer fascism with equality and tyranny with liberty.
I am an American patriot and an Antifascist. I will bet my refusal to submit against any force of tyranny, and our solidarity against any ideology of division as a strategy of our subjugation. Pledge thus with me:
I swear zero tolerance for racism or the supremacy of any persons by identity politics and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, racist violence and white supremacist terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, hate and its symbols and speech, for all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
I will make no compromise with evil.
In closing, a few words of caution, for the use of force is a Rashomon Gate of relative truths and bifurcating possible futures.
The struggle between good and evil in the human heart often pivots and balances on the differences between the purpose of the use of force; to punish transgression when inflicted by authority as an act of subjugation and repression against the powerless, or to seize power in solidarity with the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, as a duty of care for others and as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights. Be very sure you know which cause your actions serve.
All that matters in the end is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
D-day 80th anniversary comes at time of conflict and growing carelessness
We remember the valor and sacrifice of our sacred dead on this Memorial
Day, of those killed in action and all those who served in defense of our liberty and equality and in solidarity with that of others against the malign forces of racism and fascism, tyranny and terror, from the beginning of our day of recognition of the Union soldiers and Abolitionists who died in the Civil War fighting a human trafficking syndicate which had declared itself a nation answerable to no civilized law, and since its proclamation as a national holiday all those who died in our endless and terrible wars including the First and Second World Wars and thereafter to free the world of fascist imperialism, terror, and the darkness of organized violence, and all others who have died to achieve the dream of a free society of equals, whether in uniform or not, on the battlefields of civilizational conflicts or as victims of white supremacist terror, at Gettysburg 1863, Normandy 1944, Charlottesville 2017, the January 6 Insurrection 2021, Ukraine and Palestine ongoing now, and countless others.
In America and throughout the world, Confederate-Nazi revivalism and fascist tyranny once again emerges from the darkness to subjugate us, and this we must resist.
There is an iconic conversation between George Washington, about to be hanged, and Mick Rory who has come from the future to rescue him in Legends of Tomorrow, Season Two Episode 11 Turncoat; and in this historical moment wherein the fate of democracy and humankind hang in the balance, I answer now with the words of Mick, no one’s idea of a hero or even of a good man but my idea of a man like myself, of being an American as national identity, and of becoming human as a path of resistance to tyranny, seizure of power and freedom, and revolutionary struggle.
“ Washington: I’ve been a soldier since I was twenty years old. But our cause is the cause of all men. To be treated equally, regardless of hereditary privilege. We must prove to the world that you don’t need a title to be a gentleman. The British may be dishonorable, but I am not. By my death, I will prove to the Crown what it means to be an American.
Mick: You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re misfits. Outcasts. And we’re proud of it. If they attack in formation, we pop ’em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, you raid their camp at night. And if they’re gonna hang you, then you fight dirty. And you never, ever, give up. That’s the American way.”
We live now in such a time of decision, in which tyranny and liberty play for the fate of humankind.
World War Three began its European theatre of operations with the conquest of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, much as the Second World War began with fascist conquests of Spain and Manchuria, and broadened with general invasion of Ukraine last year, as a development of the conflict between Turkey and Russia for imperial dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean with the Russian intervention in Syria and Libya in 2015 and in the Nagorno-Karabakh Civil War of 2020; Russia also began a campaign of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa in 2016, operates Sudan and Belarus as client states, and invaded Kazakhstan to support a proxy tyrant with brutal repression during the revolt of January 2022. Here in America of course Russia’s star agent, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, captured the state as its President during the Stolen Election of 2016, and began systematically attacking the values, ideals, systems, structures, and institutions of democracy.
We are winning in that we have exposed our enemies for what they are and delegitimized them, but the fight is not yet won, not in Ukraine and not in America.
Twenty four centuries ago Pericles of Athens said of the heroes of democracy; “Not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions, but there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.”
On this Memorial Day let us cherish and exalt the gift of liberty given to us by our fellows, elders, and ancestors, and by all those throughout history who have answered those who would enslave us with defiance and resistance.
Such is our legacy as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others united by our refusal to submit to force and control, in our struggle for one another as Antifascists and antiracists, and as Americans but also as human beings who hold the universality of our condition above any divisions of otherness, and perform our uniqueness within the limitless diversity of our community of humankind.
As such it remains among our highest principles that we accord others those universal rights which we claim for ourselves, that each of us must possess the right to imagine and become human as a free choice in a community of autonomous individuals, and that we are committed to our common defense of those rights of ownership of identity, freedom of conscience in our faith, and of bodily autonomy which define what is human.
America was founded as an anti-theocratic, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonialist revolutionary experiment in forging a society free of the conceit of aristocratic feudalism that some of us are by nature better than others, and to redress injustices perpetrated against the many by the few.
While in the course of revolutionary struggle and the resistance to tyranny we may find just cause for action in our defense or the defense of others, there is never any justification for wars of imperialist aggression nor to secure strategic resources such as oil or any economic colonialist thievery, nor for wars of dominion or the conquest and assimilation of cultures different from our own. Different is neither better nor worse, merely an opportunity to learn new ways of being human together that we might become better than we were alone.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, but to liberate as a guarantor of our universal human rights and the principles of democracy as a free society of equals; freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
We now face near certain odds of six to eight centuries of total global war and nationalist tyranny, an age of civilizational collapse ending with the extinction of humankind. I calculate the chances of human survival among our possible futures as great as twelve and as few as two in one hundred, as of now, and we are on a countdown to a point of no return. Every moment of delay, appeasement, bargaining with our head in the lion’s mouth of the Fourth Reich, and failure to purge our destroyers from among us brings us nearer our doom.
What does our future look like? To this end I have assembled here my references in iconic films of war, with a word of caution; the wars of the Age of Terror and Tyranny will be fought with weapons unimaginable to us now and incomparably destructive as measured against those of the Second World War.
In America we have tracked and brought to justice the deniable assets of the Republican Party and the criminal and treasonous Trump regime in the January 6 Insurrection, but not its high command, nor its conspirators in Congress, nor its propagandists, nor the plutocrats and elites who fund and benefit from it all. Our institutions of Law have failed us, captured or subverted by the enemy as is the Supreme Court, and we must look beyond the law for a Reckoning and our survival.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
In Ukraine the free world hesitates to confront a Russian empire which uses terror, genocide, and threat of nuclear annihilation in its mad conquest, while in America, Europe, and throughout the world the guarantors of democracy are being destabilized and captured by fascist tyrannies. Here appeasement works as well as it did for Chamberlain in World War One, which is not at all, and when someone tells you as did Hitler in 1938 “This is my last territorial demand”, he who trusts the lie is about to become extinct. The first rule of Resistance is: everything the enemy says is a lie. Ukraine is a test of our solidarity and will, and like the 1939 invasion of Poland a gate to the conquest of Europe, and as in Gaza and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians paid for by our taxes and granted permission by American complicity, a line from which there can be no retreat, if we are to salvage something of our humanity from the darkness.
To quote the lines of Winston Churchill in the magnificent film Darkest Hour, which the historical figure never said; “You cannot reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
References
Churchill’s speech in Darkest Hour: You Cannot Reason With a Tiger When Your Head Is In Its Mouth
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow “Turncoat” Season 2 Episode 11
Our future, as echoes and reflections of the past:
How shall we see and understand images of war, death, pain, horror, and evil such as those of war films, which both glorify and authorize violence and the use of social force in the manufacture of virtue and national identity, and interrogate, subvert, and liberate us from such systems of control as stories which possess us and from which we must emerge?
How can we give answer to such darkness in our own lives?
The Second World War: A Complete History, Martin Gilbert
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts
The Battle of Britain: Five Months That Changed History, May-October 1940, Fortress Malta: An Island Under Siege 1940-43, Together We Stand: Turning the Tide in the West: North Africa, 1942-1943, Sicily ’43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe, Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned Britain’s War in the East, Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France, James Holland
Britain and Churchill
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, Erik Larson
Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts
Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat, Giles Milton
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, William Manchester, Paul Reid
France
The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940, France: The Dark Years 1940-1944, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, Julian T. Jackson
Paris at War: 1939-1944, David Drake
The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis, Matthew Cobb
Outwitting the Gestapo, Lucie Aubrac
The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, Paul Kix
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler, Lynne Olson
The Liberation of Paris: How Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and von Choltitz Saved the City of Light, Jean Edward Smith
Italy
Mussolini Warlord: Failed Dreams of Empire, 1940-1943, H. James Burgwyn
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Rick Atkinson
Bitter Victory: The Battle For Sicily, July August 1943, Carlo D’Este
Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, Peter Caddick-Adams
Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944, Lloyd Clark
Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy, Norman Lewis
Spain
Picasso’s War, Russell Martin
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
The Spanish Civil War, Hugh Thomas
The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War, Giles Tremlett
Russia
Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945, Richard Overy
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943, Antony Beevor
Jewish Peoples
Night, Elie Wiesel
Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, Ariel Burger
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy, Sergio Luzzatto
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
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
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva
America and the Second World War in the Pacific
But Not in Shame: The Six Months After Pearl Harbor, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945, John Toland
Storm Clouds over the Pacific, 1931–41, Japan Runs Wild, 1942–1943, Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze, Peter Harmsen
The Eagle & the Rising Sun: The Japanese-American War 1941-43: Pearl Harbor through Guadalcanal, Alan Schom
Victory Europe Day, Victory Over Fascism Day; what do such holidays mean to us now, when fascism has once again seized and shaken us in its jaws with the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the most disruptive events of our world order among several theatres of World War Three which has engulfed the world and threatens the global subversion of democracy and the nuclear extinction of humankind?
Netanyahu and his theocratic and kleptocratic settler regime has orchestrated the October 7 tragedy as a casus belli for the Final Solution of the Palestinians and the generalization of conflict to the conquest of the whole Middle East, and in Biden has a cheerleader of state terror who has made us all complicit in crimes against humanity, a secondary purpose of Israel’s in the sabotage and delegitimation of democracy and the principle of universal human rights as the foundations of our world order.
As Israel prepares the annihilation of Rafah and the world’s future ruling elites at universities rise up to challenge our dehumanization in solidarity with the powerless and the dispossess, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, Genocide Joe Biden gave a speech last night at a Holocaust remembrance event in which he weaponized the idea of antisemitism against students protesting the genocide of the Palestinians, fellow semites with Jews and one people divided by faith and history, to silence dissent as police thugs raid campuses in brutal repression. We have freedom of speech in America as co-owners of the state, but only when and if it serves power.
Democracy has already fallen in America, with the Stolen Election of 2016 by Russian spy and puppet ruler Traitor Trump, and those we elected as champions of our liberty to enact the Restoration of America have betrayed us, and have instead continued Trump’s sabotage of our institutions and principles in the centralization of power to a carceral state of force and control. We ordered peace and are fed war.
We are confronted with a dilemma in our elections; vote for Trump and sacrifice democracy as the Fourth Reich emerges, or vote for Biden and abandon our humanity. Either way, the Age of Tyrants begins, and as civilization falls humankind begins an irreversible path to extinction.
Both Netanyahu and Putin now wage wars of terror and imperial conquest modeled on the doctrine of Total War as designed by Hitler and Franco and first tested at Guernica, which now finds echoes and reflections in Gaza and Mariupol.
While in America and throughout Europe, a dark tide rises to engulf us all. Meloni is now the de facto ruler of Europe, leading the original Fascist Party of Mussolini which seized power in the 1922 March on Rome. And at her back marches Europe; as written by Jon Henley in The Guardian of this June’s upcoming vote to choose the future of the European Union, entitled Anti-European’ populists on track for big gains in EU elections; “Populist eurosceptic parties are likely to come first in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia, and second or third in Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden.”
Where the Gaza War is the tipping point of tyranny and democracy for the fate of humankind, it is but one of ten theatres of World War Three which include America, Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Africa, and the nation with two faces, Israel and Palestine.
Putin and his puppet tyrant Traitor Trump are figureheads of the Fourth Reich and patrons of both white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror who have perpetrated vast war crimes and the Russian imperial conquest and dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, as well as in central Asia, Africa, and Europe. Poland knows it is next on Putin’s list of conquests along with Finland, Moldova, Romania, and then all of Eastern Europe and finally Berlin, where Putin once reigned as the lord of the criminal underworld east of the Iron Curtain. Putin has threatened to annihilate the British Isles and turn Warsaw into a city of ghosts and ruins like Mariupol. In all of this his puppet tyrant Traitor Trump is complicit in providing political cover and a free hand in the invasion of Ukraine, while Putin has provided Trump vast dark money through the real estate empire he operates as a money laundry for criminal syndicates and oligarchs.
And yet we have not purged our destroyers and predators from among us.
To a Wall Street Journal article about Russia bombing a school where children were sheltering I wrote this paragraph in commentary; Russia always bombs children first. This is a policy of terror, designed to manufacture helplessness, despair, and submission, but as in the Rape of Nanking actually creates resistance as a counterforce. The Calculus of Fear obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and the people of Ukraine will resist beyond all reason, beyond hope of victory or survival, and while one Ukrainian yet lives and remembers who they are, are unconquerable.
Who cannot be compelled is free; this too is a truth demonstrated by Mariupol, and a gift of those who die for the freedom of us all. This we must witness and remember until the end of the world, and one thing more; Resist! To fascism and tyranny, to imperial conquest and dominion, to subjugation and dehumanization there can be but one reply; Never Again! On this Victory Over Fascism Day, let us unite in solidarity and liberation struggle to free ourselves from those who would enslave us.
What of those not killed but captured ? Of their fate Dean Kirby of Inews has written; “An investigation by i analysing Russian local news reports has identified 66 camps for Ukrainians in a network of former Soviet sanatoriums and other sites – and reveals how an underground network of Russians is helping people escape.
Thousands of Ukrainians have been sent to remote camps up to 5,500 miles from their homes as Vladimir Putin’s officials follow Kremlin orders to disperse them across Russia, i can reveal.
They include survivors from the besieged port city of Mariupol, where civilians remain trapped at the Azovstal steel plant as Russian forces make a final push to subdue to city’s last defenders.
An investigation by i analysing Russian local news reports has identified 66 camps in a network of former Soviet sanatoriums and other sites in regions including Siberia, the Caucasus, the Arctic Circle and the Far East.
i has also spoken to human rights activists in Russia who developed an underground grassroots network to help Ukrainians who want to leave the camps.
The Russians are taking people into their own homes, buying train tickets, and directing them to other groups who can help them get to the border.
One activist told i: “The state treats them as a labour force, as objects, moving them around without taking care of what they need. The state is unable to look after them. They are vulnerable and need help.”
i‘s investigation marks the first evidence of a major operation to spread them across a country gripped by a historic post-Cold War population decline.
It comes after i exclusively revealed last month that Moscow had ordered towns and cities across the Russian Federation to prepare for the arrival of nearly 100,000 “refugees”. Russia now claims it has “evacuated” one million people from the war zone.
Tanya Lokshina, associate director for Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch, told i: “There is ample evidence that thousands of Ukrainians were taken to Russia under duress.
“When people are only given a choice to stay under increasingly heavy shelling or to enter the territory of an occupying power, it constitutes forced transfer under international humanitarian law.
“We are extremely concerned this is happening. People who seek evacuation to safer areas in Ukraine are shuttled off to Russia instead – in some cases to remote areas very far from Ukrainian or European borders.
“They are vulnerable, destitute, often without identification documents and find themselves at the mercy of the occupying power.”
The sites identified by i by cross-checking local news reports with Russian mapping websites are known in Russia as Temporary Accommodation Points (TAP). They include dozens of sanatoriums and former children’s wilderness camps, at least one “patriotic education” centre and even a former chemical weapons dump.
They stretch across the vast Russian Steppes and across 11 time zones over the Ural Mountains from Belgorod in the west to the remote Kamchatka Peninsula on the edge of the Pacific Ocean and Vladivostok at the end of the Trans-Siberian railroad.
With names that belie the misery being suffered by their occupants after surviving two months of war, they include the Little Prince in Perm, the Santa in Tatarstan, the Friendly Guys in Omsk, the Forest Fairy Tale in Chuvashia, the Blue Lakes in Pskov and the Pine Forest in Ulyanovsk.
i has identified 6,250 people in 38 of the camps, including 621 children. If full, the 66 camps could contain about 10,800 people, including 1,000 children, with more than a third of the camps containing citizens of Mariupol. Some are yet to house Ukrainians despite being prepared by local officials.
With an average of 162 people in each, our analysis suggests Russia could need about 6,000 camps to house the total number of people it claims have crossed the border.
While Ukrainians are able to walk out of the camps, their remoteness and a lack of money, phones or documentation means those wanting to leave the country face an almost impossible task.
But Russian activists are trying to help.
“There is an impressive grassroots organisation on several levels – people collecting money for train tickets, helping with clothes and toys for children, letting people stay in their homes for a few nights,” one activist told i on condition of anonymity.
“They are sharing messages and passing people on to groups in other cities, who are helping them get to the border.”
Some Ukrainians are known to have escaped to countries including Poland and Georgia, while there have been reports of others trying to escape through Kazakhstan. One Russian news report said Ukrainians being taken to one city south east of Moscow had failed to board the train.
Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova accused Russia of genocide and of breaching the Geneva Convention, which prevents forced deportations during wartime.
Calling for the UN to investigate reports that 200,000 children are among those that have been taken from Ukraine to Russia, she said: “They have been deported to all regions of Russia. The conditions of their stay and their health is currently unknown.”
Putin’s camps revealed
i can reveal in detail how a vast network of former Soviet sanatoriums, children’s wilderness camps, hostels and orphanages is being used to move Ukrainian children and adults hundreds and thousands of miles from the border of their homeland.
On the wild Kamchatka peninsula at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, 10 people including children from Kherson were placed in a dormitory of the Kamchatka Industrial College in Yelizovo on 26 April following an eight-hour flight. About 200 people are expected in the region.
In Russia’s far eastern Maritime Territory, which is closer to Tokyo than it is to Moscow, a local newspaper reported in late April how 300 people, including 86 children, pregnant women and pensioners, arrived in Vladivostok after an exhausting seven-day journey on the Trans-Siberian Express from Taganrog.
The new arrivals, including survivors of the Mariupol siege, were taken to the Vostok hotel complex on the coast near Nakhodka. It was the third train to arrive in a number of days, with one report saying 14 TAPs were being opened in four neighbouring cities to accommodate up 1,350 people.
While Russian media claimed they had “chosen” to live in the Far East, adding that “almost everyone notes the beauty of the sea”, the advisor to the mayor of Mariupol said in a Telegram message seen by i he had learned they had no documents or money and were being promised only low paid jobs in the “arse of the world”.
Twenty people have so far arrived in the far eastern islands of Sakhalin, which contain the Kuril Islands contested by Japan, despite officials expecting 600. One report said: “The Sakhalin region, as we can see, is not very popular with them. This is understandable.”
Other reception points identified by i as housing survivors of the Mariupol siege include the Vanguard Patriotic Education Centre near Ivanovo in Ulyanovsk, a city beside the River Volga.
The centre, which has a focus on “military-patriotic work” and promoting a “commitment to serving ones Motherland”, opened at the site of a former orphanage in February as part of a national “education” project instigated by Putin to create nearly 40 similar centres including one in Russia-controlled Crimea.
It is one of two military-linked sites identified by i after this newspaper exclusively revealed last month that up to 600 Ukrainians including Mariupol survivors had been taken to a former chemical weapons dump at Leonidovka, near the Russian city of Penza, which played a former role in dismantling the country’s arsenal of nerve agents.
In Murmansk, in the Arctic Circle, officials have set up 20 TAPs at venues including a hotel named the Northern Lights in the town of Nickel and the Lapland sanatorium in Murmashi.
At a go-kart track in Belgorod, where people are staying in tents, a journalist reported having to go through two check points with armed men whose faces were covered with balaclavas.
In Ufa, the location of the TAPs was described by officials as “classified information”, but one report of a site in a university hostel said it was fenced and access was only allowed with security passes “so people will be safe”.
More than 530 people including 120 children from Mariupol have also been taken to the remote Tsaritsyno Lake boarding camp complex in the Leningrad Oblast, a three-hour drive from St Petersburg. A Russian archbishop who visited the site said several people told him they want to go home.
He said: “There are people who have lost their documents. Without them, they cannot buy tickets for trains or buses.”
In some places though, Ukrainians have already started to leave. At Nerekhta in Kostroma, numbers have dropped from 120 to 90, with reports of people travelling to Poland, while 15 have left a site in Narerezhnye Chelny.”
Terrible though it is, this network of slave labor camps and hostages throughout Russia which contain both Russian dissidents and Ukrainian and other civilians captured as war plunder conceals crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Russian state as a key factor of its campaign of terror simply because it can. This includes a system of sex trafficking and military brothels where torture is sold in at least one known incident; also torture as a sporting event with betting in arenas which recall gladiatorial combat of the Roman Empire, spectacles of savagery wherein human beings are torn apart or devoured alive by wild animals with the betting being how long it takes and how many can be killed within the time limit. This has been reported both by our allies within the Russian Army and by the Underground Railroad operated by the Wolf of Mariupol, a network of Ukrainian women freedom fighters who infiltrate groups of women captured by the Butterfly Collectors, set them free, and guide them out of Russia to safety. Some of the things the Wolf Maidens and those whom they rescue report are disturbing even beyond this.
A friend and I had an interesting conversation the other day, among the commentary on a photo with the caption “Exactly 77 years ago, on April 30, 1945, Soviet soldiers hoisted the banner of Victory over the Reichstag! A victory for all humanity.”
Writing in reaction to the first comment, by someone unknown to me, which misinterpreted the context of the post as referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and not the victory over the Nazis, which read; “I didn’t know this group was for supporters of fascism and genocidal dictators, ie Putin; not for me, this”, I replied with the following:
I was at Mariupol, and escaped as the city was sealed off on the 18th. I have written many times of the war crimes I witnessed there, which include torture, organized rape and abduction for trafficking, executions, cannibalism using mobile factories and erasure of evidence of torture with mobile crematoriums. But do not confuse the Russian fascist oligarchy committing these crimes with the ordinary Russians now waging revolutionary struggle against this criminal regime, or with the Russian soldiers now engaged in peace resistance by mutiny and joining their Ukrainian brothers in solidarity to defeat the invasion, or with the Red Army which liberated Europe, and which I have fought alongside to liberate South Africa from Apartheid. Putin’s is no Red Army.
“WTF? Cannibalism?” Was the reply from a friend, not the author of the comment confusing Putin’s shameful imperial conquest today with the glorious Red Army of 1945.
To this I wrote in answer; This was Russia’s solution to outrunning their supply lines; eat the killed in action. To be fair, they did this to their own fellow soldiers too, which caused an entire Russian unit to mutiny, kill their officers, and join the Ukrainian resistance, but its part of the terror campaign, like the Butterfly Collectors, the criminal syndicate of human traffickers within the Russian Army which kidnaps young girls and sometimes boys for use in Russian military brothels. The mobile factories for canning the dead as food for the soldiers operate with the crematorium trucks to erase evidence of torture.
My guide in Mariupol was Oleksandr, a boy who had been chained to a post, his arm secured to a log, and a gun put in his hand pointing at another boy who had been surgically skinned, leaving the head and neck untouched so his agony could be conveyed by his expressions and screams and he would survive for hours or days in torment. After he shot his friend who was begging to die to end the pain the Russians just let him go, laughing; their idea of a joke. They didn’t even make bets on it, as has happened here when torture becomes a sporting event. His sister Kateryna we found hanging from a post; I believe she hanged herself after escaping her captors. She was eleven.
And the reply to this was; “I am having a hard time believing this.”
Here is my reply to him; I have difficulty with this also, and this too is a purpose of states which use atrocities beyond comprehension to subjugate us. I spent a day throwing up and working through the stages of shock a few days before leaving Mariupol, not from injury but because of something I witnessed. Not the torture or rapes, nor the feeding of the dead into the machines of the cannery while those filled with shrapnel or rotting were cremated, nor the usual burned and shredded bodies of aerial and artillery bombardment; all this I have seen before and will again, for with the exception of industrialized cannibalism among the horrors of war such crimes are normal. Have I mentioned that normality is deviant, and to be resisted? But some things are beyond the limits of the human, and for this there are no words.
My friend’s final position in this conversation was this; “I am against wars, but for the soldiers who must fight them for the profit of others. All Russian soldiers cannot be this barbaric. Like the American soldiers who committed war crimes in Vietnam and Iraq, the criminals should be tried for their crimes and punished. But as a whole, those who send and command armies are the common enemy of those who are doomed to do the fighting.”
My answer here follows; On this we agree; such acts are usually committed by elite units chosen and trained for loyalty and brutality, as were the death camp units of the SS. No normal person does such things, and most of Putin’s invasion force are conscripts and fellow victims of tyranny, many of whom are members of the peace movement which like the soldier’s strike that ended America’s war in Vietnam are the best real chance for peace. Most professional soldiers fight because if they do not, men who rely on them will die, regardless of the motives that brought them into battle.
And as I’ve said, I have fought alongside Russian soldiers against Apartheid in South Africa and Angola, and other causes and places, in the eighties prior to the end of the Soviet Union, and they were not the same army as that in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere which serves no grand ideals, no vision of a united humankind free of the profit motive and of divisions of blood, faith, and soil, but its mirror image, an army of slaves sent by a tyrant to conquer a free people.
Many of those slaves unite in solidarity with those they were sent to conquer, and such heroes of solidarity and liberation must be welcomed and celebrated. This, and only this, will defeat war in the end.
On this Victory Over Fascism Day, let us liberate Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, America and Europe, and the future of humankind from the tyranny of war criminals wherever they may be, and from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Now as then, let us confront the would-be conqueror of Europe as a united front, and purge our destroyers from among us.
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
Europe in World War Two In Film
Band of Brothers series trailer
The Longest Day film montage
Saving Private Ryan film trailer
Churchill’s speech in Darkest Hour: You Cannot Reason With a Tiger When Your Head Is In Its Mouth
Enemy at the Gates trailer
Come and See trailer
The Guns of Navarone
Life is Beautiful
The Painted Bird
Politics is the Art of Fear, as my father taught me; here is a brilliant map of our fears in Europe and how they will determine the future of the EU in this June’s vote
A Hobson’s Choice in the Nation With Two Faces, Israel and Palestine; one people divided by history. Who do we want to become, we Americans, we human beings?
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Biden warns against ‘surge of antisemitism’ at Holocaust event
Trump and Biden are like the bear and man in the woods dilemma; we know Trump will destroy us, but Biden uses lies and deception to hide his intent to subjugate us, dehumanize us and subvert our universal human rights, and use our taxes for genocide and surveillance, censorship and repression of dissent.
Either way, we lose either democracy or our universal human rights; America falls, and with us the global civilization of humankind..
The Second World War: A Complete History, Martin Gilbert
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts
The Battle of Britain: Five Months That Changed History, May-October 1940, Fortress Malta: An Island Under Siege 1940-43, Together We Stand: Turning the Tide in the West, Sicily ’43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe, Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France, James Holland
Britain and Churchill
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, Erik Larson
Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts
Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat, Giles Milton
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, William Manchester, Paul Reid
France
The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940, France: The Dark Years 1940-1944, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, Julian T. Jackson
Paris at War: 1939-1944, David Drake
The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis, Matthew Cobb
Outwitting the Gestapo, Lucie Aubrac
The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, Paul Kix
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler, Lynne Olson
The Liberation of Paris: How Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and von Choltitz Saved the City of Light, Jean Edward Smith
Italy
Mussolini Warlord: Failed Dreams of Empire, 1940-1943, H. James Burgwyn
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Rick Atkinson
Bitter Victory: The Battle For Sicily, July August 1943, Carlo D’Este
Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, Peter Caddick-Adams
Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944, Lloyd Clark
Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy, Norman Lewis
Spain
Picasso’s War, Russell Martin
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
The Spanish Civil War, Hugh Thomas
The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War, Giles Tremlett
Russia
Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945, Richard Overy
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943, Antony Beevor
Jewish Peoples
Night, Elie Wiesel
Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, Ariel Burger
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy, Sergio Luzzatto
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
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
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva
Exactly 77 years ago, on April 30, 1945, Soviet soldiers hoisted the banner of Victory over the Reichstag!
A victo… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…— слава КПСС (@GloryToTheCPSU) April 30, 2022
This brings us to the time of my escape from Mariupol to Warsaw, with my own team and a few hundred of her defenders, as the nucleus of a new direct action network with the mission to take the fight to the enemy within Russia.
Here are my journals of Mariupol and the First General History of World War Three:
As the Ukrainian Front of the Third World War rages on, two years ago today I stood before an audience of multitudes who had answered our call for volunteers to take the fight to the enemy and bring a Reckoning for the war crimes of Russia in Ukraine, to liberate Russia from tyranny as a free society of equals and bring peace to Europe and the future of humankind in allyship and solidarity with the peace network within the Russian military and the democracy mass movement now pervasive within her society, to bring peace by confusion and destruction of Russia’s warfighting systems of manufacture, logistics, and communications, and to prepare networks of Resistance for the Russian invasion of Eastern Europe which Putin plans to begin with Moldova and the Baltic States.
Who would come to hear us, I wondered, witnesses to the horrors of war from a distant land few had ever seen, who had failed to save a city from annihilation and her people from slavery and genocide?
The descendants of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 remembered and came, from all over the world; the nation of Poland remembered the invasion of 1939 and came, the historical Allied nations of the Second World War remembered and came, Europe remembered the tyranny and terror of the war and Occupation and came, and a city flooded with Ukrainian refugees welcomed and united in solidarity with Russian peace and democracy activists and foreign volunteers like myself.
It was a glorious moment, wherein solidarity promised to redeem the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. What can be made of it remains to be seen, if placing our lives in the balance can tip the momentum of history toward democracy and away from fascism and tyranny, toward peace and not war, but the fact remains that we are unbroken, we humans, not subjugated by abjection and learned helplessness but united in the cause of our liberty and as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, and this gives me hope.
There are no Russians, no Ukrainians; only people like ourselves, and the choices we make about how to be human together.
April 20 2022 What is the Meaning of Mariupol? Address to the Volunteers in Warsaw
As we gather and prepare to take the fight to the enemy in direct action against the regime of Russia itself, against Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs and elites who sit at the helm of power and are now complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity both in Ukraine and her province of Crimea in the imperial conquest of a sovereign and independent nation and in Russia in the subjugation of their own citizens, and in the other theatres of this the Third World War, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Africa, and in the capture of the American state in the Stolen Election of 2016 which put Putin’s treasonous and dishonorable agent and proxy Donald Trump, Our Clown of Terror, in the White House to oversee the infiltration and subversion of democracy by the Fourth Reich, we are confronted with countless horrific examples of the future that awaits us at the hands of Putin’s regime, and we have chosen Resistance as the only alternative to slavery and death.
As we bring a Reckoning for tyranny, terror, and the horrors of war, in the crimes against humanity by Russia in Ukraine which include executions, torture, organized mass rape and the trafficking of abducted civilians, the capture of civilian hostages and use of forced labor, cannibalism using mobile factories, genocidal attacks, erasure of evidence of war crimes using mobile crematoriums which indicates official planning as part of the campaign of terror and proof that the countless crimes against humanity of this war are not aberrations but by design and at the orders of Putin and his commanders, threats of nuclear annihilation against European nations sending humanitarian aid, and the mass destruction of cities, we are become a court of last appeal in the defense of our universal human rights and of our humanity itself.
The Russian strategy of conquest as Total War opens with sustained and relentless bombardment and destruction of hospitals, bomb shelters, stores of food, power systems, water supply, corridors of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of refugees; anything which could help citizens survive a siege. Once nothing is left standing, a campaign of terror as organized mass rape, torture, cannibalism, and looting begins, and any survivors enslaved or executed. This is a war of genocide and erasure, and to fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
In this war which is now upon us, Putin’s goal is to restore the Russian Empire in the conquest of the Ukraine and the Black Sea as a launchpad for the conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; but he has a parallel and far more dangerous purpose in the abrogation of international law and our universal human rights. The true purpose of the Fourth Reich and its puppetmaster Vladimir Putin in this war is to make meaningless the idea of human rights.
This is a war of tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil against democracy and a free society of equals, for the idea that we all of us have meaning and value which is uniquely ours and against enslavement and the theft of our souls.
Within the limits of our form, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, we struggle to achieve the human; ours is a revolution of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase meaning repair of the world which refers to our interdependence and duty of care for each other as equals who share a common humanity.
I’m sure all of us here know what Shlomo Bardin meant when he repurposed the phrase from the Kabbalah of Luria and the Midrash, but what do I mean by this?
There are only two kinds of actions which we human beings are able to perform; those which affirm and exalt us, and those which degrade and dehumanize us.
We live at a crossroads of history which may define the fate of our civilization and the future possibilities of becoming human, in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and between solidarity and division, and we must each of us choose who we wish to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
As you know, my friends and I come to you from the Siege of Mariupol, a battle of flesh against unanswerable force and horror, of solidarity against division, of love against hate, and of hope against fear.
Here, as in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which we celebrated yesterday, the human will to freedom is tested by an enemy who exults in the embrace of the monstrous, whose policies and designs of war as terror gladly and with the open arrogance of power instrumentalize utter destruction and genocide, a war wherein atrocities and depravities are unleashed as tactics of shock and awe with intent of subjugation through learned helplessness and overwhelming and generalized fear.
In Mariupol now as in Warsaw then, we affirm and renew our humanity in refusal to submit or to abandon our duty of care for each other. The Defenders of Mariupol who have sworn to die together and have refused many demands for surrender make their glorious Last Stand not as a gesture of defiance to a conqueror and tyrant, or to hold the port to slow and impede the Russian campaign in the Donbas now ongoing and prevent the seizure of the whole seaboard and control of the Black Sea, though these are pivotal to the liberation of Ukraine, but to protect the hundreds, possibly thousands, of refugees who now shelter in the tunnels of the underground fortress at the Azovstal and Ilyin Steel and Iron Works, especially the many children in makeshift hospitals who cannot be moved.
This is the meaning of Mariupol; we stand together and remain human, regardless of the cost. This is what it means to be human, how it is achieved, and why solidarity is important. Among our values, our duty of care for others is paramount, because it is instrumental to everything else, and all else is contingent on this.
To paraphrase America’s Pledge of Allegiance not as an oath to a nation but as the declaration of a United Humankind; We, the People of Earth, pledge ourselves to each other, as one humankind, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
This brings us to my purpose in speaking to you today, for one of you has asked a question which is central to our mission of the Liberation of Russia and Ukraine, and to the solidarity of the international community in this our cause; how can ordinary people like ourselves hope for victory over the unanswerable force and overwhelming power of tyranny, terror, and war?
There are two parallel and interdependent strategies of Resistance in asymmetrical warfare; the first and most important is to redefine the terms of victory. This is because we are mortal, and the limits of our form impose conditions of struggle; we must be like Jacob wrestling the angel, not to conquer this thing of immense power but to escape being conquered by it. We can be killed, imprisoned, tortured; but we cannot be defeated or conquered if we but refuse to submit.
Power without legitimacy becomes meaningless, and authority crumbles when met with disbelief. This is why journalism and teaching as sacred callings in pursuit of truth are crucial to democracy, and why the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
What of the use of police in brutal repression by carceral states? The social use of force is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disobedience. When the police are an army of Occupation and the repression of dissent, they can be Resisted on those terms; my point here is simply that victory against unanswerable force consists of refusal to submit.
Who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled becomes Unconquered and is free. This is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us.
Second is our strategy for survival against an enemy who does not regard us as human, and will use terror to enforce submission through learned helplessness. By any means necessary, as this principle is expressed in the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X.
In Mariupol I began referring to this in its oldest form, war to the knife. Its meaning for us is simple; those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none.
The question to which I speak today in reply intrigued me, because it was nearly identical to a line which sets up one of the greatest fictional military speeches in literature, Miles Vorkosigan’s speech to the Maurilacans in The Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold.
In this story, Miles has just led a mass prisoner of war escape, from a prison which like all fascist tyrannies is fiendishly designed to produce abjection, as described by Julia Kristeva in her famous essay, in circumstances of horror such as those which my friends here and I have just survived, and in which we now find ourselves like the Marilacans having achieved an army, and about to take the fight to the enemy on his own ground.
One of the volunteers says, ”The defenders of Mariupol had those crazy Cossack warriors, swearing an oath to die rather than surrender, professional mercenaries from everywhere, all of them elite forces and utterly fearless. We just can’t fight on those terms; its been seventy years since we fought a Total War of survival, and most of us here are professionals and university intellectuals. Poland is civilized, maybe too civilized for what’s coming our way.”
To this I answer with Miles; “Let me tell you about the defenders of Mariupol. Those who sought a glorious death in battle found it early on. This cleared the chain of command of accumulated fools.
The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win and win and win. And for whom nothing, not comfort nor security, not family nor friends nor their immortal souls, was more important than victory.
They were not supermen or more than human. They sweated in confusion and darkness.
And with not one half the resources Poland possesses, Ukraine remains unconquered. When you’re all that stands between liberty and tyranny, freedom and slavery, life and death, between a people and genocide, when you’re human, there is no mustering out.”
To this wonderful speech of a fictional hero who simply refuses to stay down to the fictional survivors of the very real horror of being held captive and powerless by a tyrant, whether as prisoners of war or citizens of an occupied city, I must add this; how if Poland and Ukraine stand together, with all of Europe and America united in Resistance?
And if you are telling me you could not today fight a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, this I do not believe. Nor would you do so alone, for during this Passover as the Jewish community remembers the story of the Exile, the world also remembers; we watch it in our news every day, enacted once again in Ukraine. This, too, is a Haggadah, in which all of humankind can share, and which yet again teaches us the necessity of our interdependence and solidarity.
As written by Alan Moore in V For Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
Here is a truth to which all of us here today can bear witness.
But there is a thing which tyrants never learn; the use of force and violence obeys the Third Law of Motion, and creates resistance as its own counterforce. And when the brutality and crimes against humanity of that force and violence are performed upon the stage of the world, visible to all and a history which cannot be erased, part of the story of every human being from now until the end of our species, repression finds answer in reckoning as we awaken to our interdependence and the necessity of our solidarity and duty of care for each other.
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet on that fateful day in 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, after we refused to surrender and about to be burned alive; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
An unusual fellow, but behind the concealment of his literary notoriety he remained the Legionnaire he had once been, and after spying on the Nazis in Berlin in 1939 had returned to Paris to make mischief for her unwelcome guests, and there in 1940 repurposed the oath of the Foreign Legion for what allies he could gather. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole.
My hope is that I have lived, and written, at the beginning of the story of humankind, and not at its end.
What is the meaning of Mariupol?
Here we may look to its precedents as Last Stands, battles, and sieges; Thermopylae, Malta, Washington crossing the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton, Gallipoli which I hope we can avoid refighting, Stalingrad, and its direct parallel the Siege of Sarajevo. Moments of decision wherein the civilization of humankind hung in the balance, and with it our future possibilities of becoming human.
Who do we want to become, we humans; slaves and tyrants or a free society of equals? And how much of our humanity are we willing to trade for the chance of such futures?
What of ourselves can we not afford to lose, without also losing who we are? How much of our humanity can we claw back from the darkness in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us, and in solidarity with each other?
We must each of us face our own Gate of Fire, as did the Spartans at Thermopylae, and choose.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, plunder, and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
Let us reply with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War and the conflict of dominion which immediately followed it between tyranny and democracy, first against fascism and then between the allies who defeated it as spheres of dominion and systems of economic and political organization but both for different dreams of a free society of equals, in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
Join us.
This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate
20 באפריל 2023 יום השנה לארגון מחדש של חטיבת אברהם לינקולן של אוקראינה למען מאבק השחרור ברוסיה בעקבות הבריחה שלנו ממריופול
בעוד החזית האוקראינית של מלחמת העולם השלישית מתמשכת, לפני שנה היום עמדתי מול קהל של המונים שענו לקריאתנו למתנדבים לקחת את הקרב מול האויב ולהביא חשבון לפשעי המלחמה של רוסיה באוקראינה, לשחרר את רוסיה מהעריצות כחברה חופשית של שווים ולהביא שלום לאירופה ולעתיד האנושות בברית וסולידריות עם רשת השלום בתוך הצבא הרוסי ותנועת ההמונים הדמוקרטית הנפוצה כעת בחברה שלה, להביא שלום על ידי בלבול ו השמדת מערכות הלחימה של רוסיה לייצור, לוגיסטיקה ותקשורת, ולהכנת רשתות התנגדות לפלישה הרוסית למזרח אירופה שפוטין מתכנן להתחיל עם מולדובה והמדינות הבלטיות.
מי יבוא לשמוע אותנו, תהיתי, עדים לזוועות המלחמה מארץ רחוקה שמעטים ראו אי פעם, שלא הצליחו להציל עיר מהשמדה ואת אנשיה מעבדות ורצח עם?
צאצאי מרד גטו ורשה של 1943 זכרו ובאו, מכל העולם; האומה של פולין זכרה את הפלישה של 1939 ובאה, מדינות בעלות הברית ההיסטוריות של מלחמת העולם השנייה זכרו ובאו, אירופה זכרה את העריצות והאימה של המלחמה והכיבוש ובאה, עיר מוצפת פליטים אוקראינים התקבלו בברכה והתאחדו בסולידריות עם פעילי שלום ודמוקרטיה רוסים ומתנדבים זרים כמוני.
זה היה רגע מפואר, שבו הסולידריות הבטיחה לגאול את פגמי האנושות שלנו ואת השבר של העולם. מה אפשר לעשות מזה נותר לראות, אם הצבת חיינו באיזון יכולה להטות את המומנטום של ההיסטוריה לכיוון דמוקרטיה ולהתרחק מפאשיזם ועריצות, לשלום ולא למלחמה, אבל העובדה היא שאנחנו לא נשברים, אנו בני האדם , לא כפופים על ידי סלידה וחוסר אונים מלומד אלא מאוחדים למען חירותנו וכערבים זה לזכויות האדם האוניברסליות של זה, וזה נותן לי תקווה.
אין רוסים, אין אוקראינים; רק אנשים כמו עצמנו, והבחירות שאנחנו עושים לגבי איך להיות בני אדם ביחד.
