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Freshly added & binge-ready #AudioFiction!
Conversations with Ghosts | Dramatized supernatural drama
CONVERSATIONS WITH GHOSTS follows mausoleum attendant Mal Fleming as he tries to convince the spirits of Grey Briar Cemetery to pass on. Mal sits down with a new ghost to build a portrait of their life, death, and afterlife… all to help them release whatever still ties their soul to this reality....
https://www.theend.fyi/shows/conversations-with-ghosts -
Freshly added & binge-ready #AudioFiction!
Conversations with Ghosts | Dramatized supernatural drama
CONVERSATIONS WITH GHOSTS follows mausoleum attendant Mal Fleming as he tries to convince the spirits of Grey Briar Cemetery to pass on. Mal sits down with a new ghost to build a portrait of their life, death, and afterlife… all to help them release whatever still ties their soul to this reality....
https://www.theend.fyi/shows/conversations-with-ghosts -
Freshly added & binge-ready #AudioFiction!
Conversations with Ghosts | Dramatized supernatural drama
CONVERSATIONS WITH GHOSTS follows mausoleum attendant Mal Fleming as he tries to convince the spirits of Grey Briar Cemetery to pass on. Mal sits down with a new ghost to build a portrait of their life, death, and afterlife… all to help them release whatever still ties their soul to this reality....
https://www.theend.fyi/shows/conversations-with-ghosts -
The Downtown Raleigh Entertainment Guide Saturday Edition (October 11, 2025)
Downtown Raleigh is alive this Saturday, October 11, with a full slate of food tours, symphony performances, live music, wellness events, and fall festivities. Whether you’re in the mood for a magical treat, a family adventure, or an evening of art and culture, there’s something for everyone to enjoy in the heart of the city.
🍽️ A Taste of Downtown Raleigh Food Tour
Time: 2:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Location: City of Raleigh Museum
Embark on a delicious journey through downtown’s best local eateries with Taste Carolina Gourmet Food Tours. Explore historic sites while sampling some of Raleigh’s most talked-about flavors.
🎶 North Carolina Symphony: All Beethoven
Time: 8 p.m.
Location: North Carolina Symphony
Experience the genius of Beethoven performed live by the North Carolina Symphony. Expect an evening of world-class musicianship and timeless compositions in the heart of the city.
🧙♂️ Wizarding Weekend at Sugar Euphoria
Time: 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.
Location: Sugar Euphoria
Calling all wizards and muggles! Enjoy themed desserts, butterbeer cupcakes, and spellbinding treats at this magical bakery event. Perfect for families and Harry Potter fans alike.
🍷 15th Annual Korktoberfest Sale & Fundraiser
Time: 1 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Location: The Raleigh Wine Shop
Sip, shop, and support local charities at Korktoberfest, featuring special wine deals, raffles, and community celebration in partnership with The Raleigh Wine Shop.
🧘 Autumn Restore with Live Ukulele, Guitar, and Singing Bowls
Time: 1 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Location: Current Wellness
Recharge your spirit at this unique restorative yoga session enhanced with live music and healing vibrations from singing bowls and strings.
🥨 Crofton’s Pretzels at Wolfe & Porter
Time: 6 p.m. – Until Sold Out
Enjoy handcrafted pretzels from Crofton’s Pretzels while sipping local craft cocktails at Wolfe & Porter—a delicious downtown pairing you won’t want to miss.
🎸 Edward Crowther and Band with Lady Jane Grey
Time: 9 p.m. – 11 p.m.
Location: Slim’s Downtown
Catch a night of rock, rhythm, and local talent as Edward Crowther and Band take the stage with Lady Jane Grey at Slim’s, one of downtown Raleigh’s best live music spots.
🏛️ Fall African American Walking Tours
Times: Saturday 10–11 a.m., 1–2 p.m., 3–4 p.m. | Sunday 2–3 p.m.
Location: Pope House Museum
Explore Raleigh’s rich African American history with a guided tour through landmarks that tell the city’s cultural story.
🎯 Family Fun Day – Games!
Time: 11 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Location: City of Raleigh Museum
Bring the family downtown for a day of games, laughter, and interactive activities that celebrate community and learning.
👻 Haunted History Tour
Time: 4:45 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Location: Raleigh Walking Tours
Step into the spooky side of Raleigh’s past with this guided Haunted History Tour, featuring chilling tales and haunted landmarks.
💻 Marbles Kid Tech
Time: 1 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Location: Marbles Kids Museum
Kids can explore coding, robotics, and digital creativity at Marbles Kid Tech, where learning meets fun in a hands-on tech zone.
🍻 Raleigh Sip N’ Stroll Treasure Hunt – Walking Team Scavenger Hunt!
Time: 2 p.m. – 3 p.m.
Location: Crank Arm Brewing
Grab your friends for an afternoon of adventure, clues, and craft beer as you stroll through downtown Raleigh on this interactive scavenger hunt.
🎧 Saturday Night DJ Showcase
Time: 8 p.m. – Midnight
Location: Boatman Spirits Co.
Get ready for beats and cocktails at Boatman Spirits Co., featuring top local DJs spinning into the afterlife for a night of rhythm and energy.
👻 Sip n’ Stroll Raleigh Ghost Tour
Time: 7 p.m. – 8:15 p.m.
Location: Raleigh Walking Tours
Wrap up your Saturday with a spooky Sip n’ Stroll Ghost Tour—a guided evening walk blending eerie history with delicious drinks.
🌆 Experience Downtown Raleigh
This Saturday is packed with energy—from cultural tours and live performances to wellness workshops and nightlife. Whether you’re visiting or a long-time local, downtown Raleigh offers an experience that’s as vibrant as the fall season itself.
Your week, your city, your fun — stay connected with everything happening in the Raleigh at DoRaleigh.com
#Arts #BoatmanSpiritsCo_ #CityOfRaleighMuseum #DoRaleigh #DowntownRaleighEntertainmentGuide #events #Food #MarblesKidsMuseum #music #News #NorthCarolinaSymphony #PopeHouseMuseum #raleigh #RaleighEvents #RaleighFamilyFun #raleighFoodTours #RaleighGhostTours #RaleighLiveMusic #RaleighWineShop #SlimSDowntown
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The Downtown Raleigh Entertainment Guide Saturday Edition (October 11, 2025)
Downtown Raleigh is alive this Saturday, October 11, with a full slate of food tours, symphony performances, live music, wellness events, and fall festivities. Whether you’re in the mood for a magical treat, a family adventure, or an evening of art and culture, there’s something for everyone to enjoy in the heart of the city.
🍽️ A Taste of Downtown Raleigh Food Tour
Time: 2:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Location: City of Raleigh Museum
Embark on a delicious journey through downtown’s best local eateries with Taste Carolina Gourmet Food Tours. Explore historic sites while sampling some of Raleigh’s most talked-about flavors.
🎶 North Carolina Symphony: All Beethoven
Time: 8 p.m.
Location: North Carolina Symphony
Experience the genius of Beethoven performed live by the North Carolina Symphony. Expect an evening of world-class musicianship and timeless compositions in the heart of the city.
🧙♂️ Wizarding Weekend at Sugar Euphoria
Time: 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.
Location: Sugar Euphoria
Calling all wizards and muggles! Enjoy themed desserts, butterbeer cupcakes, and spellbinding treats at this magical bakery event. Perfect for families and Harry Potter fans alike.
🍷 15th Annual Korktoberfest Sale & Fundraiser
Time: 1 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Location: The Raleigh Wine Shop
Sip, shop, and support local charities at Korktoberfest, featuring special wine deals, raffles, and community celebration in partnership with The Raleigh Wine Shop.
🧘 Autumn Restore with Live Ukulele, Guitar, and Singing Bowls
Time: 1 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Location: Current Wellness
Recharge your spirit at this unique restorative yoga session enhanced with live music and healing vibrations from singing bowls and strings.
🥨 Crofton’s Pretzels at Wolfe & Porter
Time: 6 p.m. – Until Sold Out
Enjoy handcrafted pretzels from Crofton’s Pretzels while sipping local craft cocktails at Wolfe & Porter—a delicious downtown pairing you won’t want to miss.
🎸 Edward Crowther and Band with Lady Jane Grey
Time: 9 p.m. – 11 p.m.
Location: Slim’s Downtown
Catch a night of rock, rhythm, and local talent as Edward Crowther and Band take the stage with Lady Jane Grey at Slim’s, one of downtown Raleigh’s best live music spots.
🏛️ Fall African American Walking Tours
Times: Saturday 10–11 a.m., 1–2 p.m., 3–4 p.m. | Sunday 2–3 p.m.
Location: Pope House Museum
Explore Raleigh’s rich African American history with a guided tour through landmarks that tell the city’s cultural story.
🎯 Family Fun Day – Games!
Time: 11 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Location: City of Raleigh Museum
Bring the family downtown for a day of games, laughter, and interactive activities that celebrate community and learning.
👻 Haunted History Tour
Time: 4:45 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Location: Raleigh Walking Tours
Step into the spooky side of Raleigh’s past with this guided Haunted History Tour, featuring chilling tales and haunted landmarks.
💻 Marbles Kid Tech
Time: 1 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Location: Marbles Kids Museum
Kids can explore coding, robotics, and digital creativity at Marbles Kid Tech, where learning meets fun in a hands-on tech zone.
🍻 Raleigh Sip N’ Stroll Treasure Hunt – Walking Team Scavenger Hunt!
Time: 2 p.m. – 3 p.m.
Location: Crank Arm Brewing
Grab your friends for an afternoon of adventure, clues, and craft beer as you stroll through downtown Raleigh on this interactive scavenger hunt.
🎧 Saturday Night DJ Showcase
Time: 8 p.m. – Midnight
Location: Boatman Spirits Co.
Get ready for beats and cocktails at Boatman Spirits Co., featuring top local DJs spinning into the afterlife for a night of rhythm and energy.
👻 Sip n’ Stroll Raleigh Ghost Tour
Time: 7 p.m. – 8:15 p.m.
Location: Raleigh Walking Tours
Wrap up your Saturday with a spooky Sip n’ Stroll Ghost Tour—a guided evening walk blending eerie history with delicious drinks.
🌆 Experience Downtown Raleigh
This Saturday is packed with energy—from cultural tours and live performances to wellness workshops and nightlife. Whether you’re visiting or a long-time local, downtown Raleigh offers an experience that’s as vibrant as the fall season itself.
Your week, your city, your fun — stay connected with everything happening in the Raleigh at DoRaleigh.com
#Arts #BoatmanSpiritsCo_ #CityOfRaleighMuseum #DoRaleigh #DowntownRaleighEntertainmentGuide #events #Food #MarblesKidsMuseum #music #News #NorthCarolinaSymphony #PopeHouseMuseum #raleigh #RaleighEvents #RaleighFamilyFun #raleighFoodTours #RaleighGhostTours #RaleighLiveMusic #RaleighWineShop #SlimSDowntown
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The Downtown Raleigh Entertainment Guide Saturday Edition (October 11, 2025)
Downtown Raleigh is alive this Saturday, October 11, with a full slate of food tours, symphony performances, live music, wellness events, and fall festivities. Whether you’re in the mood for a magical treat, a family adventure, or an evening of art and culture, there’s something for everyone to enjoy in the heart of the city.
🍽️ A Taste of Downtown Raleigh Food Tour
Time: 2:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Location: City of Raleigh Museum
Embark on a delicious journey through downtown’s best local eateries with Taste Carolina Gourmet Food Tours. Explore historic sites while sampling some of Raleigh’s most talked-about flavors.
🎶 North Carolina Symphony: All Beethoven
Time: 8 p.m.
Location: North Carolina Symphony
Experience the genius of Beethoven performed live by the North Carolina Symphony. Expect an evening of world-class musicianship and timeless compositions in the heart of the city.
🧙♂️ Wizarding Weekend at Sugar Euphoria
Time: 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.
Location: Sugar Euphoria
Calling all wizards and muggles! Enjoy themed desserts, butterbeer cupcakes, and spellbinding treats at this magical bakery event. Perfect for families and Harry Potter fans alike.
🍷 15th Annual Korktoberfest Sale & Fundraiser
Time: 1 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Location: The Raleigh Wine Shop
Sip, shop, and support local charities at Korktoberfest, featuring special wine deals, raffles, and community celebration in partnership with The Raleigh Wine Shop.
🧘 Autumn Restore with Live Ukulele, Guitar, and Singing Bowls
Time: 1 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Location: Current Wellness
Recharge your spirit at this unique restorative yoga session enhanced with live music and healing vibrations from singing bowls and strings.
🥨 Crofton’s Pretzels at Wolfe & Porter
Time: 6 p.m. – Until Sold Out
Enjoy handcrafted pretzels from Crofton’s Pretzels while sipping local craft cocktails at Wolfe & Porter—a delicious downtown pairing you won’t want to miss.
🎸 Edward Crowther and Band with Lady Jane Grey
Time: 9 p.m. – 11 p.m.
Location: Slim’s Downtown
Catch a night of rock, rhythm, and local talent as Edward Crowther and Band take the stage with Lady Jane Grey at Slim’s, one of downtown Raleigh’s best live music spots.
🏛️ Fall African American Walking Tours
Times: Saturday 10–11 a.m., 1–2 p.m., 3–4 p.m. | Sunday 2–3 p.m.
Location: Pope House Museum
Explore Raleigh’s rich African American history with a guided tour through landmarks that tell the city’s cultural story.
🎯 Family Fun Day – Games!
Time: 11 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Location: City of Raleigh Museum
Bring the family downtown for a day of games, laughter, and interactive activities that celebrate community and learning.
👻 Haunted History Tour
Time: 4:45 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Location: Raleigh Walking Tours
Step into the spooky side of Raleigh’s past with this guided Haunted History Tour, featuring chilling tales and haunted landmarks.
💻 Marbles Kid Tech
Time: 1 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Location: Marbles Kids Museum
Kids can explore coding, robotics, and digital creativity at Marbles Kid Tech, where learning meets fun in a hands-on tech zone.
🍻 Raleigh Sip N’ Stroll Treasure Hunt – Walking Team Scavenger Hunt!
Time: 2 p.m. – 3 p.m.
Location: Crank Arm Brewing
Grab your friends for an afternoon of adventure, clues, and craft beer as you stroll through downtown Raleigh on this interactive scavenger hunt.
🎧 Saturday Night DJ Showcase
Time: 8 p.m. – Midnight
Location: Boatman Spirits Co.
Get ready for beats and cocktails at Boatman Spirits Co., featuring top local DJs spinning into the afterlife for a night of rhythm and energy.
👻 Sip n’ Stroll Raleigh Ghost Tour
Time: 7 p.m. – 8:15 p.m.
Location: Raleigh Walking Tours
Wrap up your Saturday with a spooky Sip n’ Stroll Ghost Tour—a guided evening walk blending eerie history with delicious drinks.
🌆 Experience Downtown Raleigh
This Saturday is packed with energy—from cultural tours and live performances to wellness workshops and nightlife. Whether you’re visiting or a long-time local, downtown Raleigh offers an experience that’s as vibrant as the fall season itself.
Your week, your city, your fun — stay connected with everything happening in the Raleigh at DoRaleigh.com
#Arts #BoatmanSpiritsCo_ #CityOfRaleighMuseum #DoRaleigh #DowntownRaleighEntertainmentGuide #events #Food #MarblesKidsMuseum #music #News #NorthCarolinaSymphony #PopeHouseMuseum #raleigh #RaleighEvents #RaleighFamilyFun #raleighFoodTours #RaleighGhostTours #RaleighLiveMusic #RaleighWineShop #SlimSDowntown
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The Downtown Raleigh Entertainment Guide Saturday Edition (October 11, 2025)
Downtown Raleigh is alive this Saturday, October 11, with a full slate of food tours, symphony performances, live music, wellness events, and fall festivities. Whether you’re in the mood for a magical treat, a family adventure, or an evening of art and culture, there’s something for everyone to enjoy in the heart of the city.
🍽️ A Taste of Downtown Raleigh Food Tour
Time: 2:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Location: City of Raleigh Museum
Embark on a delicious journey through downtown’s best local eateries with Taste Carolina Gourmet Food Tours. Explore historic sites while sampling some of Raleigh’s most talked-about flavors.
🎶 North Carolina Symphony: All Beethoven
Time: 8 p.m.
Location: North Carolina Symphony
Experience the genius of Beethoven performed live by the North Carolina Symphony. Expect an evening of world-class musicianship and timeless compositions in the heart of the city.
🧙♂️ Wizarding Weekend at Sugar Euphoria
Time: 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.
Location: Sugar Euphoria
Calling all wizards and muggles! Enjoy themed desserts, butterbeer cupcakes, and spellbinding treats at this magical bakery event. Perfect for families and Harry Potter fans alike.
🍷 15th Annual Korktoberfest Sale & Fundraiser
Time: 1 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Location: The Raleigh Wine Shop
Sip, shop, and support local charities at Korktoberfest, featuring special wine deals, raffles, and community celebration in partnership with The Raleigh Wine Shop.
🧘 Autumn Restore with Live Ukulele, Guitar, and Singing Bowls
Time: 1 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Location: Current Wellness
Recharge your spirit at this unique restorative yoga session enhanced with live music and healing vibrations from singing bowls and strings.
🥨 Crofton’s Pretzels at Wolfe & Porter
Time: 6 p.m. – Until Sold Out
Enjoy handcrafted pretzels from Crofton’s Pretzels while sipping local craft cocktails at Wolfe & Porter—a delicious downtown pairing you won’t want to miss.
🎸 Edward Crowther and Band with Lady Jane Grey
Time: 9 p.m. – 11 p.m.
Location: Slim’s Downtown
Catch a night of rock, rhythm, and local talent as Edward Crowther and Band take the stage with Lady Jane Grey at Slim’s, one of downtown Raleigh’s best live music spots.
🏛️ Fall African American Walking Tours
Times: Saturday 10–11 a.m., 1–2 p.m., 3–4 p.m. | Sunday 2–3 p.m.
Location: Pope House Museum
Explore Raleigh’s rich African American history with a guided tour through landmarks that tell the city’s cultural story.
🎯 Family Fun Day – Games!
Time: 11 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Location: City of Raleigh Museum
Bring the family downtown for a day of games, laughter, and interactive activities that celebrate community and learning.
👻 Haunted History Tour
Time: 4:45 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Location: Raleigh Walking Tours
Step into the spooky side of Raleigh’s past with this guided Haunted History Tour, featuring chilling tales and haunted landmarks.
💻 Marbles Kid Tech
Time: 1 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Location: Marbles Kids Museum
Kids can explore coding, robotics, and digital creativity at Marbles Kid Tech, where learning meets fun in a hands-on tech zone.
🍻 Raleigh Sip N’ Stroll Treasure Hunt – Walking Team Scavenger Hunt!
Time: 2 p.m. – 3 p.m.
Location: Crank Arm Brewing
Grab your friends for an afternoon of adventure, clues, and craft beer as you stroll through downtown Raleigh on this interactive scavenger hunt.
🎧 Saturday Night DJ Showcase
Time: 8 p.m. – Midnight
Location: Boatman Spirits Co.
Get ready for beats and cocktails at Boatman Spirits Co., featuring top local DJs spinning into the afterlife for a night of rhythm and energy.
👻 Sip n’ Stroll Raleigh Ghost Tour
Time: 7 p.m. – 8:15 p.m.
Location: Raleigh Walking Tours
Wrap up your Saturday with a spooky Sip n’ Stroll Ghost Tour—a guided evening walk blending eerie history with delicious drinks.
🌆 Experience Downtown Raleigh
This Saturday is packed with energy—from cultural tours and live performances to wellness workshops and nightlife. Whether you’re visiting or a long-time local, downtown Raleigh offers an experience that’s as vibrant as the fall season itself.
Your week, your city, your fun — stay connected with everything happening in the Raleigh at DoRaleigh.com
#Arts #BoatmanSpiritsCo_ #CityOfRaleighMuseum #DoRaleigh #DowntownRaleighEntertainmentGuide #events #Food #MarblesKidsMuseum #music #News #NorthCarolinaSymphony #PopeHouseMuseum #raleigh #RaleighEvents #RaleighFamilyFun #raleighFoodTours #RaleighGhostTours #RaleighLiveMusic #RaleighWineShop #SlimSDowntown
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interação
alguns dos meus gostos :BongoCatHearts:#exo #nct127 #wayv #ive #monstax #seventeen #woodz #astro #aespa #shinee #vixx #nuest
#newjeans #cix #taeyeon #leehi #katie #dpr #jooyoung #dean #zhaixiaowen #zhuzhengting #xiaozhan #wangyibobandas: metallica, motionless in white, depeche mode, bring me the horizon, my chemical romance, sisters of mercy, the gazette, buck-tick, dir en grey, ghost, arch enemy, fresno
novels: #svsss, #mdzs, #tgcf, #fgep, #2ha (lendo)
o que temos em comum?
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Reflections on Deep Space 9
I’ve been (re)watching all of Star Trek in approximate stardate order (approximate because apart from anything else stardates are inconsistent across the series). I’ve just watched the final episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, so of course I have some extremely strong opinions about it.
Historical background
Star Trek: Deep Space 9 began broadcasting while its predecessor Star Trek: The Next Generation was still on the air. It is almost invariably discussed in terms of its various firsts: first Star Trek show made without Gene Roddenberry’s involvement; first to air simultaneously with another Star Trek, first with a black lead, first where the lead was a commander, not a captain (at first, anyway), first set on a space station, first where not all the main characters were in Starfleet, and so on.
I think it’s somewhat notable that, creatively anyway, at least one of these firsts was also a last: there’s never been another stationary Star Trek. Indeed, alert readers may have noticed this is a contradiction in terms. The showrunners eventually realised they really needed a proper ship and introduced the USS Defiant to serve as as a means of getting off the station from time to time. Similarly, perhaps aware of the optics of having the various white leads explicitly outrank the only main black lead on Trek, they eventually promoted Benjamin Sisko. Twenty years later, a different set of showrunners gave themselves a near-identical problem on Star Trek: Discovery and likewise solved it by making Michael Burnham, the first black female lead on Star Trek, a captain (although she was, oddly, a ‘co-captain’).
Space: The Final… Outpost, I suppose
Overall, DS9 is probably the most consistent of all the Star Trek shows. The Original Series was notoriously all over the place, The Next Generation was, just as notoriously, pretty poor for the first two seasons and also experienced a significant drop in quality in season 7, likely because the producers had stretched themselves too thin with TNG and DS9 airing simultaneously, and Star Trek: Voyager and the first TNG film, Star Trek Generations, also in production. DS9, by contrast, starts pretty strong and is mostly good to very good all the way through (although I do think that, like TNG, the middle seasons are the strongest). Unlike Voyager, there aren’t any characters that feel oddly pointless (Harry Kim) or just plain annoying (Neelix1). It has a much stronger sense of self than the later, strangely messy shows2, and that carries it through the odd rough patch.
The acting is also generally better than it had been on Trek up to that point. I have a theory that the overall quality of mainstream film and TV acting started to get a hell of a lot better in the ’90s but no theory as to why this is. Just look at how good someone like Michael B. Jordan is3 compared to the people we got starring in blockbuster films in the ’80s, for example; he absolutely blows away Stallone or Schwarzenegger or anyone else you care to name. DS9 may be an early example of that, bar a couple of performances which I’ll come to in a moment. Right from the start, Nana Visitor, René Auberjonois, Armin Shimerman and Colm Meaney4 (returning from TNG) are all excellent, as are recurring guest stars Andrew Robinson, Marc Alaimo, Louise Fletcher (who was, after all, an Oscar winning actress), Aron Eisenberg and Max Grodénchik5. Siddig el Fadil and Terry Farrell wobble early on, but both find their feet eventually, as the writers work out what they want to do with the characters and learn how to play to the actors’ strengths. Both also benefit later from being paired up with actors with whom they have great chemistry (respectively, Meaney and Michael Dorn, likewise returning from TNG, as Worf, from season 4 on), eventually getting some of the best episodes in the whole thing. Where the space station concept works well is in allowing them to have that strong recurring cast, who slowly build relationships with many of the regulars. The recurring guests introduced later on are also all fantastic: Casey Biggs, Jeffrey Combs and JG Hertzler6, in particular, are perfectly cast and routinely excellent.
The only major fly in the ointment as far as acting goes is Avery Brooks. I find him to be an utterly baffling actor, not least because I know that many people absolutely love him, whereas my view of him is that he cannot act at all.
Now, look, I could hardly enjoy Star Trek if I couldn’t put up with the odd wooden performance. The problems with Brooks come not when he’s wooden, though he often is, but that almost every time he does emote, he’s bizarre. People often say he got better when he shaved his head and grew a beard and this is true – but we’re coming from a low base here. And his fundamental issues never went away. Look at his performance in the first episode, ‘Emissary’, where he over-reads the line ‘We just can’t leave her!’7 so much – and so badly – that it’s unintentionally hilarious. Compare this to his climatic scene with Gul Dukat in the very last episode, where he also overdoes the line ‘I am!‘ to similar effect. His much-vaunted performances in ‘Far Beyond the Stars’ and ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ have the exact same problems: whenever he tries to show a strong emotion, it’s overdone (as in ‘Stars’); when he tries to just get through a scene without a single strong emotion, whether that’s because it’s a paint by numbers scene or one where there’s meant to be an ambiguity, he’s wooden (as in ‘Moonlight’). All he really has going for him is a beautiful voice8, but this really isn’t enough. His performance in DS9 does not encourage me to seek out his other work, but perhaps he’s just woefully miscast as Sisko, or poorly directed, and really shines elsewhere.
No Gods, No Masters
I think some of the issues with Sisko are the fault of the writing, particularly his plot arc as the Emissary to the Prophets (Bajoran gods/wormhole aliens). Trying to examine religion in Star Trek was a good idea. After all, most of the world and most of the USA is still very religious. It’s long-established in the Trek universe that alien cultures have their own religious beliefs, even the hyper-logical Vulcans, including various prophets, gods and ceremonies. In our own culture, where it’s been obvious for centuries that an interventionist god doesn’t – indeed, cannot – exist, there are still a great many religious people, and it’s not at all clear that that should change by the time the 24th century rolls around9. Additionally, there have always been plenty of godlike beings in Star Trek, from Trelaine, to that thing that can’t explain what it wants with a starship, to Q. It makes sense to explore this aspect of humanity more deeply than can be done with a single episode or recurring character.
But is it well-handled in DS9? I don’t think so. The Bajorans see the Prophets as gods and their home, the wormhole to the Gamma quadrant, as the Celestial Temple. However… they’re wrong, aren’t they? The wormhole is a wormhole, not a temple, and the things that live in it really are just aliens without a linear sense of time. Kai Winn, Louise Fletcher’s character, is not wrong to argue in the final few episodes that the Prophets don’t seem actually to care very much (or at all) about Bajor, Bajorans or even their Emissary, Sisko, who they arbitrarily whisk away to live with them, he having apparently served his purpose on this corporeal plain by pushing Gul Dukat off a cliff10, forcing him to abandon his friends and family forever, for no reason.
The concept of a species that doesn’t experience or understand linear time is really interesting and also a very Star Trek kind of idea. There’s genuine interest and bathos in the idea that the Bajorans have been worshipping these entities that not only do not but cannot understand them at all; the Prophets don’t seem to know what time is until they meet Sisko and he explains it to them, which storngly suggests they’ve never seriously interacted with the Bajorans at all. But this interesting idea gradually falls away and the writers, out of nothing more than inertia, turn the Prophets into traditional ‘good’ gods, complete with some opposite, ‘evil’ fallen angel/fire demon types in the form of the Pah Wraiths (who want to set the entire universe on fire, for some reason, but can’t, for some reason).11 This of course sticks the writers with a fictional version of the problem of evil12. In the real world, the solution to the problem of evil is that God isn’t real. In Deep Space 9, the gods/Prophets are real, and so the problem of evil cannot be solved. They’re just totally useless as gods.
The interesting notion of the uncaring not-actually-gods is undermined further whenever the Prophets act more like ‘traditional’ gods with an interest in Bajor, which they do more and more as the series goes on, culminating in the revelation that ‘the Sisko’ is a Jesus analogue who the Prophets actually created in order to fulfill the destined destruction of Gul Dukat and the Kosst Amojan13, both of which again, just fall off a cliff. Why do they need a special magic man to do the job of pushing a book and a person off a cliff? Anyone can push someone off a cliff. And why didn’t they just tell Sisko – or, again, anyone, really – to destroy the book at any given time in history? This book, the origins of which are never explained, is totally useless. Literally all it can do is release the Pah Wraiths (and thus destroy the universe14) and make Gul Dukat go blind, so why can’t an immortal, non-linear race of aliens who can speak to anyone at any time using psychic alien powers just tell someone to chuck it into a warp engine or out of an airlock? Or not write it?