20 באפריל 2022 מה המשמעות של מריופול? כתובת למתנדבים בוורשה
בעודנו מתאספים ומתכוננים לקחת את המאבק אל האויב בפעולה ישירה נגד משטר רוסיה עצמה, נגד ולדימיר פוטין והאוליגרכים והאליטות שלו היושבים בראש השלטון וכעת שותפים לפשעי מלחמה ופשעים נגד האנושות אוקראינה ומחוז קרים שלה בכיבוש האימפריאלי של אומה ריבונית ועצמאית וברוסיה בהכנעת אזרחיהם, ובשאר התיאטראות של זה מלחמת העולם השלישית, סוריה, לוב, בלארוס, קזחסטן, נגורנו קרבאך , ובתפיסה של המדינה האמריקנית בבחירות הגנובות של 2016, שהכניסה את סוכנו ובוגדתו של פוטין וחסר הכבוד דונלד טראמפ, ליצן הטרור שלנו, בבית הלבן כדי לפקח על חדירתה וחתרנות הדמוקרטיה על ידי הרייך הרביעי, אנו מתמודדים עם אינספור דוגמאות מחרידות לעתיד המצפה לנו בידי משטרו של פוטין, ובחרנו בהתנגדות כאלטרנטיבה היחידה לעבדות ומוות.
כאשר אנו מביאים חשבון לעריצות, טרור וזוועות המלחמה, בפשעים נגד האנושות על ידי רוסיה באוקראינה הכוללים הוצאות להורג, עינויים, אונס המוני מאורגן וסחר באזרחים חטופים, לכידת בני ערובה אזרחיים ושימוש בכפייה עבודה, קניבליזם באמצעות מפעלים ניידים, התקפות רצח עם, מחיקת עדויות לפשעי מלחמה באמצעות משרפות ניידות המעידות על תכנון רשמי כחלק ממסע הטרור והוכחה לכך שאינספור הפשעים נגד האנושות של מלחמה זו אינם סטיות אלא בתכנון ובתכנון. פקודות של פוטין ומפקדיו, איומים בהשמדה גרעינית נגד מדינות אירופה ששולחות סיוע הומניטרי, והשמדה המונית של ערים, הפכנו לבית משפט של ערעור אחרון בהגנה על זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו ועל האנושות שלנו עצמה.
אסטרטגיית הכיבוש הרוסית נפתחת בהפצצה מתמשכת ובלתי פוסקת ובהרס של בתי חולים, מקלטים, מאגרי מזון, מערכות חשמל, אספקת מים, מסדרונות של סיוע הומניטרי ופינוי פליטים; כל דבר שיכול לעזור לאזרחים לשרוד מצור. ברגע ששום דבר לא נשאר עומד, מתחיל מסע טרור כמו אונס המוני מאורגן, עינויים, קניבליזם וביזה, וכל ניצול משועבד או מוצא להורג. זוהי מלחמה של רצח עם ומחיקה, ולפשיזם יכולה להיות רק תשובה אחת; לעולם לא שוב!
במלחמה זו אשר כעת עלינו, מטרתו של פוטין היא להחזיר את האימפריה הרוסית בכיבוש אוקראינה והים השחור כנקודת שיגור לכיבוש ושליטה של הים התיכון, אירופה, אפריקה והמזרח התיכון; אבל יש לו מטרה מקבילה ומסוכנת הרבה יותר בביטול החוק הבינלאומי וזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו. המטרה האמיתית של הרייך הרביעי ומנהל הבובות שלו ולדימיר פוטין במלחמה זו היא להפוך את רעיון זכויות האדם לחסר משמעות.
זוהי מלחמת עריצות ופשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה נגד הדמוקרטיה וחברה חופשית של שווים, על הרעיון שלכולנו יש משמעות וערך שהם ייחודיים שלנו ונגד שיעבוד וגניבת נפשנו.
בתוך גבולות הצורה שלנו, של פגמי אנושיותנו ושבירת העולם, אנו נאבקים להשיג את האדם; שלנו היא מהפכה של תיקון עולם, ביטוי עברי שמשמעותו תיקון העולם, המתייחס לתלות ההדדית ולחובת הזהירות שלנו זה לזה כשווים החולקים אנושיות משותפת.
אני בטוח שכולנו כאן יודעים למה התכוון שלמה ברדין כשחיזר את הביטוי מקובלת לוריא ומהמדרש, אבל למה אני מתכוון בזה?
ישנם רק שני סוגים של פעולות שאנו בני האדם מסוגלים לבצע; אלה שמאשרים ומעלים אותנו, ואלה שמבזים ומבטלים אותנו.
אנו חיים בצומת של היסטוריה שעשוי להגדיר את גורל הציוויליזציה שלנו ואת האפשרויות העתידיות להיות אנושיות, במאבק בין עריצות לחירות ובין סולידריות לפילוג, ועלינו כל אחד מאיתנו לבחור למי ברצוננו להיות, אנו בני אנוש; אדונים ועבדים, או חברה חופשית של שווים?
כפי שאתם יודעים, חברי ואני באים אליכם מהמצור על מריופול, קרב של בשר נגד כוח ואימה שאין להם מענה, של סולידריות נגד פילוג, של אהבה נגד שנאה ושל תקווה נגד פחד.
כאן, כמו במרד גטו ורשה שחגגנו אתמול, נבחן הרצון האנושי לחירות על ידי אויב המתמוגג בחיקם של המפלצתיים, שמדיניותו ותכנוני המלחמה שלו כטרור בשמחה וביהירות הגלויה של הכוח מכשירים באופן מוחלט. הרס ורצח עם, מלחמה שבה זוועות וקללות משתחררים כטקטיקות של הלם ויראה מתוך כוונה להכניע באמצעות חוסר אונים נלמד ופחד מוחץ ומוכלל.
Polish
20 kwietnia 2023 Rocznica reorganizacji Brygady Walk Wyzwoleńczych Ukrainy im. Abrahama Lincolna w Rosji po naszej ucieczce z Mariupola
Podczas gdy Front Ukraiński Trzeciej Wojny Światowej szaleje, rok temu dzisiaj stałem przed liczną publicznością, która odpowiedziała na nasze wezwanie ochotników do podjęcia walki z wrogiem i rozliczenia zbrodni wojennych Rosji na Ukrainie, uwolnić Rosję od tyranii jako wolnego społeczeństwa równych i zaprowadzić pokój w Europie i przyszłość ludzkości w sojuszu i solidarności z siecią pokojową w rosyjskim wojsku i masowym ruchem demokratycznym, który jest obecnie wszechobecny w jej społeczeństwie, zaprowadzić pokój przez zamęt i zniszczenie rosyjskich wojennych systemów produkcyjnych, logistycznych i komunikacyjnych oraz przygotowanie sieci ruchu oporu na rosyjską inwazję na Europę Wschodnią, którą Putin planuje rozpocząć od Mołdawii i krajów bałtyckich.
Zastanawiałem się, kto przyjdzie nas wysłuchać, świadków okropności wojny z odległej krainy, którą niewielu widziało, którzy nie zdołali ocalić miasta przed zagładą, a jego mieszkańców przed niewolnictwem i ludobójstwem.
Potomkowie powstania w getcie warszawskim z 1943 roku pamiętali i przyjeżdżali z całego świata; naród polski przypomniał sobie inwazję z 1939 roku i przybył, historyczne narody alianckie II wojny światowej przypomniały sobie i przybyły, Europa przypomniała sobie tyranię i terror wojny i okupacji i przybyła, miasto zalane uchodźcami ukraińskimi powitane i zjednoczone w solidarności z rosyjskimi działaczami na rzecz pokoju i demokracji oraz zagranicznymi wolontariuszami, takimi jak ja.
To była chwalebna chwila, w której solidarność obiecała odkupienie wad naszego człowieczeństwa i załamania świata. Co z tego da się zrobić, dopiero się okaże, czy umieszczenie naszego życia w równowadze może przechylić pęd historii w stronę demokracji, z dala od faszyzmu i tyranii, w stronę pokoju, a nie wojny, ale pozostaje faktem, że jesteśmy niezłomni, my, ludzie nie ujarzmionych poniżeniem i wyuczoną bezradnością, ale zjednoczonych w sprawie naszej wolności i jako gwarantów wzajemnych powszechnych praw człowieka, i to daje mi nadzieję.
Nie ma Rosjan, nie ma Ukraińców; tylko ludzie tacy jak my i wybory, których dokonujemy, dotyczące tego, jak być razem ludźmi.
20 kwietnia 2022 Co oznacza Mariupol? Adres do Wolontariuszy w Warszawie
Gdy zbieramy się i przygotowujemy do podjęcia walki z wrogiem w bezpośredniej akcji przeciwko reżimowi samej Rosji, przeciwko Władimirowi Putinowi oraz jego oligarchom i elitom, które zasiadają u steru władzy i są teraz współwinne zbrodni wojennych i zbrodni przeciwko ludzkości zarówno w Ukraina i jej prowincja Krym w imperialnym podboju suwerennego i niepodległego narodu, a w Rosji w ujarzmieniu własnych obywateli, a w innych teatrach tej III wojny światowej, Syrii, Libii, Białorusi, Kazachstanie, Górskim Karabachu , a także w zdobyciu państwa amerykańskiego w skradzionych wyborach 2016, które umieściły zdradzieckiego i niehonorowego agenta Putina i pełnomocnika Donalda Trumpa, naszego klauna terroru, w Białym Domu, aby nadzorować infiltrację i niszczenie demokracji przez Czwartą Rzeszę, my mamy do czynienia z niezliczonymi przerażającymi przykładami przyszłości, która czeka nas z rąk reżimu Putina, a my wybraliśmy Ruch Oporu jako jedyną alternatywę dla niewolnictwa i śmierci.
Kiedy wprowadzamy rozliczenie za tyranię, terror i okropności wojny, w zbrodniach przeciwko ludzkości dokonanych przez Rosję na Ukrainie, które obejmują egzekucje, tortury, zorganizowane masowe gwałty i handel uprowadzonymi cywilami, schwytanie cywilnych zakładników i użycie sił pracy, kanibalizm z wykorzystaniem mobilnych fabryk, ludobójcze ataki, wymazywanie dowodów zbrodni wojennych z wykorzystaniem mobilnych krematoriów, co wskazuje na oficjalne planowanie w ramach kampanii terroru i dowód, że niezliczone zbrodnie przeciwko ludzkości w tej wojnie nie są aberracją, ale celowo i na rozkazy Putina i jego dowódców, groźby nuklearnej zagłady narodów europejskich wysyłających pomoc humanitarną oraz masowe niszczenie miast, stajemy się ostatnim sądem apelacyjnym w obronie naszych uniwersalnych praw człowieka i samego naszego człowieczeństwa.
Rosyjska strategia podboju rozpoczyna się ciągłym i bezlitosnym bombardowaniem i niszczeniem szpitali, schronów bombowych, magazynów żywności, systemów zasilania, zaopatrzenia w wodę, korytarzy pomocy humanitarnej i ewakuacji uchodźców; wszystko, co mogłoby pomóc obywatelom przetrwać oblężenie. Gdy nic nie zostanie ocalone, rozpoczyna się kampania terroru, polegająca na zorganizowanych masowych gwałtach, torturach, kanibalizmie i grabieży, a wszyscy, którzy przeżyli, zostają zniewoleni lub straceni. To jest wojna ludobójstwa i wymazywania, a na faszyzm może być tylko jedna odpowiedź; Nigdy więcej!
W tej wojnie, która teraz nad nami, celem Putina jest przywrócenie Imperium Rosyjskiego w podboju Ukrainy i Morza Czarnego jako platformy startowej do podboju i panowania nad Morzem Śródziemnym, Europą, Afryką i Bliskim Wschodem; ale ma on równoległy i znacznie bardziej niebezpieczny cel, polegający na uchyleniu prawa międzynarodowego i naszych uniwersalnych praw człowieka. Prawdziwym celem Czwartej Rzeszy i jej marionetkowego mistrza Władimira Putina w tej wojnie jest uczynienie bezsensownej idei praw człowieka.
To jest wojna tyranii i faszyzmów krwi, wiary i ziemi przeciwko demokracji i wolnemu społeczeństwu równych, o ideę, że my wszyscy mamy sens i wartość, która jest wyłącznie nasza i przeciwko zniewoleniu i kradzieży naszych dusz.
W granicach naszej formy, wad naszego człowieczeństwa i zepsucia świata, walczymy o osiągnięcie człowieczeństwa; nasza jest rewolucją Tikkun Olam, hebrajskiego wyrażenia oznaczającego naprawę świata, które odnosi się do naszej współzależności i obowiązku troski o siebie nawzajem jako równych, którzy mają wspólne człowieczeństwo.
Jestem pewien, że każdy z nas tutaj wie, co miał na myśli Shlomo Bardin, gdy zmienił frazę z Kabały Lurii i Midraszu, ale co mam przez to na myśli?
Są tylko dwa rodzaje działań, które my, ludzie, jesteśmy w stanie wykonać; te, które nas utwierdzają i wywyższają, oraz te, które nas poniżają i odczłowieczają.
Żyjemy na skrzyżowaniu historii, które mogą określić los naszej cywilizacji i przyszłe możliwości stania się człowiekiem, w walce między tyranią a wolnością oraz między solidarnością a podziałem, i każdy z nas musi wybrać, kim chce się stać, ludzie; panowie i niewolnicy czy wolne społeczeństwo równych?
Ukrainian
20 квітня 2023 р. Річниця реорганізації бригади імені Авраама Лінкольна України для визвольної боротьби в Росії після нашої втечі з Маріуполя.
У той час, як Український фронт Третьої світової війни триває, рік тому сьогодні я стояв перед аудиторією з безлічі людей, які відгукнулися на наш заклик до добровольців прийняти бій з ворогом і відплатити за військові злочини Росії в Україні, звільнити Росію від тиранії як вільне суспільство рівних і принести мир Європі та майбутньому людству в союзі та солідарності з мережею миру в російській армії та масовим демократичним рухом, який зараз поширюється в її суспільстві, принести мир через плутанину та знищення російських бойових систем виробництва, логістики та зв’язку, а також для підготовки мереж Опору для російського вторгнення в Східну Європу, яке Путін планує розпочати з Молдови та країн Балтії.
Хто прийде послухати нас, — думав я, — свідків жахів війни з далекої країни, яку небагато коли-небудь бачили, які не змогли врятувати місто від знищення, а його людей — від рабства й геноциду?
Нащадки повстання у Варшавському гетто 1943 року згадали та приїхали з усього світу; нація Польщі згадала вторгнення 1939 року і прийшла, історичні країни-союзники Другої світової війни згадали і прийшли, Європа згадала тиранію та терор війни та окупації і прийшла, місто, заповнене українськими біженцями, зустрінуте та об’єднане в солідарності з російськими активістами миру та демократії та іноземними волонтерами, такими як я.
Це був чудовий момент, коли солідарність обіцяла спокутувати вади нашої людяності та зламаність світу. Що з цього можна зробити, ще невідомо, чи може постановка нашого життя на терези схилити імпульс історії в бік демократії та від фашизму та тиранії, у бік миру, а не війни, але факт залишається фактом: ми незламані, ми, люди , не підкорені відразою та навченою безпорадністю, але об’єднані у справі нашої свободи та як гаранти універсальних прав людини одне одного, і це дає мені надію.
Немає ні росіян, ні українців; лише такі люди, як ми самі, і вибір, який ми робимо щодо того, як бути людьми разом.
20 квітня 2022 Що означає Маріуполь? Звернення до волонтерів у Варшаві
Збираючись і готуючись до боротьби з ворогом у прямих діях проти режиму самої Росії, проти Володимира Путіна та його олігархів та еліт, які сидять біля керма влади і зараз є причетними до військових злочинів і злочинів проти людства як у Україна та її провінція Крим в імперському завоювання суверенної і незалежної нації і в Росії в підкоренні власних громадян, а на інших театрах цієї Третьої світової війни, Сирії, Лівії, Білорусі, Казахстану, Нагірного Карабаху , а також під час захоплення американської держави на викрадених виборах 2016 року, коли зрадницького й безчесного агента Путіна та довіреної особи Дональда Трампа, нашого клоуна терору, у Білий дім для нагляду за проникненням і підривом демократії Четвертим рейхом, ми ми стикаємося з незліченною кількістю жахливих прикладів майбутнього, яке чекає на нас від рук режиму Путіна, і ми обрали Опір як єдину альтернативу рабству і смерті.
Оскільки ми приносимо розплату за тиранію, терор і жахи війни, за злочини проти людства, зроблені Росією в Україні, які включають страти, катування, організовані масові зґвалтування та торгівлю викраденими цивільними особами, захоплення цивільних заручників та використання примусових праця, канібалізм з використанням пересувних фабрик, напади геноциду, знищення доказів військових злочинів за допомогою мобільних крематоріїв, що вказує на офіційне планування як частину кампанії терору та доказ того, що незліченна кількість злочинів проти людства цієї війни не є відхиленнями, а задумом і накази Путіна та його командирів, загрози ядерного знищення європейських країн, які надсилають гуманітарну допомогу, і масове знищення міст, ми стаємо останньою апеляційною інстанцією у захисті наших універсальних прав людини та нашого людства.
Російська завойовницька стратегія починається з постійних і невпинних бомбардувань і руйнувань лікарень, бомбосховищ, складів продовольства, енергосистем, водопостачання, коридорів гуманітарної допомоги та евакуації біженців; все, що могло б допомогти громадянам пережити облогу. Після того, як нічого не залишиться, починається кампанія терору як організовані масові зґвалтування, тортури, канібалізм та мародерство, а будь-які вижили поневолені або страчені. Це війна на геноцид і стирання, і на фашизм може бути лише одна відповідь; Ніколи знову!
У цій війні, яка зараз на нас, мета Путіна — відновити Російську імперію у завоювання України та Чорного моря як стартовий майданчик для завоювання та панування Середземномор’я, Європи, Африки та Близького Сходу; але він має паралельну й набагато більш небезпечну мету — скасування міжнародного права та наших універсальних прав людини. Справжня мета Четвертого рейху та його маріонетка Володимира Путіна у цій війні – позбутися сенсу ідеї прав людини.
Це війна тиранії та фашизму крові, віри та ґрунту проти демократії та вільного суспільства рівних за ідею, що всі ми маємо сенс і цінність, яка є унікальною, а також проти поневолення та крадіжки наших душ.
У межах нашої форми, вад нашої людяності та зламаності світу ми боремося за досягнення людського; наша – це революція Тіккуна Олама, єврейської фрази, що означає відновлення світу, яка стосується нашої взаємозалежності та обов’язку піклуватися один про одного як рівних, хто об’єднує спільне людство.
Я впевнений, що всі ми тут знаємо, що мав на увазі Шломо Бардін, коли переробив фразу з Каббали Лурія і Мідраш, але що я маю на увазі під цим?
Є лише два види дій, які ми, люди, здатні виконувати; ті, що стверджують і підносять нас, і ті, що принижують і дегуманізують нас.
Ми живемо на перехресті історії, яка може визначити долю нашої цивілізації та майбутні можливості стати людиною, у боротьбі між тиранією та свободою, між солідарністю та поділом, і кожен із нас має вибрати, ким хоче стати, ми люди; панів і рабів, чи вільне суспільство рівних?
Russian
20 апреля 2023 Годовщина реорганизации Бригады Авраама Линкольна Украины за освободительную борьбу в России после нашего побега из Мариуполя
В то время как бушует Украинский фронт Третьей мировой войны, ровно год назад я стоял перед аудиторией множества людей, которые откликнулись на наш призыв добровольцев принять бой с врагом и принести расплату за военные преступления России в Украине, освободить Россию от тирании как свободное общество равных и принести мир Европе и будущему человечества в союзе и солидарности с мирной сетью в российских вооруженных силах и демократическим массовым движением, которое сейчас проникает в ее общество, принести мир путем беспорядка и разрушение российских боевых систем производства, логистики и коммуникаций, а также подготовка сетей Сопротивления к российскому вторжению в Восточную Европу, которое Путин планирует начать с Молдовы и стран Балтии.
Кто придет послушать нас, думал я, свидетелей ужасов войны из далекой страны, которую мало кто когда-либо видел, кто не смог спасти город от уничтожения, а его народ от рабства и геноцида?
Потомки восстания в Варшавском гетто 1943 года помнили и приехали со всего мира; народ Польши вспомнил вторжение 1939 года и пришел, исторические союзные народы Второй мировой войны вспомнили и пришли, Европа вспомнила тиранию и террор войны и оккупации и пришла, город, наводненный украинскими беженцами, приветствовали и объединились в солидарности с российскими активистами мира и демократии и иностранными волонтерами, такими как я.
Это был славный момент, когда солидарность обещала искупить недостатки нашей человечности и сломленность мира. Что из этого можно сделать, еще предстоит увидеть, если балансировка наших жизней может склонить инерцию истории к демократии и от фашизма и тирании, к миру, а не войне, но факт остается фактом: мы не сломлены, мы, люди. , не порабощенные отвращением и ученой беспомощностью, но объединенные в деле нашей свободы и как гаранты универсальных человеческих прав друг друга, и это вселяет в меня надежду.
Русских нет, украинцев нет; только люди, подобные нам, и выбор, который мы делаем о том, как быть людьми вместе.
20 апреля 2022 Что такое Мариуполь? Обращение к волонтерам в Варшаве
Пока мы собираемся и готовимся принять бой с врагом в прямом действии против самого режима России, против Владимира Путина и его олигархов и элит, которые сидят у руля власти и ныне причастны к военным преступлениям и преступлениям против человечности как в Украина и ее провинция Крым в имперском завоевании суверенной и независимой нации и в России в подчинении собственных граждан, и на других театрах этой Третьей мировой войны, Сирия, Ливия, Беларусь, Казахстан, Нагорный Карабах , а также в захвате американского государства на украденных выборах 2016 года, когда изменнический и бесчестный агент и доверенное лицо Путина Дональд Трамп, наш клоун террора, попал в Белый дом, чтобы наблюдать за проникновением и подрывом демократии Четвертым рейхом, мы столкнулись с бесчисленными ужасными примерами будущего, которое ожидает нас от рук путинского режима, и мы выбрали Сопротивление как единственную альтернативу рабству и смерти.
Поскольку мы приносим расплату за тиранию, террор и ужасы войны, за преступления против человечности, совершенные Россией на Украине, включая казни, пытки, организованные массовые изнасилования и торговлю похищенными гражданскими лицами, захват гражданских заложников и применение насильственных труд, каннибализм с использованием передвижных заводов, акты геноцида, стирание доказательств военных преступлений с использованием передвижных крематориев, что указывает на официальное планирование как часть кампании террора и доказательство того, что бесчисленные преступления против человечности в ходе этой войны не являются отклонением от нормы, а являются преднамеренными и преднамеренными приказы Путина и его командиров, угрозы ядерного уничтожения европейским странам, отправляющим гуманитарную помощь, и массовое разрушение городов, мы становимся судом последней инстанции в защиту наших универсальных прав человека и самой нашей человечности.
Российская стратегия завоевания начинается с непрерывных и безжалостных бомбардировок и разрушений больниц, бомбоубежищ, складов продовольствия, энергосистем, водоснабжения, коридоров гуманитарной помощи и эвакуации беженцев; все, что может помочь гражданам пережить осаду. Как только ничего не остается, начинается кампания террора с организованными массовыми изнасилованиями, пытками, каннибализмом и грабежами, а все выжившие порабощаются или казнятся. Это война геноцида и стирания, и фашизму может быть только один ответ; Больше никогда!
В этой войне, которая сейчас надвигается, цель Путина состоит в том, чтобы восстановить Российскую империю путем завоевания Украины и Черного моря в качестве стартовой площадки для завоевания и господства в Средиземноморье, Европе, Африке и на Ближнем Востоке; но у него есть параллельная и гораздо более опасная цель в отмене международного права и наших универсальных прав человека. Истинная цель Четвертого рейха и его кукловода Владимира Путина в этой войне состоит в том, чтобы лишить смысла идею прав человека.
Это война тирании и фашизма крови, веры и почвы против демократии и свободного общества равных, за идею о том, что у всех нас есть смысл и ценность, которые принадлежат только нам, и против порабощения и кражи наших душ.
В пределах нашей формы, недостатков нашей человечности и разбитости мира мы боремся за достижение человеческого; наша — это революция Тиккун Олам, фразы на иврите, означающей восстановление мира, которая указывает на нашу взаимозависимость и обязанность заботиться друг о друге как о равных, разделяющих общую человечность.
Я уверен, что все мы здесь знаем, что имел в виду Шломо Бардин, когда он переделал фразу из Каббалы Лурии и Мидраша, но что я имею в виду под этим?
Есть только два вида действий, которые мы, человеческие существа, можем совершать; те, которые утверждают и возвышают нас, и те, которые унижают и дегуманизируют нас.
Мы живем на перекрестке истории, который может определить судьбу нашей цивилизации и будущие возможности стать людьми, в борьбе между тиранией и свободой, между солидарностью и разделением, и каждый из нас должен выбрать, кем мы хотим стать, мы люди; господа и рабы или свободное общество равных?
This is the anniversary of a tragic and glorious Last Stand the world must never forget, and I cannot.
Here follows my journal of the final day as Russian forces sealed off the city from aid or escape, and after making what mischief we could for the enemy my friends and I fled along the underground railroad to Warsaw to organize resistance and revolution within Russia, and bring a Reckoning for war crimes in Mariupol to her destroyers.
For fear of nuclear annihilation and other retaliation by and direct conflict with Russia, America and the world have avoided bringing a Reckoning to Putin’s regime for its crimes against humanity in Ukraine; we have not counter-invaded, liberated the Black Sea, destroyed the airfields, supply lines, and manufacture of war material, nor given Ukraine the means to do so for herself.
As the survival of humankind depends upon our abandonment of weapons of mass destruction and global nuclear disarmament, disengagement works on the existential level, but we know from Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” that appeasement does not. As the famous line from the film Darkest Hour that Churchill never said goes; “You can not reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
Between war with Russia and refusing our duty of care for others regardless of whose citizens they may be which entails the abandonment of our principles of universal human rights and the natural right of sovereignty of all human beings, there is a vast and enormous space of free play in which to act in solidarity and anticolonial struggle with those under threat of imperial conquest and dominion and all of the atrocities and horrors of war. This is true of Palestine as well as Ukraine, and far too many other failures of our humanity.
Let us bring regime change to Russia, for this is the only way Putin’s mad quest to re-found the Russian Empire, which now unfolds in ten theatres of war including Ukraine and America in our elections, will truly end; when the people of Russia liberate themselves. I can say the same for the Gaza War and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; it ends when the people of Israel liberate themselves from the Netanyahu settler regime and bring true democracy to Israel in abandoning the re-enactment of Auschwitz which is the Occupation, and unite with the people of Palestine as fully equal citizens in one nation wherein fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are renounced for ideals of equality, diversity, inclusion, and a secular state.
Legislation now awaits a vote in our Congress which Janus-like offers us a chiaroscuro of good and evil; funds to combat tyranny and terror for Ukraine, and funds to enforce tyranny and terror for Israel.
Our policy in Israel must be to silence the bombs of genocide, break the blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and bring regime change.
For Ukraine we must do far more than fund resistance; we must bring the fight to the enemy on his own ground, in solidarity with the people of Russia versus the regime and in alliance with the democracy movement now pervasive throughout civil society and the antiwar movement within the Russian military. This is how we brought a Reckoning to Prigozhin as a war criminal, and it is how we will bring a Reckoning to Putin and his regime.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
April 18 2022 Last Stand at Mariupol: Fight at the Steel Works
Fighting at the Azovstal and Ilyin Iron and Steel Works remains ongoing; among the vast warrens and maze of tunnels here, with its arsenals, hospitals, communications centers, and routes of resupply as in other underground fortresses in Mariupol and elsewhere, Resistance to the Russian Occupation may be waged for years if necessary. A machinist and leader of the steelworkers who armed themselves in defense, called Big Yuri, has even jury rigged an arms factory which can manufacture rifles and ammunition indefinitely. This, unfortunately, is not the same as holding the ground.
We are the Spartans; our lives buy time for our civilization to awaken to its peril and the threat of fascist tyranny and imperial conquest by Russia in this the Third World War.
For Mariupol and far too many of the people of Ukraine, this will come too late; no one is coming to help, and many of her defenders have nothing left to fight with on this forty seventh day of the Siege of Mariupol which began on the second of March, and of the Battle which began February 24th.
But it is not too late for you and yours, whomever you may be or wherever you may live. This truth must suffice, as the hope for our future.
I speak herein as a witness of history who has been in Mariupol from March 22, and offer this testimony on behalf of our universal human rights in any Reckoning brought to the perpetrators of this vast and horrific war crime.
This has been from its beginning a battle of aerial and artillery bombardment against the city itself and the civilian population, of tanks against riflemen, of flesh against unanswerable force and horror, of division against solidarity, of hate against love, and of fear against hope.
Here the human will to freedom is tested by an enemy who exults in the embrace of the monstrous, whose policies and designs of war as terror gladly and with the open arrogance of power instrumentalize utter destruction and genocide, a war wherein atrocities and depravities are unleashed as tactics of shock and awe with intent of subjugation through learned helplessness and overwhelming and generalized fear.
Here as in Nanking and countless other places, this produces not submission but resistance. Politics is about fear as a basis of exchange, and in the Calculus of Fear, where limited state terror against its own citizens in concert with total control of information may be useful internally in the manufacture of consent to be governed, provided the legitimacy of authority remains unquestioned by those in whose name it claims to act, in war what is uncontrollable and unimaginable creates conditions in which there is nothing more to lose.
Such are my people, all those with nothing left to lose, here and in all times and places throughout history and among all humankind, and when we stand in solidarity with each other we are Unconquerable and beyond any force of subjugation or control.
Too much or too little fear, and where and how it is used, can destabilize totalitarian regimes. When law becomes meaningless and is replaced by power and force, authority is delegitimized, the consent to be governed is lost, and order becomes chaos.
Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, episode seven The World to Come, has a scene in which two young successors to leadership of traditionally rival factions find themselves in love and in need of allies in a subplot which reimagines Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; the rebellious hellion Jonah Breakspear asks his Machiavellian lover Sophie Longerbane, “Who is chaos good for?” To which she replies, “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
As Jean Genet said to me in Beirut nearly forty years ago as we were surrounded by soldiers in a house they had set on fire and about to be burned alive; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
Resistance has always been a war to the knife. Curious phrase, that; among the few words and whole phrases which come into modern English unchanged from the original Norse; krig på kniven. Its meaning for us is simple; those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none.
By any means necessary, as this principle is expressed in the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X.
Why is this terrible war happening, in Mariupol a campaign of terror which includes executions, torture, organized mass rape and the trafficking of abducted civilians, the capture of civilian hostages and use of forced labor, cannibalism using mobile factories, genocidal attacks, erasure of evidence of war crimes using mobile crematoriums which indicates official planning as part of the campaign of terror and proof that the countless crimes against humanity of this war are not aberrations but by design, threats of nuclear annihilation against European nations sending humanitarian aid, and the mass destruction of cities?
The Russian strategy of conquest as Total War opens with sustained and relentless bombardment and destruction of hospitals, bomb shelters, stores of food, power systems, water supply, corridors of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of refugees; anything which could help citizens survive a siege. Once nothing is left standing, a campaign of terror as organized mass rape, torture, cannibalism, and looting begins, and any survivors enslaved or executed. This is a war of genocide and erasure, which has no parallel in modern Europe other than the Siege of Sarajevo; and here I speak as a witness of history to both.
Why? What could possibly be worth purchasing with your humanity and that of your nation and people?
Russia wants to conquer Ukraine for the same reason Japan invaded Manchuria; because it is an industrial heartland from which the conquest of the world may be launched, and the warm water ports of Mariupol and Odesa are key to this imperial plan of dominion, as well as to control of a land corridor to Crimea.
The sixty-five ports of the Black Sea connect Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine, and all of these with the Mediterranean, dominion of which Russia has long disputed with Turkey in Libya and Syria. If Russia intends to follow the conquest of Ukraine with that of Eastern Europe, the capture of Romania’s Port of Constanta would open the whole of the Danube region to invasion. The Black Sea remains as crucial to the dominion of the Mediterranean, and of Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, as it was when Mithridates VI of Pontus contested for it in his wars with the Roman Empire, or at the Battle of Gallipoli which we seem doomed to refight in Crimea.
At stake in the fight at the steelworks in Mariupol is the major regional industrial plant and the strategic resource of keeping a fleet alive, decisive in diverting Russian troops and resources from the Donbas campaign and in preventing Russia from fully colonizing Crimea and coastal Ukraine. Denying Russia the ability to refit and repair its ships from local resources may be key to defeating the invasion of the Ukrainian seaboard.
The Azovstal and Ilyin Iron and Steel Works are also a vast and labyrinthine fortress from which the defense of Mariupol may be waged, like Fort St Elmo from which the Knights of Malta made their heroic Last Stand.
What is happening in Mariupol now, among the confusion and devastation of a city of ghosts wherein the Russian army has given free rein to the depravity of war?
As Ukraine seizes the initiative in the north and drives Russia back across the border, and begins to contest and retake the Black Sea with the stunning victory of crippling the Moskva, flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet to which the defenders of Snake Island gave famous reply, savage fighting for the port and the steelworks continues though Russia has claimed a thousand Ukrainian Marines surrendered, with the implication that Mariupol itself has also surrendered.
To this disinformation aimed at the will of the Ukrainian people to refuse to submit and remain Unconquered I say; First, that Mariupol is without question under Occupation and in enemy hands, but the city has not surrendered nor ever will. Suicide teams who have volunteered to remain and harry the enemy as opportunities arise will see to that, and networks of Resistance among her citizens await the hour of Liberation.
The Russians have published their estimate of the forces gathered here at the steel works as twenty five hundred Ukrainians and four hundred foreign volunteers of the International Legion, including the independent Abraham Lincoln Brigade, we Americans who named ourselves after the legendary unit of the Spanish Civil War. Others still hold the port itself under Ukrainian control, a fact to the advantage of any such force of Liberation who may bring a fleet to this fight.
Second, there is nothing dishonorable in surrender if it means you live to fight another day, and the 36th Marines Brigade who have on the forty sixth day of their heroic defense of Mariupol declared in their last message to the world, days ago now, that they have nothing left to fight with, no ammunition, water, anything, and that they are either captive or dead, bear only honor with them into a future which must now be chosen by others.
I have never seen a Ukrainian surrender. Casually stroll into an enemy checkpoint and pull the pin on a grenade, laughing, to open the way for a hospital truck to rescue others, yes. Share a bottle of poisoned vodka with an enemy sentry and die together while refugees are escorted through the lines, yes.
Such people cannot be conquered. The use of force and violence is fragile and power is hollow when it has no legitimacy but only brutal repression to sustain it; for all such things fail at the point of disobedience and disbelief.
Whosoever refuses to submit becomes Unconquered, and is free. This is a kind of victory against which no tyranny or terror can win.
I have seen a fierce bearded fellow attack a pair of Russian tanks with an ax, running from cover to leap onto the turret and behead the commander, and vanish into the ruins like a shadow of wrath summoned by the city’s pain, grief, and fear. Called The Headsman, in him Ukraine has found an avenger. The remaining tank crewmen bailed out and ran in panic, the commanding officer in the second tank opened fire on the deserters and actually shot one of them, and he was shot in turn by a fellow Russian soldier who emerged behind him from the tank, put a gun to his head, and then simply walked across the street with hands raised and changed sides. The soldier who chose our common humanity over nationalism and solidarity over division is now the commander of that tank, but with the Ukrainian flag painted on it. Saint Andrei, they are calling him.
Putin has sent slaves to conquer a free people. He forgot to wonder, what happens when the slaves join together with their fellow victims of tyranny whom they were sent to conquer, in solidarity of action to liberate themselves?
While the Russian army has an active peace movement and networks of solidarity working with their Ukrainian counterparts, and many incidents of desertion and mutiny including fragging officers, the Ukrainians, often frozen, starving, and out of ammunition like the founders of America who crossed the Delaware with Washington on that fateful Christmas Day in 1776, remain defiant and Unconquered.
There is also the legend of the Wolf of Mariupol, a girl who tore out her attacker’s throat like a wolf. A myth of war, possibly; but I saw what was left of the Russian soldier in question. It is said she now leads a team of women who rescue others from the Butterfly Collectors, the soldiers capturing women for abduction to Russia and trafficking as a criminal syndicate within the Russian military. In her Ukraine has found a Harriet Tubman.
A group of Ukrainian Marines has last week broken through to link up with elements of the Azov National Guard, very stubborn fellows who have held the steel works in grim conditions; but several zones of conflict are unfolding and rapidly changing. Russian officers have tried to compel surrender using civilian hostages in a different incident, but not to my knowledge with success.
The war crimes of the Russians have awakened a resistance of victory or death; like the defenders at the Siege of Malta in 1565 or George Washington who coined that phrase as a password at the Battle of Trenton, the Ukrainian soldiers, civilian partisans including steelworkers and others who armed themselves when Russia attacked, and international volunteers I have witnessed swearing an oath to die in place rather than surrender anything to a conqueror will not go quietly.
What happens next? As Lenin asked in his essay that founded a political party and a Revolution which was destined to transform the world, What is to be done?
Today the Russian Occupation forces impose passports of travel required of all persons on the streets, begin capturing civilians and sending them to processing centers to choose some for forced labor camps and others for summary execution, and all access to the world beyond Mariupol and from the world to here cordoned off entirely. Mariupol is to be emptied, the population totalized as dead or enslaved, and remaining persons systematically hunted to extinction.
Putin intends to leave us nothing to defend and nowhere from which to fight. And in so doing he has freed us to begin the next phase of struggle, and take the fight to the enemy.
Sometimes I think he doesn’t know how to play this game at all.
Fortunately for us, being a KGB Colonel is not precisely the same as being a professional revolutionary, and seems to have made of Putin a truncated and misshapen thing, of limited intellect and no morals whatever, no visionary evil genius nor embodiment of Hegelian world-historical forces but merely an overseer of the carceral state. Vladimir Putin is much like Adolf Eichmann, as described by Hannah Arendt in her historic work on the Nuremberg Trials.
As I consider my goals and objectives regarding the war to be obvious to anyone, I don’t mind outlining them for you here.
First and beyond all other priorities, for only this will truly end the threat of war, we must act in solidarity with the Russian peoples to help bring regime change and the Liberation of Russia from the tyranny of Vladimir Putin and his oligarchy.
Second, we must bring a direct and personal Reckoning to Putin, his oligarchs, high command, political allies and minions, and all those complicit in war crimes in Ukraine.
Third, we must bring destruction to Russia’s ability to wage this war, especially the artillery and airfields which reduce whole cities to ruin in the opening phase of any such enemy assault.
Fourth, we must seize control of the Black Sea or prevent Russia from doing so, to deny its use as a launching pad for the imperial Russian conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
We’re going to need a pirate fleet for that last bit, and I know just where I can find one.
Herein the overarching strategic reality which must drive our decisions is the fact that World War Three has now been ongoing for some time, whose theatres of war include Russia, America, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and now Ukraine inclusive of her province Crimea.
Should we fail to stop this war of imperial conquest and dominion here in Ukraine where all our humanitarian values and international laws are violated with brutal savagery, and allow it to become a general global war between liberty and tyranny, my fear is that the world may enter an age of tyranny and centuries of war which humankind will not survive.
For Putin’s hand rests on the button of our nuclear annihilation and extinction, and it calls to him, whispering; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
”圮地則行；圍地則謀；死地則戰“; as written by Sun Tzu in Chapter Eleven of The Art of War, “In death ground, fight.”
This principle of action was once demonstrated for me in Angola, during the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988, in a tactical situation similar to ours here in Mariupol. While the spectacle of this grand final battle in a decades long liberation struggle against colonialism and Apartheid was unfolding, I was making mischief behind enemy lines in the bush. Here I discovered a lost unit, mainly Zulu though with Soviet and Cuban volunteers, which was encircled by Apartheid forces.
After reporting what I knew of the area to the command group and a brief conference in several languages, an old fellow who had heretofore been silent stood up from the shadows of the tent, whose shirtless form displayed a fearsome and magnificent scar from a lion’s claws, and said; “We are surrounded and outnumbered with no ammunition and worse, no water, and no one is coming to help us. We must attack.”
The sergeant smiled at this as if he had been given a marvelous gift, strode outside, and gave the order which if you are lucky you will never hear; “Fix bayonets!”
And the men about to die erupted in song. “Usuthu! Umkhonto wami womile!” “My spear is thirsty”, that last.
We too can emerge victorious from our war of survival against even an immensely more vast and powerful foe, as did the heroes of Cuito Cuanavale, if we unleash the full will and force of our nations against an emergent Russian Empire, as a United Humankind; especially if we do so against its weak spots and lines of fracture.
Ukraine is such a weak spot of imperial ambition, while she yet resists and remains Unconquered. And the Russian invasion of Europe can be derailed by political action in Russia through the democracy and peace movements which have challenged Putin’s tyranny.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity goes the motto of the Revolution which birthed democracies in America and France; the first two parts of which proclaim universal principles of human being, and the third part, which refers to what we call solidarity, interdependence, and our duty of care for others, is instrumental to the realization of our liberty and equality as a free society of equals.
We can be victorious in the triumph of democracy over tyranny, of solidarity over division, and of love over hate. But there is only one way this works; we must act as one United Humankind.
As written by Tom Bateman of the BBC; “Russian troops started their encirclement of Mariupol in early March, gradually tightening the noose.
There are growing signs Russia could be on the brink of fully capturing Mariupol, the besieged southern port city which has suffered a devastating, six-week assault.
Officially, Ukraine’s armed forces say they are sustaining its defence and are in “continuous contact” with their troops on the ground. But they concede it is likely Moscow will try to take full control of the city, while a regional Russian-backed separatist leader claims Mariupol is close to falling.
Ukrainian troops have said they are running out of ammunition, and are believed to have been pushed back into two isolated pockets adjoining the coastline.
The city’s fate is likely to be critical for the next phase of the war. In Russian hands it would provide control of a clear swathe of territory connecting Moscow’s two fronts in the south and east. It would release large numbers of forces to redeploy, and provide President Vladimir Putin with a moment of strategic “victory” after a lethally shambolic first stage to his invasion.
It would mark a huge loss, if by now an expected one, for Ukraine’s leadership which has described Mariupol as “the heart of this war today”.
It is believed Ukraine’s forces have been forced back to the port area and the Azovstal iron and steel plant.
Russian troops started their encirclement of Mariupol in early March. The siege has killed thousands of civilians and unleashed an appalling struggle for survival for trapped residents who remain.
Thousands of people have escaped further north, risking a deadly journey through the front line. Here, in Zaporizhzhia, I have watched civilians arrive day after day, describing how they have witnessed the obliteration of their city.
In recent days Russian forces are thought to have pushed in further by dividing the remaining holdout of Mariupol’s defenders, according to think tank the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
It’s believed Ukraine’s forces have been forced back to the port area and the Azovstal plant, a massive iron and steel works from where they had launched counter-attacks for weeks.
Videos have emerged of fighters apparently from the 36th marine brigade vowing not to surrender their positions.
“We are holding on to every bit of the city wherever possible,” says one in a video posted to social media channels on Tuesday.
“But the reality is the city is encircled and blocked and there was no re-supply of ammunition or food,” he adds. Part of the footage shows him alongside several other marines in a room that looks like a basement shelter. One of the men has crutches leaning against his chair.
A post on Monday on the brigade’s Facebook page described the situation as “the last battle… It is death for some of us, and captivity for the rest,” it said, adding they had been “pushed back” and “surrounded” by Russian troops.
Ukrainian analysts differed over whether the post could be relied on as genuine, with some claiming the page had been hacked. But more than 36 hours later the post remained on the site.
The siege and a resulting collapse in communications in Mariupol mean it is difficult to independently verify reports about changes on the ground.
There is little doubt Ukrainian forces have been desperate for new supplies of weapons, ammunition, food and water.
Mariupol – home to more than 400,000 people before the war – has been virtually wiped out by weeks of heavy Russian shelling.
Ukraine’s military reportedly managed over the weeks to resupply troops with kit including night and thermal vision goggles, portable battery charging packs and even anti-tank munitions; but it became increasingly hard.
“Ultimately, the city was surrounded so soon into the invasion that there was never a chance to build up supplies,” says Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at defence think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
“They’ve already held out far, far longer than any external analysis would have predicted possible. So it’s difficult to say how much longer they can go on,” he says, adding that they have “achieved extraordinary results with very little”.
Ukrainian attempts to rotate forces or evacuate the wounded also became much more high risk as Russia tightened its siege.
In his video address to the nation late on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said: “The future of Ukraine directly depends on the strength of our resistance in all its forms. The future of us all, each of our cities, each of our villages.
“And I am grateful to everyone who understands this. Who does not stop resisting even when it seems that the result is very far. Because the darkest time is always before dawn.
“I want to separately address those heroes who are having a very hard time. Those who defend Mariupol. A marine battalion of the 36th marine brigade, Azov special operations detachment, 12th operational brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine. Subdivisions of the State Border Guard Service. Volunteers of the “Right Sector”. The 555th military hospital and National Police employees.”
The full capture of the city could see significant numbers of Russian troops, so far used to contain and prevent resupply in Mariupol, reconstituted and moved elsewhere, particularly in other parts of the eastern Donbas region, where Moscow is gearing up for a major offensive.
It could also see Moscow consolidate its progress north of Mariupol, which is one of the reasons the Ukrainians were finding it so hard to relieve the city, according to Mr Bronk.
The forces could also be used to bolster Russian-occupied Kherson, where Ukrainian troops have been attempting to retake ground with some success.
President Zelensky continued his metaphor that Mariupol is the heart of the war. “If it stops beating then we will be… weaker,” he said.”
20 Days In Mariupol documentary film
Churchill’s speech in Darkest Hour: You cannot Reason With a Tiger When Your Head Is In Its Mouth
Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
This is my theme song for Last Stands, which I posted as I embarked for Mariupol in March 2022 and for Afghanistan in August 2021 after the Fall of Kabul.
18 квітня 2024 р. Друга річниця останнього стоянки на металургійному заводі в Маріуполі
Це річниця трагічної та славетної Останньої битви, яку світ ніколи не повинен забувати, а я не можу.
Ось мій щоденник останнього дня, коли російські війська блокували місто від допомоги чи втечі, і після того, як завдали ворогу скільки могли, ми з друзями втекли підземною залізницею до Варшави, щоб організувати опір і революцію в Росії, і принести відповідальність за військові злочини в Маріуполі її руйнівникам.
Через страх ядерного знищення та іншої помсти з боку Росії та прямого конфлікту з нею Америка та світ уникають розплати режиму Путіна за його злочини проти людства в Україні; ми не проводили контрвторгнення, не звільняли Чорне море, не знищували аеродроми, лінії постачання та виробництво військової техніки, не давали Україні для цього засобів.
Оскільки виживання людства залежить від нашої відмови від зброї масового знищення та глобального ядерного роззброєння, розмежування діє на екзистенціальному рівні, але ми знаємо з «Миру в наш час» Чемберлена, що умиротворення не діє. Як звучить відомий рядок із фільму “Найтемніша година”, про який Черчилль ніколи не говорив; «Не можна міркувати з тигром, коли твоя голова в його пащі».
Між війною з Росією та відмовою від нашого обов’язку піклуватися про інших, незалежно від того, чиїми громадянами вони можуть бути, що тягне за собою відмову від наших принципів універсальних прав людини та природного права на суверенітет усіх людей, існує величезний і величезний простір вільного гра, в якій діяти в солідарності та антиколоніальній боротьбі з тими, хто перебуває під загрозою імперського завоювання та панування, а також усіх звірств і жахів війни. Це стосується і Палестини, і України.
Давайте принесемо зміну режиму в Росії, бо це єдиний спосіб, яким справді закінчиться шалений пошук Путіна відновити Російську імперію, який зараз розгортається на десяти театрах війни, включаючи Україну та Америку на наших виборах; коли народ Росії звільниться. Я можу сказати те саме про війну в Газі та ізраїльсько-палестинський конфлікт; це закінчується, коли народ Ізраїлю звільняється від режиму поселенців Нетаньяху та приносить справжню демократію в Ізраїль, відмовляючись від реконструкції Освенціма, який є окупацією, і об’єднується з народом Палестини як повноправні громадяни в одній нації, в якій фашизм кров, віра та земля відмовляються заради ідеалів рівності, різноманітності, інклюзії та світської держави.
Законодавство тепер чекає на голосування в нашому Конгресі, який, як Янус, пропонує нам світлотінь добра і зла; кошти на боротьбу з тиранією та терором для України та кошти на посилення тиранії та терору для Ізраїлю.
Наша політика в Ізраїлі має полягати в тому, щоб заглушити бомби геноциду, прорвати блокаду гуманітарної допомоги в Газу та змінити режим.
Для України ми повинні зробити набагато більше, ніж фінансувати опір; ми повинні вести боротьбу з ворогом на його власній території, солідарно з народом Росії проти режиму та в союзі з демократичним рухом, який зараз поширений у громадянському суспільстві, та антивоєнним рухом у російській армії. Так ми розплатилися Пригожину як військовому злочинцю, так ми розплатимося Путіну та його режиму.
Бо нас багато, ми спостерігаємо, і ми майбутнє.
Russian
18 апреля 2024 Вторая годовщина последней битвы на металлургическом комбинате в Мариуполе
Это годовщина трагической и славной Последней битвы, которую мир никогда не должен забыть, а я не могу.
Здесь следует мой дневник последнего дня, когда русские войска изолировали город от помощи или побега, и, причинив врагу весь вред, который мы могли, мы с друзьями бежали по подземной железной дороге в Варшаву, чтобы организовать сопротивление и революцию внутри России, и принести расплату за военные преступления в Мариуполе ее эсминцам.
Опасаясь ядерного уничтожения и других возмездий со стороны России и прямого конфликта с ней, Америка и весь мир избегают расплаты режиму Путина за его преступления против человечности на Украине; мы не осуществили ответное вторжение, не освободили Черное море, не разрушили аэродромы, линии снабжения и производство военной техники и не предоставили Украине средств сделать это для себя.
Поскольку выживание человечества зависит от нашего отказа от оружия массового уничтожения и глобального ядерного разоружения, размежевание работает на экзистенциальном уровне, но из книги Чемберлена «Мир в наше время» мы знаем, что умиротворение этого не делает. Как гласит знаменитая фраза из фильма «Темные времена», которую Черчилль никогда не говорил; «Невозможно рассуждать с Тигром, когда твоя голова у него во рту».
Между войной с Россией и отказом от нашей обязанности заботиться о других, независимо от того, чьими гражданами они могут быть, что влечет за собой отказ от наших принципов универсальных прав человека и естественного права суверенитета всех людей, существует огромное и огромное пространство свободы. игра, в которой нужно действовать в духе солидарности и антиколониальной борьбы с теми, кто находится под угрозой имперского завоевания и владычества, а также всех зверств и ужасов войны. Это справедливо как для Палестины, так и для Украины.
Давайте осуществим смену режима в России, поскольку это единственный способ действительно положить конец безумному стремлению Путина заново основать Российскую империю, которое сейчас разворачивается на десяти театрах военных действий, включая Украину и Америку на наших выборах; когда народ России освободится. Я могу сказать то же самое о войне в Газе и израильско-палестинском конфликте; он закончится, когда народ Израиля освободится от поселенческого режима Нетаньяху и принесет Израилю истинную демократию, отказавшись от реконструкции Освенцима, который является оккупацией, и объединится с народом Палестины как полностью равные граждане в одной нации, где фашизм кровь, вера и почва отвергаются ради идеалов равенства, разнообразия, инклюзивности и светского государства.
Законодательство теперь ожидает голосования в нашем Конгрессе, которое, подобно Янусу, предлагает нам светотени добра и зла; фонды для борьбы с тиранией и террором в Украине и фонды для насаждения тирании и террора в Израиле.
Наша политика в Израиле должна заключаться в том, чтобы заставить замолчать бомбы геноцида, прорвать блокаду гуманитарной помощи Газе и добиться смены режима.
Для Украины мы должны сделать гораздо больше, чем просто финансировать сопротивление; мы должны начать борьбу с врагом на его собственной земле, в знак солидарности с народом России против режима и в союзе с демократическим движением, которое сейчас широко распространено в гражданском обществе, и с антивоенным движением в российских вооруженных силах. Вот как мы принесли расплату Пригожину как военному преступнику, и так мы принесем расплату Путину и его режиму.
Reading List for a Future History of the Battle and Siege of Mariupol, To Be Written
Such a history begins thus; Herein is my witness of history and truth telling in this, the first general history of World War Three. As with all things human, it is also fiction except when it is not, myth when it can be, poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and of our limitless future possibilities of becoming human.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
There are no Ukrainians, no Russians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
Ukrainian
Список для читання майбутньої історії битви та облоги Маріуполя, який буде написаний
Така історія починається так; Ось моє свідчення історії та правди в цій першій загальній історії Третьої світової війни. Як і все людське, це також вигадка, за винятком тих випадків, коли це не так, міф, коли він може бути, поетичне бачення та переосмислення і трансформація людського буття, сенсу й цінності та наших безмежних майбутніх можливостей стати людьми.
Хіба ми не ті історії, які розповідаємо про себе, собі та іншим?
Завжди залишається боротьба між масками, які ми робимо для себе, і тими, які роблять для нас інші.
Це перша революція, в якій ми всі повинні боротися; боротьба за володіння собою.
Немає ні українців, ні росіян; тільки такі люди, як ми, і вибір, який вони роблять щодо того, як бути людьми разом.
Russian
Список литературы для будущей истории битвы и осады Мариуполя, которую нужно написать
Такая история начинается так; Вот мой свидетель истории и правды в этой, первой общей истории Третьей мировой войны. Как и все человеческое, это также вымысел, за исключением случаев, когда это не так, миф, когда он может быть, поэтическое видение и переосмысление и трансформация человеческого бытия, смысла и ценности, а также наших безграничных будущих возможностей стать людьми.
Разве мы не истории, которые рассказываем о себе, себе и другим?
Всегда остается борьба между масками, которые мы делаем для себя, и масками, которые делают для нас другие.
Это первая революция, в которой мы все должны сражаться; борьба за право собственности на себя.
Нет ни украинцев, ни русских; только такие люди, как мы, и выбор, который они делают о том, как быть людьми вместе.
18 квітня 2022 року Останній бій у Маріуполі: бій на металургійному заводі
Бойові дії на «Азовсталі» та «Ільїнського металургійного комбінату» тривають; серед величезних лабіринтів і лабіринтів тунелів тут, з його арсеналом, госпіталем, центром зв’язку та маршрутами постачання, як і в інших підземних фортецях у Маріуполі та інших місцях, опір російській окупації можна вести роками, якщо буде потрібно. Машиніст і керівник металургійних робітників, які озброїлися для захисту, на ім’я Великий Юрій, навіть присяжні сфальсифікували збройовий завод, який може виробляти гвинтівки та боєприпаси необмежений час. Це, на жаль, не те саме, що тримати землю.
Ми спартанці; наше життя дає час для нашої цивілізації, щоб пробудитися до її небезпеки та загрози фашистської тиранії та імперського завоювання.
Для Маріуполя та дуже багатьох жителів України це станеться надто пізно; ніхто не йде на допомогу, а багатьом її захисникам нема з чим битися в цей сорок сьомий день облоги Маріуполя, що розпочалася 2 березня, і битви, що розпочалася 24 лютого.
Але ще не пізно для вас і ваших, ким би ви не були і де б ви не жили. Цієї правди має бути достатньо, як надії на наше майбутнє.
Я говорю тут як свідок історії, який перебував у Маріуполі з 22 березня, і пропоную це свідчення від імені наших універсальних прав людини в будь-якій розплаті винуватцям цього величезного та жахливого військового злочину.
З самого початку це була битва повітряних та артилерійських бомбардувань самого міста та цивільного населення, танків проти стрільців, плоті проти невідповідної сили та жаху, поділу проти солідарності, ненависті проти любові та страху проти надії. .
Тут людська воля до свободи випробовується ворогом, який радіє в обіймах жахливих, чия політика та задуми війни як терору з радістю та з відкритою зарозумілістю влади інструментують повне знищення та геноцид, війну, в якій розв’язуються звірства та розбещення. як тактика шоку і благоговіння з наміром підкорення через вивчену безпорадність і непереборний і загальний страх.
Тут, як і в Нанкіні та багатьох інших місцях, це викликає не підкорення, а опір. Політика стосується страху як основи обміну, а в Обчисленні страху, де обмежений державний терор проти власних громадян у поєднанні з повним контролем інформації може бути корисним для внутрішнього виробництва згоди на керування, за умови легітимності влади. залишається беззаперечним для тих, чиє ім’я вона претендує на дію, у війні те, що є неконтрольованим і немислимим, створює умови, в яких втрачати більше нічого.
Занадто великий або занадто малий страх, а також те, де і як він використовується, може дестабілізувати тоталітарні режими. Коли закон втрачає сенс і замінюється владою і силою, влада делегітимізується, втрачається згода на керування, а порядок стає хаосом.
Гільєрмо дель Торо у своїй чудовій епосі про міграцію та расову рівність Carnival Row, сьомий епізод «Світ, що прийде», містить сцену, в якій двоє молодих наступників лідерства традиційно ворогуючих фракцій опиняються закоханими та потребуючими союзників у сюжеті, який переосмислює «Ромео і Джульєтту» Шекспіра; бунтівний геліон Джона Брейкспір запитує свою кохану-макіавеллістську Софі Лонгербейн: «Кому хаос корисний?» На що вона відповідає: «Хаос корисний для нас. Хаос — велика надія безсилих».
Як сказав мені Жан Жене в Бейруті майже сорок років тому, коли ми були оточені солдатами в будинку, який вони підпалили і ось-ось спалили заживо; «Коли немає надії, ми вільні робити неможливі речі, славні речі».
Опір завжди був війною на ножа. Цікава фраза, що; серед небагатьох слів і цілих фраз, які приходять до сучасної англійської мови незмінними від оригінальної скандинавської мови; krig på kniven. Його значення для нас просте; ті, хто хоче нас поневолити і хто відмовляється від усіх законів і будь-яких обмежень, не можуть ховатися ні за ким.
У будь-якому разі, оскільки цей принцип виражений у знаменитому сентенції Сартра у його п’єсі «Брудні руки» 1948 року, цитованої Францом Фаноном у його промові 1960 року «Чому ми використовуємо насильство» і зробленій безсмертним Малькольмом Ікс.
Чому відбувається ця страшна війна, у Маріуполі проводиться кампанія терору, яка включає страти, катування, організовані масові зґвалтування та торгівлю викраденими цивільними, захоплення цивільних заручників та використання примусової праці, канібалізм з використанням пересувних заводів, напади геноциду, знищення докази військових злочинів із використанням мобільних крематоріїв, що вказує на офіційне планування як частину кампанії терору та доказ того, що незліченні злочини проти людства у цій війні є не відхиленнями, а задумом, загрозою ядерного знищення європейських країн, які надсилають гуманітарну допомогу, і масою руйнування міст?
Російська завойовницька стратегія починається з постійних і невпинних бомбардувань і руйнувань лікарень, бомбосховищ, складів продовольства, енергосистем, водопостачання, коридорів гуманітарної допомоги та евакуації біженців; все, що могло б допомогти громадянам пережити облогу. Після того, як нічого не залишиться, починається кампанія терору як організовані масові зґвалтування, тортури, канібалізм та мародерство, а будь-які вижили поневолені або страчені. Це війна на геноцид і стирання, яка не має аналогів у сучасній Європі, крім облоги Сараєво; і тут я виступаю як свідок історії для обох.
Чому? Що може бути варте того, щоб придбати з вашою людяністю та людськістю вашої нації та народу?
Росія хоче завоювати Україну з тієї ж причини, чому Японія вторглася в Маньчжурію; тому що це промисловий центр, з якого можна почати завоювання світу, а тепловодні порти Маріуполя та Одеси є ключовими для цього імперського плану панування, а також для контролю над сухопутним коридором до Криму.
Шістдесят п’ять портів Чорного моря з’єднують Румунію, Болгарію, Грузію, Молдову, Туреччину, Росію та Україну, і всі вони із Середземним морем, домінування якого Росія довгий час спорила з Туреччиною в Лівії та Сирії. Якщо Росія має намір продовжити завоювання України разом із завоюванням Східної Європи, захоплення румунського порту Констанца відкриє для вторгнення весь Дунайський регіон. Чорне море залишається таким же важливим для панування в Середземному морі, Східній Європі, Північній Африці та Близькому Сході, як і тоді, коли Мітрідат VI Понтійський змагався за нього у війнах з Римською імперією або в битві при Галіполі, з яким ми, здається, приречені на боротьбу в Криму.
На кону в боротьбі на металургійному заводі в Маріуполі стоїть головний регіональний промисловий завод і стратегічний ресурс підтримки флоту, який вирішальний у відверненні російських військ і ресурсів від кампанії на Донбасі та у запобіганні повної колонізації Росією Криму та прибережної України. Відмова Росії в можливості переобладнати та ремонтувати свої кораблі з місцевих ресурсів може стати ключем до перемоги над вторгненням на українське узбережжя.
«Азовсталь» та «Ільїнський металургійний комбінат» також є величезною фортецею-лабіринтом, з якої можна вести оборону Маріуполя, як форт Святого Ельмо, з якого мальтійські лицарі зробили свій героїчний Останній бій.
Що зараз відбувається в Маріуполі, серед сум’яття і розрухи міста привидів, де російська армія дала волю розбещеності війни?
Коли Україна перехоплює ініціативу на півночі й штовхає Росію назад через кордон, а також починає змагатися та відвоювати Чорне море з приголомшливою перемогою, пошкодивши Москву, флагман російського Чорноморського флоту, якому захисники Зміїного острова дали славу Відповідь, жорстокі бої за порт і металургійний завод тривають, хоча Росія заявляла про капітуляцію тисячі українських морських піхотинців, маючи на увазі, що сам Маріуполь також здався.
На цю дезінформацію, спрямовану на волю українського народу відмовитися підкоритися і залишитися Нескореним, я кажу; По-перше, що Маріуполь безперечно знаходиться під окупацією і в руках ворога, але місто не здалося і ніколи не здалося. Команди самогубців, які добровільно зголосилися залишитися і боротися з ворогом, коли з’являться можливості, подбають про це, а мережі Опору серед її громадян чекають години Визволення.
Росіяни опублікували свою оцінку сил, зібраних тут на металургійному заводі: двадцять п’ятсот українців і чотириста іноземних добровольців Міжнародного легіону, включаючи бригаду Авраама Лінкольна, американців, які назвали себе на честь легендарного підрозділу громадянської війни в Іспанії. Інші досі тримають сам порт під контролем України, що вигідно будь-якій такій силі визволення, яка може привести флот до цієї боротьби.
По-друге, немає нічого безчесного в капітуляції, якщо це означає, що ви живете, щоб воювати ще один день, а 36-та бригада морської піхоти, яка на сорок шостий день героїчної оборони Маріуполя, оголосила в своєму останньому посланні світові, кілька днів тому, що їм нема з чим битися, ні боєприпасів, ні води, ні чого, і те, що вони або полонені, або мертві, несуть із собою лише честь у майбутнє, яке тепер мають вибрати інші.
Я ніколи не бачив капітуляції українців. Невимушено зайдіть на ворожий контрольно-пропускний пункт і, сміючись, потягніть шпильку на гранату, щоб відкрити шлях лікарняній вантажівці, щоб врятувати інших, так. Поділіться пляшкою отруєної горілки з ворожим сторожем і помріте разом, поки біженців супроводжують через ряди, так.
Таких людей неможливо перемогти. Застосування сили та насильства є крихким, а влада порожньою, коли вона не має легітимності, а лише жорстокі репресії для її підтримки; бо всі такі речі зазнають непокори й невіри.
Кожен, хто відмовляється підкоритися, стає Нескореним і вільний. Це свого роду перемога, проти якої не може перемогти жодна тиранія чи терор.
Я бачив, як лютий бородатий хлопець атакував пару російських танків із сокирою, бігаючи з укриття, щоб стрибнути на вежу і відрубати голову командиру, і зникав у руїнах, як тінь гніву, викликана болем, горем і страхом міста. . Називається Головою, в ньому Україна знайшла месника. Решта танкістів вирвалась і в паніці побігла, командир другого танка відкрив вогонь по дезертирам і фактично застрелив одного з них, а його по черзі застрелив російський побратим, який вийшов за ним з танка, поклав пістолет йому в голову, а потім просто пішов через вулицю з піднятими руками й перейшовши на бік. Солдат, який вибрав нашу спільну людяність, а не націоналізм і солідарність, а не розкол, тепер є командиром того танка, але з намальованим українським прапором. Святий Андрій, його кличуть.
Путін послав рабів, щоб підкорити вільний народ. Він забув поцікавитися, що станеться, коли раби об’єднаються зі своїми побратимами-жертвами тиранії, яких їх послали завоювати, на знак солідарності, щоб звільнитися?
У той час як російська армія має активний рух за мир і мережі солідарності, які працюють зі своїми українськими колегами, а також багато випадків дезертирства та заколотів, у тому числі підривних офіцерів, українці, часто заморожені, голодні й позбавлені боєприпасів, як засновники Америки, які перетнули Делавер з Вашингтоном у той фатальний Різдво 1776 року залишаються зухвалими і Нескореними.
Існує також легенда про Маріупольського Вовка, дівчину, яка, як вовк, розірвала своєму нападникові горло. Можливо, міф про війну; але я бачив, що залишилося від російського солдата. Кажуть, що зараз вона очолює команду жінок, які рятують інших від колекціонерів метеликів, солдатів, які захоплюють жінок для викрадення в Росію та торгівлі людьми як злочинний синдикат в російських військових. У ній Україна знайшла Гаррієт Табмен.
Минулого тижня група українських морських піхотинців прорвалася, щоб зв’язатися з елементами Азовської Національної гвардії, дуже впертими хлопцями, які тримали металургійний завод у похмурих умовах; але кілька зон конфлікту розгортаються і швидко змінюються. Російські офіцери намагалися змусити здатися з використанням цивільних заручників у іншому інциденті, але, наскільки мені відомо, не вдалося.
Військові злочини росіян пробудили опір перемоги чи смерті; як захисники під час облоги Мальти в 1565 році або Джордж Вашингтон, який придумав цю фразу як пароль у битві при Трентоні, українські солдати, цивільні партизани, включаючи сталеварів та інших, які озброїлися під час нападу Росії, і міжнародні добровольці, свідками яких я був, як лаялися клятва померти на місці, а не здати щось завойовнику не пройде спокійно.
Що буде далі? Як запитав Ленін у своєму есе про створення політичної партії, якій судилося змінити світ, що робити?
Сьогодні російсько-окупаційні війська встановлюють паспорти проїзду, необхідні для всіх людей на вулицях, починають захоплювати мирних жителів і відправляти їх у центри обробки, щоб вибирати одних у табори примусової праці, а інших для розстрілу, а також доступ у світ за межами Маріуполя та з Світ тут повністю оточений. Маріуполь має бути спустошений, населення узагальнено як мертве чи поневолене, а решта особи систематично вимирають.
Путін має намір не залишити нам нічого, щоб захищати і ні звідки воювати. І тим самим він звільнив нас, щоб ми розпочали наступну фазу боротьби і перенесли боротьбу з ворогом.
Іноді мені здається, що він взагалі не знає, як грати в цю гру.
На наше щастя, бути полковником КДБ – це не те саме, що бути професійним революціонером, і, здається, зробив з Путіна урізану та деформовану річ, обмеженого інтелекту та будь-якої моралі, ні прозорливого злого генія, ні втілення гегелівського світу… історичні сили, а лише наглядач за карцерською державою. Володимир Путін дуже схожий на Адольфа Ейхмана, як описала Ханна Арендт у своїй історичній роботі про Нюрнберзький процес.
Оскільки я вважаю свої цілі та завдання щодо війни очевидними для всіх, я не проти окреслити їх тут.
Перш за все, і крім усіх інших пріоритетів, оскільки тільки це по-справжньому покінчить із загрозою війни, ми повинні діяти солідарно з російськими народами, щоб допомогти змінити режим і звільнити Росію від тиранії Володимира Путіна та його олігархії.
По-друге, ми повинні принести пряму та особисту розплату Путіну, його олігархам, верховному командуванню, політичним союзникам і прихильникам, а також усім, хто причетний до військових злочинів в Україні.
По-третє, ми повинні знищити здатність Росії вести цю війну, особливо артилерію та аеродроми, які руйнують цілі міста на початковій фазі будь-якого такого нападу ворога.
По-четверте, ми повинні взяти контроль над Чорним морем або перешкодити Росії зробити це, заперечити його використання як стартовий майданчик для імперського завоювання і панування в Середземному морі, Європі, Африці та Близькому Сході.
Для цього останнього нам знадобиться піратський флот, і я знаю, де його знайти.
Тут всеохоплюючою стратегічною реальністю, яка повинна керувати нашими рішеннями, є той факт, що вже деякий час триває Третя світова війна, театри якої включають Росію, Америку, Сирію, Лівію, Білорусь, Казахстан, Нагірний Карабах, а тепер і Україну включно. її губернії Крим.
Якщо ми не зможемо зупинити цю війну імперського завоювання і панування тут, в Україні, де всі наші гуманітарні цінності та міжнародні закони порушуються з жорстоким дикістю, і дозволимо їй перетворитися на загальну глобальну війну між свободою та тиранією, я боюся, що світ може вступити в епоху тиранії та століть воєн, яких людство не переживе.
Бо рука Путіна лежить на кнопці нашого ядерного знищення й вимирання і кличе його, шепоче; «Звільни мене, і я зроблю тебе могутнім».
”圮地則行；圍地則謀；死地則戰“; як написав Сунь Цзи в одинадцятому розділі «Мистецтво війни» «На землі смерті боріться».
Цей принцип дій був мені колись продемонстрований в Анголі, під час битви при Куіто-Куанавале в 1988 році, в тактичній ситуації, подібній до нашої тут, у Маріуполі. Поки розгорталося видовище цієї грандіозної останньої битви в десятирічній визвольній боротьбі проти колоніалізму та апартеїду, я робив зло в тилу ворога в кущах. Тут я виявив загублений загін, переважно зулуський, але з радянськими та кубинськими добровольцями, який був оточений силами апартеїду.
Після доповіді про те, що я знав про місцевість, командній групі та короткої конференції кількома мовами, старий хлопець, який досі мовчав, піднявся з тіні намету, на обличчі якого без сорочки був страшний і чудовий шрам від кігтів лева. , і сказав; «Ми оточені та перевершені, без боєприпасів і, що ще гірше, без води, і ніхто не йде нам на допомогу. Ми повинні атакувати».
Сержант посміхнувся на це, ніби отримав чудовий подарунок, вийшов надвір і віддав наказ, якого, якщо пощастить, ви ніколи не почуєте; «Поправити багнети!»
І чоловіки, які ось-ось померли, вибухали піснею. «Усутху! Umkhonto wami womile!» «Мій спис спраглий», останнє.
Ми також можемо вийти переможцями в нашій війні на виживання проти навіть набагато більшого й могутнього ворога, як це зробили герої Куіто Куанавале, якщо ми випустимо повну волю та силу наших націй проти Російської імперії, що виникає, як об’єднане людство; особливо якщо ми робимо це проти його слабких місць і ліній зламу.
Україна є таким слабким місцем імперських амбіцій, а вона все ще чинить опір і залишається Нескореною. А російське вторгнення в Європу може бути зірвано політичними діями в Росії через рухи за демократію та мир, які кинули виклик тиранії Путіна.
Свобода, рівність, братерство – девіз революції, яка породила демократії в Америці та Франції; перші дві частини яких проголошують універсальні принципи людського буття, а третя частина, яка стосується того, що ми називаємо солідарністю, взаємозалежністю та нашим обов’язком піклуватися про інших, є інструментом для реалізації нашої свободи та рівності як вільного суспільства. рівних.
Ми можемо перемогти у тріумфі демократії над тиранією, солідарності над розколом і любові над ненавистю. Але це працює лише одним способом; ми повинні діяти як єдине об’єднане людство.
Russian
18.04.2022 Последняя битва под Мариуполем: бой на металлургическом заводе
Бои на Азовстали и металлургическом комбинате имени Ильина продолжаются; среди обширных лабиринтов и лабиринтов туннелей здесь, с его арсеналом, госпиталем, узлом связи и путями снабжения, как и в других подземных крепостях в Мариуполе и других местах, Сопротивление русской оккупации может вестись годами, если это необходимо. Машинист и лидер сталеваров, вооружившихся для обороны, по имени Большой Юрий даже присяжными устроил оружейный завод, который может бесконечно производить винтовки и боеприпасы. Это, к сожалению, не то же самое, что удерживать землю.
Мы спартанцы; наши жизни выигрывают время, чтобы наша цивилизация проснулась перед опасностью и угрозой фашистской тирании и империалистического завоевания.
Для Мариуполя и слишком многих жителей Украины это произойдет слишком поздно; никто не идет на помощь, и многим ее защитникам нечем сражаться в этот сорок седьмой день осады Мариуполя, начавшейся второго марта, и битвы, начавшейся 24 февраля.
Но еще не поздно для вас и ваших близких, кем бы вы ни были и где бы вы ни жили. Эта истина должна быть достаточной, как надежда на наше будущее.
Я говорю здесь как свидетель истории, который был в Мариуполе с 22 марта, и предлагаю это свидетельство от имени наших всеобщих прав человека в любой расплате, привлеченной к виновным в этом огромном и ужасном военном преступлении.
С самого начала это была битва воздушных и артиллерийских бомбардировок против самого города и гражданского населения, танков против стрелков, плоти против неопровержимой силы и ужаса, разделения против солидарности, ненависти против любви и страха против надежды. .
Здесь человеческая воля к свободе испытывается врагом, ликующим в объятиях чудовищного, чья политика и замыслы войны как террора с радостью и с открытым высокомерием власти превращают в инструмент полнейшее разрушение и геноцид, войну, в которой развязываются зверства и разврат. как тактика шока и трепета с намерением подчинения посредством выученной беспомощности и подавляющего и всеобщего страха.
Здесь, как и в Нанкине, и во множестве других мест, это вызывает не подчинение, а сопротивление. Политика — это страх как основа обмена, и в Исчислении страха, где ограниченный государственный террор против собственных граждан в сочетании с полным контролем информации может быть полезен внутри страны для производства согласия на управление при условии легитимности власти. не подвергается сомнению со стороны тех, чье имя претендует на то, чтобы действовать, на войне то, что является неконтролируемым и невообразимым, создает условия, в которых больше нечего терять.
Слишком много или слишком мало страха, а также то, где и как он используется, могут дестабилизировать тоталитарные режимы. Когда закон теряет смысл и заменяется властью и силой, власть утрачивает легитимность, теряется согласие на то, чтобы ею управляли, а порядок превращается в хаос.
Гильермо дель Торо в великолепной эпопее о миграции и расовом равенстве «Карнивал Роу», в седьмом эпизоде «Грядущего мира», есть сцена, в которой двое молодых преемников во главе традиционно соперничающих фракций оказываются влюбленными и нуждаются в союзниках в сюжетной линии, которая переосмысливает «Ромео и Джульетту» Шекспира; мятежный геллион Джона Брейкспир спрашивает свою макиавеллиевскую возлюбленную Софи Лонгербейн: «Кому полезен хаос?» На что она отвечает: «Хаос полезен для нас. Хаос — великая надежда бессильных».
Как сказал мне Жан Жене в Бейруте почти сорок лет назад, когда мы были окружены солдатами в доме, который они подожгли и собирались сжечь заживо; «Когда нет надежды, мы свободны делать невозможные вещи, славные вещи».
Сопротивление всегда было войной на нож. Любопытная фраза, что; среди нескольких слов и целых фраз, которые вошли в современный английский язык без изменений из оригинального норвежского языка; криг для ножа. Его смысл для нас прост; те, кто хочет поработить нас и кто отказывается от всех законов и всех ограничений, не могут ни за кем спрятаться.
Любыми необходимыми средствами, как этот принцип выражен в знаменитом изречении Сартра в его пьесе 1948 года «Грязные руки», процитированном Францем Фаноном в его речи 1960 года «Почему мы используем насилие» и увековеченном Малкольмом Икс.
Почему происходит эта страшная война, в Мариуполе кампания террора, которая включает в себя расстрелы, пытки, организованные массовые изнасилования и торговлю похищенными гражданскими лицами, захват гражданских заложников и использование принудительного труда, каннибализм с использованием передвижных заводов, геноцидные нападения, стирание доказательства военных преступлений с использованием мобильных крематориев, что указывает на официальное планирование как часть кампании террора и доказательство того, что бесчисленные преступления против человечности в этой войне являются не отклонением от нормы, а намеренно, угрозы ядерного уничтожения европейским странам, отправляющим гуманитарную помощь, и массовое разрушение городов?
Российская стратегия завоевания начинается с непрерывных и безжалостных бомбардировок и разрушений больниц, бомбоубежищ, складов продовольствия, энергосистем, водоснабжения, коридоров гуманитарной помощи и эвакуации беженцев; все, что может помочь гражданам пережить осаду. Как только ничего не остается, начинается кампания террора с организованными массовыми изнасилованиями, пытками, каннибализмом и грабежами, а все выжившие порабощаются или казнятся. Это война геноцида и стирания, которая не имеет аналогов в современной Европе, кроме осады Сараево; и здесь я говорю как свидетель истории обоим.
Почему? Что может стоить покупки с вашей человечностью и человечностью вашей нации и народа?
Россия хочет завоевать Украину по той же причине, по которой Япония вторглась в Маньчжурию; потому что это промышленный центр, из которого может быть начато завоевание мира, а тепловодные порты Мариуполя и Одессы являются ключом к этому имперскому плану господства, а также к контролю над сухопутным коридором в Крым.
Шестьдесят пять портов Черного моря соединяют Румынию, Болгарию, Грузию, Молдову, Турцию, Россию и Украину, и все они со Средиземным морем, господство над которым Россия давно оспаривает с Турцией в Ливии и Сирии. Если Россия намерена после завоевания Украины завоевать Восточную Европу, захват румынского порта Констанца откроет для вторжения весь Дунайский регион. Черное море остается столь же важным для господства в Средиземноморье, Восточной Европе, Северной Африке и на Ближнем Востоке, как это было, когда Митридат VI Понтийский боролся за него в своих войнах с Римской империей или в битве при Галлиполи, которые мы, похоже, обречены отыграть в Крыму.
На карту в битве на сталелитейном заводе в Мариуполе поставлено крупное региональное промышленное предприятие и стратегический ресурс для поддержания жизни флота, решающего в отвлечении российских войск и ресурсов от кампании на Донбассе и в предотвращении полной колонизации Россией Крыма и прибрежной Украины. Лишение России возможности переоборудовать и ремонтировать свои корабли за счет местных ресурсов может стать ключом к отражению вторжения на украинское побережье.
Металлургический комбинат «Азовсталь» и Ильинский металлургический комбинат — это также обширная и запутанная крепость, из которой можно вести оборону Мариуполя, подобно форту Святого Эльма, из которого мальтийские рыцари сделали свой последний героический бой.
Что происходит сейчас в Мариуполе, среди суматохи и разрухи города-призрака, где русская армия дала волю разврату войны?
Поскольку Украина перехватывает инициативу на севере и оттесняет Россию через границу, она начинает бороться и отвоевывать Черное море с ошеломляющей победой, выводя из строя «Москву», флагман российского Черноморского флота, которому защитники Змеиного острова дали знаменитую Ответ: ожесточенные бои за порт и сталелитейный завод продолжаются, хотя Россия заявила о сдаче в плен тысячи украинских морских пехотинцев, подразумевая, что сдался и сам Мариуполь.
На эту дезинформацию, направленную на волю украинского народа отказаться подчиниться и остаться непокоренным, я говорю; Во-первых, что Мариуполь, несомненно, находится под оккупацией и в руках врага, но город не сдался и никогда не сдастся. Об этом позаботятся отряды самоубийц, которые вызвались остаться и изводить врага, когда представится возможность, а сети Сопротивления среди ее граждан ждут часа Освобождения.
Русские опубликовали свою оценку сил, собранных здесь, на сталелитейном заводе, в двадцать пятьсот украинцев и четыреста иностранных добровольцев Интернационального легиона, включая бригаду Авраама Линкольна, американцев, которые назвали себя в честь легендарного подразделения гражданской войны в Испании. Другие до сих пор держат сам порт под украинским контролем, что выгодно любой силе Освобождения, которая может привлечь флот для этой битвы.
Во-вторых, нет ничего постыдного в капитуляции, если это означает, что вы будете жить, чтобы сражаться в другой день, и 36-я бригада морской пехоты, которая на сорок шестой день своей героической обороны Мариуполя заявила в своем последнем послании миру, несколько дней назад, что им не с чем сражаться, нет боеприпасов, воды, чего угодно, и то, что они либо пленники, либо мертвы, несет с собой только честь в будущее, которое теперь должны выбрать другие.
Я никогда не видел капитуляции Украины. Случайно зайдите на вражеский контрольно-пропускной пункт и, смеясь, вытащите чеку из гранаты, чтобы открыть путь для госпитального грузовика, чтобы спасти других, да. Поделитесь бутылкой отравленной водки с вражеским часовым и умрите вместе, пока беженцев провожают через строй, да.
Таких людей невозможно победить. Применение силы и насилия хрупко, а власть бесполезна, когда у нее нет легитимности, а только жестокие репрессии для ее поддержания; ибо все подобные вещи терпят неудачу в момент непослушания и неверия.
Тот, кто отказывается подчиниться, становится Непокоренным и свободен. Это своего рода победа, против которой не может победить ни тирания, ни террор.
Я видел, как свирепый бородач напал на пару русских танков с топором, выбежал из укрытия, прыгнул на башню, обезглавил командира и исчез в руинах, как тень гнева, вызванная городской болью, горем и страхом. . По прозвищу Палач, в нем Украина нашла мстителя. Остальные танкисты выскочили и в панике побежали, командир второго танка открыл огонь по дезертирам и фактически застрелил одного из них, а его в свою очередь застрелил однополчанин русский солдат, выскочивший за ним из танка, положил пистолет к голове, а затем просто перешел улицу с поднятыми руками и перешел на другую сторону. Солдат, который предпочел нашу общность человечности национализму и солидарность дивизии, теперь командир этого танка, но с нарисованным на нем украинским флагом. Святой Андрей, его зовут.
Путин послал рабов покорять свободный народ. Он забыл спросить, что происходит, когда рабы объединяются со своими собратьями-жертвами тирании, которых они были посланы завоевывать, в знак солидарности действий ради собственного освобождения?
В то время как в российской армии есть активное движение за мир и сети солидарности, работающие со своими украинскими коллегами, и много случаев дезертирства и мятежа, включая фраги офицеров, украинцы, часто замерзшие, голодные и без боеприпасов, как основатели Америки, которые пересекли Делавэр с Вашингтоном в то судьбоносное Рождество 1776 года остаются дерзкими и непокоренными.
Существует также легенда о мариупольской Волчице, девушке, которая, как волк, разорвала нападавшему глотку. Возможно, миф о войне; но я видел, что осталось от рассматриваемого русского солдата. Говорят, что теперь она возглавляет команду женщин, которые спасают других от Коллекционеров бабочек, солдат, захвативших женщин для похищения в Россию и торговли ими в качестве преступного синдиката внутри российской армии. В ней Украина нашла Гарриет Табман.
На прошлой неделе группа украинских морских пехотинцев прорвалась, чтобы соединиться с частями Национальной гвардии «Азов», очень упрямыми ребятами, которые удерживали сталелитейный завод в тяжелых условиях; но несколько зон конфликта разворачиваются и быстро меняются. Российские офицеры пытались заставить сдаться, используя гражданских заложников в другом инциденте, но, насколько мне известно, безуспешно.