Because gods move in mysterious ways!
This is not actually an acceptable argument in real life. It’s a clever-sounding way of saying ‘I don’t know’ and also a major reason we know that this type of god doesn’t exist: history unfolds in a way completely indistinguishable from random chance because that is, in fact, what is happening. You don’t need a guiding intelligence to the universe to make statistical chance happen15. However, this is a still more unsatisfying answer in narrative fiction. ‘Things just happen all the time for no particular reason’ is not a story.
The end result is that the conclusion to Sisko’s arc is unsatisfying. We’re presented with this guy who is a dedicated family man, who feels a bit ambivalent about his career in Starfleet and is considering the possibility that he may have to drop his career to be a good father to his son. He then has a third role, of Emissary to some annoying aliens, thrust upon him. He gradually comes to embrace all three of these identities and find some sort of peace and equilibrium within himself – only to then very suddenly abandon both career and family because a not very competent god told him to, for no reason that we’re ever given. This is annoying writing. It might even have been better to leave it totally ambiguous as to whether he died in the Fire Caves rather than insisting there was some reason that he just can’t tell Kassidy (or us). And he doesn’t speak to poor old Jake at all!
So, I find it difficult to sing unqualified praise for a series where the main character and his arc are both flawed as written and executed badly onscreen.
Moral grey areas
DS9 has also been much-praised for introducing moral ambiguity into the Star Trek universe. This is very welcome in the character of Kira Nerys, a former terrorist who now finds herself in a position of authority as chief representative on DS9 of the Bajoran provisional government. She’s gone from leader of a terrorist cell, carrying out bombings, sabotage and assassinations, to an army major. This outsider to insider journey makes her different from previous Trek characters. She’s the first really good female role the series had16 and provides a fascinating point of contrast to the upstanding citizens of the Federation, most of them male, that we’d seen up to this point. She’s deeply religious, a warrior, frequently (and understandably) angry about both the past and the present. The show neither blames her for having been a terrorist but nor does it ever entirely let her off the hook. Right up to the end, she’s explaining to people who would quite like to kill her that they are going to have to kill their own people if they want to win a revolution. It’s intense and difficult, but also difficult to argue with: after all, she’s right and it largely works (and, in a neat twist, the person who most objects to the idea of killing his own people in the name of the revolution is later killed, in the name of the revolution, by one of his own). Kira never apologises for her actions in the Resistance and never forgives the Cardassians as a group, although she works with them when she has to. Her arc works through never entirely resolving the ambiguity of her position. By series’ end, she’s had one last successful go as a terrorist, ironically fighting for the people who oppressed her planet for so many years, before she returns to Deep Space 9 as the commanding officer, but still outside of Starfleet and the Federation.
Kira really hits the ground running as a character. The first really stunning episode of the show is episode 19, ‘Duet’, which I don’t think the show topped till ‘The Visitor’ (more on which later). Kira meets a man she thinks is a war criminal, but who insists he isn’t. I don’t actually want to spoil the plot of this episode. You really should just watch it. It’s really impressive that DS9 delivers an all-time great episode so early on in its run.
Likewise, Odo is a great character. He’s a variation on a key Trek trope, the alien outsider who doesn’t fully understand the human (and Bajoran, Ferengi and Cardassian) people he lives among, but wishes to understand them better, and to be like them in key ways. In TOS and TNG, this role was taken by Spock and Data, who became the most beloved characters on their shows,17 so Auberjonois has some big Beatles boots to fill. The variation the writers came up with is of an alien who is not only living among aliens, but also not in his ‘natural’ state physically: he’s a shapeshifter, a species that doesn’t have a single form and spends most of its time linked to some indeterminately massive number of its fellows in a gigantic ocean of sapient goo, known as ‘the Great Link’, located on the other side of the Galaxy. Just as Spock and Data relied on abstract non-emotional frameworks to guide them (logic and a broadly defined positivism), Odo relies on justice. When he finally meets his fellow Changelings, he soon discovers they’re a race of imperialistic genocidaires, so that his sense of justice forces him to reject them. Again, the series maintains this ambiguity throughout: he recognises both that he can never truly be himself on Deep Space 9, among ‘solids’, out of his natural state, but that he also cannot be himself if he joins the Great Link while they’re still pursuing a war, because that would violate his sense of justice.
Like Kira, Odo came of age in the show’s ‘past’ during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. He likewise had a morally ambiguous role as a sort of police officer on the station, trying to find some balance between the violent, oppressive ‘justice’ of the Cardassians and his own still-evolving ideas of what justice should involve. As we see in various flashbacks, he didn’t always succeed but, as the show also makes clear, it would’ve been impossible for him to achieve justice while working with the Cardassians. As with Kira, the show makes it clear that he could have behaved differently, but never comes down on one side or the other as to whether or what he should have done.
In Odo’s case, his arc ends in a satisfying way, because the contradiction that animates him isn’t actually internal or inherent to him; once the external issue of the war goes away, he’s able to rejoin the Link. It’s still a wrench for him, because he has to leave Kira, but it makes sense: the idea of romantic love was something he’d learned from the Solids, so it’s something he’s able to leave behind.
Shades of… black? Evil? What do you call this colour? War crime grey?
Where the moral grey areas don’t work is when the writers try to create them within the Federation itself. At their absolute worst, major characters are simply allowed to commit crimes – serious crimes – that they get away with when the status quo is restored at the end of the episode. There are three particularly egregious examples of this.
The first is with Jadzia Dax, during one of her early pre-Worf episodes in which Farrell very much fails to give the impression that she’s several hundred years old. Dax goes on a mission of vengeance with a group of Klingons, so she’s party to what, in the Federation, is clearly murder, but to the Klingons is justified as part of a blood feud. Sisko explicitly warns her not to do it. She does it anyway. It’s obviously murder, but her entire comeuppance is that Sisko gives her an annoyed look when she comes back to the station. That’s it. Is this really Starfleet’s attitude to officers violating a direct order in order to take part in a – successful! – conspiracy to murder someone?
Apparently it is! Because, much later, Worf and Dax go on holiday to Risa, the sex pleasure planet. Worf decides that he doesn’t like sex pleasure, so he joins a group of terrorists for the weekend. Again, he is simply allowed to get away with this. Perhaps remembering that she also went on a terrorism-themed jolly once, Dax doesn’t even break up with him. Nobody ever raises the time Worf joined a terrorist organisation for a bit.
Starfleet’s shockingly lax attitude to criminality in its officers continues, however. in ‘For the Uniform’, when Sisko is faced with a (different) terrorist group, the Maquis, he responds by, I’m not kidding, committing an act of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing, by poisoning a planet’s atmosphere in such a way that it won’t be able to support humans (or similar) for fifty years. This is, unambiguously, a war crime and a crime against humanity. Having done this, with scarcely a single objection from the crew, he threatens to do it several more times unless the Maquis surrender. By the end of the episode, everyone’s laughing about it.
In a lot of the writing about DS9, it seems to be assumed that the society depicted in the earlier series was a morally unambiguous utopia. However, this is not the case at all and it’s honestly quite odd that anyone thinks so. Apart from the many times the Federation is nearly destroyed by conspiracy or invasion, some of the most celebrated episodes in TOS and TNG depict the Federation, Starfleet and the people within it as deeply flawed characters, who force our heroes into uncomfortable situations. ‘The Doomsday Machine’ sees the crew having to survive when they’re given suicidal orders by a revenge-obsessed captain, for example, and Kirk frequently cheats, bluffs and lies when he has to, including to his superior officers. His senior staff spend the entire time bickering and McCoy is kind of a racist. Utopia?
‘The Measure of a Man’, one of the most celebrated TNG episodes sees the Federation threatening to dismantle Data, potentially killing him in the process, because they think it might be useful to do so. Data has to go through an entire trial to prove to the Federation that he exists. Riker’s forced to act as the prosecution for his friend. Okay, Data and Picard win in the end, but ‘proving you have the right not to be dismantled simply because it seems like it might be convenient to dismantle you’ is hardly the stuff of utopia, is it?
‘The Measure of a Man’ is a perfect example of what makes for a good exploration of ethics in Star Trek (and sci-fi more broadly). It needs to take a moral issue that is not a solved issue, then add a sci-fi element. So, the questions in ‘The Measure of a Man’ are, What does society owe to the individual (and vice-versa)? (A moral issue we haven’t solved, hence the existence of democratic politics); and, Do androids count as individuals with rights? (which is, of course, the sci-fi element). In the episode, we as the audience naturally side with Data, because we know him. But the points made by Bruce Maddox (and by Riker, acting for the prosecution), are valid. Data is a machine. It would be really useful to have a Data on every ship in Starfleet. Where they collapse is in the fact that Data is a machine who can express real views about himself, and he does not want to be dismantled.
In Star Trek: Insurrection, there’s a similar situation in that Starfleet wants to do something and the crew of the Enterprise want to stop them. The reason it works much less well than ‘The Measure of the Man’ is that, while it has the sci-fi element (a mysterious anti-aging energy), the thing Starfleet wants to do is just wrong and it is a solved moral question: it is never okay to forcibly displace an entire population18 (are you listening, Captain Sisko?). We know this is the case, and so we know there’s absolutely no question that Picard and co. will refuse to help the Federation do such a thing once they know that’s what’s happening and, indeed, that they will turn against Starfleet if they have to, in order to prevent it, which they duly do.
Back to ‘For the Uniform’: Sisko decides that he’s going to poison a planet in order to commit ethnic cleansing (displacing the humans and Bajorans so that Cardassians, who aren’t susceptible to that posion, can move in). This is a crime. The sci-fi element isn’t really interesting. It’s not significantly different from using a hypothetical dirty bomb to make an area radioactive. So this episode fails both tests: a solved ethical problem and a sci-fi element that’s not different or interesting enough from what we have in the present, non-fictional world.
It also demonstrates what’s wrong with much of the ‘grey’ morality of DS9. Committing a crime against humanity isn’t morally ambiguous, it’s evil! There isn’t any question about this, that’s just what those words mean. People like to go on about how Janeway murders Tuvix in Voyager, but for some reason Sisko is let completely off the hook here by the fanbase and, indeed, by Starfleet and the Federation, when in fact he should’ve been tried at whatever the Federation’s version of the Hague is.
Another area where DS9 had a negative impact on the series was the introduction of Section 31,19 which is a branch of the Federation that does ‘morally ambiguous’ (again, read: evil) things, apparently without any kind of oversight or approval from the government. This kind of organisation is a dreadful, nonsensical fictional trope. Invariably it’s an excuse for writers to have a group of villains who just do whatever they like with no restrictions whether physical or logical, until the writers get bored and suddenly it turns out they can be stopped20. In the case of DS9, the writers team once again use Section 31 to make what they consider to be an ambiguous argument which in fact boils down to ‘Atrocities are okay when the good guys do them’ and, again, there’s no sense in which this is ambiguous, it’s just false and wrong.
Worse, with Section 31 in particular, it’s just lazy writing. The organisation is absurdly overpowered, with its agents able to walk into rooms without anyone seeing them (until the plot deems that it’s time for them to magically appear) or, equally, to spirit people away without their noticing. Even in a universe with near-infinite resources, it’s impossible not to wonder just how Section 31 gets so many, e.g., spaceships, without anyone questioning what’s going on. Plus, the main characters frequently plaintively ask each other how they can finally ‘reveal’ what Section 31 is up to, without ever considering that the sworn testimony of numerous high-ranking Starfleet Officers, not to mention the evidence of all the corpses lying all over the place or the fact that they’ve literally caught Luther Sloan, he’s right there! – might actually be enough to reveal everything.
But apart from all that…
Despite silly elements like Section 31 and the Pah Wraiths, the show is generally good or even great. Those things are in few enough episodes that I can mostly ignore them and there’s just so much to like that even the regrettable choice of Brooks doesn’t wreck the show.
One episode, in particular, is not only one of the best Star Trek stories but I think one of the greatest works of SFF ever written: ‘The Visitor’ from season 4. I strongly advise you to go and watch this if you haven’t but, in brief, the plot is that Sisko is killed in an accident, leaving Jake an orphan. However, Sisko begins to reappear at brief intervals, first weeks and then years apart, throughout Jake’s life, as a sort of ghost. For Sisko, time doesn’t pass at all between the intervals: he remains the same age while Jake gets older. Thus, eventually, Sisko sees his son as an adult, then an old man – older than Sisko himself. After several failed attempts to bring Sisko back, Jake realises the only way to save him is to commit suicide at the right moment; that this will allow Sisko to return to the time of the accident, and avoid it. The right moment, of course, turns out to be a time when Sisko is there, with Jake, so that Sisko cradles an old man who is also his son in his arms as he dies in order to save him. It’s absolutely stunning.
Brooks, for once, doesn’t overdo it, completely selling this impossible situation. Tony Todd21, as the older Jake, is also fantastic, as is Cirroc Lofton in his regular role as the Jake we know. The reason, though, that it’s such great SFF is that it creates a real, human story that could only be told with some sort of fantastic element (in this case the ‘temporal displacement’ that takes Sisko out of time). You could achieve the broad outline in a couple of ways, but never in a ‘realistic’ plot. Yet, you feel the entire thing as a real human being: Jake’s bereavement at losing his father, the impossible hope when he apparently returns, only to devastatingly vanish again, then Sisko’s sense of loss at his son’s death (even though he understands that this will allow him to live, with his son, again). It’s brilliantly, brilliantly done. You don’t often get a piece of fiction that not only works in itself but singlehandedly justifies22 the existence of an entire genre.
Deep Space 9 is mostly good and, when everything comes together, very good. It proved that you could do Star Trek without a ship called the Enterprise and that you could almost do it without having a ship at all. It increased the alien quotient in the show, finally delivered some really good roles for women and even had a kid in it who wasn’t annoying. I think overall it’s not quite as good as TNG was when it really got going, although you could persuasively argue that it’s average was better. I also think I still prefer the generally under-rated Star Trek: Voyager, though I’ll get back to you about that when I’ve finished watching it.
Book reviews
Queen Macbeth, by Val McDermid
This is a reasonably workmanlike book. It’s not really a re-telling of Shakespeare’s play; rather, it goes back to the source materal and re-tells that. I’m not sure I find Gruoch more compelling or even necessarily more sympathetic than Lady Macbeth, though. Fun fact of the day: While we all call her ‘Lady Macbeth’ and most modern editions of the play give this name in the stage directions, she’s never referred to as such in the First Folio, the only authentic text of Macbeth: she’s referred to simply as ‘His Lady’ and then just ‘Lady’. So, McDermid does her some justice by giving her her name back.
The Malcontent, by John Marston
One of the first tragicomedies, an entertainingly twisty turny play with a fun bit of metatheatre at the beginning, featuring Shakespeare’s pals Richard Burbage (‘Burbadge’ here), Henry Condell (co-editor of the First Folio) and William Sly arguing with each other and the audience. Still, oddly, feels pleasantly surprising when the tragic-seeming play ends happily. I imagine the first audiences were blown away.
Utopia, by Thomas More
Speaking of utopias (utopiae?), I also read the original this month. As David Wittenberg argues in The Philosophy of Time Travel, it’s to later utopian fiction that we owe the concept of time travel. Once there were no new lands to discover, utopian authors had to locate their societies elsewhere in time not, as More and later Swift, parodying the genre, did, on far-flung islands. Being both a hit in Shakespeare’s day and a predecessor to the time travel story, this ticks a lot of boxes for me.
What I found most interesting about it is that More’s Utopia is so similar to the various socialist/communist utopias people have come up with afterwards and also quite similar, mostly knowingly, to Plato’s Republic. I can’t tell if this is because we’re all so collectively unimaginative we can’t come up with anything new or if it just is the case that ‘some sort of communism [that works (somehow)]’ really would be the best way for humans to live. Anyway, it’s an interesting, fairly brief read, well worth the little time it takes to read it.
- With apologies to Ethan Phillips, who I think is a fine actor working with mostly terrible material. My strongest evidence for this is the episode ‘Mortal Coil’ (S4E12), where he gives a fantastic performance making one of Voyager‘s best episodes. ↩︎
- The strongest of which are Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Lower Decks knows that it’s a funny show about Star Trek and Strange New Worlds knows it’s a straight-ahead Star Trek about exploring. Discovery, however, starts off thinking it’s an anthology show, then becomes a show about Michael Burnham, then a show about found family (where we never get to know most of the family), then a show about a dystopian version of the Federation, etc. Star Trek: Picard thinks it’s a nostalgia show but spends season 1 stamping on everyone’s nostalgia (Hugh’s back! Okay, he’s dead now. Also, everyone hates Jean-Luc Picard, now, implausibly. And I bet you thought Riker and Troi would live happily ever after, right? Well, they did until their kid died, fuck you). In season 2 it gets even weirder before, finally, in season 3, giving everyone what they wanted in the first place and doing a nostalgia show but with an incredibly nonsensical plotline in which, at one point, someone gets assimilated by the Borg until someone talks them out of it. It’s a mess, is what I’m saying. Still, at least they brought back the theme music (eventually). ↩︎
- I wrote this sentence before he won the Academy Award the other day, but it does help my point. ↩︎
- As Major (later Colonel) Kira Nerys, ‘Constable’ Odo, Quark and Chief Miles O’Brien. ↩︎
- As Garak, Gul Dukat, Vedek (later Kai) Winn Adami, Nog and Rom. ↩︎
- As Damar, Weyon and Brunt, and General (later Chancellor) Martok. ↩︎
- Another oddity of either the actor or the character is that he always partially reverses the word order in this form of sentence, saying ‘we just can’t’ instead of ‘we can’t just’ every time. ↩︎
- I read somewhere that they planned to have an opening narration in the style of the famous ‘Space: the final frontier’ speech(es), but couldn’t come up with anything good enough in time. It’s kind of a shame because there’s no doubt that Brooks would’ve sounded fantastic doing this. ↩︎
- Out of scope, but I’m inclined to think we’re trending that way. However, trends don’t necessarily continue. ↩︎
- This kind of thing happens all the time in SFF, but it still annoys me: Gul Dukat in this scene has telekinetic powers and is able to kill Winn by waving at her, but then he dies because Sisko pushes him. Come on. Okay, he pushes him into a big fire, but he’s a fire demon who has already been shown to come back from the dead in this scene. Why does this kill him? ↩︎
- The reason we know the Pah Wraiths are baddies is that when they possess people, their eyes go all red and scary. It’s just so lazy. Why not at least make them ice demons or something? ↩︎
- Simply: if God is real and good, why did He create a world with evil in it? ↩︎
- It’s a magic book, don’t worry about it. ↩︎
- Of course, once they are released, instead of immediately destroying the universe they just spend several minutes hanging around in a cave, waiting for Sisko to show up so he can shove them. ↩︎
- I’m phrasing this carefully because strictly speaking it’s possible to argue that some sort of intelligence set up the universe from outside it and to argue that said intelligence may therefore have had some sort of aim in mind. However, that is all you can say about it and you’re already saying ‘may’. ↩︎
- Role, note, not actor. Nichelle Nichols, Denise Crosby, Marina Sirtis and Gates McFadden were never given very much to do or, as especially in Sirtis’ case, the stuff they were given to do was just silly (‘Captain, I feel this alien, the one screaming at us, is upset about something’). ↩︎
- Well, probably. We all love Kirk and Picard, too, obviously, and most of both casts have their fans. They’re great shows! They have lots of great chaacters! ↩︎
- That such things still occur isn’t relevant to my point. The people who do these things know it’s wrong, which is why they variously pretend they’re not doing it, or that they’re not doing it by force, or that those other people have it coming, or they, the perpetrators, were there first, so it’s self-defence, or some other such nonsense. You don’t need to invent justifications like this for things that are morally right, so if you are saying such things, that’s a clue that you’re doing something wrong. ↩︎
- Which was already a bad idea before the terrible Star Trek: Section 31 film, though I’d like to thank the producers of that film for helping me prosecute this argument. ↩︎
- The worst/best of these is in the show Scandal where there turns out to be some secret government agency that goes around murdering people and making speeches about how unstoppable they are. Eventually, the main characters go, ‘Hey, what if we just shoot them?’ and it works. ↩︎
- In an odd, sad coincidence, Todd died the day after I watched this episode. He also played Worf’s brother, Kurn. ↩︎
- I don’t think it needs justifying and, if you’ve read this far, nor do you do; but you and me ain’t everyone. ↩︎
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Reflections on Deep Space 9
I’ve been (re)watching all of Star Trek in approximate stardate order (approximate because apart from anything else stardates are inconsistent across the series). I’ve just watched the final episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, so of course I have some extremely strong opinions about it.
Historical background
Star Trek: Deep Space 9 began broadcasting while its predecessor Star Trek: The Next Generation was still on the air. It is almost invariably discussed in terms of its various firsts: first Star Trek show made without Gene Roddenberry’s involvement; first to air simultaneously with another Star Trek, first with a black lead, first where the lead was a commander, not a captain (at first, anyway), first set on a space station, first where not all the main characters were in Starfleet, and so on.
I think it’s somewhat notable that, creatively anyway, at least one of these firsts was also a last: there’s never been another stationary Star Trek. Indeed, alert readers may have noticed this is a contradiction in terms. The showrunners eventually realised they really needed a proper ship and introduced the USS Defiant to serve as as a means of getting off the station from time to time. Similarly, perhaps aware of the optics of having the various white leads explicitly outrank the only main black lead on Trek, they eventually promoted Benjamin Sisko. Twenty years later, a different set of showrunners gave themselves a near-identical problem on Star Trek: Discovery and likewise solved it by making Michael Burnham, the first black female lead on Star Trek, a captain (although she was, oddly, a ‘co-captain’).
Space: The Final… Outpost, I suppose
Overall, DS9 is probably the most consistent of all the Star Trek shows. The Original Series was notoriously all over the place, The Next Generation was, just as notoriously, pretty poor for the first two seasons and also experienced a significant drop in quality in season 7, likely because the producers had stretched themselves too thin with TNG and DS9 airing simultaneously, and Star Trek: Voyager and the first TNG film, Star Trek Generations, also in production. DS9, by contrast, starts pretty strong and is mostly good to very good all the way through (although I do think that, like TNG, the middle seasons are the strongest). Unlike Voyager, there aren’t any characters that feel oddly pointless (Harry Kim) or just plain annoying (Neelix1). It has a much stronger sense of self than the later, strangely messy shows2, and that carries it through the odd rough patch.
The acting is also generally better than it had been on Trek up to that point. I have a theory that the overall quality of mainstream film and TV acting started to get a hell of a lot better in the ’90s but no theory as to why this is. Just look at how good someone like Michael B. Jordan is3 compared to the people we got starring in blockbuster films in the ’80s, for example; he absolutely blows away Stallone or Schwarzenegger or anyone else you care to name. DS9 may be an early example of that, bar a couple of performances which I’ll come to in a moment. Right from the start, Nana Visitor, René Auberjonois, Armin Shimerman and Colm Meaney4 (returning from TNG) are all excellent, as are recurring guest stars Andrew Robinson, Marc Alaimo, Louise Fletcher (who was, after all, an Oscar winning actress), Aron Eisenberg and Max Grodénchik5. Siddig el Fadil and Terry Farrell wobble early on, but both find their feet eventually, as the writers work out what they want to do with the characters and learn how to play to the actors’ strengths. Both also benefit later from being paired up with actors with whom they have great chemistry (respectively, Meaney and Michael Dorn, likewise returning from TNG, as Worf, from season 4 on), eventually getting some of the best episodes in the whole thing. Where the space station concept works well is in allowing them to have that strong recurring cast, who slowly build relationships with many of the regulars. The recurring guests introduced later on are also all fantastic: Casey Biggs, Jeffrey Combs and JG Hertzler6, in particular, are perfectly cast and routinely excellent.
The only major fly in the ointment as far as acting goes is Avery Brooks. I find him to be an utterly baffling actor, not least because I know that many people absolutely love him7, whereas my view of him is that he cannot act at all.
Now, look, I could hardly enjoy Star Trek if I couldn’t put up with the odd wooden performance. The problems with Brooks come not when he’s wooden, though he often is, but that almost every time he does emote, he’s bizarre. People often say he got better when he shaved his head and grew a beard and this is true – but we’re coming from a low base here. And his fundamental issues never went away. Look at his performance in the first episode, ‘Emissary’, where he over-reads the line ‘We just can’t leave her!’8 so much – and so badly – that it’s unintentionally hilarious. Compare this to his climatic scene with Gul Dukat in the very last episode, where he also overdoes the line ‘I am!‘ to similar effect. His much-vaunted performances in ‘Far Beyond the Stars’ and ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ have the exact same problems: whenever he tries to show a strong emotion, it’s overdone (as in ‘Stars’); when he tries to just get through a scene without a single strong emotion, whether that’s because it’s a paint by numbers scene or one where there’s meant to be an ambiguity, he’s wooden (as in ‘Moonlight’). All he really has going for him is a beautiful voice9, but this really isn’t enough. His performance in DS9 does not encourage me to seek out his other work, but perhaps he’s just woefully miscast as Sisko, or poorly directed, and really shines elsewhere.
No Gods, No Masters
I think some of the issues with Sisko are the fault of the writing, particularly his plot arc as the Emissary to the Prophets (Bajoran gods/wormhole aliens). Trying to examine religion in Star Trek was a good idea. After all, most of the world and most of the USA is still very religious. It’s long-established in the Trek universe that alien cultures have their own religious beliefs, even the hyper-logical Vulcans, including various prophets, gods and ceremonies. In our own culture, where it’s been obvious for centuries that an interventionist god doesn’t – indeed, cannot – exist, there are still a great many religious people, and it’s not at all clear that that should change by the time the 24th century rolls around10. Additionally, there have always been plenty of godlike beings in Star Trek, from Trelaine, to that thing that can’t explain what it wants with a starship, to Q. It makes sense to explore this aspect of humanity more deeply than can be done with a single episode or recurring character.
But is it well-handled in DS9? I don’t think so. The Bajorans see the Prophets as gods and their home, the wormhole to the Gamma quadrant, as the Celestial Temple. However… they’re wrong, aren’t they? The wormhole is a wormhole, not a temple, and the things that live in it really are just aliens without a linear sense of time. Kai Winn, Louise Fletcher’s character, is not wrong to argue in the final few episodes that the Prophets don’t seem actually to care very much (or at all) about Bajor, Bajorans or even their Emissary, Sisko, who they arbitrarily whisk away to live with them, he having apparently served his purpose on this corporeal plain by pushing Gul Dukat off a cliff11, forcing him to abandon his friends and family forever, for no reason.
The concept of a species that doesn’t experience or understand linear time is really interesting and also a very Star Trek kind of idea. There’s genuine interest and bathos in the idea that the Bajorans have been worshipping these entities that not only do not but cannot understand them at all; the Prophets don’t seem to know what time is until they meet Sisko and he explains it to them, which storngly suggests they’ve never seriously interacted with the Bajorans at all. But this interesting idea gradually falls away and the writers, out of nothing more than inertia, turn the Prophets into traditional ‘good’ gods, complete with some opposite, ‘evil’ fallen angel/fire demon types in the form of the Pah Wraiths (who want to set the entire universe on fire, for some reason, but can’t, for some reason).12 This of course sticks the writers with a fictional version of the problem of evil13. In the real world, the solution to the problem of evil is that God isn’t real. In Deep Space 9, the gods/Prophets are real, and so the problem of evil cannot be solved. They’re just totally useless as gods.
The interesting notion of the uncaring not-actually-gods is undermined further whenever the Prophets act more like ‘traditional’ gods with an interest in Bajor, which they do more and more as the series goes on, culminating in the revelation that ‘the Sisko’ is a Jesus analogue who the Prophets actually created in order to fulfill the destined destruction of Gul Dukat and the Kosst Amojan14, both of which again, just fall off a cliff. Why do they need a special magic man to do the job of pushing a book and a person off a cliff? Anyone can push someone off a cliff. And why didn’t they just tell Sisko – or, again, anyone, really – to destroy the book at any given time in history? This book, the origins of which are never explained, is totally useless. Literally all it can do is release the Pah Wraiths (and thus destroy the universe15) and make Gul Dukat go blind, so why can’t an immortal, non-linear race of aliens who can speak to anyone at any time using psychic alien powers just tell someone to chuck it into a warp engine or out of an airlock? Or not write it?