Военные преступления русских пробудили сопротивление победы или смерти; как защитники при осаде Мальты в 1565 году или Джордж Вашингтон, придумавший эту фразу в качестве пароля в битве при Трентоне, украинские солдаты, гражданские партизаны, включая сталелитейщиков и других, которые вооружились, когда Россия напала, и международные добровольцы, которых я видел ругающимися клятва скорее умереть на месте, чем отдать что-либо завоевателю, не пройдет спокойно.
Что происходит дальше? Как спрашивал Ленин в своем сочинении об основании политической партии, которой суждено было изменить мир, что делать?
Сегодня российские оккупационные силы вводят проездные документы, необходимые всем лицам на улицах, начинают захватывать мирных жителей и отправлять их в центры обработки для отбора одних в исправительно-трудовые лагеря, других для суммарной казни, а также полный доступ в мир за пределами Мариуполя и из мир здесь оцеплен полностью. Мариуполь должен быть опустошен, население подсчитано как мертвое или порабощенное, а оставшиеся люди систематически истреблены.
Путин намерен оставить нам нечего защищать и не от чего воевать. И тем самым Он освободил нас, чтобы начать следующую фазу борьбы и дать бой врагу.
Иногда мне кажется, что он вообще не умеет играть в эту игру.
К счастью для нас, быть полковником КГБ — это не совсем то же самое, что быть профессиональным революционером, и, кажется, Путин превратился в усеченного и уродливого, с ограниченным интеллектом и без всякой морали, не визионерского злого гения и не воплощения гегелевского миросозерцания. исторические силы, а всего лишь надзиратель за карцеральным государством. Владимир Путин очень похож на Адольфа Эйхмана, как описала Ханна Арендт в своей исторической работе о Нюрнбергском процессе.
Поскольку я считаю свои цели и задачи в отношении войны очевидными для всех, я не возражаю изложить их здесь для вас.
Прежде всего и помимо всех других приоритетов, поскольку только это действительно положит конец угрозе войны, мы должны действовать солидарно с русскими народами, чтобы способствовать смене режима и Освобождению России от тирании Владимира Путина и его олигархии.
Во-вторых, мы должны привлечь к прямой и личной ответственности Путина, его олигархов, высшее командование, политических союзников и приспешников, а также всех причастных к военным преступлениям на Украине.
В-третьих, мы должны разрушить способность России вести эту войну, особенно артиллерию и аэродромы, которые превращают в руины целые города в начальной фазе любого такого нападения противника.
В-четвертых, мы должны захватить контроль над Черным морем или помешать России сделать это, чтобы лишить его возможности использовать его в качестве стартовой площадки для империалистического российского завоевания и господства в Средиземноморье, Европе, Африке и на Ближнем Востоке.
Для этого нам понадобится пиратский флот, и я знаю, где его найти.
Здесь всеобъемлющей стратегической реальностью, которая должна определять наши решения, является тот факт, что уже некоторое время продолжается Третья мировая война, театры военных действий которой включают Россию, Америку, Сирию, Ливию, Беларусь, Казахстан, Нагорный Карабах, а теперь и Украину. ее губернии Крым.
Если мы не сможем остановить эту войну империалистического завоевания и господства здесь, в Украине, где все наши гуманитарные ценности и международные законы нарушаются с жестокой жестокостью, и позволим ей превратиться во всеобщую глобальную войну между свободой и тиранией, я боюсь, что мир может вступить в эпоху тирании и столетий войн, которых человечество не переживет.
Ибо рука Путина держится на кнопке нашего ядерного уничтожения и вымирания, и она зовет его шепотом; «Освободи меня, и я сделаю тебя сильным».
”圮地則行；圍地則謀；死地則戰“; как писал Сунь-Цзы в одиннадцатой главе «Искусства войны»: «На земле смерти сражайся».
Этот принцип действия мне когда-то продемонстрировали в Анголе, во время битвы при Куито-Куанавале в 1988 году, в тактической ситуации, похожей на нашу здесь, в Мариуполе. Пока разворачивалось зрелище этой грандиозной финальной битвы за многолетнюю освободительную борьбу против колониализма и апартеида, я творил зло в тылу врага в кустах. Здесь я обнаружил потерянный отряд, в основном зулусский, хотя и с советскими и кубинскими добровольцами, который был окружен силами апартеида.
После доклада командной группе того, что я знал об этом районе, и краткого совещания на нескольких языках из тени палатки встал старик, который до сих пор хранил молчание, чье тело без рубашки демонстрировало устрашающий и великолепный шрам от когтей льва. , и сказал; «Мы окружены и в меньшинстве, без боеприпасов и, что еще хуже, без воды, и никто не идет нам на помощь. Мы должны атаковать».
Сержант улыбнулся при этом, как будто ему был дан чудесный подарок, вышел наружу и отдал приказ, который, если вам повезет, вы никогда не услышите; «Крепить штыки!»
И люди, собиравшиеся умереть, разразились песней. «Усуту! Умконто вами вомиле!» «Мое копье хочет пить», последнее.
Мы тоже можем выйти победителями из нашей войны за выживание против даже гораздо более обширного и могущественного врага, как это сделали герои Куито-Куанавале, если мы высвободим всю волю и силу наших народов против зарождающейся Российской империи, как Единое Человечество; особенно если мы делаем это против его слабых мест и линий перелома.
Украина – такое слабое место имперских амбиций, а она еще сопротивляется и остается Непокоренной. И российское вторжение в Европу может быть остановлено политическими действиями в России через движения за демократию и мир, которые бросили вызов путинской тирании.
Свобода, Равенство, Братство — вот девиз Революции, породившей демократии в Америке и Франции; первые две части которого провозглашают универсальные принципы человеческого бытия, а третья часть, в которой говорится о том, что мы называем солидарностью, взаимозависимостью и нашим долгом заботиться о других, способствует реализации нашей свободы и равенства как свободного общества. равных.
Мы можем одержать победу в триумфе демократии над тиранией, солидарности над разделением и любви над ненавистью. Но это работает только одним способом; мы должны действовать как единое человечество.
A heroic wave of mass protests sweeps the world in reply to Putin’s rigged election, in defiance of assassination and torture used by the regime in the brutal repression of dissent, wherein peace and democracy movements in Russia cohere in one voice to call out the emperor who has no legitimacy.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz; “You’re just an old humbug!”
In Russia and throughout the world, let us perform, the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. Such are the stages of revolutionary struggle in delegitimizing unjust authority.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
As written in The Observer editorial entitled Insecure, weak Putin craves the popular vote, but uses violence to guarantee it: This parody of an election will be remembered for the cynically methodical manner in which he and his cronies stole the people’s right to freely choose Russia’s leader; “The frequency with which Vladimir Putin raises the possibility of using nuclear weapons to attack Britain and other western countries in support of his war of conquest in Ukraine is both chilling and irresponsible. These threats from Russia’s president, echoed by his sycophantic predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev, have become almost routine, prompting suggestions that Putin is not really serious. Yet while there is certainly an element of bluff, and a crude attempt at intimidation, complacency about his behaviour is dangerous – and potentially catastrophically misplaced.
No entirely rational national leader would casually raise the risk of mass annihilation in this way, let alone one who commands the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Putin’s incomprehensible decision to mount a full-scale invasion of Ukraine revealed a man cut off from political and military realities, impervious to opposing views, obsessed by supposed western plotting, and in thrall to his own deluded fantasies about restoring the power and sway of pre-Soviet imperial Russia. His complicity in targeting Ukraine’s civilians and numerous war crimes and assassinations shows he will stop at nothing.
Putin is not a fit person to lead Russia. He portrays himself as a man of the common people yet wholly lacks common decency, integrity and honour. He should be standing in the dock of the international criminal court in The Hague, where he faces war crimes charges over the abduction of Ukrainian children, not standing for re-election as president for another six years.
Putin’s victory in the election, which concludes this weekend, is a foregone conclusion. He faces no credible rival. The Kremlin has spent an estimated $1.2bn (£1bn) on “information management” (meaning lies and propaganda), vote-fixing in occupied Ukraine, and unopposed nationwide campaigning. Lavish state funding, including a reported 20-fold increase in spending on internet projects, platforms and media, has a single aim: a Putin landslide.
Not content with absolute power, the leader needs to be loved and adored
If it were not so sinister, Putinism might objectively be considered an interesting phenomenon. Not content with absolute power, the leader needs to be loved and adored. He craves the legitimacy conferred by popular vote, but abhors the uncertainty of a free democratic process. He purports to listen to people’s concerns, as in marathon phone-ins and rallies, but only hears what he wants to hear: positive affirmation of his omniscience. A weak man plays the strongman, horse-riding bare-chested in Siberia and assassinating rivals with a sneer and a smirk. Over the course of nearly a quarter of a century, Putin has bent and subverted Russia’s entire system of government to his will. He has co-opted, compromised or ostracised the monied elites. He has turned the state into his personal fiefdom and embezzled on an obscene scale. Putinism works through fear and corruption, underpinned by exploitative patriotism. Alexei Navalny, his foremost critic, was murdered because he exposed such abuses. He ridiculed insecure Putin and made him feel small, when he desperately needs to feel great. In Navalny’s telling, the tsar has no clothes. Worse, for a Russian, he has no soul.
This parody of an election will be remembered, if at all, for the cynically methodical manner in which Putin and his cronies stole the people’s right to freely choose Russia’s leader. It will be remembered for the accompanying threats to unleash a humanity-obliterating nuclear war upon the world. And the crass brutality of Putinism will be forever symbolised by last week’s hammer attack in Lithuania on Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s close associate.
Ultimately, it is violence, not votes, that keeps Putin in power. But it cannot sustain him indefinitely. The oppressed of Russia must look to their history and keep faith. One day, this too will pass.”
As written by Andrew Roth in The Guardian, in an article entitled A farce, not an election’: Russians abroad join ‘Noon against Putin’ protest: Voters turn out at midday from the UK to Latvia and Turkey to Thailand in action Alexei Navalny endorsed before his death; “The queue to vote at the Russian embassy stretched for more than half a mile along Kensington Gardens on Sunday as hundreds of Russians arrived at midday as part of a worldwide act of protest to show their opposition to Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine.
It took a quarter of an hour to walk to the end of the queue past people bearing signs that read: “These ‘elections’ are fake”, “My president is Alexei Navalny” and “Vladimir Putin, go fuck yourself”.
Near the end of the queue, Maria Dorofeyeva, a young woman, stood with a sign that read: “Against Putin, against the war! For freedom, peace and fair elections!” The words Putin and war were dripping blood.
“I expected there to be a lot of people, but not this many. I didn’t know there were so many Russians in London,” she said. “It gives me some hope to see how many people are not happy with the dictatorship, the war, with what’s happening in Russia. And we want to stop it.”
The long queues appeared in Russian cities and world capitals, where the Russian diaspora has swelled as hundreds of thousands have arrived in a wave of emigration triggered by the war and mobilisation at home. There were long waits in Yerevan in Armenia and Almaty in Kazakhstan, where tens of thousands of Russians have emigrated, on Istanbul’s pedestrian Istikali Street, in Phuket in Thailand and in cities across Europe including Riga and The Hague.
The protest action, labelled “Noon against Putin”, was proposed by the St Petersburg politician Maxim Reznik and endorsed by Navalny before his death. He called it a safe way for Russians inside and outside the country to congregate publicly and show their opposition to the president.
“There are many people around you who are anti-Putin and anti-war, and if we come at the same time, our anti-Putin voice will be much louder,” said his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who has vowed to continue his protest work.
Navalnaya voted in Berlin on Sunday alongside other members of Navalny’s entourage and thousands of other Russians in a queue that snaked for more than a mile through central Berlin near the Brandenburg Gate and ended at the Holocaust Memorial. “Putin is a murderer!” they chanted at one point.
In London, hundreds more protesters stood directly across from the embassy behind banners declaring opposition to Putin and the war in Ukraine. This Will Pass by the band Russian punk band Pornofilmy and other protest songs played over a loudspeaker:
“All of it will pass, everything passes sometime
In a year, in a day, in an instant
Yesterday’s dictator will lie alone in the morgue
Now just a dead old man.”
Marina Ellis held a sign calling the elections “fake” against a backdrop of the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag.
“I’m boycotting the elections. I’m not going to vote … It’s not elections, it’s a farce,” she said. “I want British people to see that not all Russians support the war. They are absolutely against Putin … If you support Putin and you have access to all the information, then you’re just an idiot.”
“I’m very happily surprised,” she said of the turnout. “I’m happy to see all these people.”
Ksenia, 24, said she had voted in elections six years ago but had not re-registered this time because “now I feel like it makes no sense to vote any more … But still I wanted to do something today,” she said, to express her opposition to the war and to Putin. So she held a sign that read: “I was born under Putin. I won’t die under him.”
Gennady, a pensioner, held his fist in the air as Russians streamed past him toward the end of the queue. “I am happy to see so many thinking, smart people,” he said. “These people have come here to be counted.
“I think it’s a clever action and it’s probably all that can be done today. You see the way that protest is put down in Russia. But it can’t last this way for ever.”
Asked for his opinion of Putin, he said he believed his time in power would “always end in a war”. “Peaceful people are dying,” he said. “Ukrainians are dying. Russians are dying. Children are dying. It’s a crime against humanity.
“There are many Russians who think differently,” he said. “But they’re being crushed. And the propaganda that is poisoning the minds of families, of grandfathers and grandmothers, is destroying all of our lives. We must fight back.”
What is to be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such different consequences? Herein I offer my thoughts as I worked through the consequences of the social use of force in the context of Russian tyranny and the invasion of Ukraine, before making my decision to launch simultaneous actions to bring a Reckoning to Putin and his regime and to join the fight in Mariupol to liberate the Black Sea and the ports of Ukraine, in my post of March 6 2022 How if Vladimir Putin Should Be Assassinated? An Interrogation of the Origins of Evil and the Social Use of Force, and of the State as Embodied Psychopathy and Violence; There is a line in Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Power That Preserves, third novel of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, spoken of a hero who refuses to be summoned to the rescue because in his other world, our own, a child has been bitten by a snake and must be saved; “Could I damn a world to save the life of one child? I’m not sure I could make that choice.”
Today we contemplate its opposite; I’m not sure I could make the decision to let the world burn and trigger the extinction of humankind to save the life of one man, Vladimir Putin, whose mad imperial conquest of Ukraine now threatens the future of us all.
The life of one war criminal versus the incalculable horrors he will bring; I could not choose to save a monster who may destroy us all over saving humankind and our world.
The violence of the slaver cannot be compared to the violence used by a slave to break his chains., as Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours teaches us.
A senator with whom I am not usually aligned made an entirely reasonable suggestion recently, for which he has been denounced in the media by friend and foe alike, even AOC for whom I have already declared in the next Presidential election, regardless of whether or not she is on the ballot.
I am having difficulty understanding why this suggestion was not embraced with great bipartisan enthusiasm, given our history. After all, assassination and overthrowing inconvenient governments is something we do all the time. We even manufacture or capitalize on unforgiveable just causes of war like Russia’s firebombing of a nuclear site this week to launch imperial conquests of our own; the terror attack on the Twin Towers provided a pretext to seize the heroin fields of Afghanistan and the oil fields of Iraq, sacrifices to our shared rituals of public grieving and need for vengeance, and Hearst’s fictions regarding the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor gave us the Spanish-American War, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Hawaiian Islands which we stole simply because we could, and later the Presidency of the war’s hero, Teddy Roosevelt.
Go us? We normally seize such chances with great avarice.
Perhaps we are growing up, we humans, and abandoning the use of force and violence. The question is whether we can survive to reach the stage of childhood’s end; and this is the inherent dilemma of force and power, for such forces are dichotomous, bidirectional, and have unintended consequences.
As written by Joan E Greve and Vivian Ho in The Guardian; “Lindsey Graham has attracted widespread condemnation after the South Carolina senator suggested Vladimir Putin should be assassinated in order to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Graham first made the suggestion in an appearance on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show on Thursday evening, and he then repeated the idea in a tweet that quickly went viral.
“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” Graham said on Twitter. “You would be doing your country – and the world – a great service.”
Brutus refers to one of the assassins of the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, and Stauffenberg was a German army officer who was executed for attempting to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944.
Graham added in a separate tweet: “The only people who can fix this are the Russian people. Easy to say, hard to do. Unless you want to live in darkness for the rest of your life, be isolated from the rest of the world in abject poverty, and live in darkness you need to step up to the plate.”
Despite immediate criticism of Graham’s comments from left and right in the US, he doubled down on the idea in a Friday morning interview with Fox & Friends. “I’m hoping somebody in Russia will understand that he is destroying Russia, and you need to take this guy out by any means possible,” Graham said.
American lawmakers of both parties responded to Graham’s comments with shock, dismay and outrage, pointing out the danger in demanding the assassination of a leader whose troops are currently engaged in shelling nuclear plants.
“I really wish our members of Congress would cool it and regulate their remarks as the administration works to avoid [a third world war],” the progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar said in a tweet.
Republican members of Congress were no less critical, as Senator Ted Cruz derided Graham’s suggestion as “an exceptionally bad idea”. “Use massive economic sanctions; BOYCOTT Russian oil [and] gas; and provide military aid so the Ukrainians can defend themselves,” Cruz said. “But we should not be calling for the assassination of heads of state.”
Even Marjorie Taylor Greene – the extremist congresswoman who has sparked outrage for, among other things, comparing coronavirus-related restrictions to the treatment of Jewish people during the Holocaust – chimed in from the right with criticism of Graham.
“While we are all praying for peace [and] for the people of Ukraine, this is irresponsible, dangerous [and] unhinged. We need leaders with calm minds [and] steady wisdom,” Greene said on Twitter. “Not blood thirsty warmongering politicians trying to tweet tough by demanding assassinations. Americans don’t want war.”
White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said: “We are not advocating for killing the leader of a foreign country or regime change. That is not the policy of the United States.”
Really? When has this not been precisely our national policy? President Biden ordered the assassination of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, a man in Syria whom our state claimed without any evidence was the new leader of ISIS, who if the charge was true was a danger only to our common enemies al Qaeda and the Assad regime, mass murdering his entire family merely to divert attention from his many failures, just as Trump had done the year before with his supposed predecessor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Did America not assassinate Salvador Allende and attempt countless times to assassinate Fidel Castro, both heroes as great as any American President?
Did we not kill in massive and horrific numbers to win our freedom from the British Empire in the Revolutionary War, from slavery in the Civil War, and from fascism in the Second World War?
We are a nation founded in death and terror through the words with which George Washington sent twelve thousand soldiers to put down the Whisky Rebellion of 1792 and demonstrate the power of the new federal government to enforce taxes; “Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force; like fire it is a dangerous servant — and a fearful master.”
Do not speak to me of the moral superiority of America.
O my brothers, sisters, and others who walk with me through this age of fire, wherein liberty and tyranny hang in the balance and possibly the survival or extinction of humankind, I thank you for the time we have spent together in conversation here, which I cherish as a refuge from the world, as a theatre in which I may process my reactions to the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, and as a forge of action in the performance of my chosen roles as a truthteller, a maker of mischief for tyrants, and in becoming a fulcrum of change.
Ours is a universe of Chaos, irrational and uncontrollable, and circumstances beyond the scope of our volition may visit disaster and life disruptive events upon us at any moment, for any reasons or none at all, and if by chance this is the last thing I have the opportunity to write, I want you and everyone who has been part of my life to know that you have helped me find balance for the terror of our nothingness in the joy of our freedom and the beauty of the world, healing in the redemptive power of love, and hope for our future possibilities of becoming human in poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of humankind.
If by chance you knew our time here in which to do and be the things that bring meaning and value to our lives may number not millennia but hours and days, what would you do and be? Do and be that now, and never stop; for as Kurt Vonnegut teaches us in Mother Night, we become what we pretend to be. What matters here is that our performances of ourselves are chosen and owned by us, and that we own the stories in which we live.
The most important question to ask of a story is; whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We are about to pass through a Rashomon Gate event, of fracture, relativization, the bifurcation of timelines and propagation of alternate futures and realities, and all bets are off as to what awaits us on the other side.
And all of this because a mad tyrant cowers and rages in his warrens of darkness, fragmented and torn apart by the demons which inhabit him as his dreams of empire and dominion fall apart and in accord with Newton’s Third Law create the forces of their own destruction, much as with his predecessor Adolf Hitler at the end, with one crucial difference; beneath his finger lies the button which will launch nuclear annihilation, and it calls to him, whispering; ”Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
So, as Alfred Doolittle said to Higgins in My Fair Lady, “I put it to you; and I leave it to you”; do we save one life and damn the world?
As I wrote in my post of February 22 2022, Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Malcolm X; We are shaped by our histories as narratives in which we play our parts; and we also change and seize ownership of our histories and our stories as we perform and enact them.
This brings us back to issues of unequal power, identity, and the social use of force and violence, issues which the life and works of Malcolm X center and bring into terrible and wonderful focus.
His principle of action, By Any Means Necessary, is like a riddle challenge uttered by a Zen master, for which there is no single interpretation, and to which no words but only deeds may give answer. It is a principle which helped set us free from history, and which in the end rebounded on him and killed him.
A dangerous idea, for the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law and always acts in both directions, action and reaction, unpredictable and slippery in one’s grasp. Yet an idea must be dangerous if it is to be useful in the struggle for liberation.
The violence used by a slavemaster cannot be compared to the violence used by a slave to break his chains, as Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours has been paraphrased, an extension of Nietzsche’s dichotomy of master versus slave morality. This dictum has its reverse; the state has no legitimate authority to use death, violence, force, or control in the repression of dissent, theft of citizenship or violations of our universal human rights, or authorization of identities. This got Trotsky killed by Stalin, as he rightly called out tyranny and terror as tyranny and terror regardless of what those who would enslave us call themselves.
Revolutionary struggle, protest movements, and wars of liberation use force and violence to achieve a society free of inequality when there are no other means possible, due to the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle when the tyranny and terror of authority, state force and control, and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege answer dissent with repression because they are without legitimacy and have only fear to keep the slaves at their work. Those who would enslave us refuse to negotiate because they see only themselves as human, and without debate we are left only the sword.
Any who stand between the tyranny and state terror of conquest, enslavement, and death, and the lives of innocents are heroes and champions of our humanity. The particulars are irrelevant.
How do such terrible things arise and seize hold of us, shaping us to their uses?
As I wrote in my post of October 24 2021 Embracing Our Monstrosity: Hierosgamos in Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights; Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein?
Yet as Prospero said of Caliban, we must also say of Frankenstein’s monster; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
As I have written of Vander Meer’s retelling of Frankenstein in the novel Borne; Mary Shelly’s glorious novel was also about the abandonment of a child who is no longer perfect, among a number of other themes, including the origins of violence.
A major theme of the novel Frankenstein is the monstrosity of God, who like Victor creates and then abandons his child when it is imperfect and no longer a reflection of his, when we become our own free and independent beings. Yes, Victor wants to become a god, which is why the story resonates with everyone, and is an allegory of the failure of science to realize Idealist visions of humanity, the novel being both a codification and critique of Romantic Idealism.
But in his quest to become a god, Victor also desires to be worshipped and obeyed; he wants to free himself from subjugation by authority, but not to liberate others. Instead of changing the nature of power, force, and control in casting down from his throne a tyrant god who bound us to his laws and then abandoned us through the abolition of the Law and of the social use of force and the centralization of power and authority to an elite as would a true revolutionary, Victor’s tragic flaw of pride compels him to become the next tyrant and enact the role of his former nemesis.
It is a cycle of substitutive tyranny which as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out in his novel Lolita, a brilliant critique of the failure of Idealism which led to his father’s execution in the Russian Revolution as an aristocrat, has been recapitulated throughout the world in revolutions which become tyrannies, especially under the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified Martin Chatwin and now like Saturn a monstrous cannibal god; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important. The great question which democracy attempts to answer is how to balance the rights and needs of individuals so that none may infringe upon another’s.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
I have no use for anything that limits our power to resist evil; the boundaries of the Forbidden, the tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue, or the limits of our humanity.
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the French and American Revolutions and their imperial successor states, those of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism as taught to us by Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita and by his model Thomas Mann in Death in Venice are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
How does a revolution seize power without becoming a tyranny? How shall we gather the force and will to resist unjust authority, without enforcing our own notions of the good on others in our turn?
This is the dilemma of power; that we must wield force to take it from our oppressors, and that we must relinquish it when it is ours and refuse to shape our fellows to our will.
We must refuse to submit to authority if we are to seize our liberty; and we must refuse to subjugate others that they may do the same if we are to avoid becoming the monsters we hunt.
I like and empathize with the character of Victor in Mary Shelly’s allegory of the origins of evil, and have used variants of this name as aliases because he is a figure of Milton’s rebel angel, but also I admire the monster in all his magnificence, a figure of the Shadow based on Caliban in The Tempest. The story is about their relationship as parent and abandoned and damaged child, about the interplay of these selves in the growth of the psyche and processes of becoming human, and about the political consequences of otherness and monstrosity.
Frankenstein addresses themes of science versus nature, reason versus passion, and both of these within a Promethean rebellion against God, authority, and universal Law as a form of Idealism; this from the perspective of the monster’s creator.
From the monster’s view, the novel portrays the disfigurement of the soul through abandonment by a parent who also functions as a figure of a creator-god and of Authority, known as the problem of the Deus Absconditus which refers to the god who bound us to his despicable Laws and then ran away before he was caught, and who drives the child to achievement and supremacy as his proxy of dominion and vindication before the world rather than empowering the child’s own agency to discover and follow a unique bliss and personhood- what the Greeks called Arete or Virtue but also denoting superiority as with the apex predator and ideal of patriarchal masculinity Achilles in the Iliad, one of Mary Shelly’s sources- in a chosen arena but who like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring must renounce love to win supremacy and power, rendering all victory meaningless and hollow, dehumanizing the child and shaping a vessel of rage and vengeance, a tyrant forged in the violence of the struggle to free himself from enslavement, with the iron self discipline and will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others. It is about birthing monsters, and the chaotic plasticity of identity and relationships.
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
A story which is at once Greek tragedy and Freudian study of the processes and relations between the id, ego, and superego, with a third parallel storyline relating a Romantic reimagination of Biblical Genesis like that of Blake, it is both the apotheosis of Romantic Idealism and its first criticism, exegesis and classical myth, dialectic on responsibility and discourse on Aristotle’s categories of being, critique of Rousseau’s natural man and of Nietzsche’s Superman which it also inspired in a recursive loop of influence across the seas of time. Its author was a Pythian visionary whose insight reached centuries into the future, and whose immense scholarship reimagined some of the greatest works of our historical civilization.
Mary Shelly’s influence echoes through time, multiplies, and reshapes the contexts of its polymorphous meanings. One cannot think of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa without thinking of his original, the dual-aspected monster-child created to bind our nature with reason, nor read her sources and references in the prophecies of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost without reevaluating them in terms of Mary Shelly’s novel; her work resonates through past and future, and what touches, it changes.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein?
A nested set of puzzle box themes and contexts, multiple narrative threads which create paradoxes of meaning, role reversals and inversions of identities, and the questioning of the mission of civilization and the morality of progress; Mary Shelly created the modern world with her great book Frankenstein.
It is a modernity which can unfold limitless possibilities of becoming human, or like Pandora’s Box and the Lament Configuration of the toymaker LeMarchand in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser mythos unleash horrors beyond our imagination, as Putin now threatens to do with nuclear war and annihilation.
With Putin like Dr Strangelove hypnotized by the siren call of his missiles and their promise of ultimate power, the power of total destruction and the end of humankind, chanting Oppenheimer’s ritual invocation; “Behold! I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds!”, the question before us all changes.
Nuclear annihilation whispers from the darkness, unleash me, and I’ll make you powerful. But this is a lie, for such power will also consume us and steal our souls.
The great question to which we must now find answer is no longer when is it good to be bad, but how much of our humanity we are willing to sacrifice for our survival as a species.
As I wrote in my post of February 5 2020, Democracy Falls in America: the Acquittal of Traitor Trump; At the end I am driven finally to reconsider the position of the great, flawed idol of my youth Malcolm X; by any means necessary.
By any means necessary; this is a horrible, terrible principle of action, one fraught with endless possibilities of inhumanity and malign power, yet if we are forced to a resistance of survival as was Camus, who wrote for those who must claw their way out of the ruins of lost positions and face yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival, how else may we combat our dehumanization?
We must never surrender hope, for our resistance can triumph over anything but the loss of our faith in ourselves and one another. So long as one of us remembers the dream of freedom, we may yet redeem our humanity.
My answer to the Republican subversion of democracy remains NO!
Yet beyond this, we must fight not merely against fascism but also for democracy and the universal rights of man. As we resist fascism to defend equality and freedom as our common human rights, so we must use force and violence against social and institutional systems, structures, and ideologies and not persons, for we may seek truth together nonviolently with those with whom we disagree as the signal virtue of democracy and humanism, even with our enemies as brother warriors.
Resisting evil means resisting that of others against our universal humanity, but it also means resisting the seduction of evil and power and of our own use of force to compel others.
Power is the evil impulse which births monsters.
So often in history those who commit true atrocities are utterly convinced of the justice of their cause, Gott Mitt Uns, are informed and motivated by narratives of victimhood and have abandoned the self-questioning which is the fulcrum of a free society of equals. This, too, we must resist.
For this is why revolutions, once power has been seized and tyranny overthrown, may become themselves tyrannies, and why I prefer to let others run amok and be ungovernable to the specter of authoritarian social control.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue.
And remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
Further illumination may be found in Anthony Burgess’ masterpiece Napoleon Symphony, a tragedy of Napoleon and Beethoven’s Eroica and a novel whose discovery was a defining moment of my fourteenth year and has remained with me ever since, despite my teenage adoration of Napoleon as a hero of revolution and liberation, a universal genius and ideal of human being.
Here is the ground of struggle between tyranny and resistance under imposed conditions of systemic unequal power in the use of social force and violence, and between seizures of power as ownership of identity versus the falsification of authorized identities in the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; history, memory, identity.
Read it as I did beneath a print of Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, depicting a Shadow pantheon with the wonderful image of the rebel Titan Typhoeus as a chthonic ape and his three gorgon daughters to his left under signifying masks of Death, Madness, and Desire (I found Disease redundant and renamed her Desire as a better balance of forces, plus she is depicted as a three aspected goddess to the right as Lasciviousness, Wantonness, and Intemperance); really, what more could a boy ask for?
And here is the dynamism of our relationship with our shadow self and all that we fear and experience as disgust and revulsion, fear of nature and of our instinctive selves externalized and projected as fear of otherness, loss of self and of control, and degradation to an animal state which drive identity politics and social constructions of race, gender, and class or caste which includes nationalism and sectarian faith, especially when overwhelming and pervasive fear and real existential threats are weaponized by authority in service to power, as Malcolm X was falsified by Elijah Muhammed’s Black Muslim separatist nationalism as his herald, in reaction against the greater historical and systemic evils and multigenerational trauma and inequality of white supremacist terror and the legacies of slavery.
Processes of transformational change and social adaptation are chaotic and interdependent, and their causes are circular or more complex as we can see in the case of Malcolm X and liberation struggle, and in all such histories. This is one lesson we can learn from Malcolm X; there is no just authority. And those who claim to speak for you often do so as a primary strategy of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and in your subjugation to tyranny.
A second such lesson is that racism in general, and all divisions and social hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, compel submission to authority through the weaponization of fear as an arbiter of our most important relationship, that of the conscious and unconscious or shadow self, which can be read in how we feel and think about nature and those truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
We define ourselves through figures of otherness who represent unintegrated parts of ourselves and define the limits of the human; freaks, monsters, and all those beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and that which we claim as ours.
For this fear of nature as the origin of racism I have a simple solution; let us embrace our monstrosity, and perform violations of normality and transgressions of the Forbidden as sacred acts of Chaos in pursuit of truth.
The third gift of Malcolm X to our limitless future possibilities of becoming human is a life lived in revolutionary struggle and resistance against systems, structures, and institutions of unequal power as direct interrogation and engagement with the state as embodied violence, and with the consequences of the use of social force.
He died for our chance to learn these three things, how authority falsifies and subjugates us as a primary historical process, how racism and other inequalities of power are born of fear of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, and the dichotomous and bidirectional nature of violence and the dialectical processes of the use of social force in tyranny and terror and in resistance and revolution, and as a martyr and teacher of wisdom Malcolm X is a figure of liberation who belongs to all humankind.
How can we disambiguate the violence of the “slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains” as Trotsky phrased it, of tyranny and carceral states from revolutionary struggle and liberation, of action in accord with our duty of care for others and our interdependence and solidarity from the enforcement of virtue and imperialism?
As I wrote in my post of February 4 2022, A Stain of Cruelty: the Assassination of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi ; To paraphrase the line from Hamlet and Star Trek in season one, episode 13, The Conscience of the King; There’s a stain of cruelty on your armor, President Biden.
We have answered terror and death with terror and death, and this is both tragic and shameful. Force cannot answer force, nor heal the flaws of our humanity.
As written for CNN by Barbara Starr, Oren Liebermann, Jeremy Herb and Eyad Kourdi; “It was the biggest US raid in the country since the 2019 operation that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Biden spoke from the White House Thursday morning to announce that the operation had taken “a major terrorist leader off the battlefield.”
“Thanks to the bravery of our troops, this horrible terrorist leader is no more,” Biden said from the Roosevelt Room. “Knowing that terrorist had chosen to surround himself with families, including children, we made a choice to pursue a Special Forces raid at a much a greater risk to our own people rather than targeting him with an airstrike.”
Now and then Biden reminds us all that he was among the principal collaborators in Bush’s invasion of Iraq as imperial conquest and colonial plunder to seize the strategic resource of oil by which America maintains a global hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege, an addiction which will result in the extinction of humankind as a species, and in the authorization through the Patriot Act of a carceral state of brutal force and pervasive surveillance and thought control exceeded only by Xin Jinping’s holocaust of the Uighurs of Xinjiang, which has enabled the most massive theft of our freedoms in our history, including the McCarthy era, and the most bizarre and reprehensible regime of torture, most infamous in the crimes against humanity perpetrated at Guantanamo and other secret prisons for political enemies of the regime and its oligarchic, plutocratic, and corporate robber baron paymasters, including even the grisly hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials.
Once again our heroes and champions are proven to have feet of clay, and I mourn the failure of moral vision and addiction to power and the use of force and violence of President Biden, our government, and America as a guarantor of universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
On this day and all too often, the Promethean Fire of the Torch of Liberty which illuminates the gates of our nation in New York Harbor did not reach across the wild seas to foreign shores. This is a great tragedy, and it is a tragedy which is ours and for which we must answer.
The deaths of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi and his family as a consequence of America’s raid on his home, not an arrest for crimes provable in a court of law but political assassinations, are rightly being compared in the media to the assassination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by Trump. This situates Biden and Trump on an equal level of criminal amorality and state terror.
Before the stage of the world and history, it also generates moral equivalence between ISIS and America, as our enemies intend by their provocations as a strategy of delegitimation of a regime. I use this myself as a democracy activist, for the art of revolution is about claiming the moral high ground and the delegitimation of authority and seizing control of the narrative.
Sending armies and police to enforce virtue through violence and repression is not only evil, it is also stupid; for it plays into the hands of the enemy. As Shakespeare teaches us in Henry V; “When lenity and cruelty play for kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.”
There are still notable differences between Biden and Trump, and between the goals, values, and ideals of Democrats and Republicans, madness and treason among them. But today those differences became suddenly and horrifically more narrow, and I fear we will need more than the eye of a needle as a window to a better future.
As written in my post of October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: Parallel Lives and Reflections; The personal and historical forces which create tyrants and monsters among us have been a lifelong study of mine, aspects of a curiosity regarding the origins and nature of evil born of primary childhood traumas in the Bloody Thursday massacre ordered by Ronald Reagan against a student peace protest in Berkeley 1969 when I was nine and my near execution in Brazil at the age of fourteen defending street children from police bounty hunters, which echoes those of Maurice Blanchot in June 1944 by the Nazis and Dostoevsky’s in 1849 by Czarist police, informed by Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird and focused by the classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, both of which I read during high school. Thus I became fascinated by the intersections of literature, philosophy, history, and psychology, and chose the origins of evil as my lifelong field of study.
As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.
A full psychological and historical study of Trump and al-Baghdadi as figures of fascist terror and madness on a global political scale in the context of civilizational conflicts would require a book of Biblical proportions and thesis-level scholarship such as Waite’s brilliant work on Hitler. Here I note only some of the obvious alignments and congruences; both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women.
Of Trump we have a cornucopia of information; Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch and The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee are excellent resources, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator. Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremberg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and his puppetmaster Putin, his model Hitler, and his mirror image al-Baghdadi, as monsters and tyrants who reflect one another and as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty, the state as embodied psychopathy and violence, and government as performance art.
For their performances of leadership as clowns of terror and madness provide mirror opposite images of the reign of the Roman Emperor described with wit and guile by Antonin Artaud in his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, a figure who disrupted norms as an agent of change and chaos to transform an inert and ossified society, whereas Trump and al-Baghdadi have acted as partners in reaction to disrupt civilization itself and return us to a pre-democratic barbarian tyranny.
Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.
So I wrote on October 28 2019; and so I must write now of Biden’s secret face and heart of darkness, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, linked now for eternity as figures of terror, murderous retribution, and cruelty.
State terror and imperialism has met sectarian and patriarchal terror as tyranny and organizations of institutionalized violence and power; we can only hope now that they will recognize their twin image in the mirror of death which war and acts of force and violence confront us with, and walk away from the precipice which threatens to consume us all.
As Ken Kesey said in his historic speech to a peace protest against the war in Vietnam recorded in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; “The way to end war is just walk away and say fuck it. Just walk away and say fuck it.”
Every word of this remains true, in these and all cases of tyranny and the institutional terror of carceral states of force and control, of authorized identities and falsification by propaganda and rewritten histories, of imperial conquest and dominion and colonial exploitation and enslavement. It is also true now of Russia in the invasion of Ukraine.
As I wrote here of Trump we may also say of his master Putin; for Traitor Trump is but a negative space and shadow cast by his original type, and both are atavisms of fear and force, chasms of emptiness which nothing can fill, no amount of dominion and control of others, displays of wealth and power or vainglorious strutting, to which no sacrifices of things loved by others or the terror and pain of their victims can suffice, for such is the nature of psychopathy and of politics as a theatre of cruelty.
What does this mean?
For us in this moment and in the context of the question of violence and the social use of force, it means that in the unequal balance of power between Russia and Ukraine, wherein real people are dying because someone has the power to steal what they have, a predator for whom nothing is real or has meaning but force and power, we must find answer to the declaration of Ayn Rand’s monstrous protagonist Howard Roark in The Fountainhead as he commits rape; “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
Who will stop Putin’s conquest of Ukraine?
If they come for one of us, let them be met with all of us; not divided by hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, nor defeated by learned helplessness and terror, but united in solidarity and refusal to submit as one unconquerable and united humankind.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. There is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
For me, this is simple; the nation invading another is in the wrong. This is no different from chancing to discover a policeman kneeling on someone’s neck, in which case our duty of care for others requires us to save the life of the person who is being murdered right in front of us, regardless of any irrelevant details like which of them has the badge and the gun, the authority and the power, by any means necessary.
Law serves power, and there is no just authority.
Even if neither nation is a democracy, and victims of unequal power have no inherent moral burden of virtue as Shaw teaches us with the figure of Arthur Doolittle in My Fair Lady, one of them stealing the lives and freedom of the other as the right of sovereignty, self-determination, autonomy, and independence cannot be just, and must be opposed.
By any means necessary.
While the political origins of conflict are often ambiguous, its consequences for the people in the path of a conquest are not. As my long term goals remain a united humankind and a stateless society which has abandoned the social use of force and control and with it all laws, authorized identities, and the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue, and the emergence of a free society of equals from divisions of exclusionary otherness, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, I stand with Ukraine and with any liberation movement of sovereignty and independence anywhere, and with the people of Russia against the oligarchy and Putin and for all democracy movements against tyranny.
Let us stand in solidarity as a band of brothers, wherever men hunger to be free.
Our duty of care for others sometimes requires us to place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. I am only one man, and not extraordinary, with nothing but my witness of history and my vision of our future possibilities of becoming human to hurl against the chasms of darkness and the terror of our nothingness in the face of overwhelming force and amoral imperial and carceral states.
But I cannot be complicit in silence with these crimes against humanity, to which as with fascism there can be but one reply: Never Again! A rallying cry complicated by its popularization in the title of founder of the Jewish Defense League Meir Kahane’s book “Never Again!: A Program for Survival, its origin is in Isaac Lambdan’s 1926 poem Masada; “Never shall Masada fall again”; it first appeared in its current form on signs written by the prisoners of Buchenwald after its liberation.
Elie Wiesel defines the phrase in his novel Hostage; “Never again” becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow. There will never again be hatred, people say. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children. And never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence. It’s a prayer.”
Here I would declare Sic Semper Tyrannis, but this is a phrase from the shadows and legacies of our history from which we must emerge, and includes the assassinations of Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln, whose killers I despise and would not align myself with.
I do not trust certainties or those who act in their name, Gott Mitt Uns bearing a history of atrocities and terror which has no equals, and includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Year’s War, and the Holocaust. As Voltaire wrote in his 1765 essay Questions sur les miracles; “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
Instead I will say with the magnificent Lt. Aldo Raine in Inglorious Basterds, and I hope in a way which preserves and reflects the moral ambiguity, contingency, and relativity of the original in the film; “Now that I can’t abide. How ’bout you, can you abide it?”
Here are the references from my essay; first among them my theme song for Last Stands, which I posted on August 24 as I joined the defense of Afghanistan after its fall, and post now as I prepare to join the defense of Ukraine with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade:
Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
Insecure, weak Putin craves the popular vote, but uses violence to guarantee it | Observer editorial
The New Annotated Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Leslie S. Klinger (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Guillermo del Toro (Introduction), Anne K. Mellor (Afterword)
The Tempest, Folger Shakespeare Library, by William Shakespeare, Paul Werstine (Editor), David Lindley (Editor), Israel Gollancz (Preface & Glossary), Barbara A. Mowat (Editor)
Herein I write a manifesto of action as Socratic dialog and Swiftian satire, which as stated in the title questions “the Origins of Evil and the Social Use of Force, and of the State as Embodied Psychopathy and Violence”.
As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty declares, my intent is “to incite, provoke, and disturb.”
Consider also that I claim the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen as Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and that I do these things in performance as what Foucault called a truth teller, in the pursuit of truth as a sacred calling.
In this essay I interrogate a set of interdependent problems which I believe are central to the project of becoming human we all share, and the consequences of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force posed to us by the situation we face in this moment, and here I use the term moment in the ways that Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou did, wherein a monstrous tyrant threatens nuclear war and the extermination of all humankind on a whim of infantile tantrum, and we must choose one or the other.
It is a dilemma which like all use of social force makes us complicit in evil, a primary strategy of fascism in our subjugation, and which reproduces the conditions from which states arise as embodied psychopathy and violence, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Badiou claims events are fundamentally indeterminate and structured by the dialectics of possibility and impossibility, maybe-maybe not as my mother used to say to students who asked her for positional declarations, judgements, authorized versions, singing the words and bouncing her hands from side to side.
For Derrida, as my friend Rene Troy Tun has described, “the event in its absolute singularity is thus resistant to cognitive description, critical objectification, interpretive reduction, and theoretical elaboration.”
Here with this primary existential question of human being, meaning, and value I struggle to find synthesis; like the performance of our identities, this process need not be determinative or prescriptive, but a space of free creative play.
If we have no answers, we must learn to ask better questions.
In this tilting at windmills I use Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars as my model, a magisterial work which comes in male and female versions and whose meaning changes with a difference of seventeen lines between them.
How if Vladimir Putin Should Be Assassinated? Do we save one life, that of a mad tyrant who will destroy us, and damn the world?
16 марта 2024 г. Массовый глобальный протест разоблачает императора, у которого нет легитимности: сфальсифицированные выборы Путина
Героическая волна массовых протестов прокатилась по миру в ответ на фальсифицированные выборы Путина, несмотря на убийства и пытки, используемые режимом для жестоких подавлений инакомыслия, в то время как движения за мир и демократию в России объединяются в один голос, чтобы призвать императора, который не имеет легитимности.
Всегда обращайте внимание на человека за кулисами. Как говорит Дороти Озу; «Ты просто старый обманщик!»
В России и во всем мире давайте исполним четыре основные обязанности гражданина; Полномочия по вопросам, полномочия по разоблачению, полномочия по имитации и полномочия по оспариванию. Таковы этапы революционной борьбы за делегитимацию несправедливой власти.
Закон служит власти, порядок присваивает, и справедливой власти не существует.
Что делать, как просили Толстой и Ленин с такими разными последствиями? Здесь я излагаю свои мысли, когда я прорабатывал последствия социального применения силы в контексте российской тирании и вторжения на Украину, прежде чем принять решение начать одновременные действия, чтобы принести расплату Путину и его режиму и присоединиться к сражайтесь в Мариуполе за освобождение Черного моря и портов Украины, в моем посте от 6 марта 2022 г. Что, если Владимира Путина следует убить? Исследование истоков зла и социального использования силы, а также государства как воплощения психопатии и насилия; В третьем романе «Хроник Томаса Ковенанта» Стивена Р. Дональдсона «Сила, которая сохраняет» есть строка, в которой говорится о герое, который отказывается быть вызванным на помощь, потому что в его другом мире, нашем, ребенка укусил змея и ее надо спасать; «Могу ли я проклясть мир, чтобы спасти жизнь одного ребенка? Я не уверен, что смогу сделать такой выбор».
Сегодня мы рассматриваем противоположное; Я не уверен, что смог бы принять решение позволить миру сгореть и вызвать вымирание человечества, чтобы спасти жизнь одного человека, Владимира Путина, чье безумное имперское завоевание Украины теперь угрожает будущему всех нас.
Жизнь одного военного преступника и неисчислимые ужасы, которые он принесет; Я не мог выбрать спасение монстра, который может уничтожить нас всех, вместо спасения человечества и нашего мира.
Насилие работорговца нельзя сравнивать с насилием, которое использует раб, чтобы разорвать свои цепи, как учит нас Троцкий в книге «Их мораль и наша».
Сенатор, с которым я обычно не согласен, недавно сделал вполне разумное предложение, за что его осудили в средствах массовой информации как друзья, так и враги, даже АОК, за которого я уже высказался на следующих президентских выборах, независимо от того, будет ли это или нет она в бюллетенях для голосования.
Мне трудно понять, почему это предложение не было воспринято с большим энтузиазмом обеих партий, учитывая нашу историю. В конце концов, убийства и свержение неудобных правительств — это то, чем мы занимаемся постоянно. Мы даже создаем или извлекаем выгоду из непростительных справедливых причин войны, таких как бомбардировка Россией ядерного объекта на этой неделе, чтобы начать собственные имперские завоевания; террористическая атака на башни-близнецы послужила предлогом для захвата героиновых полей Афганистана и нефтяных месторождений Ирака, жертвоприношения нашим общим ритуалам общественного горя и жажды мести, а также вымыслы Херста о затоплении военного корабля США «Мэн» в Гаване в 1898 году. Харбор подарил нам Испано-американскую войну, Кубу, Филиппины, Гуам, Пуэрто-Рико, Гавайские острова, которые мы украли просто потому, что могли, а затем и президентство героя войны Тедди Рузвельта.
Пойти к нам? Обычно мы с большой жадностью пользуемся такими шансами.
Возможно, мы, люди, взрослеем и отказываемся от применения силы и насилия. Вопрос в том, сможем ли мы выжить и достичь стадии конца детства; и это неотъемлемая дилемма силы и власти, поскольку такие силы дихотомичны, двунаправлены и имеют непредвиденные последствия.
Как написано Джоан Э. Греве и Вивиан Хо в The Guardian; «Линдси Грэм вызвала широкое осуждение после того, как сенатор от Южной Каролины предложил убить Владимира Путина, чтобы положить конец вторжению России в Украину.
Впервые Грэм высказал это предложение во время выступления на шоу ведущего Fox News Шона Хэннити в четверг вечером, а затем повторил эту идею в твите, который быстро стал вирусным.
«Есть ли Брут в России? Есть ли в российской армии более успешный полковник Штауффенберг? Единственный способ положить этому конец — это чтобы кто-нибудь в России устранил этого парня», — написал Грэм в Твиттере. «Вы окажете своей стране – и миру – огромную услугу».
Брут относится к одному из убийц римского императора Юлия Цезаря, а Штауффенберг был офицером немецкой армии, казненным за попытку убить Адольфа Гитлера в 1944 году.
Грэм добавил в отдельном твите: «Единственные люди, которые могут это исправить, — это русские люди. Легко сказать, трудно сделать. Если вы не хотите прожить во тьме всю оставшуюся жизнь, быть изолированным от остального мира в условиях крайней нищеты и жить во тьме, вам нужно взять на себя ответственность».
Несмотря на немедленную критику комментариев Грэма со стороны левых и правых в США, он еще раз усилил эту идею в пятничном утреннем интервью Fox & Friends. «Я надеюсь, что кто-то в России поймет, что он разрушает Россию, и вам нужно уничтожить этого парня любыми возможными способами», — сказал Грэм.
Американские законодатели от обеих партий отреагировали на комментарии Грэма шоком, тревогой и возмущением, указав на опасность требования убийства лидера, войска которого в настоящее время занимаются обстрелами атомных электростанций.
«Мне бы очень хотелось, чтобы наши члены Конгресса охладили это и урегулировали свои высказывания, поскольку администрация работает над тем, чтобы избежать [третьей мировой войны]», — написала в Твиттере прогрессивная конгрессменка Ильхан Омар.
Члены Конгресса-республиканцы были не менее критичны, поскольку сенатор Тед Круз высмеял предложение Грэма как «исключительно плохую идею». «Используйте масштабные экономические санкции; БОЙКОТ российской нефти [и] газа; и предоставить военную помощь, чтобы украинцы могли защитить себя», — сказал Круз. «Но мы не должны призывать к убийству глав государств».
Даже Марджори Тейлор Грин – конгрессмен-экстремистка, которая вызвала возмущение, среди прочего, сравнив ограничения, связанные с коронавирусом, с обращением с евреями во время Холокоста – присоединилась справа с критикой Грэма.
«Хотя мы все молимся за мир [и] за народ Украины, это безответственно, опасно [и] безумно. Нам нужны лидеры со спокойным умом и твердой мудростью», — написал Грин в Twitter. «Не кровожадные воинственные политики, пытающиеся жестко писать в Твиттере, требуя убийств. Американцы не хотят войны».
Пресс-секретарь Белого дома Джен Псаки заявила: «Мы не выступаем за убийство лидера иностранного государства или смену режима. Это не политика Соединенных Штатов».
Действительно? Когда это не было именно нашей национальной политикой? Президент Байден приказал убить Абу Ибрагима аль-Хашими аль-Курайши, человека в Сирии, которого наше государство без каких-либо доказательств объявило новым лидером ИГИЛ, который, если обвинение было правдой, представлял опасность только для наших общих врагов, Аль-Каиды и режим Асада, массово убивающий всю его семью просто для того, чтобы отвлечь внимание от своих многочисленных неудач, точно так же, как Трамп сделал годом ранее со своим предполагаемым предшественником Абу Бакром аль-Багдади.
Разве Америка не убила Сальвадора Альенде и не пыталась бесчисленное количество раз убить Фиделя Кастро, обоих героев, столь же великих, как любой американский президент?
Разве мы не убивали в огромных и ужасающих количествах, чтобы завоевать свободу от Британской империи в Войне за независимость, от рабства во время Гражданской войны и от фашизма во Второй мировой войне?
Мы — нация, основанная на смерти и терроре, благодаря словам, с которыми Джордж Вашингтон послал двенадцать тысяч солдат, чтобы подавить восстание виски 1792 года и продемонстрировать силу нового федерального правительства по обеспечению соблюдения налогов; «Правительство — это не разум. Это не красноречие. Правительство — это сила; как огонь, это опасный слуга и пугливый господин».
Не говорите мне о моральном превосходстве Америки.
О мои братья, сестры и другие, кто идет со мной в этот огненный век, когда на чаше весов висят свобода и тирания и, возможно, выживание или вымирание человечества, я благодарю вас за время, которое мы провели здесь в беседе, которая Я лелею как убежище от мира, как театр, в котором я могу обработать свои реакции на сломанность мира и недостатки нашей человечности, и как кузницу действия в исполнении выбранных мной ролей говорящего правду. создатель зла для тиранов и становящийся опорой перемен.
Наша вселенная Хаоса, иррационального и неконтролируемого, и обстоятельств, выходящих за рамки
наша воля может навлечь на нас катастрофу и разрушительные для жизни события в любой момент, по любым причинам или вообще без них, и если случайно это последнее, что у меня есть возможность написать, я хочу, чтобы вы и все, кто был частью моей всю жизнь знать, что ты помог мне найти баланс между ужасом нашего небытия в радости нашей свободы и красоте мира, исцелении искупительной силой любви и надеждой на наши будущие возможности стать людьми в поэтическом видении и переосмысление и трансформация человечества.
Если бы вы случайно знали, что время, проведенное здесь, чтобы делать и заниматься тем, что придает смысл и ценность нашей жизни, может исчисляться не тысячелетиями, а часами и днями, что бы вы делали и кем были? Делайте и будьте этим сейчас и никогда не останавливайтесь; поскольку, как учит нас Курт Воннегут в «Матери Ночи», мы становимся теми, кем притворяемся. Здесь важно то, что наши представления о самих себе выбираются и принадлежат нам, и что мы владеем историями, в которых живем.
Самый важный вопрос, который следует задать в истории: чья это история?
Всегда остается борьба между масками, которые другие создают для нас, и теми, которые мы делаем для себя. Это первая революция, в которой мы все должны бороться; борьба за право собственности на себя.
Мы вот-вот пройдем через событие Врат Расёмон, перелом, релятивизацию, раздвоение временных линий и распространение альтернативных вариантов будущего и реальностей, и все ставки на то, что ждет нас на другой стороне, сделаны.
И все это потому, что безумный тиран съеживается и бушует в своих лабиринтах тьмы, фрагментированный и раздираемый демонами, населяющими его, в то время как его мечты об империи и господстве рушатся и в соответствии с Третьим законом Ньютона создают силы собственного разрушения. , как и в случае с его предшественником Адольфом Гитлером в конце, с одним важным отличием; под его пальцем лежит кнопка, запускающая ядерное уничтожение, и она зовет его шепотом; «Освободи меня, и я сделаю тебя могущественным».
Итак, как сказал Альфред Дулиттл Хиггинсу в «Моей прекрасной леди»: «Я вам это говорю; и я оставляю это тебе»; мы спасем одну жизнь и проклянем мир?
Как я писал в своем посте от 22 февраля 2022 года, в годовщину мученической кончины Малкольма Икса; Наша история формирует нас как повествования, в которых мы играем свои роли; и мы также изменяем и захватываем право собственности на нашу историю и наши истории по мере того, как мы их исполняем и разыгрываем.
Это возвращает нас к вопросам неравной власти, идентичности и социального использования силы и насилия, вопросам, которые жизнь и творчество Малкольма Икс сосредотачивают и придают им ужасный и чудесный фокус.
Его принцип действия «Любыми необходимыми средствами» подобен загадке, произнесенной мастером дзэн, для которой не существует единого толкования и на которую не могут дать ответ никакие слова, а только дела. Это принцип, который помог нам освободиться от истории и который, в конце концов, отразился на нем и убил его.
Опасная идея, поскольку применение силы подчиняется третьему закону Ньютона и всегда действует в обоих направлениях, действия и противодействия, непредсказуемо и скользко в руках. Однако идея должна быть опасной, если она хочет быть полезной в борьбе за освобождение.
Насилие, используемое рабовладельцем, нельзя сравнивать с насилием, которое использует раб, чтобы разорвать свои цепи, как перефразировал Троцкий в книге «Их мораль и наша», которая является продолжением ницшеанской дихотомии морали господина и раба. У этого изречения есть и обратная сторона; государство не имеет законных полномочий применять смерть, насилие, силу или контроль для подавления инакомыслия, кражи гражданства или нарушений наших универсальных прав человека или установления личности. Это привело к тому, что Сталин убил Троцкого, поскольку он справедливо называл тиранию и террор тиранией и террором, независимо от того, как называют себя те, кто хотел нас поработить.
Революционная борьба, протестные движения и освободительные войны используют силу и насилие для построения общества, свободного от неравенства, когда нет других средств, из-за навязанных условий революционной борьбы, когда тирания и террор власти, государственная сила и контроль, а элитные гегемоны богатства, власти и привилегий отвечают на инакомыслие репрессиями, потому что они лишены легитимности и имеют только страх удерживать рабов на их работе. Те, кто хотел бы поработить нас, отказываются вести переговоры, потому что считают людьми только себя, и без дебатов нам остается только меч.
Любой, кто стоит между тиранией и государственным террором завоеваний, порабощения и смерти, а также жизнями невинных людей, является героями и защитниками нашей человечности. Детали не имеют значения.
Как такие ужасные вещи возникают и захватывают нас, приспосабливая нас к их использованию?
Как я писал в своем посте от 24 октября 2021 г. «Принимая наше чудовище: Иеросгам во Франкенштейне и Грозовом перевале»; Наши монстры, мы сами; гениальность, безумие, вдохновение, стремление стать богами; кто из нас не жаждал украсть божественный огонь, заглянуть за пределы самих себя, т.
o бросать вызов всем ограничениям и законам? Быть хотя бы на мгновение непобежденным Виктором Франкенштейном?
Однако, как Просперо сказал о Калибане, мы также должны сказать и о чудовище Франкенштейна; «Эту вещь тьмы я признаю своей».
Как я уже писал о пересказе Вандером Меером Франкенштейна в романе «Борн»; В великолепном романе Мэри Шелли речь шла также об отказе от ребенка, который уже не идеален, а также о ряде других тем, включая истоки насилия.
Основная тема романа «Франкенштейн» — чудовищность Бога, который, как и Виктор, создает, а затем бросает своего ребенка, когда он несовершенен и больше не является его отражением, когда мы становимся своими собственными свободными и независимыми существами. Да, Виктор хочет стать богом, поэтому эта история находит отклик у всех и является аллегорией неспособности науки реализовать идеалистические взгляды на человечество, причем роман является одновременно кодификацией и критикой романтического идеализма.
Но в своем стремлении стать богом Виктор также желает, чтобы ему поклонялись и ему подчинялись; он хочет освободиться от порабощения властью, но не освободить других. Вместо того, чтобы изменить природу власти, силы и контроля, свергнув со своего трона бога-тирана, который привязал нас к своим законам, а затем покинул нас посредством отмены Закона и социального использования силы, а также централизации власти и власть для элиты, как это сделал бы настоящий революционер, трагический недостаток гордости Виктора вынуждает его стать следующим тираном и разыграть роль своего бывшего врага.
Это цикл заместительной тирании, который, как указал Владимир Набоков в своем романе «Лолита», блестящей критике краха идеализма, приведшего к казни его отца во время русской революции как аристократа, был повторен во всем мире в революциях, которые стали тирании, особенно в навязанных условиях антиколониальной борьбы.
В сериале «Волшебники» есть фраза, произнесенная злодеем из сериала «Волшебники», пережившим жестокое обращение в детстве и тираном, известным как Зверь за свои ужасные преступления, когда-то бессильным и напуганным Мартином Чатвином, а теперь, как Сатурн, чудовищным богом-людоедом; «Знаешь, когда я был мальчиком, мужчина, который должен был заботиться обо мне, склонял меня над своим столом и держал меня снова и снова каждый раз, когда я была с ним наедине. Это помогает мне понять истину. Ты сильный или ты слабый. «
Вот подлинная ложь тирана и фашиста в апологетике и самооправдании власти; ложь о том, что только сила имеет смысл, что нет добра и зла. То, как мы используем власть, имеет такое же значение, как и то, кто ею владеет. Страх и сила — основные, но не единственные средства человеческого обмена; любовь, членство и принадлежность не менее важны. Великий вопрос, на который пытается ответить демократия, заключается в том, как сбалансировать права и потребности людей, чтобы никто не мог ущемлять права других.
Эта линия прекрасно отражает внутренние противоречия вагнеровского кольца страха, власти и силы как источника зла; поскольку использование социальной силы подрывает собственные ценности. Тем не менее, навязанные условия революционной борьбы часто требуют насилия, и пока боги закона и порядка не будут свергнуты со своих тронов, я должен согласиться со знаменитым изречением Сартра в его пьесе 1948 года «Грязные руки», процитированным Францем Фаноном в его речи 1960 года. «Почему мы используем насилие»; Малкольм Икс сделал его бессмертным; «любыми средствами».
Как написано Уолтером Родни в книге «Приземление с моими братьями»; «Нам сказали, что насилие само по себе является злом и что, какова бы ни была причина, оно морально неоправданно. По каким нормам морали насилие, применяемое рабом, чтобы разорвать свои цепи, может считаться таким же, как насилие рабовладельца? По каким стандартам мы можем приравнять насилие чернокожих, которых угнетали, подавляли, подавляли и репрессировали на протяжении четырех столетий, к насилию белых фашистов? Насилие, направленное на восстановление человеческого достоинства и равенства, не может оцениваться теми же мерками, что и насилие, направленное на поддержание дискриминации и угнетения».
А вот отрывок, на который он ссылается из книги Льва Троцкого в книге «Их мораль и наша: Классовые основы моральной практики»; «Рабовладелец, который хитростью и насилием заковывает раба в цепи, и раб, который хитростью или насилием разрывает цепи, — пусть не говорят нам презренные евнухи, что они равны перед судом нравственности!»
Мне не нужно ничего, что ограничивает нашу способность противостоять злу; границы Запретного, тирания нормальности и представления других людей о добродетели или пределы нашей человечности.
И все же, размышляя, я думаю о тех великих деятелях, которые были одновременно героями освобождения и злодеями тирании; Наполеон, Вашингтон, Сталин, Мао — этот список представляет собой почти бесконечный перечень горестей и провалов видения, в которых дивные новые миры превратились в ад и государства-тюрьмы. В качестве доказательства я привожу Французскую и Американскую революции и их имперскую
Государства-преемники, Советский Союз и Коммунистическая партия Китая, и, прежде всего, государство Израиль, мечта об убежище, выкованная в терроре Холокоста, жертвы которого извлекли неправильные уроки из нацистов и взяли на себя свою роль в оккупации Израиля. Палестина. Опасности идеализма, которым нас учили Владимир Набоков в «Лолите» и его модель Томас Манн в «Смерти в Венеции», вполне реальны; но так же опасны подчинение власти и соучастие в молчании перед лицом зла.
Как революция захватит власть, не превратившись при этом в тиранию? Как нам собрать силу и волю, чтобы противостоять несправедливой власти, не навязывая в свою очередь другим свои представления о добре?
Это дилемма власти; что мы должны применить силу, чтобы отобрать его у наших угнетателей, и что мы должны отказаться от него, когда оно принадлежит нам, и отказаться подчинять своих собратьев нашей воле.
Мы должны отказаться подчиняться власти, если хотим захватить нашу свободу; и мы должны отказаться подчинять других, чтобы они могли сделать то же самое, если мы хотим не стать монстрами, на которых охотимся.
Мне нравится и сопереживает персонаж Виктора в аллегории происхождения зла Мэри Шелли, и я использовал варианты этого имени в качестве псевдонимов, потому что он является фигурой мятежного ангела Мильтона, но я также восхищаюсь этим монстром во всем его великолепии, фигура Тени по мотивам Калибана из «Бури». История об их отношениях как родителя и брошенного и поврежденного ребенка, о взаимодействии этих личностей в развитии психики и процессах становления человека, а также о политических последствиях инаковости и чудовищности.
Франкенштейн обращается к темам противостояния науки и природы, разума и страсти, и обе эти темы находятся в рамках прометеева восстания против Бога, власти и универсального закона как формы идеализма; это с точки зрения создателя монстра.
С точки зрения монстра роман изображает обезображивание души из-за того, что ее бросил родитель, который также действует как фигура бога-творца и Власти, известная как проблема Deus Absconditus, которая относится к богу, который привязал нас к его презренные законы, а затем сбежал, прежде чем его поймали, и который подталкивает ребенка к достижениям и превосходству как его доверенное лицо владычества и оправдания перед миром, вместо того, чтобы наделять ребенка способностью самостоятельно открывать и следовать уникальному блаженству и индивидуальности – что за Греки называли Арете или Добродетель, но также обозначали превосходство, как в случае с высшим хищником и идеалом патриархальной мужественности Ахиллесом в «Илиаде», одним из источников Мэри Шелли – на выбранной арене, но который, как Альберих в «Кольце Вагнера», должен отказаться от любви, чтобы завоевать превосходство и власть. делая любую победу бессмысленной и пустой, дегуманизируя ребенка и формируя сосуд ярости и мести, тирана, выкованного в жестокой борьбе за освобождение себя от порабощения, с железной самодисциплиной и волей, чтобы в свою очередь подчинять других, страшен и жалок и с величием измученного непокорного зверя, заключенного в ту же плоть, что и невинный, которого нужно любить и который не может понять, почему он кажется другим чудовищным. Речь идет о рождении монстров и хаотической пластичности идентичностей и отношений.
Как написано Октавом Мирбо в «Саду пыток»; «Монстры, монстры! Но монстров нет! То, что вы называете монстрами, — это высшие формы или формы, находящиеся за пределами вашего понимания. Разве боги не монстры? Разве гениальный человек не является чудовищем, подобным тигру или пауку, как и все индивидуумы, живущие вне социальной лжи, в ослепительном и божественном бессмертии вещей? Да ведь я тоже — чудовище!»
История, которая одновременно является греческой трагедией и фрейдистским исследованием процессов и отношений между Ид, Эго и Супер-Эго, с третьей параллельной сюжетной линией, связанной с романтическим переосмыслением библейского Бытия, таким как история Блейка, и одновременно является апофеозом романтического идеализма. и его первая критика, экзегеза и классический миф, диалектика ответственности и рассуждения о категориях бытия Аристотеля, критика естественного человека Руссо и Сверхчеловека Ницше, которую она также вдохновила в рекурсивной петле влияния через моря времени. Ее автором был пифийский провидец, чье видение простиралось на столетия вперед и чья огромная ученость позволила переосмыслить некоторые из величайших произведений нашей исторической цивилизации.
Влияние Мэри Шелли отражается во времени, умножается и меняет контексты ее полиморфных значений. Нельзя думать о Грегоре Замсе Кафки, не думая о его оригинале, двуаспектном ребенке-монстре, созданном для того, чтобы связать нашу природу с разумом, нельзя читать ее источники и ссылки в пророчествах Уильяма Блейка и «Потерянного рая» Мильтона, не переоценивая их с точки зрения Роман Мэри Шелли; ее работа находит отклик в прошлом и будущем, а что касается, то меняется.
Кто может читать произведения Эмили Бронте, не осознавая ее великого «нет»?
изменился ли «Грозовой перевал» вместе с нашим осознанием того, что его автор считала себя Виктором Франкенштейном и титаном Прометеем, изгнанным с небес, подобно мятежному ангелу Мильтона? Что Хитклиф — ее монстр, демон, с которым нужно объединиться в возвышенном ницшеанском восторге преобразующего возрождения? И не меняет ли это прочтение ее источника Франкенштейна?
Вложенный набор тем и контекстов-пазлов, множество повествовательных нитей, которые создают парадоксы значений, смену ролей и инверсию идентичностей, а также сомнение в миссии цивилизации и морали прогресса; Мэри Шелли создала современный мир своей великой книгой «Франкенштейн».
Это современность, которая может раскрыть безграничные возможности стать человеком, или, как «Ящик Пандоры» и «Конфигурация плача» производителя игрушек ЛеМаршана в мифах Клайва Баркера «Восставший из ада», высвободить ужасы, превосходящие наше воображение, как Путин сейчас угрожает сделать с ядерной войной и уничтожением.
Когда Путин, как доктор Стрейнджлав, загипнотизированный звуком сирены своих ракет и их обещанием абсолютной власти, силы тотального разрушения и конца человечества, повторяет ритуальное заклинание Оппенгеймера; «Вот! Я стал Смертью, разрушителем миров!», вопрос, стоящий перед нами, меняется.
Ядерное уничтожение шепчет из тьмы: освободи меня, и я сделаю тебя могущественным. Но это ложь, ибо такая сила поглотит и нас и украдет наши души.
Великий вопрос, на который мы теперь должны найти ответ, заключается уже не в том, когда хорошо быть плохим, а в том, какой частью нашей человечности мы готовы пожертвовать ради выживания как вида.
Как я писал в своем посте от 5 февраля 2020 года, демократия в Америке падает: оправдание предателя Трампа; В конце концов я вынужден, наконец, пересмотреть позицию великого, ошибочного кумира моей юности Малкольма Икса; любыми необходимыми способами.
Любыми необходимыми средствами; это ужасный, ужасный принцип действия, чреватый бесконечными возможностями бесчеловечности и злонамеренной силы, но если мы вынуждены сопротивляться выживанию, как Камю, писавший для тех, кто должен выбраться из руин потерянного мира, позиции и столкнуться с еще одним Последним противостоянием, без надежды на победу или даже на выживание, как еще мы можем бороться с нашей дегуманизацией?
Мы никогда не должны отказываться от надежды, поскольку наше сопротивление может победить что угодно, кроме потери веры в себя и друг друга. Пока кто-то из нас помнит мечту о свободе, мы еще можем искупить нашу человечность.
Мой ответ республиканцам на подрыв демократии остается НЕТ!
Однако помимо этого мы должны бороться не только с фашизмом, но также за демократию и универсальные права человека. Поскольку мы сопротивляемся фашизму, чтобы защитить равенство и свободу как наши общие права человека, мы должны использовать силу и насилие против социальных и институциональных систем, структур и идеологий, а не против людей, поскольку мы можем искать истину вместе ненасильственно с теми, с кем мы не согласны, поскольку выдающаяся добродетель демократии и гуманизма, даже несмотря на то, что наши враги — братья-воины.
Сопротивление злу означает сопротивление злу других против нашей универсальной человечности, но это также означает сопротивление соблазну зла и силы, а также нашему собственному использованию силы для принуждения других.
Власть – это злой импульс, порождающий монстров.
Так часто в истории те, кто совершает настоящие злодеяния, полностью убеждены в справедливости своего дела, Gott Mitt Uns, информированы и мотивированы рассказами о жертвенности и отказались от самоанализа, который является основой свободного общества равных. Этому мы тоже должны противостоять.
Именно поэтому революции после захвата власти и свержения тирании сами могут стать тираниями, и именно поэтому я предпочитаю позволять другим выходить из-под контроля и быть неуправляемыми перед призраком авторитарного социального контроля.
Давайте не будем посылать армии, чтобы насаждать добродетель.
И всегда помните предупреждение Ницше в книге «По ту сторону добра и зла»; «Тот, кто сражается с монстрами, должен быть осторожен, чтобы не стать монстром. И если ты долго будешь смотреть в бездну, бездна посмотрит обратно на тебя».
Дальнейшее освещение можно найти в шедевре Энтони Берджесса «Наполеоновская симфония», трагедии о Наполеоне и «Героической» Бетховена, а также в романе, открытие которого стало определяющим моментом моего четырнадцатого года и с тех пор остается со мной, несмотря на мое подростковое обожание Наполеона как героя. революции и освобождения, универсальный гений и идеал человеческого существа.
Здесь лежит основа борьбы между тиранией и сопротивлением в навязанных условиях системного неравного могущества в использовании социальной силы и насилия, а также между захватом власти как владения идентичностью и фальсификацией санкционированных идентичностей в борьбе между историями, о которых мы рассказываем. мы сами и те, кто рассказал о нас другим; история, память, личность.
Прочтите ее так же, как я под репродукцией «Бетховенского фриза» Климта, изображающего пантеон Теней с чудесным образом восставшего Титана Тифо.
Евс в образе хтонической обезьяны и его три дочери-горгоны слева от него под масками Смерти, Безумия и Желания (я счёл Болезнь лишней и переименовал её в Желание как лучший баланс сил, к тому же она изображена как трёхликая богиня по отношению к справедливо как распутство, распутство и невоздержанность); действительно, чего еще может желать мальчик?
И вот динамизм наших отношений с нашим теневым «я» и всем, чего мы боимся и переживаем как отвращение и отвращение, страх перед природой и нашим инстинктивным «я», воплощенным вовне и проецируемым как страх инаковости, потери себя и контроля, а также деградации в животное состояние, которое управляет политикой идентичности и социальными конструкциями расы, пола, класса или касты, которое включает национализм и сектантскую веру, особенно когда подавляющий и всепроникающий страх и реальные экзистенциальные угрозы используются властью в качестве оружия на службе власти, как был фальсифицирован Малкольм Икс Черным мусульманским сепаратистским национализмом Элайджи Мухаммеда в качестве его глашатая, в ответ на большее историческое и системное зло, а также на травмы многих поколений и неравенство террора сторонников превосходства белой расы и наследия рабства.
Процессы трансформационных изменений и социальной адаптации хаотичны и взаимозависимы, а их причины носят циклический характер или более сложны, как мы можем видеть в случае с Малкольмом Иксом и освободительной борьбой, а также во всех подобных историях. Это один урок, который мы можем извлечь из Малкольма Икса; нет справедливой власти. И те, кто утверждает, что говорит от вашего имени, часто делают это в качестве основной стратегии фашизма крови, веры и почвы и вашего подчинения тирании.
Второй такой урок заключается в том, что расизм в целом, а также все разделения и социальные иерархии членства в элите и исключительной инаковости вынуждают подчиняться власти посредством превращения страха в оружие в качестве арбитра наших самых важных отношений, отношений сознательного и бессознательного или теневого «я». , которую можно прочитать в том, как мы чувствуем и думаем о природе и тех истинах, которые имманентны природе и записаны в нашей плоти.
Мы определяем себя через фигуры инаковости, которые представляют собой неинтегрированные части нас самих и определяют границы человеческого существования; уроды, монстры и все те, кто находится за пределами Запретного и того, что мы считаем своим.
Для этого страха перед природой как источника расизма у меня есть простое решение; давайте примем наше чудовище и будем совершать нарушения нормальности и запретного как священные акты Хаоса в поисках истины.
Третий дар Малкольма Икса нашим безграничным будущим возможностям стать человеком — это жизнь, прожитая в революционной борьбе и сопротивлении системам, структурам и институтам неравной власти, как прямой допрос и взаимодействие с государством как воплощенное насилие, и с последствиями использование социальной силы.
Он умер за наш шанс узнать эти три вещи: как власть фальсифицирует и подчиняет нас как первичный исторический процесс, как расизм и другие виды неравенства власти рождаются из страха перед дикостью природы и дикостью самих себя, а также из-за дихотомического и двунаправленного природа насилия и диалектические процессы использования социальной силы в тирании и терроре, в сопротивлении и революции, а как мученик и учитель мудрости Малкольм Икс является фигурой освобождения, принадлежащей всему человечеству.
Как мы можем устранить двусмысленность насилия «рабовладельца, который хитростью и насилием заковывает раба в цепи, и раба, который хитростью или насилием разрывает цепи», как это выразил Троцкий, тирании и тюремных государств из революционной борьбы и освобождения? , действий в соответствии с нашим долгом заботиться о других, а также с нашей взаимозависимостью и солидарностью от насаждения добродетели и империализма?
Как я писал в своем посте от 4 февраля 2022 года «Пятно жестокости: убийство Абу Ибрагима аль-Хашими аль-Курайши»; Перефразируя фразу из «Гамлета» и «Звездного пути» в первом сезоне, 13-й серии «Совесть короля»; На ваших доспехах пятно жестокости, президент Байден.
На террор и смерть мы ответили террором и смертью, и это одновременно трагично и постыдно. Сила не может ответить на силу или исцелить недостатки нашей человечности.
Как написано для CNN Барбарой Старр, Ореном Либерманном, Джереми Хербом и Эйядом Курди; «Это был самый крупный рейд США в стране со времен операции 2019 года, в результате которой был убит лидер ИГИЛ Абу Бакр аль-Багдади.
Байден выступил из Белого дома в четверг утром, чтобы объявить, что в результате операции «крупный лидер террористов покинул поле боя».
«Благодаря храбрости наших войск этого ужасного лидера террористов больше нет», — сказал Байден из комнаты Рузвельта. «Зная, что террорист решил окружить себя семьями, включая детей, мы сделали выбор провести рейд спецназа с гораздо большим риском для нашего народа, а не наносить по нему авиаудар».
Время от времени Байден напоминает нам всем об этом.
что он был одним из главных соучастников вторжения Буша в Ирак в ходе имперского завоевания и колониального грабежа с целью захватить стратегический ресурс нефти, с помощью которого Америка поддерживает глобальную гегемонию богатства, власти и привилегий, зависимость, которая приведет к вымиранию человечества. как вид, а также в санкционировании посредством Патриотического акта тюремного состояния жестокой силы, всеобщего наблюдения и контроля над мыслями, которое превосходит только холокост уйгуров Синьцзяна, организованный Синь Цзиньпином, что привело к самой массовой краже наших свобод в нашей истории. , включая эпоху Маккарти, а также самый причудливый и предосудительный режим пыток, наиболее печально известный преступлениями против человечности, совершенными в Гуантанамо и других секретных тюрьмах для политических врагов режима и его олигархических, плутократических и корпоративных грабителей-баронов-капитаров, в том числе даже ужасная истерия Салемских процессов над ведьмами.
В очередной раз доказано, что наши герои и чемпионы стоят на глиняных ногах, и я скорблю о провале морального видения и пристрастии к власти, а также о применении силы и насилия со стороны президента Байдена, нашего правительства и Америки как гаранта всеобщих прав человека и маяк надежды для мира.
В этот день слишком часто Прометеев огонь Факела Свободы, освещающий ворота нашей страны в гавани Нью-Йорка, не достигал диких морей и чужих берегов. Это великая трагедия, и это наша трагедия, за которую мы должны ответить.
Смерть Абу Ибрагима аль-Хашими аль-Курайши и его семьи в результате американского рейда на его дом, а не ареста за преступления, доказуемые в суде, а политических убийств, справедливо сравнивается в средствах массовой информации с убийством Абу Бакр аль-Багдади от Трампа. Это ставит Байдена и Трампа на одинаковый уровень криминальной аморальности и государственного террора.
На сцене мира и истории это также порождает моральную эквивалентность между ИГИЛ и Америкой, как и хотят наши враги своими провокациями в качестве стратегии делегитимации режима. Я сам использую это как активист демократии, поскольку искусство революции заключается в утверждении морального превосходства, делегитимации власти и захвате контроля над повествованием.
Отправлять армии и полицию для укрепления добродетели посредством насилия и репрессий — это не только зло, но и глупо; ибо это играет на руку врагу. Как учит нас Шекспир в «Генрихе V»; «Когда милосердие и жестокость играют за королевство, более мягкий игрок быстрее всех побеждает».
Между Байденом и Трампом, а также между целями, ценностями и идеалами демократов и республиканцев все еще существуют заметные различия, безумие и предательство среди них. Но сегодня эти различия внезапно и ужасающе сузились, и я боюсь, что нам понадобится нечто большее, чем игольное ушко, как окно в лучшее будущее.
Как написано в моем посте от 28 октября 2019 года: Трамп и аль-Багдади: параллельные жизни и размышления; Личностные и исторические силы, которые создают тиранов и монстров среди нас, были предметом моего изучения на протяжении всей жизни, аспектами любопытства относительно происхождения и природы зла, порожденного первичными детскими травмами во время резни в Кровавый четверг, заказанной Рональдом Рейганом против студенческого протеста за мир. в Беркли в 1969 году, когда мне было девять лет, и моя близкая казнь в Бразилии в возрасте четырнадцати лет, когда я защищала беспризорных детей от полицейских охотников за головами, что перекликается с действиями Мориса Бланшо в июне 1944 года, совершенными нацистами, и Достоевского в 1849 году, совершенным царской полицией, о чем сообщает Ежи Косинский. роман «Нарисованная птица» и основан на классическом исследовании Адольфа Гитлера, основанном на его речах и произведениях, «Психопатический Бог» Роберта Г. Л. Уэйта, оба из которых я прочитал в старшей школе. Таким образом, я увлекся пересечением литературы, философии, истории и психологии и выбрал происхождение зла в качестве области своих исследований на всю жизнь.
Пока мир празднует смерть аль-Багдади, одновременно тирана и монстра, а Трамп ставит в этом заслугу единственной победы своей администрации, словно трофейную голову какого-то опасного зверя, застреленного проводником, пока он наслаждался коктейлями в охотничьем лагере Возможно, будет интересно сравнить параллельные жизни, методы и цели Трампа и аль-Багдади.
Полное психологическое и историческое исследование Трампа и аль-Багдади как фигур фашистского террора и безумия в глобальном политическом масштабе в контексте цивилизационных конфликтов потребует книги библейского масштаба и научных исследований уровня диссертации, таких как блестящая работа Уэйта о Гитлере. Здесь я отмечаю лишь некоторые очевидные совпадения и совпадения; И Трамп, и аль-Багдади страдают манией величия и психопатами, которые захватили власть посредством манипулирования теми, кто считал себя жертвами, и с готовностью дегуманизировали других, чтобы изменить их статус, используя нарушение норм и переосмысление реальности с помощью лжи и неправильных указаний, чтобы формировать историю, и приняли режимы государственного террора и кампании р
религиозные и этнические чистки, а также патриархальное женоненавистничество и сексуальное насилие в отношении женщин.
О Трампе у нас есть рог изобилия информации; Книга доктора Джастина Франка «Трамп на диване» и «Опасный случай Дональда Трампа: 27 психиатров и экспертов в области психического здоровья оценивают президента» Бэнди Икс. Ли являются отличными источниками, особенно освещающими эротические отношения Трампа с его дочерью, фантазии о насилии и власти. которые коренятся в его детских отношениях с тираническим и жестоким отцом, а также в его неспособности любить или сопереживать другим в результате того, что его бросила мать.
Патологическая ложь, плохой контроль импульсов, грандиозные фантазии и заблуждения дополняют картину нарциссической личности и психопатического хищника. Трамп не может отличить правду от лжи и заблуждений; его безумие и детское слабоумие, истерики и психотическая ярость, издевательства и нарциссизм избалованного ребенка, однако, не освобождают его от ответственности за свои действия или за действия предательской клики сексуальных хищников и фашистов, которую он собрал вокруг себя.
То, как особое безумие Трампа выражается в нашей национальной политике, — это ужас, который можно описать с точностью; его страх перед заражением и фиксацией фекалий трансформируется в его фирменную кампанию против небелых и политику этнических чисток и расистского государственного террора, его женоненавистничество в патриархальную волну юридического лишения репродуктивных прав женщин, его хрупкое эго, путаницу в идентичности и потребность в внимание к управлению митингами, подобными Нюрнбергу, культивированию презренных автократов и одержимой мести любому, кто отказывается выразить обожание и подчинение.
Прежде всего, то, что объединяет Трампа и его кукловода Путина, его модель Гитлера и его зеркальное отражение аль-Багдади, как монстров и тиранов, отражающих друг друга и как параллельные фигуры и исторические силы, — это теория политики как театра жестокости, государства как воплощенная психопатия и насилие, а также правительство как перформанс.
Их лидерские роли клоунов террора и безумия представляют собой зеркально противоположные образы правления римского императора, остроумно и коварно описанные Антоненом Арто в его великом романе «Гелиогабал»; или Коронованный анархист, фигура, которая нарушила нормы как агент перемен и хаоса, чтобы преобразовать инертное и закостенелое общество, тогда как Трамп и аль-Багдади действовали как партнеры в ответной реакции, чтобы разрушить саму цивилизацию и вернуть нас к додемократическому состоянию. варварская тирания.