Because gods move in mysterious ways!
This is not actually an acceptable argument in real life. It’s a clever-sounding way of saying ‘I don’t know’ and also a major reason we know that this type of god doesn’t exist: history unfolds in a way completely indistinguishable from random chance because that is, in fact, what is happening. You don’t need a guiding intelligence to the universe to make statistical chance happen16. However, this is a still more unsatisfying answer in narrative fiction. ‘Things just happen all the time for no particular reason’ is not a story.
The end result is that the conclusion to Sisko’s arc is unsatisfying. We’re presented with this guy who is a dedicated family man, who feels a bit ambivalent about his career in Starfleet and is considering the possibility that he may have to drop his career to be a good father to his son. He then has a third role, of Emissary to some annoying aliens, thrust upon him. He gradually comes to embrace all three of these identities and find some sort of peace and equilibrium within himself – only to then very suddenly abandon both career and family because a not very competent god told him to, for no reason that we’re ever given. This is annoying writing. It might even have been better to leave it totally ambiguous as to whether he died in the Fire Caves rather than insisting there was some reason that he just can’t tell Kassidy (or us). And he doesn’t speak to poor old Jake at all!
So, I find it difficult to sing unqualified praise for a series where the main character and his arc are both flawed as written and executed badly onscreen.
Moral grey areas
DS9 has also been much-praised for introducing moral ambiguity into the Star Trek universe. This is very welcome in the character of Kira Nerys, a former terrorist who now finds herself in a position of authority as chief representative on DS9 of the Bajoran provisional government. She’s gone from leader of a terrorist cell, carrying out bombings, sabotage and assassinations, to an army major. This outsider to insider journey makes her different from previous Trek characters. She’s the first really good female role the series had17 and provides a fascinating point of contrast to the upstanding citizens of the Federation, most of them male, that we’d seen up to this point. She’s deeply religious, a warrior, frequently (and understandably) angry about both the past and the present. The show neither blames her for having been a terrorist but nor does it ever entirely let her off the hook. Right up to the end, she’s explaining to people who would quite like to kill her that they are going to have to kill their own people if they want to win a revolution. It’s intense and difficult, but also difficult to argue with: after all, she’s right and it largely works (and, in a neat twist, the person who most objects to the idea of killing his own people in the name of the revolution is later killed, in the name of the revolution, by one of his own). Kira never apologises for her actions in the Resistance and never forgives the Cardassians as a group, although she works with them when she has to. Her arc works through never entirely resolving the ambiguity of her position. By series’ end, she’s had one last successful go as a terrorist, ironically fighting for the people who oppressed her planet for so many years, before she returns to Deep Space 9 as the commanding officer, but still outside of Starfleet and the Federation.
Kira really hits the ground running as a character. The first really stunning episode of the show is episode 19, ‘Duet’, which I don’t think the show topped till ‘The Visitor’ (more on which later). Kira meets a man she thinks is a war criminal, but who insists he isn’t. I don’t actually want to spoil the plot of this episode. You really should just watch it. It’s really impressive that DS9 delivers an all-time great episode so early on in its run.
Likewise, Odo is a great character. He’s a variation on a key Trek trope, the alien outsider who doesn’t fully understand the human (and Bajoran, Ferengi and Cardassian) people he lives among, but wishes to understand them better, and to be like them in key ways. In TOS and TNG, this role was taken by Spock and Data, who became the most beloved characters on their shows,18 so Auberjonois has some big Beatles boots to fill. The variation the writers came up with is of an alien who is not only living among aliens, but also not in his ‘natural’ state physically: he’s a shapeshifter, a species that doesn’t have a single form and spends most of its time linked to some indeterminately massive number of its fellows in a gigantic ocean of sapient goo, known as ‘the Great Link’, located on the other side of the Galaxy. Just as Spock and Data relied on abstract non-emotional frameworks to guide them (logic and a broadly defined positivism), Odo relies on justice. When he finally meets his fellow Changelings, he soon discovers they’re a race of imperialistic genocidaires, so that his sense of justice forces him to reject them. Again, the series maintains this ambiguity throughout: he recognises both that he can never truly be himself on Deep Space 9, among ‘solids’, out of his natural state, but that he also cannot be himself if he joins the Great Link while they’re still pursuing a war, because that would violate his sense of justice.
Like Kira, Odo came of age in the show’s ‘past’ during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. He likewise had a morally ambiguous role as a sort of police officer on the station, trying to find some balance between the violent, oppressive ‘justice’ of the Cardassians and his own still-evolving ideas of what justice should involve. As we see in various flashbacks, he didn’t always succeed but, as the show also makes clear, it would’ve been impossible for him to achieve justice while working with the Cardassians. As with Kira, the show makes it clear that he could have behaved differently, but never comes down on one side or the other as to whether or what he should have done.
In Odo’s case, his arc ends in a satisfying way, because the contradiction that animates him isn’t actually internal or inherent to him; once the external issue of the war goes away, he’s able to rejoin the Link. It’s still a wrench for him, because he has to leave Kira, but it makes sense: the idea of romantic love was something he’d learned from the Solids, so it’s something he’s able to leave behind.
Shades of… black? Evil? What do you call this colour? War crime grey?
Where the moral grey areas don’t work is when the writers try to create them within the Federation itself. At their absolute worst, major characters are simply allowed to commit crimes – serious crimes – that they get away with when the status quo is restored at the end of the episode. There are three particularly egregious examples of this.
The first is with Jadzia Dax, during one of her early pre-Worf episodes in which Farrell very much fails to give the impression that she’s several hundred years old. Dax goes on a mission of vengeance with a group of Klingons, so she’s party to what, in the Federation, is clearly murder, but to the Klingons is justified as part of a blood feud. Sisko explicitly warns her not to do it. She does it anyway. It’s obviously murder, but her entire comeuppance is that Sisko gives her an annoyed look when she comes back to the station. That’s it. Is this really Starfleet’s attitude to officers violating a direct order in order to take part in a – successful! – conspiracy to murder someone?
Apparently it is! Because, much later, Worf and Dax go on holiday to Risa, the sex pleasure planet. Worf decides that he doesn’t like sex pleasure, so he joins a group of terrorists for the weekend. Again, he is simply allowed to get away with this. Perhaps remembering that she also went on a terrorism-themed jolly once, Dax doesn’t even break up with him. Nobody ever raises the time Worf joined a terrorist organisation for a bit.
Starfleet’s shockingly lax attitude to criminality in its officers continues, however. in ‘For the Uniform’, when Sisko is faced with a (different) terrorist group, the Maquis, he responds by, I’m not kidding, committing an act of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing, by poisoning a planet’s atmosphere in such a way that it won’t be able to support humans (or similar) for fifty years. This is, unambiguously, a war crime and a crime against humanity. Having done this, with scarcely a single objection from the crew, he threatens to do it several more times unless the Maquis surrender. By the end of the episode, everyone’s laughing about it.
In a lot of the writing about DS9, it seems to be assumed that the society depicted in the earlier series was a morally unambiguous utopia. However, this is not the case at all and it’s honestly quite odd that anyone thinks so. Apart from the many times the Federation is nearly destroyed by conspiracy or invasion, some of the most celebrated episodes in TOS and TNG depict the Federation, Starfleet and the people within it as deeply flawed characters, who force our heroes into uncomfortable situations. ‘The Doomsday Machine’ sees the crew having to survive when they’re given suicidal orders by a revenge-obsessed captain, for example, and Kirk frequently cheats, bluffs and lies when he has to, including to his superior officers. His senior staff spend the entire time bickering and McCoy is kind of a racist. Utopia?
‘The Measure of a Man’, one of the most celebrated TNG episodes sees the Federation threatening to dismantle Data, potentially killing him in the process, because they think it might be useful to do so. Data has to go through an entire trial to prove to the Federation that he exists. Riker’s forced to act as the prosecution for his friend. Okay, Data and Picard win in the end, but ‘proving you have the right not to be dismantled simply because it seems like it might be convenient to dismantle you’ is hardly the stuff of utopia, is it?
‘The Measure of a Man’ is a perfect example of what makes for a good exploration of ethics in Star Trek (and sci-fi more broadly). It needs to take a moral issue that is not a solved issue, then add a sci-fi element. So, the questions in ‘The Measure of a Man’ are, What does society owe to the individual (and vice-versa)? (A moral issue we haven’t solved, hence the existence of democratic politics); and, Do androids count as individuals with rights? (which is, of course, the sci-fi element). In the episode, we as the audience naturally side with Data, because we know him. But the points made by Bruce Maddox (and by Riker, acting for the prosecution), are valid. Data is a machine. It would be really useful to have a Data on every ship in Starfleet. Where they collapse is in the fact that Data is a machine who can express real views about himself, and he does not want to be dismantled.
In Star Trek: Insurrection, there’s a similar situation in that Starfleet wants to do something and the crew of the Enterprise want to stop them. The reason it works much less well than ‘The Measure of the Man’ is that, while it has the sci-fi element (a mysterious anti-aging energy), the thing Starfleet wants to do is just wrong and it is a solved moral question: it is never okay to forcibly displace an entire population19 (are you listening, Captain Sisko?). We know this is the case, and so we know there’s absolutely no question that Picard and co. will refuse to help the Federation do such a thing once they know that’s what’s happening and, indeed, that they will turn against Starfleet if they have to, in order to prevent it, which they duly do.
Back to ‘For the Uniform’: Sisko decides that he’s going to poison a planet in order to commit ethnic cleansing (displacing the humans and Bajorans so that Cardassians, who aren’t susceptible to that posion, can move in). This is a crime. The sci-fi element isn’t really interesting. It’s not significantly different from using a hypothetical dirty bomb to make an area radioactive. So this episode fails both tests: a solved ethical problem and a sci-fi element that’s not different or interesting enough from what we have in the present, non-fictional world.
It also demonstrates what’s wrong with much of the ‘grey’ morality of DS9. Committing a crime against humanity isn’t morally ambiguous, it’s evil! There isn’t any question about this, that’s just what those words mean. People like to go on about how Janeway murders Tuvix in Voyager, but for some reason Sisko is let completely off the hook here by the fanbase and, indeed, by Starfleet and the Federation, when in fact he should’ve been tried at whatever the Federation’s version of the Hague is.
Another area where DS9 had a negative impact on the series was the introduction of Section 31,20 which is a branch of the Federation that does ‘morally ambiguous’ (again, read: evil) things, apparently without any kind of oversight or approval from the government. This kind of organisation is a dreadful, nonsensical fictional trope. Invariably it’s an excuse for writers to have a group of villains who just do whatever they like with no restrictions whether physical or logical, until the writers get bored and suddenly it turns out they can be stopped21. In the case of DS9, the writers team once again use Section 31 to make what they consider to be an ambiguous argument which in fact boils down to ‘Atrocities are okay when the good guys do them’ and, again, there’s no sense in which this is ambiguous, it’s just false and wrong.
Worse, with Section 31 in particular, it’s just lazy writing. The organisation is absurdly overpowered, with its agents able to walk into rooms without anyone seeing them (until the plot deems that it’s time for them to magically appear) or, equally, to spirit people away without their noticing. Even in a universe with near-infinite resources, it’s impossible not to wonder just how Section 31 gets so many, e.g., spaceships, without anyone questioning what’s going on. Plus, the main characters frequently plaintively ask each other how they can finally ‘reveal’ what Section 31 is up to, without ever considering that the sworn testimony of numerous high-ranking Starfleet Officers, not to mention the evidence of all the corpses lying all over the place or the fact that they’ve literally caught Luther Sloan, he’s right there! – might actually be enough to reveal everything.
But apart from all that…
Despite silly elements like Section 31 and the Pah Wraiths, the show is generally good or even great. Those things are in few enough episodes that I can mostly ignore them and there’s just so much to like that even the regrettable choice of Brooks doesn’t wreck the show.
One episode, in particular, is not only one of the best Star Trek stories but I think one of the greatest works of SFF ever written: ‘The Visitor’ from season 4. I strongly advise you to go and watch this if you haven’t but, in brief, the plot is that Sisko is killed in an accident, leaving Jake an orphan. However, Sisko begins to reappear at brief intervals, first weeks and then years apart, throughout Jake’s life, as a sort of ghost. For Sisko, time doesn’t pass at all between the intervals: he remains the same age while Jake gets older. Thus, eventually, Sisko sees his son as an adult, then an old man – older than Sisko himself. After several failed attempts to bring Sisko back, Jake realises the only way to save him is to commit suicide at the right moment; that this will allow Sisko to return to the time of the accident, and avoid it. The right moment, of course, turns out to be a time when Sisko is there, with Jake, so that Sisko cradles an old man who is also his son in his arms as he dies in order to save him. It’s absolutely stunning.
Brooks, for once, doesn’t overdo it, completely selling this impossible situation. Tony Todd22, as the older Jake, is also fantastic, as is Cirroc Lofton in his regular role as the Jake we know. The reason, though, that it’s such great SFF is that it creates a real, human story that could only be told with some sort of fantastic element (in this case the ‘temporal displacement’ that takes Sisko out of time). You could achieve the broad outline in a couple of ways, but never in a ‘realistic’ plot. Yet, you feel the entire thing as a real human being: Jake’s bereavement at losing his father, the impossible hope when he apparently returns, only to devastatingly vanish again, then Sisko’s sense of loss at his son’s death (even though he understands that this will allow him to live, with his son, again). It’s brilliantly, brilliantly done. You don’t often get a piece of fiction that not only works in itself but singlehandedly justifies23 the existence of an entire genre.
Deep Space 9 is mostly good and, when everything comes together, very good. It proved that you could do Star Trek without a ship called the Enterprise and that you could almost do it without having a ship at all. It increased the alien quotient in the show, finally delivered some really good roles for women and even had a kid in it who wasn’t annoying. I think overall it’s not quite as good as TNG was when it really got going, although you could persuasively argue that it’s average was better. I also think I still prefer the generally under-rated Star Trek: Voyager, though I’ll get back to you about that when I’ve finished watching it.
Book reviews
Queen Macbeth, by Val McDermid
This is a reasonably workmanlike book. It’s not really a re-telling of Shakespeare’s play; rather, it goes back to the source materal and re-tells that. I’m not sure I find Gruoch more compelling or even necessarily more sympathetic than Lady Macbeth, though. Fun fact of the day: While we all call her ‘Lady Macbeth’ and most modern editions of the play give this name in the stage directions, she’s never referred to as such in the First Folio, the only authentic text of Macbeth: she’s referred to simply as ‘His Lady’ and then just ‘Lady’. So, McDermid does her some justice by giving her her name back.
The Malcontent, by John Marston
One of the first tragicomedies, an entertainingly twisty turny play with a fun bit of metatheatre at the beginning, featuring Shakespeare’s pals Richard Burbage (‘Burbadge’ here), Henry Condell (co-editor of the First Folio) and William Sly arguing with each other and the audience. Still, oddly, feels pleasantly surprising when the tragic-seeming play ends happily. I imagine the first audiences were blown away.
Utopia, by Thomas More
Speaking of utopias (utopiae?), I also read the original this month. As David Wittenberg argues in The Philosophy of Time Travel, it’s to later utopian fiction that we owe the concept of time travel. Once there were no new lands to discover, utopian authors had to locate their societies elsewhere in time not, as More and later Swift, parodying the genre, did, on far-flung islands. Being both a hit in Shakespeare’s day and a predecessor to the time travel story, this ticks a lot of boxes for me.
What I found most interesting about it is that More’s Utopia is so similar to the various socialist/communist utopias people have come up with afterwards and also quite similar, mostly knowingly, to Plato’s Republic. I can’t tell if this is because we’re all so collectively unimaginative we can’t come up with anything new or if it just is the case that ‘some sort of communism [that works (somehow)]’ really would be the best way for humans to live. Anyway, it’s an interesting, fairly brief read, well worth the little time it takes to read it.
- With apologies to Ethan Phillips, who I think is a fine actor working with mostly terrible material. My strongest evidence for this is the episode ‘Mortal Coil’ (S4E12), where he gives a fantastic performance making one of Voyager‘s best episodes. ↩︎
- The strongest of which are Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Lower Decks knows that it’s a funny show about Star Trek and Strange New Worlds knows it’s a straight-ahead Star Trek about exploring. Discovery, however, starts off thinking it’s an anthology show, then becomes a show about Michael Burnham, then a show about found family (where we never get to know most of the family), then a show about a dystopian version of the Federation, etc. Star Trek: Picard thinks it’s a nostalgia show but spends season 1 stamping on everyone’s nostalgia (Hugh’s back! Okay, he’s dead now. Also, everyone hates Jean-Luc Picard, now, implausibly. And I bet you thought Riker and Troi would live happily ever after, right? Well, they did until their kid died, fuck you). In season 2 it gets even weirder before, finally, in season 3, giving everyone what they wanted in the first place and doing a nostalgia show but with an incredibly nonsensical plotline in which, at one point, someone gets assimilated by the Borg until someone talks them out of it. It’s a mess, is what I’m saying. Still, at least they brought back the theme music (eventually). ↩︎
- I wrote this sentence before he won the Academy Award the other day, but it does help my point. ↩︎
- As Major (later Colonel) Kira Nerys, ‘Constable’ Odo, Quark and Chief Miles O’Brien. ↩︎
- As Garak, Gul Dukat, Vedek (later Kai) Winn Adami, Nog and Rom. ↩︎
- As Damar, Weyon and Brunt, and General (later Chancellor) Martok. ↩︎
- The Star Trek: Starfleet Academy producers let Tawny Newsome write an episode that was just an hour-long tribute to him! And it was really good! (It did not make sense but this is Star Trek we’re talking about.) ↩︎
- Another oddity of either the actor or the character is that he always partially reverses the word order in this form of sentence, saying ‘we just can’t’ instead of ‘we can’t just’ every time. ↩︎
- I read somewhere that they planned to have an opening narration in the style of the famous ‘Space: the final frontier’ speech(es), but couldn’t come up with anything good enough in time. It’s kind of a shame because there’s no doubt that Brooks would’ve sounded fantastic doing this. ↩︎
- Out of scope, but I’m inclined to think we’re trending that way. However, trends don’t necessarily continue. ↩︎
- This kind of thing happens all the time in SFF, but it still annoys me: Gul Dukat in this scene has telekinetic powers and is able to kill Winn by waving at her, but then he dies because Sisko pushes him. Come on. Okay, he pushes him into a big fire, but he’s a fire demon who has already been shown to come back from the dead in this scene. Why does this kill him? ↩︎
- The reason we know the Pah Wraiths are baddies is that when they possess people, their eyes go all red and scary. It’s just so lazy. Why not at least make them ice demons or something? ↩︎
- Simply: if God is real and good, why did He create a world with evil in it? ↩︎
- It’s a magic book, don’t worry about it. ↩︎
- Of course, once they are released, instead of immediately destroying the universe they just spend several minutes hanging around in a cave, waiting for Sisko to show up so he can shove them. ↩︎
- I’m phrasing this carefully because strictly speaking it’s possible to argue that some sort of intelligence set up the universe from outside it and to argue that said intelligence may therefore have had some sort of aim in mind. However, that is all you can say about it and you’re already saying ‘may’. ↩︎
- Role, note, not actor. Nichelle Nichols, Denise Crosby, Marina Sirtis and Gates McFadden were never given very much to do or, as especially in Sirtis’ case, the stuff they were given to do was just silly (‘Captain, I feel this alien, the one screaming at us, is upset about something’). ↩︎
- Well, probably. We all love Kirk and Picard, too, obviously, and most of both casts have their fans. They’re great shows! They have lots of great chaacters! ↩︎
- That such things still occur isn’t relevant to my point. The people who do these things know it’s wrong, which is why they variously pretend they’re not doing it, or that they’re not doing it by force, or that those other people have it coming, or they, the perpetrators, were there first, so it’s self-defence, or some other such nonsense. You don’t need to invent justifications like this for things that are morally right, so if you are saying such things, that’s a clue that you’re doing something wrong. ↩︎
- Which was already a bad idea before the terrible Star Trek: Section 31 film, though I’d like to thank the producers of that film for helping me prosecute this argument. ↩︎
- The worst/best of these is in the show Scandal where there turns out to be some secret government agency that goes around murdering people and making speeches about how unstoppable they are. Eventually, the main characters go, ‘Hey, what if we just shoot them?’ and it works. ↩︎
- In an odd, sad coincidence, Todd died the day after I watched this episode. He also played Worf’s brother, Kurn. ↩︎
- I don’t think it needs justifying and, if you’ve read this far, nor do you do; but you and me ain’t everyone. ↩︎
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Yes but see Tobias Forge is involved in the university Groningen psychology Epstein Zeta Grey timelime computers experiment... the mouth of Sauron IS behind it... they went to Ghost meet and greets. #mouthofsauron #shelob #tobiasforge #viy #morgoth #hexagonian #alchemicaltimelines #jarlborg #saintboniface #ruguniversitygroningen
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Yes but see Tobias Forge is involved in the university Groningen psychology Epstein Zeta Grey timelime computers experiment... the mouth of Sauron IS behind it... they went to Ghost meet and greets. #mouthofsauron #shelob #tobiasforge #viy #morgoth #hexagonian #alchemicaltimelines #jarlborg #saintboniface #ruguniversitygroningen
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A Very Queer March – Itch Bundle
Buy 63 items for $60 Regularly ~$249 Save 75%!A bundle of queer books for March just dropped! Check out this bundle hosted by Niranjan with content from 43 creators, totalling 63 titles.
The bundle of 63 titles is available for $60, which is a saving of 75%. (It would be $249 to buy all the books individually at their usual markup.)
You can also click on the covers of books that particularly interest you to buy them individually, or get them in the bundle for just less than $1 each.
This contains titles by authors who have appeared here in Author Spotlights!
Check out Spotlight posts by Katta Kis, Merlina Garance, Shane Blackheart, Odessa Silver, and H.S. Kallinger, all highlighting their work. I’ve also interviewed Amara Lynn previously on queer superheroes, and you can also check out my podcast episode with L.B. Shimaira. If that tempts you, go grab the bundle, or get their work separately.
All these eBooks are DRM free, which means you can download them, send them to your choice of eReader, and gift them to someone else to do the same.
A Very Queer March Bundle Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.comIncludes the Following Titles:
Best Friends Bury Bodies by C.M. Rosens with Bisexual, Gay, Aro, Poly, and Sapphic rep
When a search for a missing music star leads to murder, how far will his old friends – and old flame – go?
The Day We Ate Grandad by C.M. Rosens with Pansexual, Bisexual, Polyam, Gay, Ace and Aro rep
What’s family without a little sacrifice?
Like Salt And Whisky by Merlina Garance with genderqueer and trans rep
A nostalgic second chance queer romance between a heartbroken man and his long lost childhood best friend who might just be the love of his life.
Paris at Nightfall by Merlina Garance with gay rep
“In an early 20th century Paris emptied of its population and surveilled by the Army, two men are trying to survive.
Would that include falling in love?”
My Lord by L. B. Shimaira with Bi, pan, polyam rep
“A queer, polyamorous, slow-burn erotic gothic horror novel.
Meya is Lord Deminas’ latest chambermaid and favourite source of blood to drink. To avoid being his next servant to vanish, she must uncover all of Castle Tristanja’s dark secrets.”
Love at the Rock Show by Katta Kis with pansexual and other queer reps
“A burnt-out former pop star
A sweet, broke psychic… who hates him
The festival tour that changes everything “
No Love in LA by Katta Kis with queer and non-binary rep
“A heavy metal goddess with a crush on…
The stern goth who hates her…
The spark that ignites them both. “
Moth Pit by Amara Lynn with nonbinary, demi, and bi rep
A non-binary/male mothman romance.
Moth Woods by Amara Lynn with pansexual and genderfluid rep
A mothman x Flatwoods Monster West Virginia romance
A Demon to Save Me by H.S. Kallinger with Pansexual, bisexual, nonbinary trans, intersex, gay, lesbian, and demiromantic rep
Coming of age as a queer, neurodivergent, empathic dhampir is complicated enough without accidentally adding a demon into the mix.
Everything Is Wonderful Now by Shane Blackheart with Trans, poly, and disability/mental illness rep
When Dark is good and Light is evil…
Open Wound by Shane Blackheart with Trans, nonbinary, ace/aro, poly, disability, and mental illness rep
Vexis is something much more frightening and ancient than an angel or a demon…
Of Spells and Love by Odessa Silver with Aro/Ace rep
Will Noemi find peace within herself, or sink deeper into the depths?
Fimbulvinter’s Fires by A.M. Weald with gay and nonbinary rep
A heart-pounding yet tender tale of compassion, survival, and the lengths we’ll go to protect those we love.
Emergence by A.M. Weald with Achilean, Poly, Bi rep
A cozy post-apocalyptic queer romance where friends separated by sealed underground pods finally get the chance to meet.
Well of Souls by Harmonia Grey with trans and bi rep
A queer reimagining of the Eurydice and Orpheus tragic myth.
Errant Wings by S. Jean with gay rep
Errant Wings is the story of Asher who grows angel wings instead of the devil wings he expects, and now has to contend with his entire life in disarray and a city that wants to force him to live his life their way.
Once Upon a Wave of Witches by Helen Whistberry with ace, nonbinary, and lesbian rep
Join Beatrice and Amelia, two ladies of a certain age, on a wild adventure as they take to the skies and plunge into the depths of the sea to save a friend and break a curse. A unique and uplifting fantasy tale!
Doce Drosera by anita with lesbian, POC, and fat rep
Doce Drosera follows the lesbian biologist Vanessa travelling to the same region her situationship Mirella disappeared one month earlier. The grieving and Mirella’s haunting presence pushes Vanessa towards a twisted fate in the heart of the forest.
Higanbana by Jake Vanguard with gay, bi, trans, and depression rep
A young man trapped in an abusive relationship finds a fallen angel – will they save each other from their demon or will they drag each other deeper into Hell?
Impostor (Children of Lorcan Book 2) by J. M. Rose with Achillean, Bi, Poly, and Aroace rep
Nikolai Petrov hates lies.
The Nightstalker’s Mark by Joachim Heijndermans with lesbian, transgender, and blindness rep
After work, hospital worker Adrianne steals blood from the blood bank to provide for her lover, the vampire Carm.
Return the Rose by Joachim Heijndermans with lesbian rep and magical gender changing
The Beauty that had broken the Beast’s spell is now queen…yet she still yearns for the creature he was, consumed by erotic memories and desperate to have her beautiful beast returned to her.
Dark Heart of Ilmoure by Cara N. Delaney with Lesbian and bisexual rep
Iris Grey returns to her hometown hoping to heal old wounds. Instead, she finds a cold welcome, a family keeping secrets, and a sinister plot at the heart of the town.
Reborn in Ash by Gabrielle Steele with Non Binary, Demi, and Sapphic rep
Reborn in Ash is a dark epic fantasy where a thief discovers she can use newly-returned magic, but when she accidentally kills a man with it, she’s dragged into the service of the king and must train alongside other emerging mages – hard to do when she’s vowed to never care about anyone again.
Children by Bjørn Larssen with gay, aro/ace rep
Defy the Gods. Forge your destiny. A grimdark Norse mythology retelling.
Fruits of the Gods by William C. Tracy with sapphic and trans rep
Two sisters escape confinement, learn seasonal fruit magic, and plot to overthrow a corrupt government!
My Heart is Human by William C. Tracy with Gay and trans rep
Joel is on the run from the government while an AI tries to take over his mind!
The Salt in the Sea by J.D. Rivers with achillean rep
Victor, a lonely veteran werewolf, gets a second chance with the one-night stand who has lingered in his heart.
Lightbringer by J.D. Rivers with achilean rep
In a lonely valley where darkness laps at the ragged shore of reality, there rests a village where the people are reborn each time they die.
Gift of Darkness by C.L. Carhart with lesbian and bisexual rep
They say a Teuton witch shouldn’t desire an outsider. But love never follows the rules.
Gift of Wind by C.L. Carhart with bisexual rep
Second chance or impending disaster? A scarred witch collides with her darkest muse.
The Selkie and the Minstrel by Elis Madsen with ace, gay, lesbian, and nonbinary rep
After escaping from poachers, Delmar is lost and just trying to get back to the ocean. He’s discovered by a traveling minstrel band who helps him get back home.
Our Simulated Selves by Nikki Null with Trans rep
A mind-bending quantum thriller about a dating sim, brainscanners, a digital apocalypse, trans epiphanies, and tabletop gaming at a cozy queer café.