Трамп утверждает, что убил свое темное отражение и теневое «я» своим ложным заявлением о победе, одержанной нашей разведкой и военными службами; но история всегда будет видеть это второе лицо за его маской, тайного близнеца, которого он несет в вечность, лицо силы и извращенных желаний, не сдерживаемых законами и ценностями демократической цивилизации и свободного общества равных: лицо сердца Трампа. тьма, аль-Багдади.
Так я написал 28 октября 2019 года; и поэтому сейчас я должен написать о тайном лице и сердце тьмы Байдена, Абу Ибрагиме аль-Хашими аль-Курайши, который теперь навеки связан как фигуры террора, убийственного возмездия и жестокости.
Государственный террор и империализм встретили сектантский и патриархальный террор как тиранию и организации институционализированного насилия и власти; теперь мы можем только надеяться, что они узнают свой двойственный образ в зеркале смерти, с которым нам противостоят война и акты силы и насилия, и уйдут от пропасти, которая угрожает поглотить всех нас.
Как сказал Кен Кизи в своей исторической речи на мирном протесте против войны во Вьетнаме, записанном в романе Тома Вулфа «Кислотный тест на электрическое охлаждение»; «Способ положить конец войне — это просто уйти и сказать: «К черту все это». Просто уйди и скажи: «К черту все».
Каждое слово этого остается верным в этих и во всех случаях тирании и институционального террора тюремных государств силы и контроля, санкционированных идентичностей и фальсификации пропагандой и переписанной истории, имперских завоеваний и владычества, колониальной эксплуатации и порабощения. То же самое относится и к вторжению России на Украину.
Как я писал здесь о Трампе, мы можем также сказать и о его господине Путине; ибо предатель Трамп — это всего лишь негативное пространство и тень, отбрасываемая его первоначальным типом, и оба являются атавизмами страха и силы, пропастью пустоты, которую ничто не может заполнить, никаким количеством владычества и контроля над другими, демонстрациями богатства и власти или тщеславным напыщенным поведением. , для которого не могут быть достаточными жертвования вещами, любимыми другими, или ужасом и болью их жертв, ибо такова природа психопатии и политики как театра жестокости.
Что это значит?
Для нас в данный момент и в контексте вопроса о насилии и использовании силы в обществе это означает, что в условиях неравного баланса сил между Россией и Украиной, когда реальные люди умирают, потому что кто-то имеет власть украсть то, что они имеют.
аве, хищник, для которого ничто не реально и не имеет значения, кроме силы и власти, мы должны найти ответ на заявление чудовищного главного героя Айн Рэнд Говарда Рорка в «Источнике», когда он совершает изнасилование; «Вопрос не в том, кто мне позволит; вот кто меня остановит».
Кто остановит Путинское завоевание Украины?
Если они придут за одним из нас, пусть встретят их со всеми нами; не разделенные иерархией элитарной принадлежности и исключающей инаковости, не побежденные выученной беспомощностью и террором, но объединенные в солидарности и отказе подчиниться как одно непобедимое и единое человечество.
Я охотник на фашистов, и у меня охотничья мораль. Есть простой тест на применение силы; кто держит власть?
Для меня это просто; нация, вторгающаяся в другую, неправа. Это ничем не отличается от случайного обнаружения полицейского, стоящего коленями на чьей-то шее, и в этом случае наш долг заботиться о других требует от нас спасти жизнь человека, которого убивают прямо на наших глазах, независимо от каких-либо несущественных деталей, например, какие из них есть значок и пистолет, авторитет и власть, любыми необходимыми средствами.
Закон служит власти, а справедливой власти не существует.
Даже если ни одна из наций не является демократией, и жертвы неравной власти не имеют присущего им морального бремени добродетели, как учит нас Шоу на примере фигуры Артура Дулитла в «Моей прекрасной леди», где один из них крадет жизнь и свободу другого, как право суверенитет, самоопределение, автономия и независимость не могут быть справедливыми, и им необходимо противостоять.
Любыми необходимыми способами.
Хотя политические истоки конфликтов часто неоднозначны, их последствия для людей, находящихся на пути завоевания, таковыми не являются. Поскольку моими долгосрочными целями остаются объединенное человечество и общество без гражданства, которое отказалось от социального использования силы и контроля, а вместе с ним и всех законов, авторитетных личностей и тирании идей добродетели других людей, а также возникновение свободного общества равный от разделения исключительного инаковости, элитной гегемонии богатства, власти и привилегий, а также от фашизма крови, веры и почвы, я поддерживаю Украину и любое освободительное движение за суверенитет и независимость где бы то ни было, а также народ России против олигархия и Путин и все демократические движения против тирании.
Давайте будем солидарны, как группа братьев, везде, где люди жаждут свободы.
Наш долг заботиться о других иногда требует от нас поставить свою жизнь на баланс со всеми теми, кого Франц Фанон называл «Несчастными Земли»; бессильные и обездоленные, заставленные замолчать и стертые. Я всего лишь один человек, и не выдающийся, у которого нет ничего, кроме моего свидетельства истории и моего видения наших будущих возможностей стать людьми, чтобы броситься в пропасть тьмы и ужас нашего небытия перед лицом подавляющей силы и аморального имперского и тюремные состояния.
Но я не могу молча быть соучастником этих преступлений против человечества, на которые, как и на фашизм, может быть только один ответ: Никогда Больше! Сплоченный клич, осложненный его популяризацией в названии книги основателя Лиги защиты евреев Меира Кахане «Никогда снова!: Программа выживания», его происхождение берет начало из стихотворения Исаака Ламбдана «Масада» 1926 года; «Никогда Масада не падет снова»; В нынешнем виде он впервые появился на табличках, написанных узниками Бухенвальда после его освобождения.
Эли Визель определяет эту фразу в своем романе «Заложник»; «Никогда больше» становится больше, чем лозунгом: это молитва, обещание, клятва. Никогда больше не будет ненависти, говорят люди. Никогда больше не тюрьма и пытки. Никогда больше не будет страданий невинных людей или расстрелов голодающих, напуганных, напуганных детей. И никогда больше не прославлять низкое, уродливое, темное насилие. Это молитва».
Здесь я бы назвал Sic Semper Tyrannis, но это фраза из теней и наследия нашей истории, из которой мы должны выйти, и включает в себя убийства Юлия Цезаря и Авраама Линкольна, убийц которых я презираю и к которым не присоединяюсь.
Я не доверяю достоверности или тем, кто действует от их имени, Gott Mitt Uns несет в себе историю зверств и террора, не имеющую себе равных и включающую крестовые походы, инквизицию, Тридцатилетнюю войну и Холокост. Как писал Вольтер в своем эссе 1765 года «Вопросы о чудесах»; «Те, кто может заставить вас поверить в абсурдность, могут заставить вас совершать злодеяния».
Вместо этого я скажу с великолепным лейтенантом Альдо Рейном в «Бесславных ублюдках», и я надеюсь, что это сохранит и отразит моральную двусмысленность, случайность и относительность оригинала в фильме; «Теперь я этого терпеть не могу. А ты, сможешь это вытерпеть?
Как читать такой манифест?
Здесь я пишу манифест действия в виде сократического диалога и свифтианской сатиры, который, как указано в названии, ставит под вопрос «происхождение зла и социального использования силы, а также государства как воплощенной психопатии и насилия».
Как гласит девиз моей публикации «Факел свободы», мое намерение — «подстрекать, провоцировать и беспокоить».
Учтите также, что я провозглашаю четыре основные обязанности гражданина: власть задавать вопросы, власть разоблачать, ложную власть и власть оспаривать, и что я делаю эти вещи, действуя как то, что Фуко называл говорящим правду, в поисках истины как священного принципа. звоню.
В этом эссе я исследую ряд взаимозависимых проблем, которые, по моему мнению, являются центральными в проекте становления человеком, который мы все разделяем, а также последствия вагнеровского кольца страха, власти и силы, возникающие перед нами в ситуации, с которой мы сталкиваемся в данный момент. , и здесь я использую термин «момент» так же, как это делали Жак Деррида и Ален Бадью, когда чудовищный тиран угрожает ядерной войной и истреблением всего человечества по прихоти инфантильной истерики, и мы должны выбрать одно или другое.
Это дилемма, которая, как и любое использование социальной силы, делает нас соучастниками зла, основная стратегия фашизма в нашем порабощении, и которая воспроизводит условия, из которых возникают государства, как воплощенную психопатию и насилие, элитную гегемонию богатства, власти и привилегий. и фашизм крови, веры и почвы.
Бадью утверждает, что события фундаментально неопределенны и структурированы диалектикой возможности и невозможности, возможно, а может быть, и не так, как моя мать говорила студентам, которые просили ее дать позиционные декларации, суждения, авторитетные версии, напевая слова и покачивая руками из стороны в сторону. сторона.
Для Деррида, как описал мой друг Рене Трой Тун, «событие в своей абсолютной сингулярности, таким образом, устойчиво к когнитивному описанию, критической объективации, интерпретативной редукции и теоретической разработке».
Здесь, с этим основным экзистенциальным вопросом человеческого бытия, смысла и ценности, я изо всех сил пытаюсь найти синтез; как и проявление нашей идентичности, этот процесс не должен быть определяющим или предписывающим, а должен быть пространством свободной творческой игры.
Если у нас нет ответов, мы должны научиться задавать более правильные вопросы.
В этой борьбе с ветряными мельницами я использую в качестве модели «Хазарский словарь» Милорада Павича, авторитетный труд, который существует в мужской и женской версиях и смысл которого меняется с разницей в семнадцать строк между ними.
Что, если Владимира Путина убьют? Спасем ли мы одну жизнь безумного тирана, который уничтожит нас и проклянет мир?
Who shall say what we have been and may become, we humans? Who shall be granted this power, and are they to be chosen by us for their wisdom and vision, or by themselves in service to their own power and our subjugation and dehumanization?
Time is a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, alternate realities, the destruction and creation of possible futures by subtle actions like a hurricane driven by the movements of a hummingbird’s wings.
Each of our lives is such a fulcrum of change, filled with numberless beginnings of possible selves and the Defining Moments of terror and joy which make us human.
In Ukraine our solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and faith in each other is tested, as are the founding principles, values, and ideals of our civilization and world order as a praxis of the Enlightenment and democracy.
What is the meaning of the invasion of Ukraine?
Here we may look to its precedents as Last Stands, battles, and sieges; Thermopylae, Malta, Washington crossing the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton, Gallipoli, Stalingrad, and its direct parallel the Siege of Sarajevo. Moments of decision wherein the civilization of humankind hung in the balance, and with it our future possibilities of becoming human.
Who do we want to become, we humans; slaves and tyrants or a free society of equals? And how much of our humanity are we willing to trade for the chance of such futures?
What of ourselves can we not afford to lose, without also losing who we are? How much of our humanity can we claw back from the darkness in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us, and in solidarity with each other?
We must each of us face our own Gate of Fire, as did the Spartans at Thermopylae, and choose.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, plunder, and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
Let us reply with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War and the conflict of dominion which immediately followed it between tyranny and democracy, first against fascism and then between the allies who defeated it as spheres of dominion and systems of economic and political organization but both for different dreams of a free society of equals, in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
Join us.
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2022, One Hundred Days of the Invasion of Ukraine; For one hundred days now, a great struggle between democracy and tyranny, love and hate, hope and fear has been raging in Ukraine, where the fate of humankind hangs in the balance and our future possibilities of becoming human are being chosen in the great game of chance that is war.
Here, as in far too many times and places, a few unconquerable heroes and those who stand with them in solidarity as a band of brothers against the darkness of barbarian atavisms of brute fear and force and a nihilistic regime wherein only power has meaning and fear is the only means of exchange, die in the forlorn hope of buying with their lives time for civilization to awaken to the threat of fascist tyranny and imperial conquest.
How will we answer the test of our humanity in this moment of existential threat? Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a world of masters and slaves?
For these are the stakes of this game in which we now play, the Third World War; liberty or tyranny.
When those who would enslave us come for us, as they always do, let them find not a people subjugated by learned helplessness nor divided by hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, but a United Humankind unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
Herein is my witness of history and truth telling in this, the First General History of World War Three. As with all things human, it is also fiction except when it is not, myth when it can be, poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and of our limitless future possibilities of becoming human.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Herein I offer apology for my digressive ars poetica; once I sailed upon the Lake of Dreams, was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision; and in such visions I fell into a sea of words, images, songs, histories, layered and interconnected with one another like a web of reflections and the echoes of voices lost in time, a wilderness of mirrors which capture and distort and extend ourselves infinitely in all directions.
Here is a shadow self of our histories which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tale, legacies from which we must emerge to create ourselves anew and those which we cannot abandon without losing who we are.
Here my intertexts are manifest, seize and shake me with tumultuous voices and untrustworthy purposes, for where do our histories end and we begin?
We cannot escape each other, my shadows and I.
War transforms the question of our authorship of ourselves with existential primacy; where do we ourselves end, and others begin? How may we negotiate this boundary of the Forbidden and interface with alien realms of human being, meaning, and value, with division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness or with solidarity, diversity, and inclusion, with fear or with love?
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
There are no Ukrainians, no Russians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate
Origins of the Third World War
March 14 2022 Origins of the Third World War, Part 1: the Syrian Theatre in the Russian-Turkish Conflict for Dominion of the Middle East
A History of the Third World War, Part Nine: the Ukraine Theatre of War
This chapter you are reading now, and now are also writing, for it is each of us who will together choose a future for humankind. The nature of that choice is become unambiguous and simple with the invasion of Ukraine and the dawn of World War Three; tyranny or liberty?
In one of these choices and one only, we may win a future where something resembling ourselves looks back centuries from now on this moment of civilizational collapse or rebirth, with questioning, hope, and wonder.
“God Bless Us, every one” as Dickens wrote in A Christmas Carol, the story which founded the modern holiday and originated Liberation Theology in wedding Marx to the Sermon on the Mount. In this time of darkness, we must answer division with solidarity, fear with love, despair with hope, fascism and tyranny with resistance, and the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.
Here follows a three act play from my Journals of Mariupol
April 10 2022 Crimes Against Humanity in the City of Ghosts, Mariupol: A Witness of History
25 лютого 2024 р. Перша загальна історія Третьої світової війни
Хто скаже, ким ми були і можемо стати, ми люди? Кому буде надано цю владу, і чи вони будуть обрані нами за їхню мудрість і бачення, чи самі для служіння своїй власній владі та нашому підкоренню та дегуманізації?
Час — це Рашомонська брама відносних істин, альтернативних реальностей, руйнування та створення можливого майбутнього за допомогою витончених дій, як ураган, керований рухами крил колібрі.
Кожне наше життя — це така точка опори змін, наповнена незліченними початками можливого «я» та визначальними моментами жаху й радості, які роблять нас людьми.
В Україні перевіряється наша солідарність як гарантів універсальних прав людини та віра один в одного, а також основоположні принципи, цінності та ідеали нашої цивілізації та світового порядку як практики Просвітництва та демократії.
У чому сенс вторгнення в Україну?
Тут ми можемо поглянути на його прецеденти, такі як останні битви, битви та облоги; Фермопіли, Мальта, перехід Вашингтона через Делавер і битва при Трентоні, Галліполі, Сталінград і його пряма паралель Облога Сараєво. Моменти рішення, коли цивілізація людства зависла на волосині, а з нею й наші майбутні можливості стати людьми.
Ким ми хочемо стати, ми, люди; раби і тирани чи вільне суспільство рівних? І скільки нашої людяності ми готові обміняти заради шансу на таке майбутнє?
Що з себе ми не можемо дозволити собі втратити, не втративши при цьому те, ким ми є? Скільки нашої людяності ми можемо вирвати з темряви, відмовляючись підкорятися тим, хто хотів би нас поневолити, і солідарними один з одним?
Кожен із нас має зіткнутися зі своїми Вогняними Воротами, як це зробили спартанці у Фермопілах, і вибрати.
Чого ми варті, якщо дозволяємо безжальним королям-бандитам чинити звірства, грабувати та поневолювати інших?
Чого варта західна цивілізація, якщо ми не будемо відповідати нашим гарним словам? І вони залишаються гарними словами, такими як написані Томасом Джефферсоном у Декларації незалежності 1776 року, узагальненні та перегляді ідей Гоббса, Локка, Монтеск’є, Вольтера та Руссо; «Ми вважаємо ці істини самоочевидними, що всі люди створені рівними та наділені їхнім творцем певними невід’ємними правами, серед яких Життя, Свобода та прагнення до щастя».
Що таке Америка, як не гарант демократії та наших універсальних прав людини, а також маяк надії для світу?
Давайте відповімо словами Дж.Р.Р. Толкієн між 1937 і 1955 роками у своєму яскравому переосмисленні Другої світової війни та конфлікту панування, що одразу послідував за нею, між тиранією та демократією, спочатку проти фашизму, а потім між союзниками, які перемогли його як сфери панування та системи економічної та політичної організації але обидва для різних мрій про вільне суспільство рівних, у знаковій промові Арагорна біля Чорних воріт у «Поверненні короля», яка об’єднує етос, логос, пафос і кайрос; «Може настати день, коли мужність людей занепаде, коли ми покинемо своїх друзів і розірвемо всі узи товариства, але це не цей день. Година вовків і розбитих щитів, коли вік людей рухається, але це не цей день. Цього дня ми боремося».
Приєднайся до нас.
Як я писав у своєму дописі від 3 червня 2022 року, Сто днів вторгнення в Україну; Ось уже сто днів в Україні точиться велика боротьба між демократією і тиранією, любов’ю і ненавистю, надією і страхом, де на волосині висить доля людства і у великій грі вибираються наші майбутні можливості стати людьми. випадковість, тобто війна.
Тут, як у надто багато разів і місць, кілька непереможних героїв і ті, хто солідарний з ними, як група братів, проти темряви варварських атавізмів грубого страху та сили та нігілістичного режиму, де лише влада має сенс і страх є єдиним засобом обміну, помирають у марній надії купити за своє життя час, щоб цивілізація прокинулася перед загрозою фашистської тиранії та імперського завоювання.
Як ми відповімо на випробування нашої людяності в цей момент екзистенційної загрози? Ким ми хочемо стати, ми, люди? Вільне суспільство рівних чи світ панів і рабів?
Бо це ставки цієї гри, в яку ми зараз граємо, Третя світова війна; свобода чи тиранія.
Коли ті, хто хотів би нас поневолити, прийдуть за нами, як вони це завжди роблять, нехай вони знайдуть не людей, підкорених вивченою безпорадністю чи розділених ієрархіями приналежності та виняткової відмінності, а Об’єднане Людство, непереможне в солідарності та відмові підкорятися.
На тиранію і фашизм може бути лише одна відповідь; Ніколи знову!
Ось моє свідчення історії та правди в цій, Першій загальній історії Третьої світової війни. Як і з усім людським, це також
вигадка, за винятком випадків, коли вона не є, міф, коли вона може бути, поетичне бачення та переосмислення та трансформація людського буття, значення та цінності та наших безмежних майбутніх можливостей стати людьми.
Хіба ми не ті історії, які розповідаємо про себе, собі та іншим?
Завжди залишається боротьба між масками, які ми робимо для себе, і тими, які роблять для нас інші.
Це перша революція, в якій ми всі повинні боротися; боротьба за володіння собою.
Тут я прошу вибачення за моє відступне ars poetica; одного разу я плив по Озеру Мрій, мене залицяла Краса, але вимагало Бачення; і в таких видіннях я потрапляв у море слів, образів, пісень, історій, багатошарових і взаємопов’язаних одне з одним, як мережа відображень і відлуння голосів, загублених у часі, пустелю дзеркал, які захоплюють, спотворюють і нескінченно розширюють нас у всіх напрямках.
Ось тінь нашої історії, яку ми тягнемо за собою, як невидима рептилійна історія, спадщина, з якої ми повинні вийти, щоб створити себе заново, і те, від якого ми не можемо відмовитися, не втративши те, ким ми є.
Тут проявляються мої інтертексти, захоплюють і стрясають мене бурхливими голосами та недостовірними цілями, бо де закінчуються наші історії і починається ми?
Ми не можемо втекти одне від одного, мої тіні і я.
Війна перетворює питання про наше авторство самих себе на екзистенціальний примат; де закінчуються ми самі, а починаються інші? Як ми можемо подолати цю межу Забороненого та зіткнутися з чужими сферами людського буття, значення та цінності, з поділом та ієрархіями приналежності та винятковою відмінністю чи з солідарністю, різноманітністю та включеністю, зі страхом чи любов’ю?
Зрештою, все, що має значення, це те, що ми робимо зі своїм страхом і як ми використовуємо свою силу.
Немає ні українців, ні росіян; лише такі люди, як ми, і вибір, який вони роблять щодо того, як бути людьми разом.
Russian
25 февраля 2024 г. Первая всеобщая история Третьей мировой войны
Кто скажет, кем мы были и можем стать, люди? Кому будет предоставлена эта власть, и должны ли они быть выбраны нами за их мудрость и дальновидность, или они сами будут служить своей собственной власти и нашему порабощению и дегуманизации?
Время — это Врата Расёмон относительных истин, альтернативных реальностей, разрушения и создания возможного будущего тонкими действиями, подобными урагану, вызванному движениями крыльев колибри.
Каждая из наших жизней — это точка опоры перемен, наполненная бесчисленными началами возможных «я» и определяющими моментами ужаса и радости, которые делают нас людьми.
В Украине проверяется наша солидарность как гарантов универсальных прав человека друг друга и вера друг в друга, а также основополагающие принципы, ценности и идеалы нашей цивилизации и мирового порядка как практики Просвещения и демократии.
В чем смысл вторжения в Украину?
Здесь мы можем рассмотреть его прецеденты, такие как «Последние сражения», сражения и осады; Фермопилы, Мальта, форсирование Вашингтона через Делавэр и битва при Трентоне, Галлиполи, Сталинград и его прямая параллель – Осада Сараево. Моменты принятия решения, когда цивилизация человечества висела на волоске, а вместе с ней и наши будущие возможности стать человеком.
Кем мы хотим стать, мы, люди; рабы и тираны или свободное общество равных? И какую часть нашей человечности мы готовы отдать за шанс на такое будущее?
Что из себя мы не можем позволить себе потерять, не потеряв при этом самих себя? Какую часть нашей человечности мы сможем вырвать из тьмы, отказываясь подчиниться тем, кто хочет нас поработить, и проявляя солидарность друг с другом?
Каждый из нас должен встретиться со своими Огненными Вратами, как это сделали спартанцы в Фермопилах, и сделать выбор.
Чего мы стоим, если позволяем безжалостным бандитским королям совершать зверства, грабить и порабощать других?
Чего стоит западная цивилизация, если мы не будем соответствовать нашим прекрасным словам? И они остаются прекрасными словами, такими как слова, написанные Томасом Джефферсоном в Декларации независимости в 1776 году, представляющие собой синтез и пересмотр идей Гоббса, Локка, Монтескье, Вольтера и Руссо; «Мы считаем самоочевидными истины, что все люди созданы равными и наделены своим создателем определенными неотъемлемыми правами, среди которых жизнь, свобода и стремление к счастью».
Что такое Америка, если не гарант демократии и наших всеобщих прав человека и маяк надежды для мира?
Ответим словами Дж.Р.Р. Толкин между 1937 и 1955 годами в своем ярком переосмыслении Второй мировой войны и последовавшего сразу за ней конфликта доминирования между тиранией и демократией, сначала против фашизма, а затем между союзниками, которые победили его как сферы доминирования и системы экономической и политической организации. но оба они о разных мечтах о свободном обществе равных, в культовой речи Арагорна у Черных ворот в «Возвращении короля», которая объединяет этос, логос, пафос и кайрос; «Может наступить день, когда мужество людей иссякнет, когда мы оставим наших друзей и разорвем все узы товарищества, но это не этот день. Час волков и разбитых щитов, когда эпоха людей рухнет, но это не этот день. Сегодня мы сражаемся».
Присоединяйтесь к нам.
Как я писал в своем посте от 3 июня 2022 года «Сто дней вторжения в Украину»; Вот уже сто дней в Украине бушует великая борьба между демократией и тиранией, любовью и ненавистью, надеждой и страхом, где на волоске висит судьба человечества и в большой игре выбираются наши будущие возможности стать человеком. случайно это война.
Здесь, как и во многих других местах и временах, несколько непобедимых героев и те, кто солидарны с ними, как группа братьев, против тьмы варварских атавизмов грубого страха и силы и нигилистического режима, в котором только сила имеет смысл и страх. являются единственным средством обмена, умирают в тщетной надежде купить своей жизнью время, чтобы цивилизация пробудилась к угрозе фашистской тирании и имперского завоевания.
Как мы ответим на испытание нашей человечности в этот момент экзистенциальной угрозы? Кем мы хотим стать, мы, люди? Свободное общество равных или мир господ и рабов?
Таковы ставки в игре, в которую мы сейчас играем, в Третью мировую войну; свобода или тирания.
Когда те, кто хочет поработить нас, придут за нами, как они всегда это делают, пусть они найдут не народ, порабощенный выученной беспомощностью и не разделенный иерархиями принадлежности и исключающего инаковости, а Единое Человечество, непобедимое в солидарности и отказе подчиняться.
На тиранию и фашизм может быть только один ответ; Больше никогда!
Вот мое свидетельство истории и правды в этой «Первой всеобщей истории Третьей мировой войны». Как и все человеческое, это также
вымысел, за исключением тех случаев, когда это не так, миф, когда это возможно, поэтическое видение, переосмысление и трансформация человеческого существа, смысла и ценности, а также наших безграничных будущих возможностей стать человеком.
Разве мы не те истории, которые мы рассказываем о себе, себе и другим?
Всегда остается борьба между масками, которые мы делаем для себя, и масками, которые делают для нас другие.
Это первая революция, в которой мы все должны бороться; борьба за право собственности на себя.
Здесь я приношу извинения за свое отступление от поэтического искусства; однажды я плыл по Озеру Снов, за мной ухаживала Красота, но требовало Видение; и в таких видениях я падал в море слов, образов, песен, историй, наслоенных и связанных друг с другом, как паутина отражений и отголосков голосов, затерянных во времени, пустыня зеркал, которые захватывают, искажают и расширяют нас бесконечно во всех направлениях.
Это теневое «я» нашей истории, которое мы тащим за собой, как невидимая сказка рептилий, наследие, из которого мы должны выйти, чтобы создать себя заново, и то, от чего мы не можем отказаться, не потеряв того, кто мы есть.
Здесь проявляются мои интертексты, захватывают и потрясают меня шумными голосами и ненадежными целями, ибо где кончаются наши истории и начинаются мы?
Мы не можем избежать друг друга, мои тени и я.
Война трансформирует вопрос о нашем авторстве самих себя, приобретая экзистенциальное превосходство; где кончаются мы сами и начинаются другие? Как мы можем преодолевать эту границу Запретного и взаимодействовать с чуждыми сферами человеческого бытия, смысла и ценностей, с разделением и иерархиями принадлежности и исключающей инаковости или с солидарностью, разнообразием и включением, со страхом или с любовью?
В конце концов, имеет значение только то, что мы делаем со своим страхом и как мы используем свою силу.
Нет ни украинцев, ни русских; только такие люди, как мы, и выбор, который они делают в отношении того, как быть людьми вместе.
Our secret histories and lines of fracture oft reveal hidden relationships and interdependencies, with those of America and Russia in our turbulent whirlpools, undertows, waves, and reverse flows along the stream of time being exemplars of chaotic systems.
The Russian Invasion of Ukraine and the capture of the American state by Putin’s star agent Traitor Trump in the Stolen Election of 2016 are linked events which signaled and made possible the Third World War which has engulfed us in ten different theatres, the home fronts of both our nations among them.
How did this happen, what does it mean, and what is to be done?
Herein I signpost with special urgency and call of Hey Rube the existential threat of secret power, the primacy of the role of truthtellers in calling out the emperor who has no clothes, and the complicity of silence in the face of evil, in this context of an undeclared World War our authorities are pretending has not seized and shaken us all like a rat in the jaws of a lion. An invisible war, reported only in its parts and not as a whole, which like a tornado of nothingness now devours our humanity and like a Bonfire of the Vanities annihilates our pretensions to civilization, for we have regressed from throwing words to throwing stones.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Let us pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We humans are now living in the world of Elie Wiesel’s Night, and it is from his great novel of our previous struggle with fascism that I borrow a coda on the Trump era and our mission statement as American patriots and Anti-fascists; “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”
As I wrote in my post of February 23 2023, Anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Triggered by the McQuade Prosecution Memo of Treason and Insurrection Charges in United States Versus Trump: A Desperate Gamble For Power By A Failing Fourth Reich; As I wrote on this day in 2022; We awake to a radically changed world today, as the Russian Conquest of Ukraine begins and Barbara McQuade openly publishes her Prosecution Memo of charges in the United States Versus Trump.
Putin seems to have misread the situation disastrously; his fig leaf of lies and illusions in manufactured and staged propaganda of fake atrocities by Ukraine collapses under scrutiny and with it any just cause or pretext for the invasion he has launched, which renders Russian support questionable and now makes regime change a real possibility, NATO has coalesced from the ashes of history to offer solidarity with Ukraine as a united front
The Russian speaking and aligned people of Ukraine, many already Russian citizens, are declaring they will fight to the death not for Russia but for an independent Ukraine, which makes occupation a thousand times more likely to fail, especially with America and Europe imposing sanctions and supplying weapons and advisors to Ukraine, and Trump pronounces this an act of genius, one he would like to emulate at our border with Mexico.
As written by Sara Boboltz in Huffpost; “Trump appeared in awe of Putin during an interview on a right-wing talk radio program broadcast from Tennessee. He described watching the Monday evening news after Putin declared two sections of Ukraine to be independent and ordered Russian troops to storm the regions for alleged “peacekeeping” purposes.
“I said, ‘This is genius,’” Trump recalled. “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine, of Ukraine ― Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.”
“So, Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent.’ A large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force,” Trump said.
“We could use that on our southern border,” he added, before continuing with his praise. “That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re going to keep peace all right. No, but think of it. Here’s a guy who’s very savvy.”
“I know him very well. Very, very well,” Trump said.”
We can always count on Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, pathetic and ridiculous as he is, for the comedy relief. After all, he modeled his persona on the Joker, in equal measure with his idols Hitler and Charles Manson.
This incident answers an important question for us as it reveals the nature of the Putin-Trump relationship; why is Putin invading Ukraine now? After maneuvering Trump into the White House in the Stolen Election of 2016 for the purpose of conquering the Crimea as a stepping stone to the conquest of Ukraine, a clear parallel to the Japanese conquest of Manchuria as both are industrial centers crucial to the construction of an imperial army capable of world conquest and dominion, why invade now, after a year of holding an invasion force on the border?
Putin’s toy is broken and lost as Trump snarls threats he is powerless to enforce, not from the White House but from the golf course, and the noose of evidence and exposure of his treason is tightening around his neck.
Putin the Puppetmaster and Traitor Trump are inextricably linked as the figureheads of the Fourth Reich, and reveal each other’s secret faces and shadow selves to the witness of history. Here we may read the true history of the global Fourth Reich as it captured Russia and America to impose tyranny and Nazi revivalist state terror as our first world government.
For Trump, the purpose of power is cruelty, and secondarily the vengeance and destruction he can inflict on a world that never loved him. For Putin, the purpose of power is power; this why Putin is the master and Trump is his minion.
Trump’s declaration of his subservience to Putin yesterday as the Russian imperial conquest of Ukraine began recalls to me a similar incident, when Trump called Putin from the bunker for help in breaking the People’s Siege of the White House by sending Russian troops to occupy America and enforce brutal repression of dissent.
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2020, No Velvet Glove, Just the Iron Fist: Trump Attempts to Use Nationwide Riots Not to Redress Historic Inequalities But to Impose Tyranny; Cowering in his bunker in the darkness, cries of thousands of voices of the marginalized, the dispossessed, and the masses of those re-enslaved through divisions of exclusionary otherness thundering through the warrens of his underworld kingdom of lies, Trump made a frantic call to his master in the Kremlin, Putin, former Colonel of the KGB and long his patron and agent handler.
“Boss? Boss, you gotta get me outta this. Its not going down like we planned. They got the palace surrounded. What do I do?”
“Listen Donald, there’s nothing you can’t solve with greater force. You like Napoleon, right? Conquered Europe, they gave him a princess to marry as tribute. Somebody to grab, and own like a thing, just like you want to do with all of America. You just do what he did to seize the throne of France; give ‘em a whiff of grapeshot.”
“Can you send the Russian Army to restore order? Our plan was, I was supposed to ask you for an occupation force when we kicked off the boogaloo.…”
Putin laughs. Click.
“Hey, that’s not funny. Pick up the phone.” He smashes things, howling and blubbering in fear and rage. “I’m the joke? I’m never the joke. I’ll make America pay for making a monkey outta me. I’ll make everybody pay.”
And like the petulant child and bully that he is, Trump goes forth to avenge himself on the world that does not love him, visions of a red button in a briefcase dancing in his head, muttering, “Behold, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Among the many testimonials of the witness of history which have been written on this anniversary of an enormous war crime, there is one which intrigues me as it presents our recent history in terms of Hegelian dialectical process, though we remember the Soviet Union very differently as I can never forget that we would never have overthrown the Apartheid regime of South Africa without Soviet and Cuban solidarity in resistance, one of many conflicts of revolutionary struggle in which I was and now remain proud to have called Russian soldiers comrades.
As written by Tom Nichols in The Atlantic’s newsletter of February 23, 2023; “The war in Ukraine is the final shovel of dirt on the grave of any optimism about the world order that was born with the fall of Soviet Communism. Now we are faced with the long grind of defeating Moscow’s armies and eventually rebuilding a better world.”
“Today marks a year since Russian President Vladimir Putin embarked on his mad quest to capture Ukraine and conjure into existence some sort of mutant Soviet-Christian-Slavic empire in Europe. On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.
The first half of my life was dominated by the Cold War. I grew up next to a nuclear bomber base in Massachusetts. I studied Russian and Soviet affairs in college and graduate school. I first visited the Soviet Union when I was 22. I was 28 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. I turned 31 a few weeks before the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time.
When I visited Moscow on that initial trip in 1983, I sat on a curb on a summer night in Red Square, staring at the Soviet stars on top of the Kremlin. I had the sensation of being in the belly of the beast, right next to the beating heart of the enemy. I knew that hundreds of American nuclear warheads were aimed where I was sitting, and I was convinced that everything I knew was more than likely destined to end in flames. Peace seemed impossible; war felt imminent.
And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse, especially if you had spent any time in the former U.S.S.R. I have some fond memories of my trips to the pre-collapse Soviet Union (I made four from 1983 to 1991). It was a weird and fascinating place. But it was also every inch the “evil empire” that President Ronald Reagan described, a place of fear and daily low-grade paranoia where any form of social attachment, whether religion or simple hobbies, was discouraged if it fell outside the control of the party-state.
Perhaps one story can explain the disorienting sense of wonder I felt in those days after the Soviet collapse.
If you visited the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, Western music was forbidden. Soviet kids would trade almost anything they had to get their hands on rock records. I could play a little guitar in those days, and I and other Americans would catch Soviet acquaintances up on whatever was big in the U.S. at the time. But once the wine and vodka bottles were empty and the playing was over, the music was gone.
Fast-forward to the early 1990s. I was in a Russian gift shop, and as I browsed, the store piped in the song “Hero” by the late David Crosby. I was absentmindedly singing along, and I looked up to see the store clerk, a Russian woman perhaps a few years younger than me, also singing along. She smiled and nodded. I smiled back. “Great song,” I said to her in Russian. “One of my favorites,” she answered.
This might seem like a small thing, even trivial. But it would have been nearly unthinkable five or six years earlier. And at such moments in my later travels in Russia—including in 2004, when I walked into a Moscow courtroom to adopt my daughter—I thought: No one would willingly go backward. No one would choose to return to the hell they just escaped.
In fact, I was more concerned about places such as Ukraine. Russia, although a mess, had at least inherited the infrastructure of the Soviet government, but the new republics were starting from scratch, and, like Russia, they were still hip-deep in corrupt Soviet elites who were looking for new jobs. Nonetheless, the idea that anyone in Moscow would be stupid or deranged enough to want to reassemble the Soviet Union seemed to me a laughable fantasy. Even Putin himself—at least in public—often dismissed the idea.
I was wrong. I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve.
I grieve for the innocent people of Ukraine, for the dead and for the survivors, for the mutilated men and women, for the orphans and the kidnapped children. I grieve for the elderly who have had to live through the brutality of the Nazis and the Soviets and, now, the Russians. I grieve for a nation whose history will be forever changed by Putin’s crimes against humanity.
And yes, I grieve, too, for the Russians. I care not one bit for Putin or his criminal accomplices, who might never face justice in this world but who I am certain will one day stand before an inescapable and far more terrifying seat of judgment. But I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.
Finally, I grieve for the end of a world I knew for most of my adult life. I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope. The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.
Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing. The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine. But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States, and while I celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world’s democracies, I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.
I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.
P.S.
Today I’ll leave aside any recommendations for something to do over the weekend. Instead, I hope we Americans can all take a moment to reflect with gratitude on the fact that we are citizens of a great and good democracy, and that we are fortunate to be far from the horror of a battle that rages on even as we go about our lives here in safety every day.
— Tom”
The Restoration of Democracy in the wake of the Putin-Trump Fourth Reich balances on our solidarity of action in stewardship of each other, and in the many theatres of World War Three which has engulfed much of the former Soviet hegemony and dominion Ukraine is our first and most crucial historical test of America as a guarantor of democracy and an emerging free society of equals which may one day become a United Humankind.
Biden’s recent speech in Warsaw, from which we survivors of Mariupol and such allies as we could gather in a reorganized Abraham Lincoln Brigade launched our campaign to bring a Reckoning to the oligarchs and war criminals of Putin’s regime who are the direct and primary beneficiaries of his mad conquest of the Middle East, Africa, the Mediterranean, and Europe, not counting the Stolen Election of 2016 as he never actually sent a Russian army of occupation to seize America, is an important fulcrum of change event. I hope that the free world can find the political will to challenge tyranny with liberty, division with solidarity, fear and hate with love and hope.
As written by Kevin Liptakin in CNN, in an article entitled Biden issues a rallying cry in Warsaw: ‘Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia’; “
President Joe Biden vowed in a fiery speech Tuesday to continue supporting Ukraine as it enters a second year of war, repeatedly denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin and promising the United States would not waver even as the conflict enters a new, more uncertain phase.
In his second major address in less than a year from the same Polish castle, Biden said before a large, energetic crowd that Western resolve was stiffening in the face of Putin’s assault on democracy.
He used his trip to the Ukrainian capital a day earlier as evidence that the democracies of the world are growing stronger in the face of autocracy, repeatedly noting Kyiv remained in Ukrainian hands despite the early expectations inside the Kremlin.
“One year ago, the world was bracing for the fall of Kyiv. Well, I’ve just come from a visit to Kyiv and I can report Kyiv stands strong. Kyiv stands proud, it stands tall and most important, it stands free,” Biden said as a crowd, many waving American flags, cheered underneath cold rain.
In remarkably pointed terms, Biden accused Putin of atrocities and said his attempt to subjugate a sovereign nation wouldn’t succeed.
“President Putin’s craven lust for land and power will fail,” he said, one of the 10 separate times he singled out the Russian leader by name in his address.
By contrast, Putin didn’t name Biden once in a lengthy and belligerent address from Moscow earlier in the day. In other ways as well, the two presidents’ speeches could not have been more different. Biden was introduced to a driving electronic pop anthem; meanwhile in Moscow, some members of Putin’s audience appeared to fall asleep during his one-hour-and-45-minute speech.
White House aides said ahead of time that Biden’s remarks were not timed to act as a rebuttal to Putin’s speech. And Biden made only a single reference to it, denying Putin’s claim that Ukraine and its allies in the West started the war.
“The West was not plotting to attack Russia,” Biden said by way of response in his own speech.
According to senior US and European officials, Putin’s aims have not changed since he launched his invasion a year ago. Despite humiliating setbacks for his military and an apparent power struggle between the mercenary Wagner Group and the Russian defense ministry, Russia has recently made gains in the east. Putin’s troops appear poised to take the city of Bakhmut, the first significant Russian military victory in months.
Visiting the region this week, Biden hoped to again provide a rallying cry for Ukraine, demonstrating to Putin and Russia that Western resolve isn’t weakening. Harkening to the start of the war, Biden said the challenges of the invasion extended beyond Ukraine’s borders.
“When Russia invaded, it was not just Ukraine being tested. The whole world faced a test for the ages,” he said. “Europe was being tested. America was being tested. NATO was being tested.”
Biden appeared to speak almost directly to Putin in much of the remarks, saying, “Autocrats only understand one word: No. No, no. No, you will not take my country. No, you will not take my freedom. No, you will not take my future.”
“Ukraine, Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never,” Biden said to applause.
Biden makes the case for ‘the defense of freedom
The war has left an indelible mark on nearly all aspects of Biden’s presidency and he has left his mark on the war, from the billions of dollars in arms shipments to the newly invigorated Western alliance. It has caused convulsions in the global economy and created political problems at home while still providing Biden an opening to demonstrate his oft-recited claim that “America is back.”
White House officials have been looking towards this week’s anniversary for weeks, consistently making the point that one year ago, as Russian troops were massing on the border with Ukraine, there were plenty of people – including inside the Biden administration – who predicted Kyiv would’ fall in a matter of days.
The surprising resilience of the Ukrainian people, along with the unexpected ineptitude of the Russian forces, have prevented a full takeover. Instead, the war has become what NATO’s chief Jens Stoltenberg described last week as a “grinding war of attrition” without a discernible end.
“We have to be honest and clear-eyed as we look at the year ahead,” Biden said Tuesday. “The defense of freedom is not the work of a day. It’s always difficult. It’s always important.”
The United States and other Western nations have been shipping tranches of arms, tanks and ammunition to Ukraine, steadily increasing what they are willing to provide in the hopes of changing the trajectory of the war. It’s not enough for Zelensky, who wants heavier weapons and fighter jets.