Vengeance Is Our Legacy by MC Burnell/ Jeremy Rayne with gay rep
They hated each other on sight but became best friends over the course of the adventure they didn’t want to have together.
The Exile and His Fool by MC Burnell/ Jeremy Rayne with gay rep
Mateo’s exile is hopelessly boring, but falling for a man who isn’t sure what he wants or even who he is may not be a great alternative.
Black Sails to Sunward by Sheila Jenné with lesbian rep
On a sailing ship in space, either you’re loyal to the Martian Empire, or you’re the enemy.
A Life in Too Many Margins by S. E. Thomson with Trans, ace, queer, disabled, autistic, and ADHD rep
A fictional memoir of a quadruply-marginalized disaster-human with zero chill. A book for anyone who ever felt like too much or not enough.
Alchemy of Chaos by Ruth Miranda with queer, sapphic, gay, and bi rep
When Professor Ezra King’s old classmates at St Cyr start showing up dead, his demons resurface, and the ghosts of his past threaten to rise from their graves…
Crystal Gunslinger – The Obsidian Outlaws by O.Z Laws with Bi and Trans rep
A Dark Fantasy Western Adventure
Yes, Captain by O.Z Laws with trans and lesbian rep
A short, sweet, and smutty story set among the stars.
A Stellar Spy by Maya Darjani with Bisexual rep
A futuristic, magic-fueled homage to the great classics of the spy genre: the cerebral musings of John le Carre with the excitement of The Americans.
The Star-Crossed Empire by Maya Darjani with Acespec rep
For fans of Lois McMaster Bujold, David Weber, and KB Wagers. Get swept away into a lush and romantic space opera that transcends time, untangles court intrigue, and spans the entire Galactic Whorl.
UNGRATEFUL by mk zariel with trans and lesbian rep
poetry against queer assimilationism. anthems for the trans imagination. a rant about middle school boys. a six-year-old’s obsession with dragons. a lovesong for trans people at magic the gathering tournaments. a prose poem reminding us that assimilation is a problem. a reminder that computers are actually very gay. a trans-assimilationist dystopia. and hope.
UNTIMEZONE by mk zariel with trans and neuroqueer rep
i want to be reminded why i came out
The Towers of Nine by Alyssa Louttit with Aro, Ace, Lesbian, Gay and Pansexual rep
Serafina Stewart’s here to become a real witch and it’s going to take far more than ghosts and spiders to make her give up.
To Target the Heart by Aldrea Alien with Gay, PoC rep
Hamish has one choice: Follow tradition or his heart. How can he win with the odds stacked against him?
To Poison a Prince by Aldrea Alien with Gay, PoC, and other queer rep
Someone is out to murder his husband and he might just be the reason they succeed.
A Study on Magic and Crystals by May Barros with Aro/ace, demi, agender, alloaro, autistic, adhd, queerplatonic, and poly rep
Talita is sent on a mission to solve the magienergetic crisis of the kingdom
Journey Home by May Barros with aromantic and queerplatonic rep
Amara e Luiza are two witches that live in a queerplatonic relationship.
Lost Blades by Liz Sauco with Ace and gay rep
A thief on the run from crimes he both did and did not commit and a ninja trying to help his country break free from the Empire get pulled into an ancient battle between magic, life, and a force that seeks to end existence itself.
Colors of Magic by Liz Sauco with Ace, gay, bi, and lesbian rep
A set of nine short stories set before Lost Blades (some shortly before, others long before) looking at moments in the lives of characters such as Hades, Jak, Sukra, Ander, and more.
Final Night by Kell Shaw with Lesbian and trans rep
“Lukie’s been murdered. And she needs answers.
Book 1 of the Revenant Records”
Feral Night by Kell Shaw with Ace/bi and trans rep
“Lukie’s father is trapped in the Underworld and it’s all her fault.
Book 2 of the Revenant Records”
Structural Integrity by Tabitha O’Connell with trans, gay, and acespec rep
A demolition order for Kel’s favorite building could salvage her and Yaan’s crumbling relationship… or cause its collapse.
Structural Strain by Tabitha O’Connell with trans, gay, and acespec rep
Sequel to Structural Integrity
Shadows Dark and Deadly Andrea Marie Johnson with Bi, nonbinary, and poly rep
Become an assassin’s apprentice to get out of the cold? Sure, what could go wrong?
A Mutual Connection by Kay Claire with nonbinary, fat, trans, pansexual, and ADHD rep
Two online friends from across the globe meet each other in person when they both start working at the same tattoo studio.
A Summer with the Immortal by Paris Vivian with Bi, lesbian, and agender rep
Acacia, the renowned immortal of Eopolis, has run into trouble with his new biotech project.
Blade Broken by Niranjan with Bi, Gay, Sapphic, Ace, Aro, PoC, and mental health/illness rep
A spy lurking in the shadows, a nation on the verge of an invasion, a man desperate to protect his home.
Colliding Forces by Niranjan with Gay, BI, Aro, mental health/illness rep
His clock is ticking, and his only way out are the aliens who think him an enemy
Rin in Time Immemorial by L’Poni with Gay rep
Subscribe to my newsletter to stay updated! I send newsletters around once a month. You can also subscribe to my site so you don't miss a post, but I also do a post round-up in my monthly newsletters, along with what I've been working on, what I've been reading, and what I've been watching. I will often update newsletter subscribers first with news, so stay ahead of the game with my announcements and discount codes, etc! First name Last name Email #itchBundle #queerAuthor #queerBooksA collection of flash stories, story poems and lore about Rinaldo Karrucci, the femboy dragon prince and his life with his werewolf boyfriend Argönon
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Calcarata – Der Müde Mensch Review
By Thus Spoke
Calcarata is only the second metal band I’ve encountered with a conceptual connection to the Mollusca phylum.1 Admittedly, their debut, Der Müde Mensch, incorporates the gastropod more in the mythic sense than the literal, as it purports to “follow the giant snail of slumber up and down the slopes of the mind.” And yet the creature’s prominence—from the cover art to the music itself—proves to be a key motif for the album. Exploring realms of dreams and death in word, Calcarata’s hazy atmospheric black metal experiments with them in musical expression too with mollifying, slow-moving soundscapes. Music evoking the essence of liminal states of consciousness, deliberately measured and hypnotic in its sway, treads the fine line between effectively immersive, and simply soporific. Der Müde Mensch falls very firmly on one side of this line.
Der Müde Mensch—The Tired Person—turns out to be very aptly named. The mellow ethereality that wafts across its runtime (particularly in opener “Calcarata,” and ending title track) is reminiscent of a dreamlike state of semi-consciousness, listlessness. In fact, much of the black metal on display would fall neatly into the DSBM camp (“Heilung,” title track) were it not for that hopeful thread inhabiting the melodies, both in guitar and clean-vocal form. Many such melodies, if not gripping, are pleasing and ambient, working well against both faltering shrieks as low-tuned “mmmms” and “ahhhs” (“Morgenrot im Totental”). The whole thing has a kind of easy familiarity embodied by layered tremolos repeating vaguely melancholic refrains and fades naturally into the background.
Der Müde Mensch is characterized by placid, uninspired themes, with exceptions to this rule few and far between. The “sprawling psychedelic solo” teased in the one-sheet and delivered in the back half of “Heilung,” is undoubtedly the album’s high point. While nothing spectacular in itself, its warbling, wobbling meander is a sudden explosion of color amidst the grey, monotonous surroundings. There are times when the vocals gain an impassioned power, and the guitars a lilting melancholia (“Morgenrot im Totental,” title track) that seems to capture the ghost of feeling. But it’s difficult to appreciate these assets when Calcarata take a decidedly snail-like approach to composition that drags already tired refrains out to unbearable lengths, where they dry up and wither. The pay-offs that consist mainly of a simple escalation of the central melody, and screams, could be powerful, were it not for the fact that one has had to wait ten-plus minutes for them. Even then the denouement is unambitious and lukewarm; neither intricate and mesmerizing, nor punchily affecting through deceptive simplicity.
The overall absence of dynamism makes Der Müde Mensch a slog to get through, despite its reasonable 47-minute runtime. Far too often a melody enters only to leave undeveloped. With the notable exception of “Heilung”‘s five-minute solo, the best it gets is a flicker of urgency coming through a more mournful iteration of the theme (“Morgenrot im Totental”). The percussion is similarly anaemic, with only a few moments of genuine flourish (“Heilung,” title track), and entirely lacking the assertiveness which would mitigate the monotony of the monosyllabic tempos. If there’s one thing Calcarata deserve praise for, it’s their production choices. Der Müde Mensch would have turned out far worse had the duo opted for a traditional raw or atmo-black mix. Thankfully, they did not, and so the melodies and percussion are comparatively crisp and layered. One can only imagine the heights of beauty the music could have reached with a more ambitious template.
I want to like Der Müde Mensch more than I do, but Calcarata don’t make it easy. Rather than using an interesting concept to inform deep, intriguing soundscapes, the duo seem uninterested in musically exploring the metaphorical worlds they center their art around or taking their listener on any kind of journey. They just end up putting you to sleep.
Rating: Disappointing
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: WAV
Label: Naturmacht Productions
Websites: Bandcamp | Artist Site
Releases Worldwide: September 27th, 2024#20 #2024 #AtmosphericBlackMetal #BlackMetal #Calcarata #DerMüdeMensch #GermanMetal #NaturmachtProductions #Review #Reviews #Sep24
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Calcarata – Der Müde Mensch Review
By Thus Spoke
Calcarata is only the second metal band I’ve encountered with a conceptual connection to the Mollusca phylum.1 Admittedly, their debut, Der Müde Mensch, incorporates the gastropod more in the mythic sense than the literal, as it purports to “follow the giant snail of slumber up and down the slopes of the mind.” And yet the creature’s prominence—from the cover art to the music itself—proves to be a key motif for the album. Exploring realms of dreams and death in word, Calcarata’s hazy atmospheric black metal experiments with them in musical expression too with mollifying, slow-moving soundscapes. Music evoking the essence of liminal states of consciousness, deliberately measured and hypnotic in its sway, treads the fine line between effectively immersive, and simply soporific. Der Müde Mensch falls very firmly on one side of this line.
Der Müde Mensch—The Tired Person—turns out to be very aptly named. The mellow ethereality that wafts across its runtime (particularly in opener “Calcarata,” and ending title track) is reminiscent of a dreamlike state of semi-consciousness, listlessness. In fact, much of the black metal on display would fall neatly into the DSBM camp (“Heilung,” title track) were it not for that hopeful thread inhabiting the melodies, both in guitar and clean-vocal form. Many such melodies, if not gripping, are pleasing and ambient, working well against both faltering shrieks as low-tuned “mmmms” and “ahhhs” (“Morgenrot im Totental”). The whole thing has a kind of easy familiarity embodied by layered tremolos repeating vaguely melancholic refrains and fades naturally into the background.
Der Müde Mensch is characterized by placid, uninspired themes, with exceptions to this rule few and far between. The “sprawling psychedelic solo” teased in the one-sheet and delivered in the back half of “Heilung,” is undoubtedly the album’s high point. While nothing spectacular in itself, its warbling, wobbling meander is a sudden explosion of color amidst the grey, monotonous surroundings. There are times when the vocals gain an impassioned power, and the guitars a lilting melancholia (“Morgenrot im Totental,” title track) that seems to capture the ghost of feeling. But it’s difficult to appreciate these assets when Calcarata take a decidedly snail-like approach to composition that drags already tired refrains out to unbearable lengths, where they dry up and wither. The pay-offs that consist mainly of a simple escalation of the central melody, and screams, could be powerful, were it not for the fact that one has had to wait ten-plus minutes for them. Even then the denouement is unambitious and lukewarm; neither intricate and mesmerizing, nor punchily affecting through deceptive simplicity.
The overall absence of dynamism makes Der Müde Mensch a slog to get through, despite its reasonable 47-minute runtime. Far too often a melody enters only to leave undeveloped. With the notable exception of “Heilung”‘s five-minute solo, the best it gets is a flicker of urgency coming through a more mournful iteration of the theme (“Morgenrot im Totental”). The percussion is similarly anaemic, with only a few moments of genuine flourish (“Heilung,” title track), and entirely lacking the assertiveness which would mitigate the monotony of the monosyllabic tempos. If there’s one thing Calcarata deserve praise for, it’s their production choices. Der Müde Mensch would have turned out far worse had the duo opted for a traditional raw or atmo-black mix. Thankfully, they did not, and so the melodies and percussion are comparatively crisp and layered. One can only imagine the heights of beauty the music could have reached with a more ambitious template.
I want to like Der Müde Mensch more than I do, but Calcarata don’t make it easy. Rather than using an interesting concept to inform deep, intriguing soundscapes, the duo seem uninterested in musically exploring the metaphorical worlds they center their art around or taking their listener on any kind of journey. They just end up putting you to sleep.
Rating: Disappointing
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: WAV
Label: Naturmacht Productions
Websites: Bandcamp | Artist Site
Releases Worldwide: September 27th, 2024#20 #2024 #AtmosphericBlackMetal #BlackMetal #Calcarata #DerMüdeMensch #GermanMetal #NaturmachtProductions #Review #Reviews #Sep24
-
Calcarata – Der Müde Mensch Review
By Thus Spoke
Calcarata is only the second metal band I’ve encountered with a conceptual connection to the Mollusca phylum.1 Admittedly, their debut, Der Müde Mensch, incorporates the gastropod more in the mythic sense than the literal, as it purports to “follow the giant snail of slumber up and down the slopes of the mind.” And yet the creature’s prominence—from the cover art to the music itself—proves to be a key motif for the album. Exploring realms of dreams and death in word, Calcarata’s hazy atmospheric black metal experiments with them in musical expression too with mollifying, slow-moving soundscapes. Music evoking the essence of liminal states of consciousness, deliberately measured and hypnotic in its sway, treads the fine line between effectively immersive, and simply soporific. Der Müde Mensch falls very firmly on one side of this line.
Der Müde Mensch—The Tired Person—turns out to be very aptly named. The mellow ethereality that wafts across its runtime (particularly in opener “Calcarata,” and ending title track) is reminiscent of a dreamlike state of semi-consciousness, listlessness. In fact, much of the black metal on display would fall neatly into the DSBM camp (“Heilung,” title track) were it not for that hopeful thread inhabiting the melodies, both in guitar and clean-vocal form. Many such melodies, if not gripping, are pleasing and ambient, working well against both faltering shrieks as low-tuned “mmmms” and “ahhhs” (“Morgenrot im Totental”). The whole thing has a kind of easy familiarity embodied by layered tremolos repeating vaguely melancholic refrains and fades naturally into the background.
Der Müde Mensch is characterized by placid, uninspired themes, with exceptions to this rule few and far between. The “sprawling psychedelic solo” teased in the one-sheet and delivered in the back half of “Heilung,” is undoubtedly the album’s high point. While nothing spectacular in itself, its warbling, wobbling meander is a sudden explosion of color amidst the grey, monotonous surroundings. There are times when the vocals gain an impassioned power, and the guitars a lilting melancholia (“Morgenrot im Totental,” title track) that seems to capture the ghost of feeling. But it’s difficult to appreciate these assets when Calcarata take a decidedly snail-like approach to composition that drags already tired refrains out to unbearable lengths, where they dry up and wither. The pay-offs that consist mainly of a simple escalation of the central melody, and screams, could be powerful, were it not for the fact that one has had to wait ten-plus minutes for them. Even then the denouement is unambitious and lukewarm; neither intricate and mesmerizing, nor punchily affecting through deceptive simplicity.
The overall absence of dynamism makes Der Müde Mensch a slog to get through, despite its reasonable 47-minute runtime. Far too often a melody enters only to leave undeveloped. With the notable exception of “Heilung”‘s five-minute solo, the best it gets is a flicker of urgency coming through a more mournful iteration of the theme (“Morgenrot im Totental”). The percussion is similarly anaemic, with only a few moments of genuine flourish (“Heilung,” title track), and entirely lacking the assertiveness which would mitigate the monotony of the monosyllabic tempos. If there’s one thing Calcarata deserve praise for, it’s their production choices. Der Müde Mensch would have turned out far worse had the duo opted for a traditional raw or atmo-black mix. Thankfully, they did not, and so the melodies and percussion are comparatively crisp and layered. One can only imagine the heights of beauty the music could have reached with a more ambitious template.
I want to like Der Müde Mensch more than I do, but Calcarata don’t make it easy. Rather than using an interesting concept to inform deep, intriguing soundscapes, the duo seem uninterested in musically exploring the metaphorical worlds they center their art around or taking their listener on any kind of journey. They just end up putting you to sleep.
Rating: Disappointing
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: WAV
Label: Naturmacht Productions
Websites: Bandcamp | Artist Site
Releases Worldwide: September 27th, 2024#20 #2024 #AtmosphericBlackMetal #BlackMetal #Calcarata #DerMüdeMensch #GermanMetal #NaturmachtProductions #Review #Reviews #Sep24
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#paranormal #ghosts #ghostcam #usa #willardpubliclibrary #greylady #webcam #liveghostcam #spooky #phantom
Nothing to watch on TV tonight? Here’s a live cam to keep you going.
The Grey Lady. Last seen August 10, 2010 in this hallway of the Willard Public Library.
Keep some fresh pants on standby in case she turns up again…
https://www.willardlib.org/basement-hall -
#paranormal #ghosts #ghostcam #usa #willardpubliclibrary #greylady #webcam #liveghostcam #spooky #phantom
Nothing to watch on TV tonight? Here’s a live cam to keep you going.
The Grey Lady. Last seen August 10, 2010 in this hallway of the Willard Public Library.
Keep some fresh pants on standby in case she turns up again…
https://www.willardlib.org/basement-hall -
#paranormal #ghosts #ghostcam #usa #willardpubliclibrary #greylady #webcam #liveghostcam #spooky #phantom
Nothing to watch on TV tonight? Here’s a live cam to keep you going.
The Grey Lady. Last seen August 10, 2010 in this hallway of the Willard Public Library.
Keep some fresh pants on standby in case she turns up again…
https://www.willardlib.org/basement-hall -
Theia (cleric) has taken a significantly morally grey path, to the consternation of her friends and allies. "You... turned your faith to a new god while you were trapped in a foreign plane, and invited her into ours?!" it's like they're afraid of the goddess of Darkon's Mists! :D #theConsequences
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10 - Ghost 🪦 - #eerieelementslist
Fineliners + brush pen + markers + gold + white paint markers
(These are a mix of grey Uni Pin fineliners + Pitt Brush Pen).·:·.☽✧ ✦ ✧☾.·:·
#ghost #ghostgirl #drawing #drawingchallenges #markers #markerart #originalart #art
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10 - Ghost 🪦 - #eerieelementslist
Fineliners + brush pen + markers + gold + white paint markers
(These are a mix of grey Uni Pin fineliners + Pitt Brush Pen).·:·.☽✧ ✦ ✧☾.·:·
#ghost #ghostgirl #drawing #drawingchallenges #markers #markerart #originalart #art
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10 - Ghost 🪦 - #eerieelementslist
Fineliners + brush pen + markers + gold + white paint markers
(These are a mix of grey Uni Pin fineliners + Pitt Brush Pen).·:·.☽✧ ✦ ✧☾.·:·
#ghost #ghostgirl #drawing #drawingchallenges #markers #markerart #originalart #art
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10 - Ghost 🪦 - #eerieelementslist
Fineliners + brush pen + markers + gold + white paint markers
(These are a mix of grey Uni Pin fineliners + Pitt Brush Pen).·:·.☽✧ ✦ ✧☾.·:·
#ghost #ghostgirl #drawing #drawingchallenges #markers #markerart #originalart #art
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I can imagine many people resenting the term Palestinian revolution when reading the title of this article. Some have already written that revolution is one thing and resistance is another, that war is one thing and liberation is another. I chose this title, being literal, precisely because it would be provocative. Let us be open to any dialogue, knowing that the first thing that is at issue is the definition of the subject. In times of war, any political discourse is a polemic act. War is not a choice, it is not a means among other means, as statist positivism and its projections on the anti-authoritarian pretexts for capitulation assert; it is the incessant class condition in which we find ourselves and through which we liberate ourselves. Every phrase that has been uttered in the last 20, 50, hundreds and thousands of years flutters on the broken Gaza wall or hangs in the rubble of the city, among the dismembered children. If the well-meaning movement researchers who have produced numerous analyses of the class and social background of the Greek revolution of 1821 find it difficult to recognize the Palestinian revolution as such, this says something about their euroelitism and nationalism. As for those who deny resistance to colonialism and imperialism, as well as its revolutionary potential, by juxtaposing the “essential” antithesis of capital-labor, the totality or molecularity, today we can say that their abstractions and confines are filled with the stench of the carnivorous capitalist North. The thoughtless adoption of the dogmatic social-democratic scholasticism suggests a blind consumption of intellectualism, self-indulging in ideological garbage. If I pay you a regular salary, the relationship is class-based. But if I take your land to build a work camp or a prison, then not only the relationship is not class-based, but it is subordinate to that, even if I put you in the camp on a salary or put you in prison! If I put you up against the prison wall and shoot you, the relationship is not class-based, it is “essentially” indifferent outside of its interpretation into a monetary relationship. If I lock you up in the prison that I built by stealing your land, if I control your survival resources and bomb you day and night, the relationship is not class-based and the relation of power cannot be changed until the labor relation is universally and completely dismantled. This kind of idiocy goes around as scholastic proletarian theory.
We have entered the evolutionary phase of capitalist civilization where it is materialized as a total synchronic crisis and where every tick of the clock reveals the positioning of every political subject on the side of revolution or on the side of counter-revolution. All antitheses are condensed, they intersect and are confounded towards the maximum and the minimum and in the explosive way that they emerge they express their complexity. The anti-capitalist movement is shaped within this vortex, it does not stand still in some idealized apathetic position of an overseer. It is therefore traversed by the whole set of intersections, confusions and complexities. The war waged by the statist public health control revealed a deep rift in the anti-capitalist movement, the imperialist war in the Ukrainian territory revealed other rifts, which literally culminate into war. The revolutionary counterattack inside the territory of the zionist colonialist rule, illuminated the most fundamental rift within the movement. If we can schematically say that the first rupture concerned the fractional scope of imperialist colonialism over the social body and the second one concerned revolutionary autonomy in conditions where military rule, as fundamental to capitalism, is unveiled, then the Palestinian rupture concerns the very point of the history of capitalism and its destruction. The unfulfilled crusade of colonizing the Eurasian East (prior to the complete colonization of Africa and of the continent westward to Europe) reappears as a historically inescapable and globally universal definitive question. Incidentally, wage slavery, on which the capitalist mode of production is founded, emerged and prevailed in Europe through the colonialist war to the east (in particular, from the data so far it appears that the prime organism where the prevalence of the wage relation was incubated was crusading Venice).
The historical moment of the dissemination of CoV-2 and the culmination of the anti-health imperialist counter-revolution, through its militaristic and bio-technocratic experiment of the universal vaccination, brought to the fore the class and political subjectivity of the human body, i.e. the most elementary organic unit of human existence and society, making it the target of a totalitarian colonial campaign. Imperialist terrorism attempted to establish itself in new depths of primitive accumulation and to restructure all existing power relations with the guiding principle of the liquidation, expulsion and purging of surplus labour. This coincided with the powerful manifestation of the Black Revolt in so-called America and of the women’s revolt globally, the living subject of the history of slavery and capitalist colonization of the Earth. The war of state sanitation introduced a historically innovative regime of perpetual state of emergency, which through bio-politics gave primacy to militaristic terms of domination and to the ideology and morality that derives from that. The counter-revolutionary offensive, in the form of the emergency regime, within the metropolises of Euro-Atlantic imperialism, continued in relation to the war in the Ukrainian-Russian space and now continues in relation to the war in Palestine (the Chinese counter- revolution continues on the first axis). It is no coincidence that the Israeli techno-stratocracy is a pioneer in the production and export of technology and methodology of control and repression, of fascist organization and politics, of biotechnology, digital integration and post-humanist fiction ideology. It should be noted that Israeli fascism imposed universal compulsory biotechnological vaccination of its citizens. Zionist colonialism fuses on the one hand traditional religious totalitarianism and racism, and on the other hand the fundamentalist governmentalist and mechanistic mentality of the bourgeoisie, the theocracy of capital and its technocratic mysticism. That is why Israeli colonialism today is demonstrating worldwide, on behalf of the Western Empire, the might of its terrorism with unprecedented intensity.
In the ideological battle within the international movement, which of course expresses contradictory and now increasingly antagonistic tendencies on the line of conflict between revolution and counter- revolution, what emerges as a central rift is the koinonismos (1) of counter-revolution. In particular, the koinonismos of imperialism and more specifically the koinonismos of imperialist social democracy. In correlation to this, anti-imperialist social fascism reappears as a problem. In the Greek movement the concept of koinonismos has been defined as the internalization of the pervasive ideology of the regime by the social movement. I reinstate it here with a reverse definition, which, without negating what is historically recorded, it puts the title of social in the right causal relation: the social ground and the social relation are not constructed by power, but on the contrary, power pillages their material, their name and their value, in order to return them to the subjects, having reconstructed them with the necessary divisions. This rift concerns the underlying anti-proletarian, anti-social and counter-revolutionary roots of making a separation from the aggressive initiative of the Palestinians, from their Islamic vanguard, from the unholy revolutionary means, from the open class war, from anti-imperialist resistance, from the national identities of the global South, from the prevalence of faith over survival, from the devaluation of the ideological and normative claims and rhythms of the bourgeois positivism internalized in the movements of the North, etc.
The koinonismos of counter-revolution is defined by the class and political frontier that the ruling class erects against the savage proletariat, which in the historical narrative is presented as uncivilized and in politics as terrorist. The koinonismos of imperialism has as its central axes the peace of Christian ecumenism and bourgeois liberalism with its modern ecumenism. The peace of God presupposes the sovereignty of the crusading sword. Imperialist socialism, by demanding the disarmament of the ‘uncivilized’ in order for a peace to be recognized, expresses its militaristic totalitarianism. Let’s not forget that even when Euro-Atlantic imperialism declared war on Russian nationalism, it called Russian nationalism uncivilized and collectively criminalized Russian culture (arts, sports, history…).
The common joint of imperialist koinonismos is the Law of Empire, developed on a global model, in transnational conventions (treaties) and transnational institutions. The sword of peace of the god of the Judeo-Christian tradition is surrounded by legal trinkets and supposedly collective mediations. Around the slaughterhouse, the real class conditions of political warfare (military, biopolitical, moral-social) imperialist koinonismos bombards with a totalitarian morality, founded on the given biopolitical class divisions. Not only is not every death or freedom of every person measured equally, but more specifically, the more intense the class or political factors that determine a person’s life chances and local rights, the more necessary and just for the political economy of capital is the intensification of their oppression or even their killing.
In examining the ideological conflict around the Palestinian revolution, I will use as a model of reference the first statement of Syriza after the revolutionary initiative of October 7, because it contains in three sentences all the basic ideological points of imperialist social democracy that have been internalized in the anti-capitalist movement.
“SYRIZA unequivocally condemns today’s Hamas attack against Israel, calls for its immediate end and expresses its solidarity with the people of Israel. The ongoing violence by all sides in the region, is a threat to any prospect of resolving the differences and is brutally affecting the security and rights especially of civilians, Israelis and Palestinians. We stand firmly in favour of the immediate resumption of credible bilateral talks for a two-state solution on the basis of the 1967 borders, with the capital of the Palestinian state being the city of east Jerusalem.”
Let us distinguish the ideological points that form the positions of imperialist social democracy:
1. Condemnation of the attack against the occupier’s national body inside its fort. This condemnation is the most basic position statement within the war. Various people try to convince that the condemnation of violence or of state violence from either side places them in a third position, morally and politically superior. The global proletariat understands, today as a whole, that the condemnation of the real military victory of the Palestinians is an expression of solidarity with imperialist koinonismos and thus a statement of consent to the extension of genocide, stronger than any tearful protest against it by the very subjects who condemn the attack.
In many statements, the condemnation, in its support, invokes the particular religious identity of the political organization that carried out the attack on the colonial fortress. This dogmatic demonization of Islam is identical with the fundamentalism of the crusades, which permeates conservative ideologies of capitalist times and culminates in imperialist/colonial elitism. Those who have been quick to denounce the religious character of Hamas identify with Netanyahu in his position that “we are the light, they are the darkness”. Koinonismos, the most subservient to imperialism, immediately assimilated the propaganda about rapes and massacres of civilians and children as if these practices, which characterize state warfare in general, are automatically derived from the Islamic identity of the resistance organization. The anti- theocratic guise of political condemnation is itself an attack on faith that transcends the carnal lust and fears of the bourgeois citizen, an attack on social morality that puts individualist autarchy under question, an attack on the collective and transcendentalist psyche that dismantles utilitarian positivism.
The ideological lackeys who, disgusted from the resistance’s attack joined the chorus of the liberal crusade, forgot that Hamas is the elected government of the marginal colonial territories, which was arbitrarily denied its bourgeois-democratic authority. The genocidal blockade of Gaza began in 2007, when Hamas ousted Fatah coup plotters, at whose hands the struggling Palestinians had been infamously tortured. Liberal fundamentalism, which sets up a la carte democracies, with coups, terrorism and mass purges, calls the “uncivilized” people fascists, whenever its bribery doesn’t work. The goal is the condemnation of their extended political autonomy.
Hamas was of no interest to the luminaries of imperialist social democracy during the years when the unrecognized Hamas government was tolerated by the colonialists, as it was managing the biopolitical and economic plight of the people of Gaza due to its total blockade. Once it breached the blockade, its militaristic armor and the security of its national reproduction, imperialist social democracy felt the need to join in denouncing the virtual hideous monster.
2. Recognition of the settlers and their genocidal state as a people. Subsequently, expressing solidarity with the colonialist organization. Only statism ascribes the concept of people to a state that is ethnically homogeneous. From the socio-revolutionary point of view, the popular always defines itself in class terms. The militarist colonists never and nowhere constituted a people. All Israelis are settlers because, in contrast to their abstract historical locality, their actual settlement, residence and expansion in the biblical land is by direct and continuous ethnic cleansing of another locality. If we were talking about the United States, only white fascists consider white Americans a distinct people. There is an Israeli nation, but it is not a people. The people of the Israeli state are the Palestinians, the hunted natives. Israeli citizens become a people to the extent that they betray their nation and fight with the Palestinian people. We will see this in a moment in their own words.
A side note, invoking the phantom Israeli people and expressing solidarity with this makes no class or political distinctions within the colonial nation. This phantom comes straight out of the most horrible statist nationalism, that is, colonialist nationalism. In any case, solidarity with the exploited classes of the colonial organism itself cannot possibly depend on submissiveness to its state of domination. On the contrary, class solidarity starts from the anti-colonial revolution, the social war for the destruction of the state-launching ground for imperialism.
The declarations of solidarity with the “Israeli people” are an invitation to complete the genocide of the Palestinians.
3. Condemnation of violence on both sides.
4. Focus on civilians and subjecting them to the imperialist conditions of rights and security. The focus on civilians completes the project of moral-ideological disarmament, depoliticization and passivization of the resisting people. At the same time that imperialism is blowing up the revolted prison of Gaza, it is also assuming the paternalistic responsibility of managing the survivors of genocide. More generally, the humanitarian infiltration of the transnational and parastatal (NGO) institutions of capital in the global South is paving the way for the formation of protectorate state institutions in the service of imperialism, with the assignment of managerial positions to collaborationists. We should note that the regional hegemonic powers are also playing in this field, always against the political autonomy and internationalist solidarity of the resisting people.
The external projection of the security claim as a primary need, annihilates the revolutionary needs of the people and extorts the recognition of the colonial interest, the security of its national fascist regime, as a universal need. The conclaves that hold the sword of imperialist peace can define the rights and the timeliness or untimeliness of their application. While international rights have been established in order to give the form of a contract to structural inequalities, the equation of the Palestinian people and of the zionist settlers under the category of ‘civilian’ legitimizes colonialism and currently justifies the attempt for a “final solution” for the sake of the security of the genocidal organization, i.e. total ethnic cleansing through genocide.
5. Proposing the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories that remained unconquered until 1967. On this point, libertarian imperialist social democracy is differentiated from the statist leftist social-democracy in terms of theoretical formulations and working field. However, they meet on the basic point of the relationship with the colonial state. Left social democracy expresses the imminent imperialist project of annihilating the Palestinian resistance and imposing on the wreckage of Gaza a collaborationist regime based on the experience of the Abbas management, who is an agent of the years-long ethnic cleansing. Libertarian social democracy, with a kind of Jesuit elitism and hypocrisy, advocates the fraternity of the exploited Palestinians and Israeli “peoples” or “societies”, without the destruction of the colonial state. I note that the workerist position that attributes the capacity for overthrowing the Israeli capitalist state formation exclusively to the Israeli working class, validates colonial nationalism and even lends it with an ideological envelope of pure national socialism (Nazism). Nothing new, Mussolini started out as a leftist and zionist settlers too, with strong socialist, workerist and communitarian roots.
All the ideological points of imperialist social democracy except the last one are replacing political polemics with a biopolitical ethics and managerial lingo. The biopolitical discourse objectifies existential experience in order to strip it of its class history and political subjectivity. Biopolitical ethics defines what violence is in order to exempt a set of capitalist-state practices from the category of violence and at the same time to criminalize resistance practices. Critical biopolitical ideology ratifies imperialism’s stripping of bodies of their collective identities and their resistance power. Vulnerability is transformed ideologically into an insurmountable anthropological condition, either as a class condition or as its weak consciousness. In this context, “civilians” become the central figures of the biopolitical narrative of war, with imperialist citizenship as their archetype of identification and measure of evaluation.
From a revolutionary point of view, the examination of experiences and the subordination of means to abstract ends that come from outside the immediate field of struggle is an ideological ploy to eliminate and replace the practical ends of direct resistance with the koinonistic ethics of the means, i.e. the anti-proletarian and counter-revolutionary values of the bourgeoisie, which reflect established inequalities. To judge the Palestinian resistance by the yardstick of anarchist or Marxist utopia is a project of ideological colonialism, but also of existential annihilation by the intelligentsia of dominant european humanism. Values that do not allow for taking sides with the existing resistance are values that are comfortable with the existing class slaughterhouse. In the offices where the fundamentalist critique on unholy means takes place, sits the Inquisition, which is certainly concerned with popular resistance, but only as an enemy. A Palestinian people separated from its armed struggle and its resistance organizations is the imaginary flock of the crusader church.
The Palestinian revolution awakens a multitude of questions of the international anti-capitalist movement, which are inevitably answered immediately by each one’s stance. I will only mention a few of these in which the class-political borders have already been drawn within the actual conflict, and then I will focus on the revolutionary lines given to us by the revolutionary anarchists from the ground of the conflict.
a. The identification of class relations in the actual composition of capitalist domination on a global scale. Who is an enemy and who is a friend at any particular point for the revolutionary anarchist movement? How is the distinction between direct and indirect political tasks concretized at each point, given anarchism’s characteristic historical stance of directly responding to the needs of our community as oppressed people, with the general perspective of freedom and equality? The most concrete answers, the only ones capable of bringing about alliance, immediacy and radical perspective, stem from the direct struggle of the subjects involved. This observation confirms the anarchist claim to the political autonomy of all resistance.
b. The correlation of ends and means. A question that many anarchists falsely and arrogantly declare that anarchism has solved, unlike the statist political currents. Whenever the class conflict brings this question to the fore, as did the revolutionary initiative on October 7, all those who claim to have answered this question without having a revolutionary organization on the ground, can and do validate their ideological position in only one way: by separating themselves from revolutionary action.
c. The strategic treatment of the relations between imperialism, the state and the social revolution.
d. The political mediation of the resistance. Here I am not referring to the mediation of the Palestinian movement by the Palestinian political organizations, the surrounding state or, more generally, political-military forces and the international imperialist institutions. The Palestinian people have felt on their own flesh the exploitative and usually treacherous attitude of the Arab and Islamic states. One sees no friends in the UN and in the various imperialist political interventions. Here I am referring to the ideological and political mediation of antagonistic positions of the international movement on behalf of the Palestinian movement. In particular, it is important within the internationalist movement, to deal with the internalized imperialist koinonismos and also with anti-imperialist social fascism, from the point of view of their colonialist political authoritarianism against the autonomy of the Palestinian revolution. In the sphere of political mediation which cancels the field of struggle itself, belongs also the usual koinonistic address to an imaginary apathetic mass as if it constituted the political public of resistance. The political public of resistance is of course the movements themselves, from their organic processes (and their collaborations) to the militant frontier of their development.
The confusion has spread to the internationalist movement. A simple example is the confrontation
within the anti-fascist football club St.Pauli. The critical response (2) of the local clubs to the club’s pro-Israeli statement sharply reproduced the positions of imperialist social democracy. An exception was the message of the Turkish club, a few days later, which highlighted the historical unity of the anti-colonial and anti- racist struggle. The radical position came from the key borderland between the global North and the global South. I will focus below on the first statement (3) of the Anarchist Federation of Afghanistan-Iran, because of the intensity of its reactionary positions, its locality in a place of struggle (Middle East, Kurdistan), and in connection to this because of its internal contradictions. In contrast, I will examine the social-fascist positions that present themselves as anti-imperialist. The last critical reference will focus on conspiratorial (4) positions.The entirety of the ideological positions of imperialist social democracy have been eloquently and succinctly answered by the Palestinian refugee Nidal Khalaf in his intervention, “On ‘pro-Palestinian’ hypocrisy.” (5) I will only summarize at this point, but anyone who continues reading this text should read the aforementioned article as if it were interjected here. I adopt every word of it, considering it sufficient to deconstruct the scarecrows of imperialist koinonismos. N. Khalaf, after stating from the outset that “Israel” is a colonial entity created and existing as an advance military base for Western imperialism, makes it clear that a war is being waged with colonialism and that it is not a border or religious dispute. He then goes on to denounce pro-colonial pacifism and collaborationist case of the two-state solution, the condemnation of violence and international law. He explains that the western value systems underlying the allegedly friendly critique of the Palestinian resistance, exist due to and for the sake of imperialist genocide. According to the Palestinian refugee’s testimony, the real hypocrisy is not the imperialists’ policies and their propaganda, but the projection of a pro-Palestinian identity by subjects who conform to the western scheme of liberal values. The worst form of western hegemonism is the attempts at moral subjugation, which are condensed in the refusal to support the Palestinian resistance organizations. The article closes by returning back to the exponents of cultural imperialism the image of the dead civilian. The whole text decimates the ideological colonialism of imperialist koinonismos that is so internalized in the international movement.
I proceed to a political summary of the views expressed in two interviews by two anarchists from the field, one who spoke (6) on behalf of the Palestinian anarchist organization FAUDA and one with Israeli citizenship. (7) Political positions from reality, against the political mediation of imperialist koinonismos. As another testimony (8) from the refugee Palestinian diaspora notes: “There is plenty of temptation to wag fingers in the aftermath of the operation [of October 7], but surely that task is not the domain of academics and activists in the metropole. Nor should it be the priority of diaspora Palestinians (among whom I include myself). In our environs, filled with their own kind of hostility, the priority should be to defend Palestinians against the torment to which they have been subjected by the entire industrialized world. Among politicians, artists, celebrities, and intellectuals, Palestinians have no shortage of critics happy to cosign Zionist genocide. Those critiques don’t need or desire our validation, anyway. Abandoning our brethren in order to appease the Zionist establishment will deliver no accolades. In the end, the aspirant to respectability is left only with the shame of conciliation.
Palestinians are perfectly capable of formulating strategy and thinking through complex problems without the guidance of outsiders; they certainly don’t need half-baked moralism from dorks and social climbers in the West.”
The actual relationship between ends and means as testimonies from ground reveal, clarifies the issue of concretizing class-political relations and identifying enemies and friends. I begin with two quotes from the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. (9) “The Gaza Palestinians have decided they’re willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom.” Who would deny this cause and its consequences? “On Saturday, Israel saw pictures it has never seen before. Palestinian vehicles patrolling its cities, bike riders entering through the Gaza gates. These pictures tear away at that arrogance.” No consequence is capable of undoing the achieved unity of this cause and this means. The October 7 initiative drew a line of war, of revolution and counter-revolution in Gaza that defines the world in an inescapable way: you either tread on one hemisphere of the Earth or the other, either with the Palestinian revolution or with imperialist genocide. The word arrogance, couched as the self-consciousness of the colonial nation (self-consciousness can only ever be negative) dissolves the counter-revolutionary propaganda about innocent victims.
The comrade from FAUDA informs us that the common front of the Palestinian resistance under the same banner and with the common goal of liberation from zionism is a fundamental need and that their organization is fighting for the unity of the movement. It also points out the necessity of mobilizing the youth for this purpose. (10)
The comrade with Israeli nationality informs us that what characterizes the Palestinian resistance these days, both in the West Bank and in Gaza, is the common and broad fronts. Islamists, secularists, Marxists and even national-liberals, like some parts of Fatah, are fighting side by side. The immediate class and political frontier has been defined, the immediate revolutionary purpose has been defined, the practical consequences are inescapable.
The comrade, with their testimony, completes the revolutionary line by taking a radical stand at the rear of the colonial frontier. His words illuminate precisely what internationalist defeatism means. Already as he introduces himself he declares his place of birth, Haifa, as occupied Palestine and thus calls the occupation by its name, for all Palestinian land. Recognizing the anti-colonial resistance as the only revolutionary movement in the occupied territories and as the vanguard of any radical change, he declares his obligation to deny his Israeli identity, to become an enemy, a traitor to the colonial nation, to his “society” and to ally with the dispossessed. Here is a perception of class specific condition, of the specific consequences of ends and means. The comrade declares his duty to side with the oppressed, on their own terms and under their own leadership. And he notes on this that anarchism (11) gives him both the language and the tools to envision this politics. “For me, there is no ‘anarchist society’ to march towards, since we don’t have an end goal. I see anarchism as a resistance movement, an arsenal of tools for the oppressed all over the Earth to fight the present dystopia, and that is what attracts me to it.”
The comrade participated in the organization “Anarchists against the Wall” (now dissolved). Since the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present day, the walls between North and South have multiplied: Palestine, Mexico, Mediterranean, Evros (greek-turkish border), Kurdistan. The revolutionary initiative of October 7 was a powerful blow to the historical development of the global imperialist prison. The comrade from the settler hinterland explains that the idea of coexistence is a superficial show and that only by fighting against the wall did the two sides come together, not as enemies, but as fighters for the same purpose, comrades, co-conspirators and allies, on equal terms. “What Hamas did on Saturday, October 7, was to break the ghetto, both physically and symbolically. They broke the gates surrounding Gaza and reclaimed land inside Israel, positioning themselves as a force beyond their assigned role as the Gaza government. They put themselves at the forefront of the Palestinian liberation movement, directly decolonizing territory.” Class conditions, revolutionary consistency, ends, means, all crystal clear from the anarchist perspective that unites the oppressed in the war.
Let us return briefly to the question of defining the grid of class relations overall. Why is the anti-colonial struggle the key meeting point on both sides of the border? Why not the workers’ struggle, the anti-patriarchal struggle, etc.? Aside from the fact that the regime of national subordination and general exile in Palestine has implanted a condition of domination that superimposes the entirety of class relations there, the comrade points out an additional condition: the settler democracy allows everything, all kinds of radicalism, as long as it is committed to the zionist military rule.
I would like to make two comments on the information given to us by our comrades from Palestine. Both the relativist theory of the intersectional approach and the relativist theory of the abstract wage-relationship as a universal class identity, are incapable of dealing with the specific class needs and social currents that unite people in revolutionary struggle. This does not imply that the correct theory is the post- Leninist one that projects imperialism as the main antithesis in relation to which all other antitheses are indifferent. We will see this below. Direct action anarchism, even when aware of the various abstract theories of Marxist or sociological origin, goes beyond them, having at its disposal the wealth of knowledge offered by direct struggle. There are no issues that fall within a molecular sphere independent of class relations on a global scale, nor issues that fall within a mega-scale where relations are inevitably mediated by states. The scales are interrelated and the criticality of each antithesis is defined by the subjects of the resistance. There are contradictions that affect internationalist solidarity (e.g. Hamas’s links to the Turkish state and the ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories of Rojava) and direct contradictions that exclude any non polemic encounter (e.g. the participation of the working class and the queer community of the colonial Israeli nation in its war machine).
Many libertarians internationally are still investing in the working class of the colonialist establishment. Typical is the intervention of the Anarchist Communist Group of Melbourne (12) (11/10) which, while acknowledging the complicity of the majority of the Israeli working class and not expecting Jewish workers’ solidarity to be a major force in the near future, characterizes the targeting of Israeli workers as damaging. Although this intervention describes the Israeli state in real terms, pointing out that Israeli fascism is moving towards the “final solution”, it does not neglect the obligation to imperialist social democracy to condemn Hamas with a cultural shadow (abstractly “reactionary”) and to distance itself from the targeting of Israeli civilians. But why is equality in horror damaging, especially in a permanent condition where no other practice has been able to even remotely crack the arrogance of genocidal peace, as the Israeli writer D. Levi attests?
Both comrades from Palestine answered categorically to the questions put to them about workers’ solidarity: mass proletarian solidarity from within the colonialist entity towards the Palestinian people is an ideological ghost. The suggestion that the liberation of Palestine, and more broadly of the global South, from imperialist domination is dependent on the workers’ movement of the North, is a characteristic expression of imperialist social democracy, of the colonial capitalist conception of progress and its projection against the revolutionary class struggle. Without the direct struggle of the oppressed people, nothing else happens except the expansive reformism of genocide.
Immediately after the revolutionary initiative of October 7, the state of settler bosses detained the thousands of Palestinian workers who crossed from Gaza every day as if moving through a labour camp, tortured them and marked them with numbers. Some workers died from the torture. In what way did the settler workers express their solidarity? By continuing to enlist and work to murder 160 children of the uncivilized proletariat every day.
The popular movement of the citizens of the occupied colonial hinterland has a direct enemy and if it does not confront this enemy in a way proportional to the intensity and depth of the current nationalist offensive, it will leave the nationwide responsibility of Israelis for the culmination of the genocide intact. War with zionist fascism which suppresses even the slightest questioning of the “final solution” and which devalues even the Israeli hostages and their protesting relatives, must be internalized in the Israeli nation. During the Nazi occupation of Europe, Italian and German antifascists found a way to stand in solidarity with the peoples in the conquered lands and to put antifascist resistance into practice: they defected to the partisans. This was the clearest manifestation of proletarian internationalism.
Of course, the preconditions for solidarity to the Palestinian resistance are not put forth by the anti-nationalist anti-colonial movement of the colonial entity, which has expressed understanding for the loss of its own people in the revolutionary attack of October 7, but by the imperialist social democracy. The same fascism, especially its antiproletarian-counterrevolutionary expressions, must be confronted in the imperialist hinterland, such as the capitalists’ terrorism against the workers of Starbucks (13) or against Harvard students in the USA and the military rule in the streets of Europe.
As various people attempt to contrast the Kurdish Freedom Movement with the Palestinian movement, doing in this way great disservice to internationalist solidarity, let me remind that the internationalist connection of the PKK with the revolutionary proletarian movement in the turkish territory is the HBDH ( Peoples’ United Revolutionary Movement) the front of the Turkish armed revolutionary organizations with the PKK.
Those who say that “resistance, uprisings and revolutions will either be social/class or nothing”, denying the class and social nature of the Palestinian resistance and the class and social elements of the political self-determination of the resistance organizations, are aiding the imperialist genocide. Their “nothing” is a gleeful applause for the cultural and physical ethnic cleansing of the oppressed who stray from the fundamentalist lines of colonial socialism. After all, the ideological totalitarianism of “All or Nothing” always comes to nothing anyway. (14)
Speaking of workers’ struggle, when the FAUDA comrade was asked about the possibility of a new general strike of Palestinians like in 2021, he replied that although it is not a trivial and useless practice, the struggle today has gone beyond this level. The situation and experience prove the necessity of armed struggle. The interdependence of means and ends is not deduced from some abstract interpretation of the conflict (e.g. workerism), nor from a mechanistic projection of abstractions onto practice. Even the purely economic struggle, as we move away from the reformism of the workers’ aristocracy, requires armed ways of protecting itself against military and penal repression, strike-breaking and anti-union terrorism (e.g. in the greek territory today). The political strike sharply raises the level of conflict. And finally, the whole historical experience of the workers’ movement showcases that the labor camp is a base for self-organization and for venturing into the struggle, but not a place of militant power, when the bourgeoisie is ready to extend its military means beyond limits.
The class conflict in Palestine reveals the hypocrisy of the ideological distinction, founded on an anti-armed struggle stance, between organized vanguardism and spontaneous insurrection, a construct propagated in the libertarian movement by the situationist lackeys of counter-revolution. Many political texts claiming the title of solidarity with Palestine, call for or wish for the emergence of an uprising in the image of the 1st Intifada, as opposed to the current military conflict. These vulgar euro-elitists, who pretend to be the generals of the correct ways of rebellion, underestimate the Palestinian people, as if they were not already rebellious, as if they were not involved in the resistance in a thousand ways, as if they cannot judge for themselves what the right ways are, and with no sense of responsibility, push a line of disarmament and non-organization within the slaughterhouse, only to promote the doctrine of their political subservience to the military rule’s monopoly, as the genuine liberal colonialists that they are.
On the actual ground, Gaza, the quality and size of the war production of the Palestinian resistance shows, in real terms, what the historical evolution of social horizontality means. Both the arsenal and infrastructure of resistance, with their particular characteristics within specific cultural and political conditions, express the breadth and depth of creative participation and social cohesion in relation to the conflict with colonialism. The main weapons of resistance are improvised. To manufacture the available quantity of rockets and various explosive devices required a huge amount of work. In addition, it required working space and an equally vast transport network. Even more work was needed to build the underground forts, which serve almost all the activities of the combative forces, and not only their cover at the time of close combat. In other words, this is an infrastructure project that serves far more needs than the classic concrete forts, such as those of the Maginot and Metaxa lines, with all the work being done underground and in incomparable territorial density. Additional work was required to ensure that all work was done invisibly and that no information would leak, within a geographically tiny space, overrun by people and which comprises the world model for technocratic surveillance and espionage.
None of these tasks, in the given guerrilla warfare conditions, could have be done for 30 pieces of silver or under gunpoint. Only volunteers with credibility for their dedication to the cause could accomplish this feat. A pan-popular army of unparalleled cohesion density, with no historical precedent, prepared the counterattack against the zionist class enemy and the long war of attrition. The conditions demanded an unprecedented density in the unity of social and armed resistance, and the revolted Palestinian people brought the evolution of humanity towards social self-direction one step further. A step further within the tightest universal prison, a step over an abyss that had to be bridged for us all to move forward, lest we be swallowed up by the history of capitalist and state rule.
In order to carry out the multidimensional program of the aforementioned work, improvisation was needed at all scales, in all phases. It is impossible for a structure of tight vertical direction to carry out all the interdependent productive objectives in the given conditions. It may be difficult for the individualist mentality that permeates part of the anti-capitalist movement to grasp the concept of coordinated self organization, its radicalism and its evolutionary force, but the revolutionary people are putting it into practice. I will not tire of saying it, the historical evolution of guerrilla struggle is the main natural field of development of the fractionally synthetic autonomy of the human animal, because it aims at its liberation from its cultural cannibalism and has developed explosively in the capitalist era, which has unified humanity in a negative way.
At this point we must note something that the guerrilla organization of the Kurdish Freedom Movement constantly emphasizes: capitalist technology is not capable of defeating determined resistance. The self-sacrifice, cooperativeness and resourcefulness of social resistance are capable of annihilating all the mechanical means of the enemy, its one-dimensional way of organizing and its inherent predisposition to take precautions by increasing distances and obstacles. Victory over modern industrial warfare depends on appropriate tactics, strategy and logistics, but it derives, like guerrilla tactics, strategy and logistics, from the moral forces and collective intelligence of the revolutionary people. Hamas has developed homemade rockets into precision guided systems and has expanded its arsenal with effective portable anti-tank and anti-helicopter missile systems, also of its own design. The ideological dogma that considers the proletariat capable only of tearing up bricks of the pavements, is a vile insult to the working class. If euro-elitism cannot understand that beneath the soil of Gaza a temple of popular culture has been built, catacombs that cut the legs off the modern empire, and if it cannot comprehend insurrection beyond setting up barricades with rubbish bins, it is because of insufficient imagination, but more fundamentally, because of insufficient determination.
Horizontalism is not a question of preference of certain closed communities, but a question of breaking down class relations, political heteronomy, all inequalities and especially the conditions of polemic power on which they are based. By what yardstick would horizontality be measured if, while the community of the oppressed filled the coffins, the masters stood unmoved like the columns of the Parthenon?
The authoritarian critique to the means of insurrection, a critique that is certainly directed against the insurrection itself, attempts to define what is ‘of the peoples’, in the way that bio-political critique validates totalitarian rule and its genocides by abolishing political self-determination. The juxtaposition of the 1st Intifada against the armed Palestinian resistance, by recognizing an uprising as popular only when unorganized and unarmed masses are involved, denies the people their status when they organize, arm themselves and try to fight back on as equal terms as possible. This reverse insurrectionalism is no different, neither in political position nor in morality, from the imperialists’ sarcastic statements, “We are against Hamas, not against the Palestinian people”, at the same time that they have unleashed their gendarme to slaughter the rebellious people. In the real conditions of Palestine (and beyond), denying the popular essence of armed resistance means not only to agree with the liquidation of armed resistance, but also, to give masked consent to genocide, since the separation of Hamas from the Palestinian people is precisely the pretext for the dehumanization of the entire Palestinian people, who have been branded as the “shield of terrorists”. He who holds the weapons defines the scope of the hostility. The movements that denounce the armed popular resistance of Palestine have nothing to offer up against the imperialist total massacre, that is being advertised live as the upcoming political management of the entire global South. To settle for throwing a rock or two, not to strike at those who ensure their well-being through displacement and genocide, but instead to implore them for humanity. The means do not tell us what the end is, but they do tell us what it is not. The separation of armed struggle from insurrection is certainly not a friend of Palestine, it is not a friend of political autonomy, nor of social liberation; it cannot go beyond the vortex of serfdom to military rule.
Unfortunately, calls for non-organization and disarmament are also heard from collectives active around the Kurdish revolutionary movement. How do they forget from one announcement to the next, the armed struggle in Rojava? Have they not understood the decisive contribution of the PKK’s party-popular guerrilla movement in the development of the entire movement over half a century? Have they never heard of the declared People’s Revolutionary War and the unity of its four fields: guerrilla, youth and women’s uprising, direct social self-defense and socialist workers’ movement? Have they overlooked the account of the battle of Heftanin (2020) and the evolution of its lessons in the three-year all-out war that followed in the Medya Defense Zones? Today’s Kurdish guerrilla resistance promotes itself as a model for the whole world.
Let’s see what the comrade from the colonial hinterland has to say about the issue of diffuse struggle: “Dana El-Kurd, a Palestinian academic, in her book ‘Polarized and Demobilized- Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine’ makes the argument that the Palestinian struggle is not only anti-colonial, but also anti-authoritarian in its roots. During the days of the first Intifada, Palestinians had a vibrant civil society, spontaneously organizing local committees to coordinate struggle, and address the needs of local communities. This uprising was democratic in its nature, and was fought against the will of the PLO. Even within the PLO, as Edward Said argues in his book ‘The Question of Palestine’, the structure was organized in a very democratic way, with internal discussions and open criticism, in complete contrast to politics in the Arab world, an area filled with reactionary regimes and self-appointed dictators and out of touch monarchs. The Palestine liberation movement was always the most democratic and progressive movement in the region, and inspired many other anti-authoritarian movements and uprisings, some of them we saw during the Arab Spring, and many are still ongoing. Many argue that the defeat of the Palestinian left in Lebanon, the establishment of the Palestinian Authority after the Oslo accords and the rise of political Islam have changed the picture, but I think many of the original characteristics are still in place.
Having said all that, I can’t really say that Palestinians ever had an anarchist movement per se. Palestinian anarchists do exist, but like among Israelis, it isn’t really organized as a movement, nor can I say it’s a popular idea. I do believe though that even if the name anarchism isn’t being used, Palestinians do tend to organize in an anarchist way, without calling it like that. New guerrilla groups in the West Bank in recent years like the Lion’s Den in Nablus, Jenin Brigade in Jenin and Balata Battalion in Balata refugee camp organize in a non-hierarchical way and are non-sectarian in principle, open to all the different factions to join. These youth groups are completely outside the control of the Palestinian Authority and the old politics of factions and parties, and their unpredictable, spontaneous nature is challenging to the Israeli authorities.”