US officials have said they hope the massive influx of weaponry to Ukraine – which includes new vehicles, longer-range missiles, and Patriot air defense systems – can help Ukraine prevail on the battlefield and put the country in a stronger position to negotiate an end to the war.
But it remains unclear what parameters Zelensky might be willing to accept in any peace negotiations, and the US has steadfastly refused to define what a settlement may look like beyond stating it will be up to Zelensky to decide.
Meanwhile, new concerns about the available supplies of ammunition and weapons have emerged in the past week, a clear indication the West cannot provide unlimited support forever – neither logistically nor politically – as evidenced by polls showing support for the war effort waning.
In the US, some conservative Republicans have balked at providing any more aid to Ukraine, though the party’s leaders appear unwavering in their support. As Biden prepares to announce his intentions on running for reelection, anxiety is rising in Europe that a change in the White House could herald a shift in policy toward Ukraine.
Clashing with Putin
The last time Biden spoke from the courtyard of the Royal Castle, the content of his 27-minute speech was mostly obscured by what he ad-libbed about Putin at the end: “For God’s sake,” he proclaimed in March 2022, “this man cannot remain in power.”
Nearly a year later, Biden returned to the Royal Castle to mark the anniversary of a war that has increasingly put him directly at odds with the Russian leader, a Cold War dynamic underscored by Biden’s highly secretive visit to Kyiv a day earlier.
In his speech, Biden accused Putin of atrocities and trying to “starve the world” by preventing Ukrainian grain exports.
“When President Putin ordered the tanks to roll in Ukraine, he thought we would roll over. He was wrong,” Biden said.
Yet unlike Biden’s last appearance in Warsaw, which came as Putin’s forces appeared in retreat and observers expected the Russian economy to crumble under the weight of Western sanctions, the war now appears poised to stretch at least another year. There are currently no serious efforts at negotiating an end to the fighting.
If there was ever a point when Biden and his aides hoped to avoid personalizing the Ukraine conflict, it was over long before this week’s anniversary. Biden has declared Putin a “war criminal” and a “pure thug,” accusing Russia of genocide and, in his castle speech, making an implicit call for regime change.
Speaking to reporters ahead of Biden’s speech, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said it was not planned as a direct rebuttal to Putin.
“We did not set the speech up some kind of head to head,” Sullivan said. “This is not a rhetorical contest with anyone else.”
‘Our support for Ukraine remains unwavering’
In meetings with Polish President Andrzej Duda earlier Tuesday, Biden reiterated his commitment to the region’s security.
Biden thanked Duda for his country’s commitment to supporting the people of Ukraine, calling the relationship between the two nations “critical, critical, critical.” Biden said he believes Ukraine is in a “better position than we’ve ever been” and called on NATO countries to “keep our head and our focus.”
“I made it clear that the commitment of the United States is real and that a year later I would argue NATO is stronger than it’s ever been,” Biden said.
“I can proudly say that our support for Ukraine remains unwavering.”
Biden announced Monday he would join European nations in announcing new sanctions on Moscow and unveil another security assistance package on top of the tens of billions already committed this year.”
As I wrote in my post of February 25 2023, On the Question of Motives and Goals: Why has Putin Invaded Ukraine?; Our first question in any analysis and interpretation of current events for purposes of strategy and policy guidance, my field here at Torch of Liberty as a voice of the global Resistance in democracy and antifascist action, regards the motives and goals of the enemy. In the case of Putin and the Russian Dominion in the invasion and conquest of Ukraine, why has Putin invaded Ukraine?
The McQuade Memo being the trigger and last cause of the invasion, because Putin saw himself losing any chance of his puppet and agent Trump retaking the White House and therefore a closing window of opportunity for the conquest of Ukraine without American, NATO, EU, or UN intervention, only goes back as far as the Maidan Revolution which overthrew Putin’s Ukrainian puppet and created a new democracy, to the conquest of Crimea and its vital warm water ports, and to the Stolen Election of 2016 in America.
But larger historical and systemic forces are in play here, which involve Putin’s ideological model and shaping source, the philosopher of Russian identitarian politics and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil Ivan Ilyin, and we must also have a model of the material and economic conditions driving political decisions.
As written by Volodymyr Ishchenko in Jacobin, in an article entitled Behind Russia’s War Is Thirty Years of Post-Soviet Class Conflict: The invasion of Ukraine is not simply a product of Vladimir Putin’s expansionist mindset. It corresponds to a project for Russian capitalism that he and his allies have pursued since the collapse of the Soviet Union; “Since Russian forces invaded Ukraine earlier this year, analysts across the political spectrum have struggled to identify exactly what — or who — led us to this point. Phrases like “Russia,” “Ukraine,” “the West,” or “the Global South” have been thrown around as if they denoted unified political actors. Even on the Left, the utterances of Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, Joe Biden, and other world leaders about “security concerns,” “self-determination,” “civilizational choice,” “sovereignty,” “imperialism,” or “anti-imperialism” are often taken at face value, as if they represented coherent national interests.
Specifically, the debate over Russian — or, more precisely, the Russian ruling clique’s — interests in launching the war tends to be polarized around questionable extremes. Many take what Putin says literally, failing to even question whether his obsession with NATO expansion or his insistence that Ukrainians and Russians constitute “one people” represent Russian national interests or are shared by Russian society as a whole. On the other side, many dismiss his remarks as bold-faced lies and strategic communication lacking any relation to his “real” goals in Ukraine.
In their own ways, both of these positions serve to mystify the Kremlin’s motivations rather than clarify them. Today’s discussions of Russian ideology often feel like a return to the times of The German Ideology, penned by young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels some 175 years ago. To some, the dominant ideology in Russian society is a true representation of the social and political order. Others believe that simply proclaiming the emperor has no clothes will be enough to pierce the free-floating bubble of ideology.
Unfortunately, the real world is more complicated. The key to understanding “what Putin really wants” is not cherry-picking obscure phrases from his speeches and articles that fit observers’ preconceived biases, but rather conducting a systematic analysis of the structurally determined material interests, political organization, and ideological legitimation of the social class he represents.
In the following, I try to identify some basic elements of such an analysis for the Russian context. That does not mean a similar analysis of the Western or Ukrainian ruling classes’ interests in this conflict is irrelevant or inappropriate, but I focus on Russia partially for practical reasons, partially because it is the most controversial question at the moment, and partially because the Russian ruling class bears the primary responsibility for the war. By understanding their material interests, we can move beyond flimsy explanations that take rulers’ claims at face value and move toward a more coherent picture of how the war is rooted in the economic and political vacuum opened up by the Soviet collapse in 1991.
What’s in a Name?
During the current war, most Marxists have referred back to the concept of imperialism to theorize the Kremlin’s interests. Of course, it is important to approach any analytical puzzle with all available tools. It is just as important, however, to use them properly.
The problem here is that the concept of imperialism has undergone practically no further development in its application to the post-Soviet condition. Neither Vladimir Lenin nor any other classical Marxist theorist could have imagined the fundamentally new situation that emerged with the collapse of Soviet socialism. Their generation analyzed the imperialism of capitalist expansion and modernization. The post-Soviet condition, by contrast, is a permanent crisis of contraction, demodernization, and peripheralization.
That does not mean that analysis of Russian imperialism today is pointless as such, but we need to do quite a lot of conceptual homework to render it fruitful. A debate over whether contemporary Russia constitutes an imperialist country by referring to some textbook definitions from the twentieth century has only scholastic value. From an explanatory concept, “imperialism” turns into an ahistorical and tautological descriptive label: “Russia is imperialist because it attacked a weaker neighbor”; “Russia attacked a weaker neighbor because it is imperialist,” and so on.
Failing to find the expansionism of Russian finance capital (considering the impact of sanctions on the very globalized Russian economy and the Western assets of Russian “oligarchs”); the conquest of new markets (in Ukraine, which has failed to attract virtually any foreign direct investment, or FDI, except for the offshore money of its own oligarchs); control over strategic resources (whatever mineral deposits lie in Ukrainian soil, Russia would need either expanding industry to absorb them or at least the possibility to sell them to more advanced economies, which is, surprise, only severely restricted because of the Western sanctions); or any other typical imperialist causes behind the Russian invasion, some analysts claim that the war may possess the autonomous rationality of a “political” or “cultural” imperialism. This is ultimately an eclectic explanation. Our task is precisely to explain how the political and ideological rationales for the invasion reflect the ruling class’s interests. Otherwise, we inevitably end up with crude theories of power for the sake of power or ideological fanaticism. Moreover, it would mean that the Russian ruling class has either been taken hostage by a power-hungry maniac and national chauvinist obsessed with a “historical mission” of restoring Russian greatness, or suffers from an extreme form of false consciousness — sharing Putin’s ideas about the NATO threat and his denial of Ukrainian statehood, leading to policies that are objectively contrary to their interests.
It is not uncommon for collective class interests to only partially overlap with the interests of individual representatives of that class.
I believe this is wrong. Putin is neither a power-hungry maniac, nor an ideological zealot (this kind of politics has been marginal in the whole post-Soviet space), nor a madman. By launching the war in Ukraine, he protects the rational collective interests of the Russian ruling class. It is not uncommon for collective class interests to only partially overlap with the interests of individual representatives of that class, or even contradict them. But what kind of class actually rules Russia — and what are its collective interests?
Political Capitalism in Russia and Beyond
When asked which class rules Russia, most people on the Left would likely answer almost instinctively: capitalists. The average citizen in the post-Soviet space would probably call them thieves, crooks, or mafia. A slightly more highbrow response would be “oligarchs.” It is easy to dismiss such answers as the false consciousness of those who do not understand their rulers in “proper” Marxist terms. However, a more productive path of analysis would be to think about why post-Soviet citizens emphasize the stealing and the tight interdependency between private business and the state that the word “oligarch” implies.
As with the discussion of modern imperialism, we need to take the specificity of the post-Soviet condition seriously. Historically, the “primitive accumulation” here happened in the process of the Soviet state and economy’s centrifugal disintegration. Political scientist Steven Solnick called this process “stealing the state.” Members of the new ruling class either privatized state property (often for pennies on the dollar) or were granted plentiful opportunities to siphon off profits from formally public entities into private hands. They exploited informal relations with state officials and the often intentionally designed legal loopholes for massive tax evasion and capital flight, all while executing hostile company takeovers for the sake of quick profits with a short-term horizon.
Russian Marxist economist Ruslan Dzarasov captured these practices with the “insider rent” concept, emphasizing the rent-like nature of income extracted by insiders thanks to their control over the financial flows of the enterprises, which depend on the relationships with the power holders. These practices can certainly also be found in other parts of the world, but their role in the formation and reproduction of the Russian ruling class is far more important due to the nature of the post-Soviet transformation, which began with the centrifugal collapse of state socialism and the subsequent political-economic reconsolidation on a patronage basis.
Other prominent thinkers, such as Hungarian sociologist Iván Szelényi, describe a similar phenomenon as “political capitalism.” Following Max Weber, political capitalism is characterized by the exploitation of political office to accumulate private wealth. I would call the political capitalists the fraction of the capitalist class whose main competitive advantage is derived from selective benefits from the state, unlike capitalists whose advantage is rooted in technological innovations or a particularly cheap labor force. Political capitalists are not unique to the post-Soviet countries, but they are able to flourish precisely in those areas where the state has historically played the dominant role in the economy and accumulated immense capital, now open for private exploitation.
The presence of political capitalism is crucial to understand why, when the Kremlin speaks about “sovereignty” or “spheres of influence,” it is by no means the product of an irrational obsession with outdated concepts. At the same time, such rhetoric is not necessarily an articulation of Russia’s national interest so much as a direct reflection of Russian political capitalists’ class interests. If the state’s selective benefits are fundamental for the accumulation of their wealth, these capitalists have no choice but to fence off the territory where they exercise monopoly control — control not to be shared with any other fraction of the capitalist class.
This interest in “marking territory” is not shared by, or at least not so important for, different types of capitalists. A long-running controversy in Marxist theory centered around the question of, to paraphrase Göran Therborn, “what the ruling class actually does when it rules.” The puzzle was that the bourgeoisie in capitalist states does not usually run the state directly. The state bureaucracy usually enjoys substantial autonomy from the capitalist class but serves it by establishing and enforcing rules that benefit capitalist accumulation. Political capitalists, by contrast, require not general rules but much tighter control over political decision makers. Alternatively, they occupy political offices themselves and exploit them for private enrichment.
Many icons of classical entrepreneurial capitalism benefited from state subsidies, preferential tax regimes, or various protectionist measures. Yet, unlike political capitalists, their very survival and expansion on the market only rarely depended on the specific set of individuals holding specific offices, the specific parties in power, or specific political regimes. Transnational capital could and would survive without the nation-states in which their headquarters were located — recall the seasteading project of floating entrepreneurial cities independent of any nation-state, boosted by Silicon Valley tycoons like Peter Thiel. Political capitalists cannot survive in global competition without at least some territory where they can reap insider rents without outside interference.
Class Conflict in the Post-Soviet Periphery
It remains an open question whether political capitalism will be sustainable in the long run. After all, the state needs to take resources from somewhere to redistribute them among the political capitalists. As Branko Milanovic notes, corruption is an endemic problem for political capitalism, even when an effective, technocratic, and autonomous bureaucracy runs it. Unlike in the most successful case of political capitalism, such as China, the Soviet Communist Party institutions disintegrated and were replaced by regimes based on personal patronage networks bending the formal facade of liberal democracy in their favor. This often works against impulses to modernize and professionalize the economy. To put it crudely, one cannot steal from the same source forever. One needs to transform into a different capitalist model in order to sustain the profit rate, either via capital investments or intensified labor exploitation, or expand to obtain more sources for extracting insider rent.
The region’s relatively low wages were only possible due to the extensive material infrastructure and welfare institutions the Soviet Union left as a legacy.
But both reinvestment and labor exploitation face structural obstacles in post-Soviet political capitalism. On the one hand, many hesitate to engage in long-term investment when their business model and even property ownership fundamentally depend on specific people in power. It has generally proven more opportune to simply move profits into offshore accounts. On the other hand, post-Soviet labor was urbanized, educated, and not cheap. The region’s relatively low wages were only possible due to the extensive material infrastructure and welfare institutions the Soviet Union left as a legacy. That legacy poses a massive burden for the state, but one that is not so easy to abandon without undermining support from key groups of voters. Seeking to end the rapacious rivalry between political capitalists that characterized the 1990s, Bonapartist leaders like Putin and other post-Soviet autocrats mitigated the war of all against all by balancing out the interests of some elite fractions and repressing others — without altering the foundations of political capitalism.
As rapacious expansion began to run up against internal limits, Russian elites sought to outsource it externally to sustain the rate of rent by increasing the pool of extraction. Hence the intensification of Russian-led integration projects like the Eurasian Economic Union. These faced two obstacles. One was relatively minor: local political capitalists. In Ukraine, for example, they were interested in cheap Russian energy, but also in their own sovereign right to reap insider rents within their territory. They could instrumentalize anti-Russian nationalism to legitimate their claim to the Ukrainian part of the disintegrating Soviet state, but failed to develop a distinct national development project.
The title of the famous book by the second Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine Is Not Russia, is a good illustration of this problem. If Ukraine is not Russia, then what exactly is it? The universal failure of non-Russian post-Soviet political capitalists in overcoming the crisis of hegemony made their rule fragile and ultimately dependent on Russian support, as we have seen recently in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
The alliance between transnational capital and the professional middle classes in the post-Soviet space, represented politically by pro-Western, NGO-ized civil societies, gave a more compelling answer to the question of what exactly should grow on the ruins of the degraded and disintegrated state socialism, and presented a bigger obstacle to the Russia-led post-Soviet integration. This constituted the main political conflict in the post-Soviet space that culminated in the invasion of Ukraine.
The Bonapartist stabilization enacted by Putin and other post-Soviet leaders fostered the growth of the professional middle class. A part of it shared some benefits of the system, for example, if employed in bureaucracy or in strategic state enterprises. However, a large part of it was excluded from political capitalism. Their main opportunities for incomes, career, and developing political influence lay in the prospects of intensifying political, economic, and cultural connections with the West. At the same time, they were the vanguard of Western soft power. Integration into EU- and US-led institutions presented for them an ersatz-modernization project of joining both “proper” capitalism and the “civilized world” more generally. This necessarily meant breaking with post-Soviet elites, institutions, and the ingrained, socialist-era mentalities of the “backward” plebeian masses sticking to at least some stability after the 1990s disaster.
For most Ukrainians, this is a war of self-defense. Recognizing this, we should also not forget about the gap between their interests and those who claim to speak on their behalf.
The deeply elitist nature of this project is why it never truly became hegemonic in any post-Soviet country, even when boosted by historical anti-Russian nationalism as it was in — even now, the negative coalition mobilized against the Russian invasion does not mean that Ukrainians are united around any particular positive agenda. At the same time, it helps to explain the Global South’s skeptical neutrality when called on to solidarize with either a wannabe great power on a par with other Western great powers (Russia) or a wannabe periphery of the same great powers seeking not to abolish imperialism, but to join a better one (Ukraine). For most Ukrainians, this is a war of self-defense. Recognizing this, we should also not forget about the gap between their interests and the interests of those who claim to speak on their behalf, and who present very particular political and ideological agendas as universal for the whole nation — shaping “self-determination” in a very class-specific way.
The discussion of the role of the West in paving the way for the Russian invasion is typically focused on NATO’s threatening stance toward Russia. But taking the phenomenon of political capitalism into account, we can see the class conflict behind Western expansion, and why Western integration of Russia without the latter’s fundamental transformation could never have worked. There was no way to integrate post-Soviet political capitalists into Western-led institutions that explicitly sought to eliminate them as a class by depriving them of their main competitive advantage: selective benefits bestowed by the post-Soviet states. The so-called “anti-corruption” agenda has been a vital, if not the most important, part of Western institutions’ vision for the post-Soviet space, widely shared by the pro-Western middle class in the region. For political capitalists, the success of that agenda would mean their political and economic end.
In public, the Kremlin tries to present the war as a battle for Russia’s survival as a sovereign nation. The most important stake, however, is the survival of the Russian ruling class and its model of political capitalism. The “multipolar” restructuring of the world order would solve the problem for some time. This is why the Kremlin is trying to sell their specific class project to the Global South elites that would get their own sovereign “sphere of influence” based on a claim to represent a “civilization.”
The Crisis of Post-Soviet Bonapartism
The contradictory interests of post-Soviet political capitalists, the professional middle classes, and transnational capital structured the political conflict that ultimately gave birth to the current war. However, the crisis of the political capitalists’ political organization exacerbated the threat to them.
Bonapartist regimes like Putin’s or Alexander Lukashenko’s in Belarus rely on passive, depoliticized support and draw their legitimacy from overcoming the disaster of the post-Soviet collapse, not from the kind of active consent that secures the political hegemony of the ruling class. Such personalistic authoritarian rule is fundamentally fragile because of the problem of succession. There are no clear rules or traditions to transfer power, no articulated ideology a new leader must adhere to, no party or movement in which a new leader could be socialized. Succession represents the point of vulnerability where internal conflicts within the elite can escalate to a dangerous degree, and where uprisings from below have better chances to succeed.
Such uprisings have been accelerating on Russia’s periphery in recent years, including not just the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine in 2014 but also the revolutions in Armenia, the third revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the failed 2020 uprising in Belarus, and, most recently, the uprising in Kazakhstan. In the two last cases, Russian support proved crucial to ensure the local regime’s survival. Within Russia itself, the “For Fair Elections” rallies held in 2011 and 2012, as well as later mobilizations inspired by Alexei Navalny, were not insignificant. On the eve of the invasion, labor unrest was on the rise, while polls showed declining trust in Putin and a growing number of people who wanted him to retire. Dangerously, opposition to Putin was higher the younger the respondents were.
None of the post-Soviet, so-called maidan revolutions posed an existential threat to the post-Soviet political capitalists as a class by themselves. They only swapped out fractions of the same class in power, and thus only intensified the crisis of political representation to which they were a reaction in the first place. This is why these protests have repeated so frequently.
The maidan revolutions are typical contemporary urban civic revolutions, as political scientist Mark Beissinger called them. On a massive statistical material, he shows that unlike social revolutions of the past, the urban civic revolutions only temporarily weaken authoritarian rule and empower middle-class civil societies. They do not bring a stronger or more egalitarian political order, nor lasting democratic changes. Typically, in post-Soviet countries, the maidan revolutions only weakened the state and made local political capitalists more vulnerable to pressure from transnational capital — both directly and indirectly via pro-Western NGOs. For example, in Ukraine, after the Euromaidan revolution, a set of “anti-corruption” institutions has been stubbornly pushed forward by the IMF, G7, and civil society. They have failed to present any major case of corruption in the last eight years. However, they have institutionalized oversight of key state enterprises and the court system by foreign nationals and anti-corruption activists, thus squeezing domestic political capitalists’ opportunities for reaping insider rents. Russian political capitalists would have a good reason to be nervous with the troubles of Ukraine’s once-powerful oligarchs.
The Unintended Consequences of Ruling-Class Consolidation
Several factors help to explain the timing of the invasion as well as Putin’s miscalculation about a quick and easy victory, such as Russia’s temporary advantage in hypersonic weapons, Europe’s dependency on Russian energy, the repression of the so-called pro-Russian opposition in Ukraine, the stagnation of the 2015 Minsk accords following the War in Donbas, or the failure of Russian intelligence in Ukraine. Here, I sought to outline in very broad strokes the class conflict behind the invasion, namely between political capitalists interested in territorial expansion to sustain the rate of rent, on the one hand, and transnational capital allied with the professional middle classes — which were excluded from political capitalism — on the other.
The Marxist concept of imperialism can only be usefully applied to the current war if we can identify the material interests behind it. At the same time, the conflict is about more than just Russian imperialism. The conflict now being resolved in Ukraine by tanks, artillery, and rockets is the same conflict that police batons have suppressed in Belarus and Russia itself. The intensification of the post-Soviet crisis of hegemony — the incapacity of the ruling class to develop sustained political, moral, and intellectual leadership — is the root cause for the escalating violence.
The Russian ruling class is diverse. Some parts of it are taking heavy losses as a result of Western sanctions. However, the Russian regime’s partial autonomy from the ruling class allows it to pursue long-term collective interests independently of the losses of individual representatives or groups. At the same time, the crisis of similar regimes in the Russian periphery is exacerbating the existential threat to the Russian ruling class as a whole. The more sovereigntist fractions of the Russian political capitalists are taking the upper hand over the more comprador, but even the latter likely understand that, with the regime’s fall, all of them are losing.
By launching the war, the Kremlin sought to mitigate that threat for the foreseeable future, with the ultimate goal of the “multipolar” restructuring of the world order. As Branko Milanovic suggests, the war provides legitimacy for the Russian decoupling from the West, despite the high costs, and at the same time makes it extremely difficult to reverse it after the annexation of even more Ukrainian territory. At the same time, the Russian ruling clique elevates the political organization and ideological legitimation of the ruling class to a higher level. There are already signs of a transformation toward a more consolidated, ideological, and mobilizationist authoritarian political regime in Russia, with explicit hints at China’s more effective political capitalism as a role model. For Putin, this is essentially another stage in the process of post-Soviet consolidation that he began in the early 2000s by taming Russia’s oligarchs. The loose narrative of preventing disaster and restoring “stability” in the first stage is now followed by a more articulated conservative nationalism in the second stage (directed abroad against Ukrainians and the West, but also within Russia against cosmopolitan “traitors”) as the only ideological language widely available in the context of the post-Soviet crisis of ideology.
Some authors, like sociologist Dylan John Riley, argue that a stronger hegemonic politics from above may help to foster the growth of a stronger counterhegemonic politics below. If this is true, the Kremlin’s shift toward more ideological and mobilizationist politics may create the condition for a more organized, conscious, mass political opposition rooted in the popular classes than any post-Soviet country has ever seen, and ultimately for a new social-revolutionary wave. Such a development could, in turn, fundamentally shift the balance of social and political forces in this part of the world, potentially putting an end to the vicious cycle that has plagued it since the Soviet Union collapsed some three decades ago.”
How did Russia, once a committed antifascist state and nation bearing a historical momentum of global revolutionary struggle and often a heroic lone ally in solidarity with oppressed peoples throughout the world, as it was with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the Spanish Civil War which we American volunteers in the defense of Ukraine named ourselves for, how did this glorious and resolute champion of humankind become a fascist tyranny?
As I wrote in my journal of February 25 2022 Origins of the Fourth Reich Part One: Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism Ivan Ilyin; As the second day of the Russian Conquest of Ukraine dawns, fierce resistance and savage battles erupt throughout Ukraine and mass peace protests engulf Russia, air raid sirens are near constant as Ukraine shoots Russian planes from the sky and Russian bombs and artillery devastated her cities, Russian special forces teams in the capital assassinate Ukrainian leaders and prepare the way for the main army closing in despite heroic last stands by the defenders of Ukraine, Poland, the Baltics, Moldovia and other former Soviet dominion states wonder if they are next on the menu, President Biden imposes sanctions which directly target the oligarchs who rule Russia as a crime syndicate, and ominously the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl has become a contested prize.
As written by Tony Tran in The Byte; “In an ominous turn of events, Ukraine’s president says that Russian troops are trying to seize the sealed off Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Pripyat.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Twitter on Thursday Russia was “trying to seize” the area, and media are now reporting that fighting has broken out there. The fighting could endanger the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant sarcophagus, a massive steel and concrete structure encasing the highly radioactive nuclear reactor that melted down in a 1986 disaster.
“Russian occupation forces are trying to seize the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Our defenders are giving their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 will not be repeated,” Zelensky said. “This is a declaration of war against the whole of Europe.”
Anton Herashchenko, former deputy minister and current advisor to Ukraine’s interior ministry, echoed the point in a Facebook post, warning that “if the invaders’ artillery hits” the sarcophagus, “radioactive nuclear dust” could “be spread over the territory of Ukraine, Belarus, and the countries in the EU.”
This all came mere hours after Russian President Vladmir Putin announced a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Moscow has begun military operations throughout Ukraine that includes bombardments of cities, attacks on military bases, and boots-on-the-ground fighting with Ukrainian soldiers.
So basically, things are looking pretty bleak. Not only does this war threaten the lives of millions of innocent Ukrainian citizens, but it also throws the entire geopolitical arena into turmoil.
Now, with the threat of nuclear fallout from Chernobyl rearing its head, it’s clear things might get very ugly very quickly.”
Putin has cried havoc and loosed the dogs of war, and all bets are off as to where it may end. I greet the dawn with prayers that we have not witnessed the start of the Third World War and the extinction of humankind.
We must now interrogate and assess the ideas, motives, and construction of Russian national identity of Vladimir Putin, a man who captured the government of the United States of America without a shot fired in the Stolen Election of 2016, and in the conquest of Ukraine as a game of brinkmanship with NATO holds the balance between the survival or extinction of humankind in global nuclear war.
What are the origins of the Fourth Reich, and how did it come to seize both Russia and America without Resistance?
For the historical background of how fascism came to Russia with Putin as its champion, I refer to Timothy Snyder’s Road to Unfreedom. Here is the story of how a Russian nationalist and fascist, Ilyin, has become the guiding ideological force of Putin’s Russia and its key role in the global fascist assault on the heritage of the Enlightenment and Western civilization; democracy and our values of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, and the Universal Rights of Man.
As written by Tim Adams in The Guardian, reviewing The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder; “Even presidents who don’t believe in history need a historian to rely on. When asked, in 2014, by a delegation of students and history teachers for his chosen chronicler of Russia’s past, Vladimir Putin came up with a single name: Ivan Ilyin.
Ilyin is a figure who might have been easily lost to history were it not for the posthumous patronage of Russia’s leader. Putin first drew attention to him – Ilyin was a philosopher, not a historian, a Russian who died in exile in Switzerland in 1954 – when he organised the repatriation of Ilyin’s remains for reburial in Moscow in 2005. Ilyin’s personal papers, held in a library in Michigan, were also brought “home” at the president’s request. New editions of Ilyin’s dense books of political philosophy became popular in Kremlin circles – and all of Russia’s civil servants reportedly received a collection of his essays in 2014. And when Putin explained Russia’s need to combat the expansion of the European Union, and laid out the argument to invade Ukraine, it was Ilyin’s arguments on which the president relied.
Timothy Snyder begins his pattern-making deconstruction of recent Russian history – which by design, he argues, is indistinguishable from recent British and American history – with a comprehensive account of Putin’s reverence for the work of Ilyin. Like much of Snyder’s analysis in this unignorable book, the framing offers both a disturbing and persuasive insight.
Ilyin, an early critic of Bolshevism, had been expelled by the Soviets in 1922. In Germany, where he wrote favourably of the rise of Hitler and the example of Mussolini, he developed ideas for a Russian fascism, which could counter the effects of the 1917 revolution. As a thread through his nationalist rhetoric, he proposed a lost “Russian spirit”, which in its essence reflected a Christian God’s original creation before the fall and drew on a strongly masculine “pure” sexual energy (he had been psychoanalysed by Freud). A new Russian nation should be established, Ilyin argued, to defend and promote that ineffable spirit against all external threats – not only communism but also individualism. To achieve that end, Ilyin outlined a “simulacrum” of democracy in which the Russian people would speak “naturally” with one voice, dependent on a leader who was cast as “redeemer” for returning true Russian culture to its people. Elections would be “rituals” designed to endorse that power, periodically “uniting the nation in a gesture of subjugation”.
To establish that dystopian state, Snyder argues, Putin’s regime has deliberately pursued two of Ilyin’s central concepts. The first demanded the identification and destruction of the enemies of that Russian spirit to establish unity; alien influences – Muslim or Jewish, fundamentalist or cosmopolitan – were intent on “sodomising” Russian virtue (sexual imagery is never far away in the Kremlin’s lurid calls to arms). If those enemies did not exist they would have to be invented or exaggerated. After the terror attacks on Russian institutions – the Moscow theatre siege and the Beslan school massacre – Chechen separatism was used as a reason to bring first television and then regional governorships under state control. Those policies were led, Snyder documents, by Vladislav Surkov, the former postmodernist theatre director who was Boris Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff and then Putin’s lead strategist. Surkov directs a policy, borrowed from Ilyin, which he calls “centralisation, personification, idealisation”. With Surkov’s management, “Putin was to offer masculinity as an argument against democracy”, Snyder suggests; he was to associate, specifically, for example, gay rights and equal marriage with an attack on the Russian spirit.
In this culture war, disinformation was critical. Russian TV and social media would create a climate in which news became entertainment, and nothing would quite seem factual. This surreal shift is well documented, but Snyder’s forensic examination of, for example, the news cycle that followed the shooting down of flight MH17 makes essential reading. On the first day official propaganda suggested that the Russian missile attack on the Malaysian plane had in fact been a botched attempt by Ukrainian forces to assassinate Putin himself; by day two, Russian TV was promoting the idea that the CIA had sent a ghost plane filled with corpses overhead to provoke Russian forces.
The more outrageous the official lie was, the more it allowed people to demonstrate their faith in the Kremlin. Putin made, Snyder argues, his direct assault on “western” factuality a source of national pride. Snyder calls this policy “implausible deniability”; you hear it in the tone of the current “debate” around the Salisbury attack: Russian power is displayed in a relativist blizzard of alternative theories, delivered in a vaguely absurdist spirit, as if no truth on earth is really provable.
The second half of Snyder’s book explores how Russia has sought to export this policy to those who threaten it, primarily through a mass disinformation war, a 2.0 update of Sun Tzu’s “confusion to our enemy” principle, with the aim of dividing and polarising pluralist democracies – in particular the EU and the US – against themselves.
Snyder is very astute at joining the dots in how Russian propagandists, human or digital, sought to spread fake news to undermine faith in the democratic process, at the same time giving overt support to European separatists and Russia TV regulars such as Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage. He details how, for example, Russian “news” sources spread the idea that the Scottish independence vote had been “rigged” by “establishment forces” with the aim of undermining faith in democratic institutions in Britain before the EU referendum. We are still awaiting, of course, the full disentangling of Donald Trump’s complex relations with Putin’s government, and the many links between his campaign organisation and Russian operatives. As with Luke Harding’s book Collusion, however, there is more than enough here to keep Robert Mueller busy for a long while yet.
One unavoidable conclusion of this depressing tale lies in the acknowledgment that Putin’s strategy has been so successful in shaking faith in the sanctity of fact and expert knowledge.”
” How did we get here? Snyder has a good idea.”
And now our story begins to develop of how America was seized by a fascist regime whose figurehead was a lifelong agent of the KGB and of Russia’s FSB intelligence thereafter, the most successful espionage operation ever conducted against America by a foreign power, culminating in the Stolen Election of 2016 and the Presidency of Donald Trump and his mission of subversion of global democracy and the fall of America to a Fourth Reich of white supremacist terror and fascist tyranny, in a new book by Craig Unger, American Kompromat.
As reported in The Guardian, Unger describes the ease with which a credulous fool with no morals, a consuming greed, and an appetite for perversions and sexual terror became an instrument of Russian imperialism and the violation and destruction of America’s values and institutions; “Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”
Here is the expanded version of Timothy Snyder’s essay “God Is a Russian” in the April 5, 2018 issue of The New York Review:
“The Russian looked Satan in the eye, put God on the psychoanalyst’s couch, and understood that his nation could redeem the world. An agonized God told the Russian a story of failure. In the beginning was the Word, purity and perfection, and the Word was God. But then God made a youthful mistake. He created the world to complete himself, but instead soiled himself, and hid in shame. God’s, not Adam’s, was the original sin, the release of the imperfect. Once people were in the world, they apprehended facts and experienced feelings that could not be reassembled to what had been God’s mind. Each individual thought or passion deepened the hold of Satan on the world.
And so the Russian, a philosopher, understood history as a disgrace. Nothing that had happened since creation was of significance. The world was a meaningless farrago of fragments. The more humans sought to understand it, the more sinful it became. Modern society, with its pluralism and its civil society, deepened the flaws of the world and kept God in his exile. God’s one hope was that a righteous nation would follow a Leader into political totality, and thereby begin a repair of the world that might in turn redeem the divine. Because the unifying principle of the Word was the only good in the universe, any means that might bring about its return were justified.
Thus this Russian philosopher, whose name was Ivan Ilyin, came to imagine a Russian Christian fascism. Born in 1883, he finished a dissertation on God’s worldly failure just before the Russian Revolution of 1917. Expelled from his homeland in 1922 by the Soviet power he despised, he embraced the cause of Benito Mussolini and completed an apology for political violence in 1925. In German and Swiss exile, he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s for White Russian exiles who had fled after defeat in the Russian civil war, and in the 1940s and 1950s for future Russians who would see the end of the Soviet power.
A tireless worker, Ilyin produced about twenty books in Russian, and another twenty in German. Some of his work has a rambling and commonsensical character, and it is easy to find tensions and contradictions. One current of thought that is coherent over the decades, however, is his metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a fascist state. A crucial concept was “law” or “legal consciousness” (pravosoznanie). For the young Ilyin, writing before the Revolution, law embodied the hope that Russians would partake in a universal consciousness that would allow Russia to create a modern state. For the mature, counter-revolutionary Ilyin, a particular consciousness (“heart” or “soul,” not “mind”) permitted Russians to experience the arbitrary claims of power as law. Though he died forgotten, in 1954, Ilyin’s work was revived after collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and guides the men who rule Russia today.
The Russian Federation of the early twenty-first century is a new country, formed in 1991 from the territory of the Russian republic of the Soviet Union. It is smaller than the old Russian Empire, and separated from it in time by the intervening seven decades of Soviet history. Yet the Russian Federation of today does resemble the Russian Empire of Ilyin’s youth in one crucial respect: it has not established the rule of law as the principle of government. The trajectory in Ilyin’s understanding of law, from hopeful universalism to arbitrary nationalism, was followed in the discourse of Russian politicians, including Vladimir Putin. Because Ilyin found ways to present the failure of the rule of law as Russian virtue, Russian kleptocrats use his ideas to portray economic inequality as national innocence. In the last few years, Vladimir Putin has also used some of Ilyin’s more specific ideas about geopolitics in his effort translate the task of Russian politics from the pursuit of reform at home to the export of virtue abroad. By transforming international politics into a discussion of “spiritual threats,” Ilyin’s works have helped Russian elites to portray the Ukraine, Europe, and the United States as existential dangers to Russia.
Ivan Ilyin was a philosopher who confronted Russian problems with German thinkers. This was typical of the time and place. He was child of the Silver Age, the late empire of the Romanov dynasty. His father was a Russian nobleman, his mother a German Protestant who had converted to Orthodoxy. As a student at Moscow between 1901 and 1906, Ilyin’s real subject was philosophy, which meant the ethical thought of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). For the neo-Kantians, who then held sway in universities across Europe as well as in Russia, humans differed from the rest of creation by a capacity for reason that permitted meaningful choices. Humans could then freely submit to law, since they could grasp and accept its spirit.
Law was then the great object of desire of the Russian thinking classes. Russian students of law, perhaps more than their European colleagues, could see it as a source of political transformation. Law seemed to offer the antidote to the ancient Russian problem of proizvol, of arbitrary rule by autocratic tsars. Even as a hopeful young man, however, Ilyin struggled to see the Russian people as the creatures of reason Kant imagined. He waited expectantly for a grand revolt that would hasten the education of the Russian masses. When the Russo-Japanese War created conditions for a revolution in 1905, Ilyin defended the right to free assembly. With his girlfriend, Natalia Vokach, he translated a German anarchist pamphlet into Russian. The tsar was forced to concede a new constitution in 1906, which created a new Russian parliament. Though chosen in a way that guaranteed the power of the empire’s landed classes, the parliament had the authority to legislate. The tsar dismissed parliament twice, and then illegally changed the electoral system to ensure that it was even more conservative. It was impossible to see the new constitution as having brought the rule of law to Russia.
Employed to teach law by the university in 1909, Ilyin published a beautiful article in both Russian (1910) and German (1912) on the conceptual differences between law and power. Yet how to make law functional in practice and resonant in life? Kant seemed to leave open a gap between the spirit of law and the reality of autocracy. G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), however, offered hope by proposing that this and other painful tensions would be resolved by time. History, as a hopeful Ilyin read Hegel, was the gradual penetration of Spirit (Geist) into the world. Each age transcended the previous one and brought a crisis that promised the next one. The beastly masses will come to resemble the enlightened friends, ardors of daily life will yield to political order.
The philosopher who understands this message becomes the vehicle of Spirit, always a tempting prospect. Like other Russian intellectuals of his own and previous generations, the young Ilyin was drawn to Hegel, and in 1912 proclaimed a “Hegelian renaissance.” Yet, just as the immense Russian peasantry had given him second thoughts about the ease of communicating law to Russian society, so his experience of modern urban life left him doubtful that historical change was only a matter of Spirit. He found Russians, even those of his own class and milieu in Moscow, to be disgustingly corporeal. In arguments about philosophy and politics in the 1910s, he accused his opponents of “sexual perversion.”
In 1913, Ilyin worried that perversion was a national Russian syndrome, and proposed Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) as Russia’s savior. In Ilyin’s reading of Freud, civilization arose from a collective agreement to suppress basic drives. The individual paid a psychological price for sacrifice of his nature to culture. Only through long consultations on the couch of the psychoanalyst could unconscious experience surface into awareness. Psychoanalysis therefore offered a very different portrait of thought than did the Hegelian philosophy that Ilyin was then studying. Even as Ilyin was preparing his dissertation on Hegel, he offered himself as the pioneer of Russia’s national psychotherapy, travelling with Natalia to Vienna in May 1914 for sessions with Freud. Thus the outbreak of World War I found Ilyin in Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg monarchy, now one of Russia’s enemies.
“My inner Germans,” Ilyin wrote to a friend in 1915, “trouble me more than the outer Germans,” the German and Habsburg realms making war against the Russian Empire. The “inner German” who helped Ilyin to master the others was the philosopher Edmund Husserl, with whom he had studied in Göttingen in 1911. Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of the school of thought known as phenomenology, tried to describe the method by which the philosopher thinks himself into the world. The philosopher sought to forget his own personality and prior assumptions, and tried to experience a subject on its own terms. As Ilyin put it, the philosopher must mentally possess (perezhit’) the object of inquiry until he attains self-evident and exhaustive clarity (ochevidnost).
Husserl’s method was simplified by Ilyin into a “philosophical act” whereby the philosopher can still the universe and anything in it—other philosophers, the world, God— by stilling his own mind. Like an Orthodox believer contemplating an icon, Ilyin believed (in contrast to Husserl) that he could see a metaphysical reality through a physical one. As he wrote his dissertation about Hegel, he perceived the divine subject in a philosophical text, and fixed it in place. Hegel meant God when he wrote Spirit, concluded Ilyin, and Hegel was wrong to see motion in history. God could not realize himself in the world, since the substance of God was irreconcilably different from the substance of the world. Hegel could not show that every fact was connected to a principle, that every accident was part of a design, that every detail was part of a whole, and so on. God had initiated history and then been blocked from further influence.
Ilyin was quite typical of Russian intellectuals in his rapid and enthusiastic embrace of contradictory German ideas. In his dissertation he was able, thanks to his own very specific understanding of Husserl, to bring some order to his “inner Germans.” Kant had suggested the initial problem for a Russian political thinker: how to establish the rule of law. Hegel had seemed to provide a solution, a Spirit advancing through history. Freud had redefined Russia’s problem as sexual rather than spiritual. Husserl allowed Ilyin to transfer the responsibility for political failure and sexual unease to God. Philosophy meant the contemplation that allowed contact with God and began God’s cure. The philosopher had taken control and all was in view: other philosophers, the world, God. Yet, even after contact was made with the divine, history continued, “the current of events” continued to flow.
Indeed, even as Ilyin contemplated God, men were killing and dying by the millions on battlefields across Europe. Ilyin was writing his dissertation as the Russian Empire gained and then lost territory on the Eastern Front of World War I. In February 1917, the tsarist regime was replaced by a new constitutional order. The new government tottered as it continued a costly war. That April, Germany sent Vladimir Lenin to Russia in a sealed train, and his Bolsheviks carried out a second revolution in November, promising land to peasants and peace to all. Ilyin was meanwhile trying to assemble the committee so he could defend his dissertation. By the time he did so, in 1918, the Bolsheviks were in power, their Red Army was fighting a civil war, and the Cheka was defending revolution through terror.