It is logically consistent to note that the reproduction of imperialist koinonismos in the libertarian movement and the aberration of “insurrection, not armed conflict”, are expressed by a plethora of ideological schools that either openly oppose the platformist tradition or tend to smother the organizational approach within the boundaries of the national field and of legitimacy. The current class struggle demands that anarchist revolutionary organization be in its constitution borderless and guerrilla. The world that rises will be shaped by those revolutionary organizations that fight and take roots simultaneously in all corners of the Earth. If we anarchists miss this calling, the responsibility will not belong to history. From a historical evolutionary point of view, I reckon that these days are the last chance for anarchism, until the imminent collapse of capitalism, to become a real force for change. The fighting comrades in Kurdistan, Armenia, in the land of the Mapuche, in Palestine and perhaps in other parts of the South that do not come up in the northerners’ maps are paving the way.
The question of bankrupt anarchism and bankrupt leftism
The statement of the Federation of the Anarchist Era, Afghanistan-Iran (9/10/23) (15) exalts the polemics of imperialist social democracy. The condemnation of the October 7 revolutionary initiative is not limited to the act itself. The act is placed entirely in the sphere of the war between powers. The condemnation of Hamas adopts the rhetoric constructed by the genocidal and counter-revolutionary imperialist propaganda. Violence is denounced not as a method but as a tautology of statism. The distinction between civilians and resistance goes to an extent that is constitutive for political meanings: on one side are “peoples” as passive subjects without class determinants and on the other side are governments, which are equated as an ideological category. Referring to the specific field, however, the announcement focuses its aggressive assertion on one pole of power, the Islamist one. And peace is not put forward as a pragmatic perspective, always under the yoke of colonialism, but as an ultimate goal and at the same time an accepted social status which was destroyed by the resistance’s initiative. Peace and security.Since when did security, the main pretext for state and imperialist terrorism, become a revolutionary project capable of inescapably canceling the struggle for freedom and equality? The conflict has begun anew, here is the evil, according to the statement. As if the years-long siege of Gaza by a nation of settlers were not one-sided war. And as if the preceding, “peaceful” status were not based on the threat of the new status, that is, the “final solution”. Did this particular anarchist collective ascertain from the prisoners of the Gaza strip that the state of their genocidal peonage is acceptable? This statement is an exaltation of voluntary servitude, transposed on the peoples by an ideological elite. Are the Iranian insurgents to be deemed deluded, as they fight for their freedom by risking their lives and continuing while the regime’s murderous terror intensifies? Let them be left to the peace and security offered by submission to power… Why is it that in one place freedom is life and in another place, where there is no guarantee of survival and tranquility, freedom is superfluous and the needs of the settlers (peace and security) are prioritized? Simply because the Federation of the Anarchist Era chooses enemies and friends based on localist criteria. Since the Palestinian resistance is led by forces linked to the regime we are directly confronting (Iranian), we are siding with the polemic of the colonizer. This reflects zero political autonomy and a scant utilitarian internationalism. This is of course campism with a sectarian motive. Idealistic neutrality, speaking in the language of counter revolution, is the most insidious form of campism. In the interpretation and utopia of the Federation, anti statism is the completion of liberalism, with class relations remaining intact, with the crimes of imperialism and zionist ethnic cleansing and counter-revolution going unpunished, with memory trashed.
By disregarding the fighting Palestinians and by nullifying their discourse, which declares that this is a war with colonialism, the statement reduces the war to a question of ideologies. The meaning that the Western ideological trend wants to imperiously impose is to strip the real class-political subjects of their class-political determinations. From the point of view of fundamentalist liberal consciousness, ideology is an illusion, without which citizens can peacefully regulate their relations. In the train of thought of liberal metaphysics, Thomas Hobbes’ classic scheme, which describes the state as a necessary evil for the safeguarding of the “social contract”, makes more sense than the version of the Federation, which regresses as to the determination of the cause: if ideology is the cause of the state and of war, then what is the cause of ideology? The answer, if we adhere to this theory, is illusory consciousness. Everything comes down to a question of enlightenment. And as usual, enlightenment is not aimed at promoting direct revolutionary action, but at preventing it and promoting class pacification. What does this metaphysics have to do with the revolutionary anarchist tradition? Nothing, not with any revolutionary tradition. Anarchist ethics and vision is the spawn and development of direct struggle, not an offshoot of bourgeois koinonismos and pacifism.
The reduction of this conflict to ideology agrees with the imperialist ideology about the “war of civilizations”. The aforementioned statement takes this provocative polemic beyond its general formulation; it targets the side of the resistance, describing its ideology as reactionary and inhuman, with the only evidence being its resistance activity. In this way, the counter-revolutionary terrorism of the colonialist regime is transformed into the logical and inevitable consequence of the unacceptable provocation of the resistance. Having assimilated itself to the counter-revolutionary line of imperialist ideology, due to its sectarian perspective, the Federation culminates its attack on the Palestinian resistance by reproducing the pretext of the colonial militarists for the massacre of the Palestinian people: “using innocents as human shields”. How obvious, the army of colonialists is bombing the Palestinian people, slaughtering their children, pushing them towards the Sinai desert, and attacking them on the route, in order to free them from the terrible power of Hamas! Journalists, nurses and international volunteers, who are unaware that they are being used as human shields by the barbarians, are bombarded by the progressive forces in order to free themselves from this delusion! There are several ways to endorse genocide. Erdogan has literally put his signature on drones that are hitting Rojava and Basur. The Federation of the Anarchist Era and others have put their signature on the bombs that flatten hospitals, schools, temples and refugee camps in Gaza and have put the blame up front on the resistance, with their polemic pen. A sign of the bankruptcy of anarchism in the era of liberal illusions.
The so-called libertarians who blame Hamas equally or primarily for the suffering of the people of Gaza are, like the imperialists, silencing the fact that the people of Gaza have been condemned to an exhausting blockade because they elected a government that disobeyed the colonialists. All those who criticize Hamas at the moment it attacked the wall and the settler prison guards are, like the imperialists, demanding that the Palestinians abandon anti-colonial resistance. They demand it by means of genocide. Their anti-statist or democratic sentiment is encapsulated in the disparagement and abandonment of the Palestinian people to genocide because they chose the “wrong” leadership.
According to the logic of liberal fundamentalism, the PKK is responsible for the razing of the Kurdish towns of Bakur in 2015, during the war of Democratic Self-Government, and the Kurdish youth should not get organized with the YDGH and YPS, but against them. In this way one sides with the special warfare of the Grey Wolves and of Mossad.
The Palestinians’ self-organization which the authoritarian liberals, so called libertarians, advocate, will never happen, because it is a historically arbitrary metonymy for submission to zionist colonialism and imperialism. The Palestinian people do not lie in wait for the luminaries of imperialist koinonismos, they are self-organizing in their daily uprising, in their armed struggle, in their survival, in their mutual aid and in the care of the wounds of genocide. The most radical form of self-organization is the collective memory of the martyrs, which turns into revolutionary organization and an endless river of revenge. Only this self-organization that rejects voluntary servitude and the inequality in life and death can be internationalist. Yes,there is a problem. If a statist religious party is leading the resistance and anarchism seems to be on the opposite side, there is a historical problem for anarchism.
Koinonistic neutrality has a common intersection with the leftist defense of counter-revolutionary regimes which are antagonistic to NATO imperialism, around which they complement each other. They both derive from the denial of proletarian and social political autonomy within the unremitting war of capitalism. Pacifist idealism, by denying war, makes the people a passive subject, compromised in the world class hierarchy, while statist anti-imperialism also makes the people a passive subject of the world class hierarchy, unable to change the general relations without the mediation of bourgeois power and unable to change the class and political relations at the grassroots level. This opportunism is a by-product of the historical bankruptcy of marxism. By investing in Islamism in order to have an effective anti-imperialism, leftism comes to terms with its historical end and changes sides, since political Islam was the investment of the imperialist counter-revolution in the South. It is common, and historically explicable, for would-be leaders of the left to shift from one pole of power to another on occasion, in order to hold the position of would-be leadership. It has happened even in the most radical revolutionary organizations. The adherents of the anti-NATO front of Iran, Russia, China or even Turkey, support the counter-revolution in order to continue having a say about the anti-imperialist struggle, because it is necessary for them to gloss over the defeated anti-imperialist strategy of Leninism. Since the leadership has been historically defeated, it demands that the people become servile too. This pretentiously anti-imperialist opportunism, being unable to lead the living subjects of resistance in the global South, refers to Khomeini and Saddam Hussein (16), the butchers of the proletarian movement, of the revolutions and of the marxist left in Iran and Iraq.
The arab and islamic states have sold Palestine out, many decades now. No state will take on a clash with NATO, unless its own existence is threatened. No bourgeoisie can lead the resistance to the end, because it will not risk its own existence, as Bakunin pointed out. The history of the PLO is yet another example. We saw how the Iranian counter-revolution sucked up the execution of Soleimani. No state will seriously go to war over Palestine. No state will throw more resources into the battle for Palestine than are necessary to spend in order to strengthen its own position in the inter-state power relations, by undermining its antagonizers. The pro-Palestinian war crowns are a preventive protection of the counter-revolution in the Middle East and are specifically aimed at maintaining discipline in the armies and paramilitary militias of the arab and islamic states. The above positions and predictions were written before Nasrallah’s backpedaling statement, which confirmed them. Also, before the Houthis take up action, but with knowledge of their expressed threats. The Houthis are a community that recently faced a genocidal war and remains under siege by local exploiters, NATO powers, the saudi monarchy and the Emirates, with the active participation of the greek army.
The revolutionary resurgence of Palestine, the worldwide popular mobilization, especially of the muslim world, and the surge of imperialist terrorism with unprecedented brutality, put the anti-imperialist struggle at the forefront of the internationalist social movement. In the Middle East, the urgency of the popular anti-imperialist resistance strengthens the need to overthrow the state-capitalist regimes, whether religious or purely bourgeois, dictatorial or parliamentary. The opportunists who support the counter-revolution in the name of anti-imperialism also undermine the anti-imperialist resistance, because they have betrayed its popular basis. On the other hand, liberals who separate the social revolution from the anti- imperialist resistance are dividing the popular uprising, giving away living radical forces to nationalist and religious fascism and thus undermining the social revolution.
Turkish fascism in particular, which incorporated Palestine in its neo-Ottoman conquest plans, is doing service to NATO imperialism, in parallel with zionist fascism. Turkish fascism is spreading war, fascism and genocide in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus and Europe. However, it doesn’t make a move, unless it serves the interests of American or Russian imperialism or both. Neo-Turkism was a child of imperialism. Turkish islamic-fascism is the product of the imperialists’ desperate plan to dismantle the revolutionary movement in Kurdistan and the turkish territory. The same plan that led to the transnational conspiracy to capture Abdullah Ocalan. Erdogan’s anti-imperialist speeches are also part of the special counter-revolutionary war that the Turkish state is waging in cooperation with all imperialist and regional reactionary forces. If the AKP-MHP regime offered any support to Hamas, it did so only to undermine revolutionary internationalism, to strengthen the repression and genocide in Kurdistan, to promote its colonialist plans, which also involve Palestine, and to enhance its negotiating position among the hegemonic powers of the World War III imperialist war. Behind the facade, the flow of oil and steel from Turkey to Israel has not been interrupted, according to a recent article (17), and there is direct military involvement of Turkey in the genocide of Palestinians, as the zionists use the Kürecik Radar Station in Malatya province.
Turkish fascism likens israeli fascism to the Islamic State, just as israeli fascism also identifies the Palestinian resistance with the Islamic State, the demon that NATO and the colonialists bred together. All the massacres carried out by the I.S. inside turkish territory were the plans of the MIT, and of the current Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan personally, as were also the anti-Kurdish assassinations in Europe. On the same day that the Palestinian revolutionary attack took place, the Turkish air force bombed a mosque in the Makhmur refugee camp in Basur, as part of the ongoing war against the social forces of democratic con- federalism. (18) An Israeli army spokesman sarcastically mocked the Turkish regime’s genocide accusations directed at Israeli fascism, pointing out that they are doing the same in northern Syria. Zionism, no longer having anything to gain by adorning imperialist humanism, speaks candidly: only we, the blessed ones, are human – the rest are just flesh, useful for our progress. Neo-Ottomanism is compelled to usurp the revolutionary movement. At the same time that the mercenaries of turkish colonialism in Rojava rape and murder women because the women’s revolution is gaining ground and femicide is multiplying in the turkish territory, Erdogan’s wife and daughter are crowning themselves as leaders of the regime’s “pro-palestine” movement. The political alignment with the staged manipulation of revolutionary internationalism cannot be justified, it has no innocence.
Imperialism must be defeated militarily wherever it lands or places its war proxies. Only the popular movements can achieve this. The zionist military rule must be defeated. In order to socially deconstruct the zionist organization, it is necessary to defeat it in war. Only popular resistance can achieve this. Turkish colonialism must be defeated. The Revolutionary People’s War of the Kurdish Freedom Movement and internationalist confederalism is achieving this. Fascism must be defeated everywhere, the insurrections must win by means of the political autonomy and military might of the proletarian social forces.
Anti-imperialism or social revolution, fascism or imperialist democracy, multiple poles or a single pole in the global capitalist order, european enlightenment or jihadism, anti-occupation or workers’ struggle, war or self-organization, insurrection or armed resistance, Palestine or Kurdistan? Artificial dilemmas. It is the job of the bosses to make such enforced divisions on the internationalist social revolution. The most important consequence of revolutionary anarchism is the immediacy of its commitment to the entirety of all particular points of struggle. This alone builds the cohesion of the revolutionary social front.
In these days of the crucial frontal confrontation with NATO terrorism in the Middle East and in the metropolises of the North, revolutionary internationalism has the responsibility to promote solidarity with the Kurdish and Palestinian resistance on a undivided basis. (19) It is crucial for the revolutionary social and anti-imperialist/anti-colonial character of any expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people to not neglect the task of highlighting the conflict in Kurdistan and informing about the current intensity of colonialist attacks in northern Syria and Armenia. At the same time, contrasting the social gains of the Kurdish movement against the Palestinian resistance is unacceptable. As organizations of the turkish- kurdish political front point out, “we support the struggle of the people of Kurdistan and Palestine without any ifs and buts.” (20) Sectarian attitudes are expressions of the conditions of repression of revolutionary internationalism. In practice, the state-capitalist leaderships that organize the military and bio-political rule of the Middle East and of the whole Earth are the same for both Kurdistan and Palestine. The same imperialist directorates, the same war industries, the same energy trusts, the same logistics chains.
As a revolutionary internationalist movement we have a duty to promote the arab-kurdish alliance, which has spread the social revolution in NE Syria and is defending the battle front against the turkish occupation. To promote it wherever we struggle.
From the message of an HPG guerrilla of Arab origin fighting in Medina of Basur (Siyar Ereb, 14/10) (21): “As a member of the brother Arab nations, I now take my place in the Free Movement. I joined the guerrillas to respond to enemy attacks. I am very happy and proud of this. […] Genocidal wars are being waged everywhere. […] We will resist until we fulfill our defensive duty and defeat the invading forces. Arab peoples must support this honorable struggle. Our young people need to join this struggle and fight against fascism.”
And the account of an internationalist fighter a few years before: “An experience full of hope? There are many in this case too. I can juxtapose another man whom I met, who is a boy from Raqqa, an Arab. He willingly chose to leave Raqqa. He was a worker in a garage, he was 15 years old, and, while at work, a civil guard approached him, one of those who in many Syrian cities goes around like they are a king and does whatever they want, who said to him: “Show me how you pray”. And after he prayed, the guard told him: “You are phony, you don’t believe, you don’t pray right”. Well, the boy said: “I am here in my city, I am working, and here comes someone who is not even from Raqqa to bother me and tell me I don’t know how to pray”. And so he decided to leave and to migrate to the North. In the end he joined the YPG because he saw the Kurdish people like people who behave in the opposite way to what he had experienced.
He was one of the first Arabs to join a force that was initially 100% Kurdish. I met him one year after this happened, and we were in the same Unit. He is an impressive person. Aside from the fact that he explained his plan to me, which was that he would participate in the liberation of Rojava which has then to become the liberation of all Syria. And he wanted to go fight in Turkey, in Iran and in Iraq. “Finally afterwards we will be able to liberate Palestine and in this way also Lebanon”, he would say. And if there was a need also in Italy, he would come here to fight too. He is a person, almost illiterate, who had never seen anything outside of Raqqa, of Kobane and maybe a bit further, but he has a genuine will and perspective, a real one. I am speaking in the present tense, even though I unfortunately cannot be sure if he is still alive, since I left him in September, and in Syria life expectancy is rather short. I fought by his side, and as a fighter he is just impressive, indescribable. There were scenes that, to a westerner like myself, seem like they come out of a movie, how a person can fight like this. As a proletarian and a man with no education, illiterate, condemned by his life to a limited reality, he is a revolutionary of the highest levels in history imaginable. This is how I know that in the north of Syria there are thousands like him, and this is inestimable.
I can say his nom de guerre, Zagros Raqqa, because no one in Rojava uses their real name…
The biggest lessons are two. The first is that there is an inequality, a divide, and I already knew this, between the West and the Middle East, or maybe between the West and the rest of the world. It is so great that you cannot imagine it, it cannot be described, and unfortunately, it is not even enough for one to go there and fight in order to bridge the gap, in the sense that it is a divide between those who have everything and those who have nothing, between one who is well and one who is suffering. This is a realization of the seriousness of this situation, made mainly by the one who goes to fight in such war situations.
The other lesson is that the revolution is just and necessary, however, when we say ‘revolution’ we must be conscientious about the gravity of this word in the sense of the pain, the tragedy and the pain it brings about, because a revolution is still a turning point for society, it is an upheaval of society that doesn’t happen peacefully, even though it is necessary, and so we should not use this term lightly. We don’t need to imagine simply that it is a ‘beautiful thing’. Those who think like this should better give up on politics and do something else, while it would be useful to have people who understand how terrible it is to have to have a revolution, but who continue to think it is necessary.” (Davide Grasso, former YPG fighter, Italy, September 2017)
Stories of spies and saints
“Palestinians have determined to proceed without their Western custodians. Decolonization is a grueling project, generally beyond the acumen of those weaned in comfort. The professional classes are stuck in bourgeois abstractions (from which they derive so many rewards) or profess a material politics they don’t in reality support. They demand a bloodless liberation, but only without the colonizer’s blood, even as the native bleeds out in full view of the world. They demand a revolt without consequence, a caucus of pristine victims politely asking to stay alive. They have taught Fanon but ignored his observation that decolonization ‘cannot be accomplished by the wave of a magic wand, a natural cataclysm, or a gentleman’s agreement.’These erstwhile liberals don’t need to consult Palestinians to see how wrong they are. Zionists have been explaining for decades that Israel must be defeated by force.” (A Voice from Palestine) (22)
It is undeniable that Hamas is working with states. It does not hide it, since it is not ashamed of its statism. It is also plausible that the revolutionary initiative of 7 October was aimed, among other things, at significantly changing the inter-state power relations in the Middle East and at overturning the political relations as regards the imperialist hegemony. As Hamas confirmed after a month of fighting (in an interview with the New York Times), the initiative was founded on a decision to break free from the long and exhausting siege of Gaza, at any cost.
None of the above facts implies that the stated purposes are contrary to the will of the Palestinian people. This implication presupposes as an arbitrary rule that the people always choose peace, even when that means their long-term extermination, over desperate resistance. The lackeys of genocidal colonial peace silence the fact that the news of the invasion against the colonial fortress was greeted with mass celebrations in the besieged Palestinian territories. (23)
No one on the planet could have interpreted Hamas’ move as the product of anti-state struggle, nor of course as independent of any state assistance. However, the statist mediation of popular interests does not make these interests entirely artificial and alien; it does not cancel the existence of needs determined by the class-oppressed communities and exploited classes themselves, which are assigned to the political mediation of an agent of power. From the anarchist point of view, political mediation is a historical problem, precisely because there are always proletarian and social needs, which are confused with antagonistic needs wherever authoritarian mediation takes place. The idea that any mediated will expresses false needs and only hostile interests, expresses a vulgar aristocratic anti-popular elitism. As if the people are a thoughtless passive entity that will be redeemed only when it is enlightened by some blessed ones, or by chance.
Why should the upsurge of the Middle East or even of the whole Earth be a hostile prospect for those who permanently live and die inside the furnace of colonialist rule? How else will Palestine be liberated, if the colonial fortress is not blown up like a powder keg and thus, if the whole world does not flare up first? The scaremongering about ‘escalation’ is a central propaganda line of the imperialists. If there is a specific problem with state mediators here, it is their inherent incompetence and their insufficient motivation to engage in the anti-imperialist struggle to the degree that is necessary for the liberation of Palestine. The ideological elites of any social democracy have even less of a motivation and zero capacity.
In Greece, a group that brandishes an understanding of politics as an interplay between agents, surpassing even the greek Communist Party, added to the above that “the destruction of Gaza and the displacement of its inhabitants was and is among the plans of Hamas’ agents, was intended and indeed is a precondition for its continuation.” (24) This conclusion negates the fundamental axiom of the state that state expediency takes precedence over all other expediency and therefore of the interests of its citizens, because it completely equates the interests of Hamas with the interests of the supporting states and their interests with the interests of the enemy states (NATO, Israel, etc.). This is the typical Hitlerian reduction (propaganda manual in “My Struggle”), historically anti-Semitic, of all antitheses to the dark designs of a principal enemy. This mystical reduction is the pretext for stripping the meaning from the antitheses and subordinating them to a simplistic monolithic ideology. In this case, the contradictory factors in the imperialistic management of the Palestinian genocide are blatant. It has been shown by official documents that the colonialists are seeking the complete displacement of the disobedient people. But the vassal Arab states do not want the surplus Palestinian precariat and the displaced Palestinian resistance in their territories. Neither do the European imperialists. That’s why the Egyptian junta keeps them corralled in the slaughterhouse. Which state and why would it want the Palestinian resistance to diffuse, except the settlers, who have their own special interest as a priority? The NATOists have pulled out of the drawer the case of a collaborationist palestinian state, the ideal plan for them, however, as much as an open war was necessary in order to attempt the definitive annihilation of resistance throughout occupied Palestine, so too a war makes the prospect of annihilation unrealistically idealistic. The national disregard for the Palestinian Authority, its total weakness on an international level, the resistance’s ultimatums to Abbas (5-6/11/23, Organization ‘Children of Abu Jadal’, from inside the police forces of the Palestinian Authority), and the attack on him (7/11/23, questioned by the Palestinian Authority and the imperialists) confirm these lines, which were written prior to this. The interpretation that open war was a priori necessary and legitimate for the colonialists and imperialists, and by implication, the October 7 attack was a pretext, turns the causes and practical consequences upside down, with a preconceived position that resistance is irrational. Why would the imperialists seek to feed and diffuse anti-colonial anti-imperialist resistance, why would they want to compromise the relations of the Arab states with Israeli colonialism, why would they want to increase Iranian-Shiite influence and to hand over to the mediating Turkish hegemony more bargaining cards, while the Hamas state was quietly managing the Gaza camp? Why would the Iranian regime want the Palestinians scattered around rather than at the feet of the Israeli hinterland? There is only one answer: because this is how it suits the ideology that says that the powerful are always powerful and that they inevitably pull the strings of history.
All the current complications have one driving premise, which alone gives them coherent meaning: the settlers’ and NATO’s expectation to eliminate Palestinian resistance, because on October 7 it manifested itself powerfully. With the unhindered prolonged mass massacre of the people of Gaza, with the repeated bombings of refugee convoys, hospitals, schools and churches turned into refugee shelters, with the killing of 101 volunteers of the UN humanitarian mission (until 12 November), the targeted killing of dozens of Red Crescent nurses and doctors (an article published on 19/10 reports 192 deaths since 7/1025 and of 40 journalists (by the first week of November), the imperialists are sending the message to the people of the whole world, that those who do not get used to poverty, exclusion, displacement, incarceration and slow death, will be brutally exterminated. Resistance is not the pretext for this coordinated operation of global terror, it is its cause, its enemy. The ‘agents’ game’ theorists are capable of making up any nonsense in order to interpret the facts to suit their simplistic ideology, always against the resistance.
The more specific interpretations of the hypothesis that the attack on the colonial fortress was carried out to provoke the war and impose a new occupation of Gaza or an imperialist protectorate regime, refer to marine hydrocarbon deposits and pipelines. Some also link Turkish involvement with competition for energy routes. These interpretations have the advantage of reducing political conspiracies to specific economic interests and thus pretend to flirt with an anti-capitalist or even anti-imperialist perspective. On the specific field of conflict, it is a stupid ideology to suggest that while there was a semblance of capitulation there were more obstacles to the exploitation of the undersea resources west of Gaza than have now arisen due to open warfare. The only ideal footing of this view is the total disparagement of the Palestinian resistance or popular resistance in general. On 7 October a dynamic of total collapse of the colonialist organization was triggered, but the pseudo-intellectuals of the North could see nothing but the endless development of imperialist domination.
It is not only that they cannot see in any other way than through the language of subjugation. They can neither think in any other way than in the mentality of capital. The usual talk about oil is not class analysis, it is vulgar political economy. Besides, something that is a key issue in capitalist competition everywhere, energy resources, is not enough to describe and explain anything relevant to the specific forms that the class-political struggle takes. Then, politics is reduced entirely to the sphere of political economy and, as a corollary, war falls into the category of political guise. This scheme, of course, comes from the most extreme liberal school.
The conspiratorial pseudo-understanding of the October 7 revolutionary initiative offers the greatest ideological service to genocide, having eliminated the existence of resistance by statute. We can passively watch the massacre without guilt, since everything is pre-designed and inevitable and there is no popular resistance on the ground. The aforementioned group spews out its fatalism on the Palestinians: “The residents of [Gaza] are complying [!] with a directive from the Israeli state and are moving from the north to the south despite UN complaints that Israel is imposing a collective punishment, calling the ultimatum ‘horrible’.” Too much compliance by the elite of koinonismos.
Simplistic reductions in order to get rid of the real contradictions are also expressed in more subtle tones. E.g. (from another group’s text): “Hamas is an Islamist organization. Huge differences of all kinds separate us from it, including – but not limited to – the tactic of targeting civilians. Keeping in our hearts the days of the Palestinian intifada, we stand always and wholeheartedly with the Palestinian people and their resistance, but we see ourselves as far removed from any Islamist formation. We cannot ignore the fact that Hamas’s growth is largely due to its strengthening by Israel itself during the period when it was trying to weaken the secular and progressive forces of the Palestinian resistance. In a similar way, the US was funding and arming Islamist forces as a counterweight to the socialist and communist movements in the Arab and Islamic world. The truth is that Israel chose the enemy it considered most easily manageable. What it was trying to achieve (and it succeeded) was to reverse the internationalization of the Palestinian question (which was the greatest conquest of the resistance until the 1990s) and turn it into an issue of the Islamic world alone. This role was played by Hamas. A role destructive to the movement’s prospects. However, we cannot ignore the fact that at the moment Hamas is also the result of decades of oppression and humiliation of a people. That the young people, born and raised in a prison, seeing their families slaughtered again and again, are siding with those who oppose the inhuman conqueror with arms: and that, unfortunately, is Hamas, even though it is part of the problem and at the same time has the role of oppressor for the Palestinian people themselves.” I skip the points where all the positions of imperialist social democracy of counter-revolutionary pseudo-insurrectionalism, which I analyzed at the beginning, are reproduced. We go forward from the fact that, in the last century, political Islam was promoted by the imperialists to inhibit and reverse the revolution in Asia. The aphoristic ideological lumping together all Islamic movements, belongs precisely to the methods of this imperialist strategy, it reproduces the projection of religion as a dominant field, it vindicates Christian racism, since it recognizes the internationalization of a problem of the South only insofar as it speaks in the language of the North and, above all it veils, behind the conspiratorial mysticism, the class and political dynamics that lead an Islamic organization to the leadership of a resistance movement, the left to decline and anarchism to irrelevance, wherever this has happened. Authoritarian Euro-socialism gets away with an “unfortunately”. Without exaggeration I can say that this attitude does more damage to internationalist solidarity than the practice of provocation through funding (such as the scenarios about the funding of Hamas).
The revolutionary answer to political Islam is not atheistic fundamentalism, which can only dictatorially and colonially become a political identity. The answer has been given practically and effectively on the ground by the Kurdish Freedom Movement: democratization of Islam, in the way of social resistance, not in the way of imperialist assimilation and subjugation. Idealist abstractions and totalitarian aphorisms offer precisely the easy escape from the task of the struggle to transform contradictions. In this particular conflict, the clearest answer to the ideological construction of the ‘religious war’ comes from the joined mass demonstrations of rabbis, priests and mullahs against the zionist military rule.