World War I gave revolutionaries their chance, and so opened the way for counter-revolutionaries as well. Throughout Europe, men of the far right saw the Bolshevik Revolution as a certain kind of opportunity; and the drama of revolution and counter-revolution was played out, with different outcomes, in Germany, Hungary, and Italy. Nowhere was the conflict so long, bloody, and passionate as in the lands of the former Russian Empire, where civil war lasted for years, brought famine and pogroms, and cost about as many lives as World War I itself. In Europe in general, but in Russia in particular, the terrible loss of life, the seemingly endless strife, and the fall of empire brought a certain plausibility to ideas that might otherwise have remained unknown or seemed irrelevant. Without the war, Leninism would likely be a footnote in the history of Marxist thought; without Lenin’s revolution, Ilyin might not have drawn right-wing political conclusions from his dissertation.
Lenin and Ilyin did not know each other, but their encounter in revolution and counter-revolution was nevertheless uncanny. Lenin’s patronymic was “Ilyich” and he wrote under the pseudonym “Ilyin,” and the real Ilyin reviewed some of that pseudonymous work. When Ilyin was arrested by the Cheka as an opponent of the revolution, Lenin intervened on his behalf as a gesture of respect for Ilyin’s philosophical work. The intellectual interaction between the two men, which began in 1917 and continues in Russia today, began from a common appreciation of Hegel’s promise of totality. Both men interpreted Hegel in radical ways, agreeing with one another on important points such as the need to destroy the middle classes, disagreeing about the final form of the classless community.
Lenin accepted with Hegel that history was a story of progress through conflict. As a Marxist, he believed that the conflict was between social classes: the bourgeoisie that owned property and the proletariat that enabled profits. Lenin added to Marxism the proposal that the working class, though formed by capitalism and destined to seize its achievements, needed guidance from a disciplined party that understood the rules of history. In 1917, Lenin went so far as to claim that the people who knew the rules of history also knew when to break them— by beginning a socialist revolution in the Russian Empire, where capitalism was weak and the working class tiny. Yet Lenin never doubted that there was a good human nature, trapped by historical conditions, and therefore subject to release by historical action.
Marxists such as Lenin were atheists. They thought that by Spirit, Hegel meant God or some other theological notion, and replaced Spirit with society. Ilyin was not a typical Christian, but he believed in God. Ilyin agreed with Marxists that Hegel meant God, and argued that Hegel’s God had created a ruined world. For Marxists, private property served the function of an original sin, and its dissolution would release the good in man. For Ilyin, God’s act of creation was itself the original sin. There was never a good moment in history, and no intrinsic good in humans. The Marxists were right to hate the middle classes, and indeed did not hate them enough. Middle-class “civil society” entrenches plural interests that confound hopes for an “overpowering national organization” that God needs. Because the middle classes block God, they must be swept away by a classless national community. But there is no historical tendency, no historical group, that will perform this labor. The grand transformation from Satanic individuality to divine totality must begin somewhere beyond history.
According to Ilyin, liberation would arise not from understanding history, but from eliminating it. Since the earthly was corrupt and the divine unattainable, political rescue would come from the realm of fiction. In 1917, Ilyin was still hopeful that Russia might become a state ruled by law. Lenin’s revolution ensured that Ilyin henceforth regarded his own philosophical ideas as political. Bolshevism had proven that God’s world was as flawed as Ilyin had maintained. What Ilyin would call “the abyss of atheism” of the new regime was the final confirmation of the flaws of world, and of the power of modern ideas to reinforce them.
After he departed Russia, Ilyin would maintain that humanity needed heroes, outsized characters from beyond history, capable of willing themselves to power. In his dissertation, this politics was implicit in the longing for a missing totality and the suggestion that the nation might begin its restoration. It was an ideology awaiting a form and a name.
Ilyin left Russia in 1922, the year the Soviet Union was founded. His imagination was soon captured by Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome, the coup d’état that brought the world’s first fascist regime. Ilyin was convinced that bold gestures by bold men could begin to undo the flawed character of existence. He visited Italy and published admiring articles about Il Duce while he was writing his book, On the Use of Violence to Resist Evil (1925). If Ilyin’s dissertation had laid groundwork for a metaphysical defense of fascism, this book was a justification of an emerging system. The dissertation described the lost totality unleashed by an unwitting God; second book explained the limits of the teachings of God’s Son. Having understood the trauma of God, Ilyin now “looked Satan in the eye.”
Thus famous teachings of Jesus, as rendered in the Gospel of Mark, take on unexpected meanings in Ilyin’s interpretations. “Judge not,” says Jesus, “that ye not be judged.” That famous appeal to reflection continues:
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
For Ilyin, these were the words of a failed God with a doomed Son. In fact, a righteous man did not reflect upon his own deeds or attempt to see the perspective of another; he contemplated, recognized absolute good and evil, and named the enemies to be destroyed. The proper interpretation of the “judge not” passage was that every day was judgment day, and that men would be judged for not killing God’s enemies when they had the chance. In God’s absence, Ilyin determined who those enemies were.
Perhaps Jesus’ most remembered commandment is to love one’s enemy, from the Gospel of Matthew: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Ilyin maintained that the opposite was meant. Properly understood, love meant totality. It did not matter whether one individual tries to love another individual. The individual only loved if he was totally subsumed in the community. To be immersed in such love was to struggle “against the enemies of the divine order on earth.” Christianity actually meant the call of the right-seeing philosopher to apply decisive violence in the name of love. Anyone who failed to accept this logic was himself an agent of Satan: “He who opposes the chivalrous struggle against the devil is himself the devil.”
Thus theology becomes politics. The democracies did not oppose Bolshevism, but enabled it, and must be destroyed. The only way to prevent the spread of evil was to crush middle classes, eradicate their civil society, and transform their individualist and universalist understanding of law into a consciousness of national submission. Bolshevism was no antidote to the disease of the middle classes, but rather the full irruption of their disease. Soviet and European governments must be swept away by violent coups d’état.
Ilyin used the word Spirit (Dukh) to describe the inspiration of fascists. The fascist seizure of power, he wrote, was an “act of salvation.” The fascist is the true redeemer, since he grasps that it is the enemy who must be sacrificed. Ilyin took from Mussolini the concept of a “chivalrous sacrifice” that fascists make in the blood of others. (Speaking of the Holocaust in 1943, Heinrich Himmler would praise his SS-men in just these terms.)
Ilyin understood his role as a Russian intellectual as the propagation of fascist ideas in a particular Russian idiom. In a poem in the first number of a journal he edited between 1927 and 1930, he provided the appropriate lapidary motto: “My prayer is like a sword. And my sword is like a prayer.” Ilyin dedicated his huge 1925 book On the Use of Violence to Resist Evil to the Whites, the men who had resisted the Bolshevik Revolution. It was meant as a guide to their future.
What seemed to trouble Ilyin most was that Italians and not Russians had invented fascism: “Why did the Italians succeed where we failed?” Writing of the future of Russian fascism in 1927, he tried to establish Russian primacy by considering the White resistance to the Bolsheviks as the pre-history of the fascist movement as a whole. The White movement had also been “deeper and broader” than fascism because it had preserved a connection to religion and the need for totality. Ilyin proclaimed to “my White brothers, the fascists” that a minority must seize power in Russia. The time would come. The “White Spirit” was eternal.
Ilyin’s proclamation of a fascist future for Russia in the 1920s was the absolute negation of his hopes in the 1910s that Russia might become a rule-of-law state. “The fact of the matter,” wrote Ilyin, “is that fascism is a redemptive excess of patriotic arbitrariness.” Arbitrariness (proizvol), a central concept in all modern Russian political discussions, was the bugbear of all Russian reformers seeking improvement through law. Now proizvol was patriotic. The word for “redemptive” (spasytelnii), is another central Russian concept. It is the adjective Russian Orthodox Christians might apply to the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, the death of the One for the salvation of the many. Ilyin uses it to mean the murder of outsiders so that the nation could undertake a project of total politics that might later redeem a lost God.
In one sentence, two universal concepts, law and Christianity, are undone. A spirit of lawlessness replaces the spirit of the law; a spirit of murder replaces a spirit of mercy.
Although Ilyin was inspired by fascist Italy, his home as a political refugee between 1922 and 1938 was Germany. As an employee of the Russian Scholarly Institute (Russisches Wissenschaftliches Institut), he was an academic civil servant. It was from Berlin that he observed the succession struggle after Lenin’s death that brought Joseph Stalin to power. He then followed Stalin’s attempt to transform the political victory of the Bolsheviks into a social revolution. In 1933, Ilyin published a long book, in German, on the famine brought by the collectivization of Soviet agriculture.
Writing in Russian for Russian émigrés, Ilyin was quick to praise Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933. Hitler did well, in Ilyin’s opinion, to have the rule of law suspended after the Reichstag Fire of February 1933. Ilyin presented Hitler, like Mussolini, as a Leader from beyond history whose mission was entirely defensive. “A reaction to Bolshevism had to come,” wrote Ilyin, “and it came.” European civilization had been sentenced to death, but “so long as Mussolini is leading Italy and Hitler is leading Germany, European culture has a stay of execution.” Nazis embodied a “Spirit” (Dukh) that Russians must share.
According to Ilyin, Nazis were right to boycott Jewish businesses and blame Jews as a collectivity for the evils that had befallen Germany. Above all, Ilyin wanted to persuade Russians and other Europeans that Hitler was right to treat Jews as agents of Bolshevism. This “Judeobolshevik” idea, as Ilyin understood, was the ideological connection between the Whites and the Nazis. The claim that Jews were Bolsheviks and Bolsheviks were Jews was White propaganda during the Russian Civil War. Of course, most communists were not Jews, and the overwhelming majority of Jews had nothing to do with communism. The conflation of the two groups was not an error or an exaggeration, but rather a transformation of traditional religious prejudices into instruments of national unity. Judeobolshevism appealed to the superstitious belief of Orthodox Christian peasants that Jews guarded the border between the realms of good and evil. It shifted this conviction to modern politics, portraying revolution as hell and Jews as its gatekeepers. As in Ilyin’s philosophy, God was weak, Satan was dominant, and the weapons of hell were modern ideas in the world.
During and after the Russian Civil War, some of the Whites had fled to Germany as refugees. Some brought with them the foundational text of modern antisemitism, the fictional “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and many others the conviction that a global Jewish conspiracy was responsible for their defeat. White Judeobolshevism, arriving in Germany in 1919 and 1920, completed the education of Adolf Hitler as an antisemite. Until that moment, Hitler had presented the enemy of Germany as Jewish capitalism. Once convinced that Jews were responsible for both capitalism and communism, Hitler could take the final step and conclude, as he did in Mein Kampf, that Jews were the source of all ideas that threatened the German people. In this important respect, Hitler was indeed a pupil of the Russian White movement. Ilyin, the main White ideologist, wanted the world to know that Hitler was right.
As the 1930s passed, Ilyin began to doubt that Nazi Germany was advancing the cause of Russian fascism. This was natural, since Hitler regarded Russians as subhumans, and Germany supported European fascists only insofar as they were useful to the specific Nazi cause. Ilyin began to caution Russian Whites about Nazis, and came under suspicion from the German government. He lost his job and, in 1938, left Germany for Switzerland. He remained faithful, however, to his conviction that the White movement was anterior to Italian fascism and German National Socialism. In time, Russians would demonstrate a superior fascism.
From a safe Swiss vantage point near Zurich, Ilyin observed the outbreak of World War II. It was a confusing moment for both communists and their enemies, since the conflict began after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany reached an agreement known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Its secret protocol, which divided East European territories between the two powers, was an alliance in all but name. In September 1939, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, their armies meeting in the middle. Ilyin believed that the Nazi-Soviet alliance would not last, since Stalin would betray Hitler. In 1941, the reverse took place, as the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. Though Ilyin harbored reservations about the Nazis, he wrote of the German invasion of the USSR as a “judgment on Bolshevism.” After the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, when it became clear that Germany would likely lose the war, Ilyin changed his position again. Then, and in the years to follow, he would present the war as one of a series of Western attacks on Russian virtue.
Russian innocence was becoming one of Ilyin’s great themes. As a concept, it completed Ilyin’s fascist theory: the world was corrupt; it needed redemption from a nation capable of total politics; that nation was unsoiled Russia. As he aged, Ilyin dwelled on the Russian past, not as history, but as a cyclical myth of native virtue defended from external penetration. Russia was an immaculate empire, always under attack from all sides. A small territory around Moscow became the Russian Empire, the largest country of all time, without ever attacking anyone. Even as it expanded, Russia was the victim, because Europeans did not understand the profound virtue it was defending by taking more land. In Ilyin’s words, Russia has been subject to unceasing “continental blockade,” and so its entire past was one of “self-defense.” And so, “the Russian nation, since its full conversion to Christianity, can count nearly one thousand years of historical suffering.”
Although Ilyin wrote hundreds of tedious pages along these lines, he also made clear that it did not matter what had actually happened or what Russians actually did. That was meaningless history, those were mere facts. The truth about a nation, wrote Ilyin, was “pure and objective” regardless of the evidence, and the Russian truth was invisible and ineffable Godliness. Russia was not a country with individuals and institutions, even should it so appear, but an immortal living creature. “Russia is an organism of nature and the soul,” it was a “living organism,” a “living organic unity,” and so on. Ilyin wrote of “Ukrainians” within quotation marks, since in his view they were a part of the Russian organism. Ilyin was obsessed by the fear that people in the West would not understand this, and saw any mention of Ukraine as an attack on Russia. Because Russia is an organism, it “cannot be divided, only dissected.”
Ilyin’s conception of Russia’s political return to God required the abandonment not only of individuality and plurality, but also of humanity. The fascist language of organic unity, discredited by the war, remained central to Ilyin. In general, his thinking was not really altered by the war. He did not reject fascism, as did most of its prewar advocates, although he now did distinguish between what he regarded as better and worse forms of fascism. He did not partake in the general shift of European politics to the left, nor in the rehabilitation of democracy. Perhaps most importantly, he did not recognize that the age of European colonialism was passing. He saw Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, then far-flung empires ruled by right-wing authoritarian regimes, as exemplary.
World War II was not a “judgment on Bolshevism,” as Ilyin had imagined in 1941. Instead, the Red Army had emerged triumphant in 1945, Soviet borders had been extended west, and a new outer empire of replicate regimes had been established in Eastern Europe. The simple passage of time made it impossible to imagine in the 1940s, as Ilyin had in the 1920s, the members of the White emigration might someday return to power in Russia. Now he was writing their eulogies rather than their ideologies. What was needed instead was a blueprint for a post-Soviet Russia that would be legible in the future. Ilyin set about composing a number of constitutional proposals, as well as a shorter set of political essays. These last, published as Our tasks (Nashi zadachi), began his intellectual revival in post-Soviet Russia.
These postwar recommendations bear an unmistakable resemblance to prewar fascist systems, and are consistent with the metaphysical and ethical legitimations of fascism present in Ilyin’s major works. The “national dictator,” predicted Ilyin, would spring from somewhere beyond history, from some fictional realm. This Leader (Gosudar’) must be “sufficiently manly,” like Mussolini. The note of fragile masculinity is hard to overlook. “Power comes all by itself,” declared Ilyin, “to the strong man.” People would bow before “the living organ of Russia.” The Leader “hardens himself in just and manly service.”
In Ilyin’s scheme, this Leader would be personally and totally responsible for every aspect of political life, as chief executive, chief legislator, chief justice, and commander of the military. His executive power is unlimited. Any “political selection” should take place “on a formally undemocratic basis.” Democratic elections institutionalized the evil notion of individuality. “The principle of democracy,” Ilyin wrote, “was the irresponsible human atom.” Counting votes was to falsely accept “the mechanical and arithmetical understanding of politics.” It followed that “we must reject blind faith in the number of votes and its political significance.” Public voting with signed ballots will allow Russians to surrender their individuality. Elections were a ritual of submission of Russians before their Leader.
The problem with prewar fascism, according to Ilyin, had been the one-party state. That was one party too many. Russia should be a zero-party state, in that no party should control the state or exercise any influence on the course of events. A party represents only a segment of society, and segmentation is what is to be avoided. Parties can exist, but only as traps for the ambitious or as elements of the ritual of electoral subservience. (Members of Putin’s party were sent the article that makes this point in 2014.) The same goes for civil society: it should exist as a simulacrum. Russians should be allowed to pursue hobbies and the like, but only within the framework of a total corporate structure that included all social organizations. The middle classes must be at the very bottom of the corporate structure, bearing the weight of the entire system. They are the producers and consumers of facts and feelings in a system where the purpose is to overcome factuality and sensuality.
“Freedom for Russia,” as Ilyin understood it (in a text selectively quoted by Putin in 2014), would not mean freedom for Russians as individuals, but rather freedom for Russians to understand themselves as parts of a whole. The political system must generate, as Ilyin clarified, “the organic-spiritual unity of the government with the people, and the people with the government.” The first step back toward the Word would be “the metaphysical identity of all people of the same nation.” The “the evil nature of the ‘sensual’” could be banished, and “the empirical variety of human beings” itself could be overcome.
Russia today is a media-heavy authoritarian kleptocracy, not the religious totalitarian entity that Ilyin imagined. And yet, his concepts do help lift the obscurity from some of the more interesting aspects of Russian politics. Vladimir Putin, to take a very important example, is a post-Soviet politician who emerged from the realm of fiction. Since it is he who brought Ilyin’s ideas into high politics, his rise to power is part of Ilyin’s story as well.
Putin was an unknown when he was selected by post-Soviet Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, to be prime minister in 1999. Putin was chosen by political casting call. Yeltsin’s intimates, carrying out what they called “Operation Successor,” asked themselves who the most popular character in Russian television was. Polling showed that this was the hero of a 1970s program, a Soviet spy who spoke German. This fit Putin, a former KGB officer who had served in East Germany. Right after he was appointed prime minister by Yeltsin in September 1999, Putin gained his reputation through a bloodier fiction. When apartment buildings in Russian cities began to explode, Putin blamed Muslims and began a war in Chechnya. Contemporary evidence suggests that the bombs might have been planted by Russia’s own security organization, the FSB. Putin was elected president in 2000, and served until 2008.
In the early 2000s, Putin maintained that Russia could become some kind of rule-of-law state. Instead, he succeeded in bringing economic crime within the Russian state, transforming general corruption into official kleptocracy. Once the state became the center of crime, the rule of law became incoherent, inequality entrenched, and reform unthinkable. Another political story was needed. Because Putin’s victory over Russia’s oligarchs also meant control over their television stations, new media instruments were at hand. The Western trend towards infotainment was brought to its logical conclusion in Russia, generating an alternative reality meant to generate faith in Russian virtue but cynicism about facts. This transformation was engineered by Vladislav Surkov, the genius of Russian propaganda. He oversaw a striking move toward the world as Ilyin imagined it, a dark and confusing realm given shape only by Russian innocence. With the financial and media resources under control, Putin needed only, in the nice Russian term, to add the “spiritual resource.” And so, beginning in 2005, Putin began to rehabilitate Ilyin as a Kremlin court philosopher.
That year, Putin began to cite Ilyin in his addresses to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, and arranged for the reinterment of Ilyin’s remains in Russia. Then Surkov began to cite Ilyin. The propagandist accepted Ilyin’s idea that “Russian culture is the contemplation of the whole,” and summarizes his own work as the creation of a narrative of an innocent Russia surrounded by permanent hostility. Surkov’s enmity toward factuality is as deep as Ilyin’s, and like Ilyin, he tends to find theological grounds for it. Dmitry Medvedev, the leader of Putin’s political party, recommended Ilyin’s books to Russia’s youth. Ilyin began to figure in the speeches of the leaders of Russia’s tame opposition parties, the communists and the (confusingly-named, extreme-right) Liberal Democrats. These last few years, Ilyin has been cited by the head of the constitutional court, by the foreign minister, and by patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church.
After a four-year intermission between 2008 and 2012, during which Putin served as prime minister and allowed Medvedev to be president, Putin returned to the highest office. If Putin came to power in 2000 as hero from the realm of fiction, he returned in 2012 as the destroyer of the rule of law. In a minor key, the Russia of Putin’s time had repeated the drama of the Russia of Ilyin’s time. The hopes of Russian liberals for a rule-of-law state were again disappointed. Ilyin, who had transformed that failure into fascism the first time around, now had his moment. His arguments helped Putin transform the failure of his first period in office, the inability to introduce of the rule of law, into the promise for a second period in office, the confirmation of Russian virtue. If Russia could not become a rule-of-law state, it would seek to destroy neighbors that had succeeded in doing so or that aspired to do so. Echoing one of the most notorious proclamations of the Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt, Ilyin wrote that politics “is the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy.” In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Putin’s promises were not about law in Russia, but about the defeat of a hyper-legal neighboring entity.
The European Union, the largest economy in the world and Russia’s most important economic partner, is grounded on the assumption that international legal agreements provide the basis for fruitful cooperation among rule-of-law states. In late 2011 and early 2012, Putin made public a new ideology, based in Ilyin, defining Russia in opposition to this model of Europe. In an article in Izvestiia on October 3, 2011, Putin announced a rival Eurasian Union that would unite states that had failed to establish the rule of law. In Nezavisimaia Gazeta on January 23, 2012, Putin, citing Ilyin, presented integration among states as a matter of virtue rather than achievement. The rule of law was not a universal aspiration, but part of an alien Western civilization; Russian culture, meanwhile, united Russia with post-Soviet states such as Ukraine. In a third article, in Moskovskie Novosti on February 27, 2012, Putin drew the political conclusions. Ilyin had imagined that “Russia as a spiritual organism served not only all the Orthodox nations and not only all of the nations of the Eurasian landmass, but all the nations of the world.” Putin predicted that Eurasia would overcome the European Union and bring its members into a larger entity that would extend “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.”
Putin’s offensive against the rule of law began with the manner of his reaccession to the office of president of the Russian Federation. The foundation of any rule-of-law state is a principle of succession, the set of rules that allow one person to succeed another in office in a manner that confirms rather than destroys the system. The way that Putin returned to power in 2012 destroyed any possibility that such a principle could function in Russia in any foreseeable future. He assumed the office of president, with a parliamentary majority, thanks to presidential and parliamentary elections that were ostentatiously faked, during protests whose participants he condemned as foreign agents.
In depriving Russia of any accepted means by which he might be succeeded by someone else and the Russian parliament controlled by another party but his, Putin was following Ilyin’s recommendation. Elections had become a ritual, and those who thought otherwise were portrayed by a formidable state media as traitors. Sitting in a radio station with the fascist writer Alexander Prokhanov as Russians protested electoral fraud, Putin mused about what Ivan Ilyin would have to say about the state of Russia. “Can we say,” asked Putin rhetorically, “that our country has fully recovered and healed after the dramatic events that have occurred to us after the Soviet Union collapsed, and that we now have a strong, healthy state? No, of course she is still quite ill; but here we must recall Ivan Ilyin: ‘Yes, our country is still sick, but we did not flee from the bed of our sick mother.’”
The fact that Putin cited Ilyin in this setting is very suggestive, and that he knew this phrase suggests extensive reading. Be that as it may, the way that he cited it seems strange. Ilyin was expelled from the Soviet Union by the Cheka—the institution that was the predecessor of Putin’s employer, the KGB. For Ilyin, it was the foundation of the USSR, not its dissolution, that was the Russian sickness. As Ilyin told his Cheka interrogator at the time: “I consider Soviet power to be an inevitable historical outcome of the great social and spiritual disease which has been growing in Russia for several centuries.” Ilyin thought that KGB officers (of whom Putin was one) should be forbidden from entering politics after the end of the Soviet Union. Ilyin dreamed his whole life of a Soviet collapse.
Putin’s reinterment of Ilyin’s remains was a mystical release from this contradiction. Ilyin had been expelled from Russia by the Soviet security service; his corpse was reburied alongside the remains of its victims. Putin had Ilyin’s corpse interred at a monastery where the NKVD, the heir to the Cheka and the predecessor of the KGB, had interred the ashes of thousands of Soviet citizens executed in the Great Terror. When Putin later visited the site to lay flowers on Ilyin’s grave, he was in the company of an Orthodox monk who saw the NKVD executioners as Russian patriots and therefore good men. At the time of the reburial, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church was a man who had previously served the KGB as an agent. After all, Ilyin’s justification for mass murder was the same as that of the Bolsheviks: the defense of an absolute good. As critics of his second book in the 1920s put it, Ilyin was a “Chekist for God.” He was reburied as such, with all possible honors conferred by the Chekists and by the men of God—and by the men of God who were Chekists, and by the Chekists who were men of God.
Ilyin was returned, body and soul, to the Russia he had been forced to leave. And that very return, in its inattention to contradiction, in its disregard of fact, was the purest expression of respect for his legacy. To be sure, Ilyin opposed the Soviet system. Yet, once the USSR ceased to exist in 1991, it was history—and the past, for Ilyin, was nothing but cognitive raw material for a literature of eternal virtue. Modifying Ilyin’s views about Russian innocence ever so slightly, Russian leaders could see the Soviet Union not as a foreign imposition upon Russia, as Ilyin had, but rather as Russia itself, and so virtuous despite appearances. Any faults of the Soviet system became necessary Russian reactions to the prior hostility of the West.
Questions about the influence of ideas in politics are very difficult to answer, and it would be needlessly bold to make of Ilyin’s writings the pillar of the Russian system. For one thing, Ilyin’s vast body of work admits multiple interpretations. As with Martin Heidegger, another student of Husserl who supported Hitler, it is reasonable to ask how closely a man’s political support of fascism relates to a philosopher’s work. Within Russia itself, Ilyin is not the only native source of fascist ideas to be cited with approval by Vladimir Putin; Lev Gumilev is another. Contemporary Russian fascists who now rove through the public space, such as Aleksander Prokhanov and Aleksander Dugin, represent distinct traditions. It is Dugin, for example, who made the idea of “Eurasia” popular in Russia, and his references are German Nazis and postwar West European fascists. And yet, most often in the Russia of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is Ilyin’s ideas that to seem to satisfy political needs and to fill rhetorical gaps, to provide the “spiritual resource” for the kleptocratic state machine. In 2017, when the Russian state had so much difficulty commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ilyin was advanced as its heroic opponent. In a television drama about the revolution, he decried the evil of promising social advancement to Russians.
Russian policies certainly recall Ilyin’s recommendations. Russia’s 2012 law on “foreign agents,” passed right after Putin’s return to the office of the presidency, well represents Ilyin’s attitude to civil society. Ilyin believed that Russia’s “White Spirit” should animate the fascists of Europe; since 2013, the Kremlin has provided financial and propaganda support to European parties of the populist and extreme right. The Russian campaign against the “decadence” of the European Union, initiated in 2013, is in accord with Ilyin’s worldview. Ilyin’s scholarly effort followed his personal projection of sexual anxiety to others. First, Ilyin called Russia homosexual, then underwent therapy with his girlfriend, then blamed God. Putin first submitted to years of shirtless fur-and-feather photoshoots, then divorced his wife, then blamed the European Union for Russian homosexuality. Ilyin sexualized what he experienced as foreign threats. Jazz, for example, was a plot to induce premature ejaculation. When Ukrainians began in late 2013 to assemble in favor of a European future for their country, the Russian media raised the specter of a “homodictatorship.”
The case for Ilyin’s influence is perhaps easiest to make with respect to Russia’s new orientation toward Ukraine. Ukraine, like the Russian Federation, is a new country, formed from the territory of a Soviet republic in 1991. After Russia, it was the second-most populous republic of the Soviet Union, and it has a long border with Russia to the east and north as well as with European Union members to the west. For the first two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian-Ukrainian relations were defined by both sides according to international law, with Russian lawyers always insistent on very traditional concepts such as sovereignty and territorial integrity. When Putin returned to power in 2012, legalism gave way to colonialism. Since 2012, Russian policy toward Ukraine has been made on the basis of first principles, and those principles have been Ilyin’s. Putin’s Eurasian Union, a plan he announced with the help of Ilyin’s ideas, presupposed that Ukraine would join. Putin justified Russia’s attempt to draw Ukraine towards Eurasia by Ilyin’s “organic model” that made of Russia and Ukraine “one people.”
Ilyin’s idea of a Russian organism including Ukraine clashed with the more prosaic Ukrainian notion of reforming the Ukrainian state. In Ukraine in 2013, the European Union was a subject of domestic political debate, and was generally popular. An association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union was seen as a way to address the major local problem, the weakness of the rule of law. Through threats and promises, Putin was able in November 2013 to induce the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, not to sign the association agreement, which had already been negotiated. This brought young Ukrainians to the street to demonstrate in favor the agreement. When the Ukrainian government (urged on and assisted by Russia) used violence, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens assembled in Kyiv’s Independence Square. Their main postulate, as surveys showed at the time, was the rule of law. After a sniper massacre that left more than one hundred Ukrainians dead, Yanukovych fled to Russia. His main adviser, Paul Manafort, was next seen working as Donald Trump’s campaign manager.
By the time Yanukovych fled to Russia, Russian troops had already been mobilized for the invasion of Ukraine. As Russian troops entered Ukraine in February 2014, Russian civilizational rhetoric (of which Ilyin was a major source) captured the imagination of many Western observers. In the first half of 2014, the issues debated were whether or not Ukraine was or was not part of Russian culture, or whether Russian myths about the past were somehow a reason to invade a neighboring sovereign state. In accepting the way that Ilyin put the question, as a matter of civilization rather than law, Western observers missed the stakes of the conflict for Europe and the United States. Considering the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a clash of cultures was to render it distant and colorful and obscure; seeing it as an element of a larger assault on the rule of law would have been to realize that Western institutions were in peril. To accept the civilizational framing was also to overlook the basic issue of inequality. What pro-European Ukrainians wanted was to avoid Russian-style kleptocracy. What Putin needed was to demonstrate that such efforts were fruitless.
Ilyin’s arguments were everywhere as Russian troops entered Ukraine multiple times in 2014. As soldiers received their mobilization orders for the invasion of the Ukraine’s Crimean province in January 2014, all of Russia’s high-ranking bureaucrats and regional governors were sent a copy of Ilyin’s Our Tasks. After Russian troops occupied Crimea and the Russian parliament voted for annexation, Putin cited Ilyin again as justification. The Russian commander sent to oversee the second major movement of Russian troops into Ukraine, to the southeastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in summer 2014, described the war’s final goal in terms that Ilyin would have understood: “If the world were saved from demonic constructions such as the United States, it would be easier for everyone to live. And one of these days it will happen.”
Anyone following Russian politics could see in early 2016 that the Russian elite preferred Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee for president and then to defeat Hillary Clinton in the general election. In the spring of that year, Russian military intelligence was boasting of an effort to help Trump win. In the Russian assault on American democracy that followed, the main weapon was falsehood. Donald Trump is another masculinity-challenged kleptocrat from the realm of fiction, in his case that of reality television. His campaign was helped by the elaborate untruths that Russia distributed about his opponent. In office, Trump imitates Putin in his pursuit of political post-truth: first filling the public sphere with lies, then blaming the institutions whose purpose is to seek facts, and finally rejoicing in the resulting confusion. Russian assistance to Trump weakened American trust in the institutions that Russia has been unable to build. Such trust was already in decline, thanks to America’s own media culture and growing inequality.
Ilyin meant to be the prophet of our age, the post-Soviet age, and perhaps he is. His disbelief in this world allows politics to take place in a fictional one. He made of lawlessness a virtue so pure as to be invisible, and so absolute as to demand the destruction of the West. He shows us how fragile masculinity generates enemies, how perverted Christianity rejects Jesus, how economic inequality imitates innocence, and how fascist ideas flow into the postmodern. This is no longer just Russian philosophy. It is now American life.”
23 лютого 2024 р. Як все почалося; Третя світова війна, захоплення Америки та підрив демократії зрадником Трампом, вторгнення в Україну та падіння цивілізації
Наші секретні історії та лінії розлому часто виявляють приховані зв’язки та взаємозалежності, причому стосунки Америки та Росії в наших бурхливих вирах, підводних течіях, хвилях і зворотних течіях уздовж потоку часу є зразками хаотичних систем.
Російське вторгнення в Україну та захоплення американської держави зірковим агентом Путіна, зрадником Трампом під час викрадених виборів 2016 року, є пов’язаними подіями, які сигналізували та зробили можливою Третю світову війну, яка охопила нас на десяти різних сценах, внутрішніх фронтах обох серед них наші народи.
Як це сталося, що це означає і що робити?
У цьому контексті я з особливою наполегливістю вказую на екзистенціальну загрозу таємної влади, першочергову роль правдословів у закликанні імператора, який не має одягу, і співучасть мовчання перед лицем зла в цьому контексті. неоголошена світова війна, яку вдає наша влада, не схопила і не потрясла нас усіх, як щура в пащі лева. Невидима війна, про яку повідомляють лише її частини, а не в цілому, яка, як торнадо небуття, тепер пожирає нашу людність і, як багаття марнот, знищує наші претензії на цивілізацію, бо ми відступили від кидання слів до кидання каміння.
Як ми дізнаємося від Джона Кейджа в музиці, Гарольда Пінтера в театрі та Піта Мондріана в мистецтві, саме порожні місця визначають і впорядковують значення; і в історії саме до заглушених і стертих голосів ми повинні прислухатися найуважніше, бо тут порожнеча говорить нам про таємну владу та про ключові функції та стосунки, які влада повинна приховувати, щоб зберегти свою гегемонію над нами.
Звернемо увагу на людину за завісою.
Ми, люди, зараз живемо у світі «Ночі» Елі Візеля, і саме з його великого роману про нашу попередню боротьбу з фашизмом я запозичив коду про еру Трампа та нашу місію як американських патріотів і антифашистів; «Ми повинні прийняти чийсь бік. Нейтралітет допомагає гнобителю, а не жертві. Мовчання підбадьорює мучителя, а не мученого. Іноді ми повинні втручатися. Коли людське життя знаходиться під загрозою, коли людська гідність знаходиться під загрозою, національні кордони та чутливість стають неактуальними. Скрізь, де чоловіків і жінок переслідують через їхню расу, релігію чи політичні погляди, це місце повинно – в цей момент – стати центром Всесвіту».
Russian
23 февраля 2024 г. Как все начиналось; Третья мировая война, захват Америки и подрыв демократии предателем Трампом, вторжение на Украину и падение цивилизации
Наши тайные истории и линии разлома часто раскрывают скрытые отношения и взаимозависимости, причем истории Америки и России в наших бурных водоворотах, отливах, волнах и обратных течениях вдоль потока времени являются образцами хаотических систем.
Вторжение России на Украину и захват американского государства звездным агентом Путина предателем Трампом на украденных выборах 2016 года — это связанные события, которые сигнализировали и сделали возможной Третью мировую войну, охватившую нас на десяти различных театрах военных действий, в тылу обеих сторон. наши народы среди них.
Как это произошло, что это значит и что делать?
Здесь я отмечаю с особой настойчивостью и призывом Эй Рубе экзистенциальную угрозу тайной власти, главенствующую роль говорящих правду в вызове обнаженного императора и соучастие молчания перед лицом зла в этом контексте необъявленная мировая война, как делают вид наши власти, не захватила и не потрясла нас всех, как крыса в пасти льва. Невидимая война, о которой сообщается только по частям, а не в целом, которая, как торнадо небытия, теперь пожирает наше человечество и, как костер тщеславия, уничтожает наши претензии на цивилизацию, поскольку мы регрессировали от бросания слов к бросанию камней.
Как мы учимся у Джона Кейджа в музыке, Гарольда Пинтера в театре и Пита Мондриана в искусстве, именно пустые пространства определяют и упорядочивают смысл; а в истории именно к заглушенным и стертым голосам мы должны прислушиваться наиболее внимательно, поскольку здесь пустота говорит нам о тайной власти и о ключевых функциях и отношениях, которые власть должна скрывать, чтобы поддерживать свою гегемонию над нами.
Обратим внимание на человека за занавеской.
Мы, люди, сейчас живем в мире «Ночи» Эли Визеля, и именно из его великого романа о нашей предыдущей борьбе с фашизмом я позаимствовал код об эпохе Трампа и нашей формулировке миссии как американских патриотов и антифашистов; «Мы должны принять чью-то сторону. Нейтралитет помогает угнетателю, а не жертве. Молчание поощряет мучителя, а не мучимого. Иногда нам приходится вмешиваться. Когда человеческие жизни находятся под угрозой, когда человеческое достоинство находится под угрозой, национальные границы и чувствительность теряют значение. Где бы мужчины и женщины не подвергались преследованиям из-за их расы, религии или политических взглядов, это место должно – в этот момент – стать центром вселенной».
Here we are in the final year of the Biden Presidency which was intended to enact the Restoration of America after its fall to Russian propaganda influence and subversion by the Fourth Reich in the capture of the state by the Stolen Election of 2016, yet what has been changed?
We have abandoned our historic role as a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights throughout the world, of our allies and of the victims of atrocities and crimes against humanity which define the limits of the human; in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza, and countless other betrayals of the solidarity of all who hunger to be free and who resist death and dehumanization, imperial conquest and slavery by tyrants,
World War Three swirls invisible all around us, interpenetrating and poisoning everything our society holds just and true, on multiple fronts both here at home in America and in Russia which has unleashed this nightmare upon the world in her mad dreams of empire, on the battlefields of Syria and Libya, Belarus and Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh and West Africa, and now since October 7 possibly Gaza as Israel’s brutal war crimes engulf the whole of the region in a war of survival against Israeli ethnic cleansing and imperial conquest of her neighbors, and the dark gravity of Russia’s mass pulls her ally Iran and the whole of the Iranian Dominion of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen into orbit.
Yet we have failed to confront our destroyers beyond our borders just as we have failed to purge them from among us here, the fascists who lurk behind the legal fiction of the Republican Party and their brownshirts of the January 6 Insurrection, Putin who threatens us with nuclear annihilation and world conquest and dominion, and Netanyahu whose war crimes in which we are complicit as his sponsors of state terror, whose crimes we have sanctioned and authorized in sending warships to serve his power in place of ships of mercy and humanitarian aid to his many victims, and who together with Biden has delegitimized both our states and exposed our nations siren songs of democracy and human rights as the lies and illusions they may have always been.
This year begins like no other in our history, for we are beset by enemies both within and without, and our leaders have betrayed us.
Under such imposed conditions of struggle, and with civilizational collapse and the end of all possibilities of victory in achieving a free society of equals and a United Humankind as we enter the Age of Tyrants and centuries of total war which will consume us all and end with the extinction of humankind, I ask the question once again which was answered so differently by Tolstoy and Lenin; what is to be done?
As I answered the great and strange friend who set me on my life’s path in Beirut 1982, Jean Genet; I will not surrender.
So I offer all of you the Oath of the Resistance he offered me; We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.
Join us.
February 28 2023 First General History of the Third World War
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2022, One Hundred Days of the Invasion of Ukraine; For one hundred days now, a great struggle between democracy and tyranny, love and hate, hope and fear has been raging in Ukraine, where the fate of humankind hangs in the balance and our future possibilities of becoming human are being chosen in the great game of chance that is war.
Here, as in far too many times and places, a few unconquerable heroes and those who stand with them in solidarity as a band of brothers against the darkness of barbarian atavisms of brute fear and force and a nihilistic regime wherein only power has meaning and fear is the only means of exchange, die in the forlorn hope of buying with their lives time for civilization to awaken to the threat of fascist tyranny and imperial conquest.
How will we answer the test of our humanity in this moment of existential threat? Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a world of masters and slaves?
For these are the stakes of this game in which we now play, the Third World War; liberty or tyranny.
When those who would enslave us come for us, as they always do, let them find not a people subjugated by learned helplessness nor divided by hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, but a United Humankind unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
Herein is my witness of history and truth telling in this, the First General History of World War Three. As with all things human, it is also fiction except when it is not, myth when it can be, poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and of our limitless future possibilities of becoming human.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Herein I offer apology for my digressive ars poetica; once in Srinagar I sailed on the Lake of Dreams, was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision; and in such visions I fell into a sea of words, images, songs, histories, layered and interconnected with one another like a web of reflections and the echoes of voices lost in time, a Wilderness of Mirrors which capture and distort and extend ourselves infinitely in all directions.
Here is a shadow self of our histories which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail, legacies from which we must emerge to create ourselves anew and those which we cannot abandon without losing who we are.
Of the legacies of our histories and the many versions of our pasts I have often said; there are those which must be kept and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Here my intertexts are manifest, seize and shake me with tumultuous voices and untrustworthy purposes, for where do our histories end and we begin?
We cannot escape each other, my shadows and I.
War transforms the question of our authorship of ourselves with existential primacy; where do we ourselves end, and others begin? How may we negotiate this boundary of the Forbidden and interface with alien realms of human being, meaning, and value, with division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness or with solidarity, diversity, and inclusion, with fear or with love?
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
There are no Ukrainians, no Russians, no Israelis and no Palestinians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
Schindler’s List: What The Girl In The Red Coat Represents, Explained
A History of the Third World War, Part Nine: the Ukraine Theatre of War
This chapter you are reading now, and now are also writing, for it is each of us who will together choose a future for humankind. The nature of that choice is become unambiguous and simple with the invasion of Ukraine and the dawn of World War Three; tyranny or liberty?
In one of these choices and one only, we may win a future where something resembling ourselves looks back centuries from now on this moment of civilizational collapse or rebirth, with questioning, hope, and wonder.
“God Bless Us, every one” as Dickens wrote in A Christmas Carol, the story which founded the modern holiday and originated Liberation Theology in wedding Marx to the Sermon on the Mount. In this time of darkness, we must answer division with solidarity, fear with love, despair with hope, fascism and tyranny with resistance, and the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.
Here follows a three act play, being some of my journals of Mariupol
April 10 2022 Crimes Against Humanity in the City of Ghosts, Mariupol: A Witness of History
Torch of Liberty 