The fundamentalist koinonismos of the above-mentioned group (that uses agents’ game rhetoric) had led it to nationalism a few years ago (the Macedonian issue). Now it mocks “the general prompt for victory to the weapons of Palestine”. It indirectly advocates refusing to support the resistance and accepting colonial peace, so that a new state is not imposed on the Palestinians and does not annihilate dissidents and insurgents, as if they were secure until then. As those who joined arms with Ukrainian fascism say, Zelensky’s racist regime offered more freedom for anarchists and they expect the same from an ideal post- war renewed bourgeois democracy. Revolutionary anarchism is not positioned laterally, and so from my own position I answer that it is the axioms of koinonismos, not the prompts of revolutionary solidarity, that are general and abstract. Victory to the arms of the specific organizations that are fighting the colonialists, victory to their struggle against the colonialists. No political conflict justifies undermining the anti-colonial struggle. To leave no room for intentional confusion, I note that resistance to Palestine’s long-term ethnic cleansing is not an isomorphic phenomenon with Ukrainian-NATO nationalism, nor with the Iranian counter-revolution, despite its nationalist anti-NATO interests. The differences between these struggles are predominantly class-based on a global and local scale, and moreover political.
Biopolitical ethics, based on its self-valorization, extends its polemic claims to a general and absolute distinction between the supposed revolutionary discipline towards it and the subjects who oppose it and are thus placed in the category of the authoritarians. The elitist project of denouncing real resistance begins with the rape of history and the proclamation of the sovereignty of colonialism over memory. In the words of the aforementioned groups: “No purge can ever and nowhere be a project of revolutionary movements”. Incidentally, the severity of the October 7 attack, across the colonialist entity, was not an attempt at purging, nor did it mean that the liberation of Palestine requires the extermination of all settlers. From the text of the aforementioned group: “The October 7 methodical massacre of hundreds of civilians, youth, children, women and elderly, carried out by the butchers sent by Hamas to carry out this religious ‘duty’ on the road to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the hostage-taking of old people, young children and women, the display of savagery even on the bodies of the murdered, is now added to the pantheon of similar acts of savagery that adorn the history of every form of power. But they will never be written in the pages that adorn the history of the struggles for social liberation and dignity, in the pages that adorn the world history of uprisings and revolutions of oppressed and exploited people.” Gentrification against “savagery”.
Should we erase from revolutionary proletarian history the Makhnovists who set up machine guns and shot at the bourgeoisie and the feudal lords at their feasts? Butchers, when they threw into the furnace of a locomotive a priest-snitch of the German colonialists? (26) The CNT fighters, who during the revolution of ’36 stormed the monasteries and spared no one? The barefoot Somalis who two and a half decades ago paraded as trophies on spikes the flesh of the American soldiers of a downed helicopter, under whose history should we register them? Popular hatred is the heart of liberational evolution, as Walter Benjamin had noted. It is the task of imperialist social democracy to extinguish proletarian hatred, replacing it with appeals for mercy to the theocracy of capitalist war. Thus koinonismos concludes its positions with abstract pacifism. E.g., “Stop the Israeli attack on Gaza now. Stop now the occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza.” Which forces will stop them and how? Not to ask how the return of the Palestinians to the main occupied territories will take place.
The moderate view of the aforementioned comrade with colonial citizenship, restores historical and contemporaneous truth, opening up as topic of discussion the humanitarian law of war. “The images coming from southern Israel the day of the attack 7th of October were of course very hard to process emotionally.Nothing to celebrate about the massacre of many civilians, and by all definitions and standards this is a war crime. Things should be seen in of context though. Also, there are zero examples in history of a pure, ‘clean’ resistance movement and liberation that didn’t kill innocent people. Be it resistance to apartheid in South Africa, the British colonization of India, the fight against slavery in America and resistance to nazi occupation throughout Europe- in all of those cases innocent people died. This is not to justify, but the demand of purism from the Palestinian liberation movement alone is unrealistic. The bigger responsibility is on the occupier.”
The Geneva Convention binds the parties to abide by it regardless of its violation by enemy forces. In any case, no state abides by it. Besides, the inter-state law of war does not apply to internal war, since the internal enemy is not presented as militarily distinct and with represented responsibilities. Indeed, only revolutionary armed forces are self-disciplined in the law of war. The Kurdish Freedom Movement is an example of such an attitude.Does the imperialist humanitarian law of war consist a revolutionary self-worth? For biopolitical ethics, yes. But biopolitical ethics is grounded on the regime of class power inequality, biopolitical terrorism and biopolitical racism, and it is articulated so as to perpetuate these. The biopolitical ethics of war revolves around the ‘civilian’, but he is defined by the archetype of imperialist citizenship. The guerrilla and his community first and foremost, the unruly government and its supporters, the pariah state and its citizens, are excluded from bourgeois law. In this case this applies to all the people of Palestine before and after October 7. The citizen who joins arms with, who votes for and finances the class war of the tyrant is the definition of ‘civilian’, with the archetype of the innocence of the capitalist, the politician, the technocrat, the media baron, the soldier and the cop, who become targets of the revolutionary struggle. The identification of the ‘civilian’ with the ‘unarmed’, masks with the feudal aristocratic code of values, the protection of the capitalist-state division of responsibilities, from its war machine. Imperialist humanist law transforms the genocidal settlers into ‘the people’ and the people into an exemption from bourgeois civilization. That is why the UN officials do not say, “what Israel is doing is genocide,” but they say, “what is being done may amount to genocide.” The boundary between the recognizably real and the typical speculation is deeply classist and savagely lethal.
Thus, subservient koinonismos and pacifism put forward the historical legitimacy of the unstoppable century long genocide as “living in harmony and respecting diversity”. Diversity indeed, where one slaughters and steals the land of the other and the other is slaughtered and persecuted in exile. Some good comrades proposed the mutual rapprochement of the arab and jewish populations on an internationalist and proletarian basis, through the realization that they have nothing to divide and that they can coexist without religious differences, as they did for centuries in the region before the creation of the state of Israel. Both the myth and the utopia are equally true and necessary, but are interspersed with the real history of class struggle. The state of Israel also comes in the way. A history and a present that fatally divides Palestinians and settlers. The former have nothing but chains and death. The others have everything, have seized it with savagery and maintain this relationship with even greater savagery. “Israelis have the right to call the area home”, say some anarchists. “Because whatever happened in the past, all these people live there now.” Except it didn’t happen 3,000 years ago. The present class-political regime of the Palestinian land is the capitalization of the ethnic cleansing (not a vague ‘whatever’) that began in the recent past, a few generations ago, and continues unabated. The koinonists suck up to the colonialists, but the colonialists are not impressed by pacifist cajoling.
On the contrary, a single experience proved capable of instilling humanistic feelings, moderation, a sense of equality in a small part of the colonial nation: the hostage-taking of loved ones. The murderousness of the October 7 attack produced a consciousness of the insurmountable vulnerability of the dominant clan, and mass hostage-taking produced the prospect of a peace with a little more freedom for the class oppressed, which would not have been conceivable without the universal equation to death. “All hostages, for all of their prisoners”, chant the protesting settlers who are turning against their war-mongering government. The fact that these deeply and broadly nationalistic subjects still form the only opposition within the militaristic nation today, demonstrates something important. Dialectically, the barbarians’ method creates social progress, because it brings to light the means and subsequently the motives of capitalist civilization.
The vile tyranny says, “what’s done is done”. Restorative justice for the massacred and displaced Palestinian people requires the uprooting of the settlers. Projecting the ideal consent of the settlers to a peaceful settlement as a precondition, reflects the hypocrisy of imperialist social democracy and glosses over class ethnic cleansing. Revolutionary law directly restores cosmic harmony by the edge of the knife.
“Whatever is necessary for the return”(27)These days my soul dwells in the basements and rubble with the dying fighters who wait and stoically greet the settler army. Revenge! Revenge for all the history of tyranny. Revenge for the bloody hypocrisy of the imperialists and colonialists. Revenge for the children of Palestine.
Unconditionally with Spartacus, for the fall of the Empire.“So it is fortunate that insurrection and revolution still remain absurd, because this is precisely what still remains their only potential to win”(28)
Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis
November-December 2023
Domokos Prison(1) In 1990, the term “κοινωνισμός” [koinonismos] was introduced in the critical thinking of greek speaking anarchists, which is literally translated into english as “socialism”. The word socialism has been conveyed into the greek language without etymological transformations (in greek: “σοσιαλισμός”). The term koinonismos means something different from socialism, so if we were to translate it as socialism based on the language roots, it would result in serious confusion. Writer and translator of this text jointly decided to use the direct transliteration from the greek to english, the word koinonismos, adding this linguistic and conceptual note. In short, the meaning of the term koinonismos, as was first expressed, was the political invocation of an ideologically artificial social whole, which, in communication practice, entails the reproduction of those ideological forms that are produced and infused by the state and capital.
(2) International statement of the clubs (10/10/23) – https://fcstpauliathensclub.wordpress.com/2023/1/10/%cf%83%cf%87%ce %b5%cf%84%ce%b9%ce%ba%ce%ac-%ce%bc%ce%b5-%cf%84%ce%b7%c%bd-%ce%b4%ce%ae%ce%bb%cf%89%cf %83%ce%b7-%cf%84%ce%bf%cf%85-%cf%83%cf%85%ce%bb%ce%bb%cf%8c%ce%b3%ce%bf%cf%85-%cf%84%ce%b7%cf%82-s/, Statement of the Turkish club (28/10/23) – https://twitter.com/StPauli_TR
(3) The issue of Palestine is the issue of statism’s bankruptcy! – https://asranarshism.com/1402/07/18/palestine-issue-statism-failure-en/
(4) tn: The term conspiratorial is the nearest translation of the term that the writer in this text uses to refer not to conspiracy theories, but to an understanding of politics as an interplay between agents or proxies.
(5) On “Pro-Palestine” hypocricy – https://thepublicsource.org/palestine-solidarity
(6) Voices from the Front Line Against the Occupation: Interview with Palestinian Anarchists –
Voices from the Front Line Against the Occupation: Interview with Palestinian Anarchists
(7) We Can’t Afford to Remain Silent – Interview with an Israeli Anarchist – https://itsgoingdown.org/two-new-zines-interviews-with-israeli-and-palestinian-anarchists/
(8) A Practical Appraisal of Palestinian Violence – https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2023/10/21/a-practical-appraisal-of-palestinian-violence/
(9) Israel Can’t Imprison Two Million Gazans Without Paying a Cruel Price – https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/israelis-made-to-suffer-the-cruel-price-for-oppression-of-palestinians-in-gaza
(10) A recent interview with three FAUDA members confirms the commitment to the unity of the resistance and adds the information that FAUDA is involved in the guerrilla struggle. One comrade states that their anarchist movement has opened up a path of popular self-sacrifice. Regarding Hamas, it deconstructs NATO propaganda and describes the political dialogue and cooperation of anarchists with other organizations in the resistance. Importantly, they points out that all resistance organizations have an inclusive political position for all religious communities. The case for Islamic dictatorship is imperialist black propaganda. Just as the addition of a new, Palestinian state is a case of imperialist designs. Anti-authoritarian criticism of the claim of a two-state status and the separation of religious communities throws the discussion off course. Maoists (PFLP), confederationists (DFLP) and pacifist democrats (such as Mussa’ab Bashir, used as a reference by certain ideological opponents of the Palestinian resistance), Islamists (Hamas and Jihad) and anarchists (FAUDA) agree as a program on a single inclusive polity. Such were the declarations of the Israeli constitution as well. Only the imperialists and the would-be exploiters of the Palestinian resistance want two states. But the crucial question is whether we are defending the colonial state as the agent of potential coexistence, against historical and current revolutionary realities, or are we defending the right of the oppressed to reorganize social culture on their own terms, correcting the accumulated injustices? For anarchism the answer is self-evident. Whether the Palestinian revolutionary polity will claim recognition from the inter-state matrix and take the title of state is nobody’s business outside the Palestinian resistance, just as it is nobody’s business outside the Kurdish resistance, the claim of official recognition for the confederation of N-E Syria as a constituent state entity of the unified Syrian territory. (The interview: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/abolishtheusa-fauda-in-depth-interviews-with-3-members-of-fauda )
(11) The revolutionary South responds to the a-historical critique that describes anarchism as a eurocentric project. Only the anchorage to the post-Bakunin deconstructivism, that eroded the anarchist movement after the dissolution of the First International, can see in anti-imperialism conceptual and practical boundaries to anarchism. For example, “Anarchists in the Sahel” (18/9/23), (https://www.alerta.gr/archives/33233 ). Marxism had to go beyond the imperialist philosophy of its writings, with Lenin. Revolutionary anarchism never had that problem. From its birth it ventured all over the Earth.
(12) https://www.alerta.gr/archives/33399
(13) https://www.efsyn.gr/kosmos/boreia-ameriki/408433_i-starbucks-poinikopoiei-tin-allileggyi-stin-palaistini
(14) One group writes, “Clearly, we do not intend to dictate to the oppressed and exploited how they should fight […]”. Just before they wrote, “The only self-defense that we recognize -ethically and politically- is the collective social self-defense and social counter violence that the exploited and the oppressed co-opt to emancipate themselves and to shake off the bonds of authority over them”. What does this group mean behind the unclear invocation of collectivity and cooption? And who cares whether these here pharisees of anarchism recognize the Palestinian resistance as self-defense or not? To put the question in a different context: a person who has suffered patriarchal violence, do they need the opinion of these conclaves so as to decide whether to resort to the police, to the state, or if they will cut off the balls of the rapist or whatever else? This same group, ten years ago, in order not to spoil the self interest of some of its members, had covered up an attack against a squat, legitimized by the fact that they refused to recognize the squat as a community, refused to recognize the community’s egalitarian institutions and practices, the political dynamic proletarian social development taking place there, its autonomy in social self- direction and its self-defense. This is what “we do not recognize” means in the world of violence and terrorism: let Netanyahu do his dirty work. However, the Palestinian resistance is winning and the aforementioned squat, which offers refuge to the persecuted and has not put any terms on the Palestinian resistance, is still standing.
(15) https://asranarshism.com/1402/07/18/palestine-issue-statism-failure-en/
(16) Artistic intervention for Palestine, ΚΕΔ – https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1627014/ & https://avantgarde2009.wordpress.com/2023/10/12/palaistinh-dikh-mas-ypothesh/ Two months after writing this text I received a text from Solidarity with migrants entitled “The avant-garde of retrogression: notes on the pro-russian and pro-china political tendencies in the greek society” (https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1628404/). The political line of anti-american campism and its political conclusions that this text describes, make up a stance of active counter-revolution on the field. Political directions and practices that are anti-labour, anti-feminist, pro-imperialist and pro- fascist, anti-internationalist and totalitarian. The text correctly argues that the two tendencies inside the pro-Palestine movement are clashing and they will continue to do so. I will further note that this clash is not related only to the movement for Palestine. The fields of struggle are intersecting as is shown in the text. Social-fascism is lurking everywhere and is manifesting itself respectively to political priorities. The contradictions of the social-fascist lines are interesting. Eg, political subjects who converge in their defense of the Assad regime and in their anti kurdish stance, and who have allied in the past as a friendly opposition to SYRIZA in the re-negotiation of the greek state’s position in the imperialist pyramid, have taken antagonistic positions in the conflict over (or against) the capitalist-statist public health control. The former, who openly defend the anti-NATO imperialist front, openly supported the resistance to the unhealthy health-control repression and the dictatorial bio-technocratic subjugation. The latter, who are intensively trying to take the lead of the movement with reformist positions, joined arms with the vanguard of capitalist and statist progress. Despite this, the leftist group that the aforementioned text is denouncing has not “infiltrated” the movement; it comprises one of its constitutive subjects. Particularly in reference to the Palestinian struggle, where the subjects of the struggle are collaborating with state agents in their periphery, it is illogical to demand that the struggle be cleansed of statist ideological tendencies within the solidarity movement. In general, I have put down at length my arguments against the automated logic of exclusions.
(17) Middle East: Economy and Geo-strategy, https://trohia.espivblogs.net/2024/01/03/mesanatoliko-oikonomia-kai-geostratigiki/
(18) https://anfenglishmobile.com/features/kck-calls-on-muslim-peoples-to-take-a-stance-against-turkish-bombing-of-mosque-in-maxmur-69767
(19) A simple practical example: Larissa, solidarity gathering for the Palestinian and the Kurdish peoples, from Dugru Squat- https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1627002/
(20) https://anfenglishmobile.com/news/kahilogullari-peace-in-the-middle-east-will-only-be-possible-if-people-struggle-together-69791
(21) https://anfenglishmobile.com/kurdistan/hpg-guerrilla-ereb-calls-on-arab-young-people-to-support-the-struggle-69811
(22) https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2023/10/21/a-practical-appraisal-of-palestinian-violence/
(23) as above
(24) The massacres of Hamas, the brutality of the Israeli state and the imminent global conflict, Syspeirosi Anarxikon-
https://anarchypress.wordpress.com/2023/10/14/%ce%bf%ce%b9-%cf%83%cf%86%ce%b1%ce%b3%ce%b5%cf%83-%cf%84%ce%b7%cf%83-%cf%87%ce%b1%ce%bc%ce%b1%cf%83-%ce%bf%c%b9-%ce%b8%ce%b7%cf%81%ce%b9%cf%89%ce%b4%ce%b9%ce%b5%cf%83-%cf%84%ce%bf%cf%85-%ce%b9%cf%83/(25) Gaza 2023 — High-Tech War Revisited – https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2023/11/19/gaza-2023-high-tech-war-revisited/
(26) The roads of Nestor Makhno, B. Bielas & A. Bielas, Babylonia Press, October 2007 –
(27) https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2023/10/21/a-practical-appraisal-of-palestinian-violence/
(28) Nikos Nikanoras, The right to self-defense – https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1627291/
#anarchism #counterRevolution #DimitrisChatzivasiliadis #greece #palestine #platformism
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I can imagine many people resenting the term Palestinian revolution when reading the title of this article. Some have already written that revolution is one thing and resistance is another, that war is one thing and liberation is another. I chose this title, being literal, precisely because it would be provocative. Let us be open to any dialogue, knowing that the first thing that is at issue is the definition of the subject. In times of war, any political discourse is a polemic act. War is not a choice, it is not a means among other means, as statist positivism and its projections on the anti-authoritarian pretexts for capitulation assert; it is the incessant class condition in which we find ourselves and through which we liberate ourselves. Every phrase that has been uttered in the last 20, 50, hundreds and thousands of years flutters on the broken Gaza wall or hangs in the rubble of the city, among the dismembered children. If the well-meaning movement researchers who have produced numerous analyses of the class and social background of the Greek revolution of 1821 find it difficult to recognize the Palestinian revolution as such, this says something about their euroelitism and nationalism. As for those who deny resistance to colonialism and imperialism, as well as its revolutionary potential, by juxtaposing the “essential” antithesis of capital-labor, the totality or molecularity, today we can say that their abstractions and confines are filled with the stench of the carnivorous capitalist North. The thoughtless adoption of the dogmatic social-democratic scholasticism suggests a blind consumption of intellectualism, self-indulging in ideological garbage. If I pay you a regular salary, the relationship is class-based. But if I take your land to build a work camp or a prison, then not only the relationship is not class-based, but it is subordinate to that, even if I put you in the camp on a salary or put you in prison! If I put you up against the prison wall and shoot you, the relationship is not class-based, it is “essentially” indifferent outside of its interpretation into a monetary relationship. If I lock you up in the prison that I built by stealing your land, if I control your survival resources and bomb you day and night, the relationship is not class-based and the relation of power cannot be changed until the labor relation is universally and completely dismantled. This kind of idiocy goes around as scholastic proletarian theory.
We have entered the evolutionary phase of capitalist civilization where it is materialized as a total synchronic crisis and where every tick of the clock reveals the positioning of every political subject on the side of revolution or on the side of counter-revolution. All antitheses are condensed, they intersect and are confounded towards the maximum and the minimum and in the explosive way that they emerge they express their complexity. The anti-capitalist movement is shaped within this vortex, it does not stand still in some idealized apathetic position of an overseer. It is therefore traversed by the whole set of intersections, confusions and complexities. The war waged by the statist public health control revealed a deep rift in the anti-capitalist movement, the imperialist war in the Ukrainian territory revealed other rifts, which literally culminate into war. The revolutionary counterattack inside the territory of the zionist colonialist rule, illuminated the most fundamental rift within the movement. If we can schematically say that the first rupture concerned the fractional scope of imperialist colonialism over the social body and the second one concerned revolutionary autonomy in conditions where military rule, as fundamental to capitalism, is unveiled, then the Palestinian rupture concerns the very point of the history of capitalism and its destruction. The unfulfilled crusade of colonizing the Eurasian East (prior to the complete colonization of Africa and of the continent westward to Europe) reappears as a historically inescapable and globally universal definitive question. Incidentally, wage slavery, on which the capitalist mode of production is founded, emerged and prevailed in Europe through the colonialist war to the east (in particular, from the data so far it appears that the prime organism where the prevalence of the wage relation was incubated was crusading Venice).
The historical moment of the dissemination of CoV-2 and the culmination of the anti-health imperialist counter-revolution, through its militaristic and bio-technocratic experiment of the universal vaccination, brought to the fore the class and political subjectivity of the human body, i.e. the most elementary organic unit of human existence and society, making it the target of a totalitarian colonial campaign. Imperialist terrorism attempted to establish itself in new depths of primitive accumulation and to restructure all existing power relations with the guiding principle of the liquidation, expulsion and purging of surplus labour. This coincided with the powerful manifestation of the Black Revolt in so-called America and of the women’s revolt globally, the living subject of the history of slavery and capitalist colonization of the Earth. The war of state sanitation introduced a historically innovative regime of perpetual state of emergency, which through bio-politics gave primacy to militaristic terms of domination and to the ideology and morality that derives from that. The counter-revolutionary offensive, in the form of the emergency regime, within the metropolises of Euro-Atlantic imperialism, continued in relation to the war in the Ukrainian-Russian space and now continues in relation to the war in Palestine (the Chinese counter- revolution continues on the first axis). It is no coincidence that the Israeli techno-stratocracy is a pioneer in the production and export of technology and methodology of control and repression, of fascist organization and politics, of biotechnology, digital integration and post-humanist fiction ideology. It should be noted that Israeli fascism imposed universal compulsory biotechnological vaccination of its citizens. Zionist colonialism fuses on the one hand traditional religious totalitarianism and racism, and on the other hand the fundamentalist governmentalist and mechanistic mentality of the bourgeoisie, the theocracy of capital and its technocratic mysticism. That is why Israeli colonialism today is demonstrating worldwide, on behalf of the Western Empire, the might of its terrorism with unprecedented intensity.
In the ideological battle within the international movement, which of course expresses contradictory and now increasingly antagonistic tendencies on the line of conflict between revolution and counter- revolution, what emerges as a central rift is the koinonismos (1) of counter-revolution. In particular, the koinonismos of imperialism and more specifically the koinonismos of imperialist social democracy. In correlation to this, anti-imperialist social fascism reappears as a problem. In the Greek movement the concept of koinonismos has been defined as the internalization of the pervasive ideology of the regime by the social movement. I reinstate it here with a reverse definition, which, without negating what is historically recorded, it puts the title of social in the right causal relation: the social ground and the social relation are not constructed by power, but on the contrary, power pillages their material, their name and their value, in order to return them to the subjects, having reconstructed them with the necessary divisions. This rift concerns the underlying anti-proletarian, anti-social and counter-revolutionary roots of making a separation from the aggressive initiative of the Palestinians, from their Islamic vanguard, from the unholy revolutionary means, from the open class war, from anti-imperialist resistance, from the national identities of the global South, from the prevalence of faith over survival, from the devaluation of the ideological and normative claims and rhythms of the bourgeois positivism internalized in the movements of the North, etc.
The koinonismos of counter-revolution is defined by the class and political frontier that the ruling class erects against the savage proletariat, which in the historical narrative is presented as uncivilized and in politics as terrorist. The koinonismos of imperialism has as its central axes the peace of Christian ecumenism and bourgeois liberalism with its modern ecumenism. The peace of God presupposes the sovereignty of the crusading sword. Imperialist socialism, by demanding the disarmament of the ‘uncivilized’ in order for a peace to be recognized, expresses its militaristic totalitarianism. Let’s not forget that even when Euro-Atlantic imperialism declared war on Russian nationalism, it called Russian nationalism uncivilized and collectively criminalized Russian culture (arts, sports, history…).
The common joint of imperialist koinonismos is the Law of Empire, developed on a global model, in transnational conventions (treaties) and transnational institutions. The sword of peace of the god of the Judeo-Christian tradition is surrounded by legal trinkets and supposedly collective mediations. Around the slaughterhouse, the real class conditions of political warfare (military, biopolitical, moral-social) imperialist koinonismos bombards with a totalitarian morality, founded on the given biopolitical class divisions. Not only is not every death or freedom of every person measured equally, but more specifically, the more intense the class or political factors that determine a person’s life chances and local rights, the more necessary and just for the political economy of capital is the intensification of their oppression or even their killing.
In examining the ideological conflict around the Palestinian revolution, I will use as a model of reference the first statement of Syriza after the revolutionary initiative of October 7, because it contains in three sentences all the basic ideological points of imperialist social democracy that have been internalized in the anti-capitalist movement.
“SYRIZA unequivocally condemns today’s Hamas attack against Israel, calls for its immediate end and expresses its solidarity with the people of Israel. The ongoing violence by all sides in the region, is a threat to any prospect of resolving the differences and is brutally affecting the security and rights especially of civilians, Israelis and Palestinians. We stand firmly in favour of the immediate resumption of credible bilateral talks for a two-state solution on the basis of the 1967 borders, with the capital of the Palestinian state being the city of east Jerusalem.”
Let us distinguish the ideological points that form the positions of imperialist social democracy:
1. Condemnation of the attack against the occupier’s national body inside its fort. This condemnation is the most basic position statement within the war. Various people try to convince that the condemnation of violence or of state violence from either side places them in a third position, morally and politically superior. The global proletariat understands, today as a whole, that the condemnation of the real military victory of the Palestinians is an expression of solidarity with imperialist koinonismos and thus a statement of consent to the extension of genocide, stronger than any tearful protest against it by the very subjects who condemn the attack.
In many statements, the condemnation, in its support, invokes the particular religious identity of the political organization that carried out the attack on the colonial fortress. This dogmatic demonization of Islam is identical with the fundamentalism of the crusades, which permeates conservative ideologies of capitalist times and culminates in imperialist/colonial elitism. Those who have been quick to denounce the religious character of Hamas identify with Netanyahu in his position that “we are the light, they are the darkness”. Koinonismos, the most subservient to imperialism, immediately assimilated the propaganda about rapes and massacres of civilians and children as if these practices, which characterize state warfare in general, are automatically derived from the Islamic identity of the resistance organization. The anti- theocratic guise of political condemnation is itself an attack on faith that transcends the carnal lust and fears of the bourgeois citizen, an attack on social morality that puts individualist autarchy under question, an attack on the collective and transcendentalist psyche that dismantles utilitarian positivism.
The ideological lackeys who, disgusted from the resistance’s attack joined the chorus of the liberal crusade, forgot that Hamas is the elected government of the marginal colonial territories, which was arbitrarily denied its bourgeois-democratic authority. The genocidal blockade of Gaza began in 2007, when Hamas ousted Fatah coup plotters, at whose hands the struggling Palestinians had been infamously tortured. Liberal fundamentalism, which sets up a la carte democracies, with coups, terrorism and mass purges, calls the “uncivilized” people fascists, whenever its bribery doesn’t work. The goal is the condemnation of their extended political autonomy.
Hamas was of no interest to the luminaries of imperialist social democracy during the years when the unrecognized Hamas government was tolerated by the colonialists, as it was managing the biopolitical and economic plight of the people of Gaza due to its total blockade. Once it breached the blockade, its militaristic armor and the security of its national reproduction, imperialist social democracy felt the need to join in denouncing the virtual hideous monster.
2. Recognition of the settlers and their genocidal state as a people. Subsequently, expressing solidarity with the colonialist organization. Only statism ascribes the concept of people to a state that is ethnically homogeneous. From the socio-revolutionary point of view, the popular always defines itself in class terms. The militarist colonists never and nowhere constituted a people. All Israelis are settlers because, in contrast to their abstract historical locality, their actual settlement, residence and expansion in the biblical land is by direct and continuous ethnic cleansing of another locality. If we were talking about the United States, only white fascists consider white Americans a distinct people. There is an Israeli nation, but it is not a people. The people of the Israeli state are the Palestinians, the hunted natives. Israeli citizens become a people to the extent that they betray their nation and fight with the Palestinian people. We will see this in a moment in their own words.
A side note, invoking the phantom Israeli people and expressing solidarity with this makes no class or political distinctions within the colonial nation. This phantom comes straight out of the most horrible statist nationalism, that is, colonialist nationalism. In any case, solidarity with the exploited classes of the colonial organism itself cannot possibly depend on submissiveness to its state of domination. On the contrary, class solidarity starts from the anti-colonial revolution, the social war for the destruction of the state-launching ground for imperialism.
The declarations of solidarity with the “Israeli people” are an invitation to complete the genocide of the Palestinians.
3. Condemnation of violence on both sides.
4. Focus on civilians and subjecting them to the imperialist conditions of rights and security. The focus on civilians completes the project of moral-ideological disarmament, depoliticization and passivization of the resisting people. At the same time that imperialism is blowing up the revolted prison of Gaza, it is also assuming the paternalistic responsibility of managing the survivors of genocide. More generally, the humanitarian infiltration of the transnational and parastatal (NGO) institutions of capital in the global South is paving the way for the formation of protectorate state institutions in the service of imperialism, with the assignment of managerial positions to collaborationists. We should note that the regional hegemonic powers are also playing in this field, always against the political autonomy and internationalist solidarity of the resisting people.
The external projection of the security claim as a primary need, annihilates the revolutionary needs of the people and extorts the recognition of the colonial interest, the security of its national fascist regime, as a universal need. The conclaves that hold the sword of imperialist peace can define the rights and the timeliness or untimeliness of their application. While international rights have been established in order to give the form of a contract to structural inequalities, the equation of the Palestinian people and of the zionist settlers under the category of ‘civilian’ legitimizes colonialism and currently justifies the attempt for a “final solution” for the sake of the security of the genocidal organization, i.e. total ethnic cleansing through genocide.
5. Proposing the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories that remained unconquered until 1967. On this point, libertarian imperialist social democracy is differentiated from the statist leftist social-democracy in terms of theoretical formulations and working field. However, they meet on the basic point of the relationship with the colonial state. Left social democracy expresses the imminent imperialist project of annihilating the Palestinian resistance and imposing on the wreckage of Gaza a collaborationist regime based on the experience of the Abbas management, who is an agent of the years-long ethnic cleansing. Libertarian social democracy, with a kind of Jesuit elitism and hypocrisy, advocates the fraternity of the exploited Palestinians and Israeli “peoples” or “societies”, without the destruction of the colonial state. I note that the workerist position that attributes the capacity for overthrowing the Israeli capitalist state formation exclusively to the Israeli working class, validates colonial nationalism and even lends it with an ideological envelope of pure national socialism (Nazism). Nothing new, Mussolini started out as a leftist and zionist settlers too, with strong socialist, workerist and communitarian roots.
All the ideological points of imperialist social democracy except the last one are replacing political polemics with a biopolitical ethics and managerial lingo. The biopolitical discourse objectifies existential experience in order to strip it of its class history and political subjectivity. Biopolitical ethics defines what violence is in order to exempt a set of capitalist-state practices from the category of violence and at the same time to criminalize resistance practices. Critical biopolitical ideology ratifies imperialism’s stripping of bodies of their collective identities and their resistance power. Vulnerability is transformed ideologically into an insurmountable anthropological condition, either as a class condition or as its weak consciousness. In this context, “civilians” become the central figures of the biopolitical narrative of war, with imperialist citizenship as their archetype of identification and measure of evaluation.
From a revolutionary point of view, the examination of experiences and the subordination of means to abstract ends that come from outside the immediate field of struggle is an ideological ploy to eliminate and replace the practical ends of direct resistance with the koinonistic ethics of the means, i.e. the anti-proletarian and counter-revolutionary values of the bourgeoisie, which reflect established inequalities. To judge the Palestinian resistance by the yardstick of anarchist or Marxist utopia is a project of ideological colonialism, but also of existential annihilation by the intelligentsia of dominant european humanism. Values that do not allow for taking sides with the existing resistance are values that are comfortable with the existing class slaughterhouse. In the offices where the fundamentalist critique on unholy means takes place, sits the Inquisition, which is certainly concerned with popular resistance, but only as an enemy. A Palestinian people separated from its armed struggle and its resistance organizations is the imaginary flock of the crusader church.
The Palestinian revolution awakens a multitude of questions of the international anti-capitalist movement, which are inevitably answered immediately by each one’s stance. I will only mention a few of these in which the class-political borders have already been drawn within the actual conflict, and then I will focus on the revolutionary lines given to us by the revolutionary anarchists from the ground of the conflict.
a. The identification of class relations in the actual composition of capitalist domination on a global scale. Who is an enemy and who is a friend at any particular point for the revolutionary anarchist movement? How is the distinction between direct and indirect political tasks concretized at each point, given anarchism’s characteristic historical stance of directly responding to the needs of our community as oppressed people, with the general perspective of freedom and equality? The most concrete answers, the only ones capable of bringing about alliance, immediacy and radical perspective, stem from the direct struggle of the subjects involved. This observation confirms the anarchist claim to the political autonomy of all resistance.
b. The correlation of ends and means. A question that many anarchists falsely and arrogantly declare that anarchism has solved, unlike the statist political currents. Whenever the class conflict brings this question to the fore, as did the revolutionary initiative on October 7, all those who claim to have answered this question without having a revolutionary organization on the ground, can and do validate their ideological position in only one way: by separating themselves from revolutionary action.
c. The strategic treatment of the relations between imperialism, the state and the social revolution.
d. The political mediation of the resistance. Here I am not referring to the mediation of the Palestinian movement by the Palestinian political organizations, the surrounding state or, more generally, political-military forces and the international imperialist institutions. The Palestinian people have felt on their own flesh the exploitative and usually treacherous attitude of the Arab and Islamic states. One sees no friends in the UN and in the various imperialist political interventions. Here I am referring to the ideological and political mediation of antagonistic positions of the international movement on behalf of the Palestinian movement. In particular, it is important within the internationalist movement, to deal with the internalized imperialist koinonismos and also with anti-imperialist social fascism, from the point of view of their colonialist political authoritarianism against the autonomy of the Palestinian revolution. In the sphere of political mediation which cancels the field of struggle itself, belongs also the usual koinonistic address to an imaginary apathetic mass as if it constituted the political public of resistance. The political public of resistance is of course the movements themselves, from their organic processes (and their collaborations) to the militant frontier of their development.
The confusion has spread to the internationalist movement. A simple example is the confrontation
within the anti-fascist football club St.Pauli. The critical response (2) of the local clubs to the club’s pro-Israeli statement sharply reproduced the positions of imperialist social democracy. An exception was the message of the Turkish club, a few days later, which highlighted the historical unity of the anti-colonial and anti- racist struggle. The radical position came from the key borderland between the global North and the global South. I will focus below on the first statement (3) of the Anarchist Federation of Afghanistan-Iran, because of the intensity of its reactionary positions, its locality in a place of struggle (Middle East, Kurdistan), and in connection to this because of its internal contradictions. In contrast, I will examine the social-fascist positions that present themselves as anti-imperialist. The last critical reference will focus on conspiratorial (4) positions.The entirety of the ideological positions of imperialist social democracy have been eloquently and succinctly answered by the Palestinian refugee Nidal Khalaf in his intervention, “On ‘pro-Palestinian’ hypocrisy.” (5) I will only summarize at this point, but anyone who continues reading this text should read the aforementioned article as if it were interjected here. I adopt every word of it, considering it sufficient to deconstruct the scarecrows of imperialist koinonismos. N. Khalaf, after stating from the outset that “Israel” is a colonial entity created and existing as an advance military base for Western imperialism, makes it clear that a war is being waged with colonialism and that it is not a border or religious dispute. He then goes on to denounce pro-colonial pacifism and collaborationist case of the two-state solution, the condemnation of violence and international law. He explains that the western value systems underlying the allegedly friendly critique of the Palestinian resistance, exist due to and for the sake of imperialist genocide. According to the Palestinian refugee’s testimony, the real hypocrisy is not the imperialists’ policies and their propaganda, but the projection of a pro-Palestinian identity by subjects who conform to the western scheme of liberal values. The worst form of western hegemonism is the attempts at moral subjugation, which are condensed in the refusal to support the Palestinian resistance organizations. The article closes by returning back to the exponents of cultural imperialism the image of the dead civilian. The whole text decimates the ideological colonialism of imperialist koinonismos that is so internalized in the international movement.
I proceed to a political summary of the views expressed in two interviews by two anarchists from the field, one who spoke (6) on behalf of the Palestinian anarchist organization FAUDA and one with Israeli citizenship. (7) Political positions from reality, against the political mediation of imperialist koinonismos. As another testimony (8) from the refugee Palestinian diaspora notes: “There is plenty of temptation to wag fingers in the aftermath of the operation [of October 7], but surely that task is not the domain of academics and activists in the metropole. Nor should it be the priority of diaspora Palestinians (among whom I include myself). In our environs, filled with their own kind of hostility, the priority should be to defend Palestinians against the torment to which they have been subjected by the entire industrialized world. Among politicians, artists, celebrities, and intellectuals, Palestinians have no shortage of critics happy to cosign Zionist genocide. Those critiques don’t need or desire our validation, anyway. Abandoning our brethren in order to appease the Zionist establishment will deliver no accolades. In the end, the aspirant to respectability is left only with the shame of conciliation.
Palestinians are perfectly capable of formulating strategy and thinking through complex problems without the guidance of outsiders; they certainly don’t need half-baked moralism from dorks and social climbers in the West.”
The actual relationship between ends and means as testimonies from ground reveal, clarifies the issue of concretizing class-political relations and identifying enemies and friends. I begin with two quotes from the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. (9) “The Gaza Palestinians have decided they’re willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom.” Who would deny this cause and its consequences? “On Saturday, Israel saw pictures it has never seen before. Palestinian vehicles patrolling its cities, bike riders entering through the Gaza gates. These pictures tear away at that arrogance.” No consequence is capable of undoing the achieved unity of this cause and this means. The October 7 initiative drew a line of war, of revolution and counter-revolution in Gaza that defines the world in an inescapable way: you either tread on one hemisphere of the Earth or the other, either with the Palestinian revolution or with imperialist genocide. The word arrogance, couched as the self-consciousness of the colonial nation (self-consciousness can only ever be negative) dissolves the counter-revolutionary propaganda about innocent victims.
The comrade from FAUDA informs us that the common front of the Palestinian resistance under the same banner and with the common goal of liberation from zionism is a fundamental need and that their organization is fighting for the unity of the movement. It also points out the necessity of mobilizing the youth for this purpose. (10)
The comrade with Israeli nationality informs us that what characterizes the Palestinian resistance these days, both in the West Bank and in Gaza, is the common and broad fronts. Islamists, secularists, Marxists and even national-liberals, like some parts of Fatah, are fighting side by side. The immediate class and political frontier has been defined, the immediate revolutionary purpose has been defined, the practical consequences are inescapable.
The comrade, with their testimony, completes the revolutionary line by taking a radical stand at the rear of the colonial frontier. His words illuminate precisely what internationalist defeatism means. Already as he introduces himself he declares his place of birth, Haifa, as occupied Palestine and thus calls the occupation by its name, for all Palestinian land. Recognizing the anti-colonial resistance as the only revolutionary movement in the occupied territories and as the vanguard of any radical change, he declares his obligation to deny his Israeli identity, to become an enemy, a traitor to the colonial nation, to his “society” and to ally with the dispossessed. Here is a perception of class specific condition, of the specific consequences of ends and means. The comrade declares his duty to side with the oppressed, on their own terms and under their own leadership. And he notes on this that anarchism (11) gives him both the language and the tools to envision this politics. “For me, there is no ‘anarchist society’ to march towards, since we don’t have an end goal. I see anarchism as a resistance movement, an arsenal of tools for the oppressed all over the Earth to fight the present dystopia, and that is what attracts me to it.”
The comrade participated in the organization “Anarchists against the Wall” (now dissolved). Since the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present day, the walls between North and South have multiplied: Palestine, Mexico, Mediterranean, Evros (greek-turkish border), Kurdistan. The revolutionary initiative of October 7 was a powerful blow to the historical development of the global imperialist prison. The comrade from the settler hinterland explains that the idea of coexistence is a superficial show and that only by fighting against the wall did the two sides come together, not as enemies, but as fighters for the same purpose, comrades, co-conspirators and allies, on equal terms. “What Hamas did on Saturday, October 7, was to break the ghetto, both physically and symbolically. They broke the gates surrounding Gaza and reclaimed land inside Israel, positioning themselves as a force beyond their assigned role as the Gaza government. They put themselves at the forefront of the Palestinian liberation movement, directly decolonizing territory.” Class conditions, revolutionary consistency, ends, means, all crystal clear from the anarchist perspective that unites the oppressed in the war.
Let us return briefly to the question of defining the grid of class relations overall. Why is the anti-colonial struggle the key meeting point on both sides of the border? Why not the workers’ struggle, the anti-patriarchal struggle, etc.? Aside from the fact that the regime of national subordination and general exile in Palestine has implanted a condition of domination that superimposes the entirety of class relations there, the comrade points out an additional condition: the settler democracy allows everything, all kinds of radicalism, as long as it is committed to the zionist military rule.
I would like to make two comments on the information given to us by our comrades from Palestine. Both the relativist theory of the intersectional approach and the relativist theory of the abstract wage-relationship as a universal class identity, are incapable of dealing with the specific class needs and social currents that unite people in revolutionary struggle. This does not imply that the correct theory is the post- Leninist one that projects imperialism as the main antithesis in relation to which all other antitheses are indifferent. We will see this below. Direct action anarchism, even when aware of the various abstract theories of Marxist or sociological origin, goes beyond them, having at its disposal the wealth of knowledge offered by direct struggle. There are no issues that fall within a molecular sphere independent of class relations on a global scale, nor issues that fall within a mega-scale where relations are inevitably mediated by states. The scales are interrelated and the criticality of each antithesis is defined by the subjects of the resistance. There are contradictions that affect internationalist solidarity (e.g. Hamas’s links to the Turkish state and the ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories of Rojava) and direct contradictions that exclude any non polemic encounter (e.g. the participation of the working class and the queer community of the colonial Israeli nation in its war machine).
Many libertarians internationally are still investing in the working class of the colonialist establishment. Typical is the intervention of the Anarchist Communist Group of Melbourne (12) (11/10) which, while acknowledging the complicity of the majority of the Israeli working class and not expecting Jewish workers’ solidarity to be a major force in the near future, characterizes the targeting of Israeli workers as damaging. Although this intervention describes the Israeli state in real terms, pointing out that Israeli fascism is moving towards the “final solution”, it does not neglect the obligation to imperialist social democracy to condemn Hamas with a cultural shadow (abstractly “reactionary”) and to distance itself from the targeting of Israeli civilians. But why is equality in horror damaging, especially in a permanent condition where no other practice has been able to even remotely crack the arrogance of genocidal peace, as the Israeli writer D. Levi attests?
Both comrades from Palestine answered categorically to the questions put to them about workers’ solidarity: mass proletarian solidarity from within the colonialist entity towards the Palestinian people is an ideological ghost. The suggestion that the liberation of Palestine, and more broadly of the global South, from imperialist domination is dependent on the workers’ movement of the North, is a characteristic expression of imperialist social democracy, of the colonial capitalist conception of progress and its projection against the revolutionary class struggle. Without the direct struggle of the oppressed people, nothing else happens except the expansive reformism of genocide.
Immediately after the revolutionary initiative of October 7, the state of settler bosses detained the thousands of Palestinian workers who crossed from Gaza every day as if moving through a labour camp, tortured them and marked them with numbers. Some workers died from the torture. In what way did the settler workers express their solidarity? By continuing to enlist and work to murder 160 children of the uncivilized proletariat every day.
The popular movement of the citizens of the occupied colonial hinterland has a direct enemy and if it does not confront this enemy in a way proportional to the intensity and depth of the current nationalist offensive, it will leave the nationwide responsibility of Israelis for the culmination of the genocide intact. War with zionist fascism which suppresses even the slightest questioning of the “final solution” and which devalues even the Israeli hostages and their protesting relatives, must be internalized in the Israeli nation. During the Nazi occupation of Europe, Italian and German antifascists found a way to stand in solidarity with the peoples in the conquered lands and to put antifascist resistance into practice: they defected to the partisans. This was the clearest manifestation of proletarian internationalism.
Of course, the preconditions for solidarity to the Palestinian resistance are not put forth by the anti-nationalist anti-colonial movement of the colonial entity, which has expressed understanding for the loss of its own people in the revolutionary attack of October 7, but by the imperialist social democracy. The same fascism, especially its antiproletarian-counterrevolutionary expressions, must be confronted in the imperialist hinterland, such as the capitalists’ terrorism against the workers of Starbucks (13) or against Harvard students in the USA and the military rule in the streets of Europe.
As various people attempt to contrast the Kurdish Freedom Movement with the Palestinian movement, doing in this way great disservice to internationalist solidarity, let me remind that the internationalist connection of the PKK with the revolutionary proletarian movement in the turkish territory is the HBDH ( Peoples’ United Revolutionary Movement) the front of the Turkish armed revolutionary organizations with the PKK.
Those who say that “resistance, uprisings and revolutions will either be social/class or nothing”, denying the class and social nature of the Palestinian resistance and the class and social elements of the political self-determination of the resistance organizations, are aiding the imperialist genocide. Their “nothing” is a gleeful applause for the cultural and physical ethnic cleansing of the oppressed who stray from the fundamentalist lines of colonial socialism. After all, the ideological totalitarianism of “All or Nothing” always comes to nothing anyway. (14)
Speaking of workers’ struggle, when the FAUDA comrade was asked about the possibility of a new general strike of Palestinians like in 2021, he replied that although it is not a trivial and useless practice, the struggle today has gone beyond this level. The situation and experience prove the necessity of armed struggle. The interdependence of means and ends is not deduced from some abstract interpretation of the conflict (e.g. workerism), nor from a mechanistic projection of abstractions onto practice. Even the purely economic struggle, as we move away from the reformism of the workers’ aristocracy, requires armed ways of protecting itself against military and penal repression, strike-breaking and anti-union terrorism (e.g. in the greek territory today). The political strike sharply raises the level of conflict. And finally, the whole historical experience of the workers’ movement showcases that the labor camp is a base for self-organization and for venturing into the struggle, but not a place of militant power, when the bourgeoisie is ready to extend its military means beyond limits.
The class conflict in Palestine reveals the hypocrisy of the ideological distinction, founded on an anti-armed struggle stance, between organized vanguardism and spontaneous insurrection, a construct propagated in the libertarian movement by the situationist lackeys of counter-revolution. Many political texts claiming the title of solidarity with Palestine, call for or wish for the emergence of an uprising in the image of the 1st Intifada, as opposed to the current military conflict. These vulgar euro-elitists, who pretend to be the generals of the correct ways of rebellion, underestimate the Palestinian people, as if they were not already rebellious, as if they were not involved in the resistance in a thousand ways, as if they cannot judge for themselves what the right ways are, and with no sense of responsibility, push a line of disarmament and non-organization within the slaughterhouse, only to promote the doctrine of their political subservience to the military rule’s monopoly, as the genuine liberal colonialists that they are.
On the actual ground, Gaza, the quality and size of the war production of the Palestinian resistance shows, in real terms, what the historical evolution of social horizontality means. Both the arsenal and infrastructure of resistance, with their particular characteristics within specific cultural and political conditions, express the breadth and depth of creative participation and social cohesion in relation to the conflict with colonialism. The main weapons of resistance are improvised. To manufacture the available quantity of rockets and various explosive devices required a huge amount of work. In addition, it required working space and an equally vast transport network. Even more work was needed to build the underground forts, which serve almost all the activities of the combative forces, and not only their cover at the time of close combat. In other words, this is an infrastructure project that serves far more needs than the classic concrete forts, such as those of the Maginot and Metaxa lines, with all the work being done underground and in incomparable territorial density. Additional work was required to ensure that all work was done invisibly and that no information would leak, within a geographically tiny space, overrun by people and which comprises the world model for technocratic surveillance and espionage.
None of these tasks, in the given guerrilla warfare conditions, could have be done for 30 pieces of silver or under gunpoint. Only volunteers with credibility for their dedication to the cause could accomplish this feat. A pan-popular army of unparalleled cohesion density, with no historical precedent, prepared the counterattack against the zionist class enemy and the long war of attrition. The conditions demanded an unprecedented density in the unity of social and armed resistance, and the revolted Palestinian people brought the evolution of humanity towards social self-direction one step further. A step further within the tightest universal prison, a step over an abyss that had to be bridged for us all to move forward, lest we be swallowed up by the history of capitalist and state rule.
In order to carry out the multidimensional program of the aforementioned work, improvisation was needed at all scales, in all phases. It is impossible for a structure of tight vertical direction to carry out all the interdependent productive objectives in the given conditions. It may be difficult for the individualist mentality that permeates part of the anti-capitalist movement to grasp the concept of coordinated self organization, its radicalism and its evolutionary force, but the revolutionary people are putting it into practice. I will not tire of saying it, the historical evolution of guerrilla struggle is the main natural field of development of the fractionally synthetic autonomy of the human animal, because it aims at its liberation from its cultural cannibalism and has developed explosively in the capitalist era, which has unified humanity in a negative way.
At this point we must note something that the guerrilla organization of the Kurdish Freedom Movement constantly emphasizes: capitalist technology is not capable of defeating determined resistance. The self-sacrifice, cooperativeness and resourcefulness of social resistance are capable of annihilating all the mechanical means of the enemy, its one-dimensional way of organizing and its inherent predisposition to take precautions by increasing distances and obstacles. Victory over modern industrial warfare depends on appropriate tactics, strategy and logistics, but it derives, like guerrilla tactics, strategy and logistics, from the moral forces and collective intelligence of the revolutionary people. Hamas has developed homemade rockets into precision guided systems and has expanded its arsenal with effective portable anti-tank and anti-helicopter missile systems, also of its own design. The ideological dogma that considers the proletariat capable only of tearing up bricks of the pavements, is a vile insult to the working class. If euro-elitism cannot understand that beneath the soil of Gaza a temple of popular culture has been built, catacombs that cut the legs off the modern empire, and if it cannot comprehend insurrection beyond setting up barricades with rubbish bins, it is because of insufficient imagination, but more fundamentally, because of insufficient determination.
Horizontalism is not a question of preference of certain closed communities, but a question of breaking down class relations, political heteronomy, all inequalities and especially the conditions of polemic power on which they are based. By what yardstick would horizontality be measured if, while the community of the oppressed filled the coffins, the masters stood unmoved like the columns of the Parthenon?
The authoritarian critique to the means of insurrection, a critique that is certainly directed against the insurrection itself, attempts to define what is ‘of the peoples’, in the way that bio-political critique validates totalitarian rule and its genocides by abolishing political self-determination. The juxtaposition of the 1st Intifada against the armed Palestinian resistance, by recognizing an uprising as popular only when unorganized and unarmed masses are involved, denies the people their status when they organize, arm themselves and try to fight back on as equal terms as possible. This reverse insurrectionalism is no different, neither in political position nor in morality, from the imperialists’ sarcastic statements, “We are against Hamas, not against the Palestinian people”, at the same time that they have unleashed their gendarme to slaughter the rebellious people. In the real conditions of Palestine (and beyond), denying the popular essence of armed resistance means not only to agree with the liquidation of armed resistance, but also, to give masked consent to genocide, since the separation of Hamas from the Palestinian people is precisely the pretext for the dehumanization of the entire Palestinian people, who have been branded as the “shield of terrorists”. He who holds the weapons defines the scope of the hostility. The movements that denounce the armed popular resistance of Palestine have nothing to offer up against the imperialist total massacre, that is being advertised live as the upcoming political management of the entire global South. To settle for throwing a rock or two, not to strike at those who ensure their well-being through displacement and genocide, but instead to implore them for humanity. The means do not tell us what the end is, but they do tell us what it is not. The separation of armed struggle from insurrection is certainly not a friend of Palestine, it is not a friend of political autonomy, nor of social liberation; it cannot go beyond the vortex of serfdom to military rule.
Unfortunately, calls for non-organization and disarmament are also heard from collectives active around the Kurdish revolutionary movement. How do they forget from one announcement to the next, the armed struggle in Rojava? Have they not understood the decisive contribution of the PKK’s party-popular guerrilla movement in the development of the entire movement over half a century? Have they never heard of the declared People’s Revolutionary War and the unity of its four fields: guerrilla, youth and women’s uprising, direct social self-defense and socialist workers’ movement? Have they overlooked the account of the battle of Heftanin (2020) and the evolution of its lessons in the three-year all-out war that followed in the Medya Defense Zones? Today’s Kurdish guerrilla resistance promotes itself as a model for the whole world.
Let’s see what the comrade from the colonial hinterland has to say about the issue of diffuse struggle: “Dana El-Kurd, a Palestinian academic, in her book ‘Polarized and Demobilized- Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine’ makes the argument that the Palestinian struggle is not only anti-colonial, but also anti-authoritarian in its roots. During the days of the first Intifada, Palestinians had a vibrant civil society, spontaneously organizing local committees to coordinate struggle, and address the needs of local communities. This uprising was democratic in its nature, and was fought against the will of the PLO. Even within the PLO, as Edward Said argues in his book ‘The Question of Palestine’, the structure was organized in a very democratic way, with internal discussions and open criticism, in complete contrast to politics in the Arab world, an area filled with reactionary regimes and self-appointed dictators and out of touch monarchs. The Palestine liberation movement was always the most democratic and progressive movement in the region, and inspired many other anti-authoritarian movements and uprisings, some of them we saw during the Arab Spring, and many are still ongoing. Many argue that the defeat of the Palestinian left in Lebanon, the establishment of the Palestinian Authority after the Oslo accords and the rise of political Islam have changed the picture, but I think many of the original characteristics are still in place.
Having said all that, I can’t really say that Palestinians ever had an anarchist movement per se. Palestinian anarchists do exist, but like among Israelis, it isn’t really organized as a movement, nor can I say it’s a popular idea. I do believe though that even if the name anarchism isn’t being used, Palestinians do tend to organize in an anarchist way, without calling it like that. New guerrilla groups in the West Bank in recent years like the Lion’s Den in Nablus, Jenin Brigade in Jenin and Balata Battalion in Balata refugee camp organize in a non-hierarchical way and are non-sectarian in principle, open to all the different factions to join. These youth groups are completely outside the control of the Palestinian Authority and the old politics of factions and parties, and their unpredictable, spontaneous nature is challenging to the Israeli authorities.”
It is logically consistent to note that the reproduction of imperialist koinonismos in the libertarian movement and the aberration of “insurrection, not armed conflict”, are expressed by a plethora of ideological schools that either openly oppose the platformist tradition or tend to smother the organizational approach within the boundaries of the national field and of legitimacy. The current class struggle demands that anarchist revolutionary organization be in its constitution borderless and guerrilla. The world that rises will be shaped by those revolutionary organizations that fight and take roots simultaneously in all corners of the Earth. If we anarchists miss this calling, the responsibility will not belong to history. From a historical evolutionary point of view, I reckon that these days are the last chance for anarchism, until the imminent collapse of capitalism, to become a real force for change. The fighting comrades in Kurdistan, Armenia, in the land of the Mapuche, in Palestine and perhaps in other parts of the South that do not come up in the northerners’ maps are paving the way.
The question of bankrupt anarchism and bankrupt leftism
The statement of the Federation of the Anarchist Era, Afghanistan-Iran (9/10/23) (15) exalts the polemics of imperialist social democracy. The condemnation of the October 7 revolutionary initiative is not limited to the act itself. The act is placed entirely in the sphere of the war between powers. The condemnation of Hamas adopts the rhetoric constructed by the genocidal and counter-revolutionary imperialist propaganda. Violence is denounced not as a method but as a tautology of statism. The distinction between civilians and resistance goes to an extent that is constitutive for political meanings: on one side are “peoples” as passive subjects without class determinants and on the other side are governments, which are equated as an ideological category. Referring to the specific field, however, the announcement focuses its aggressive assertion on one pole of power, the Islamist one. And peace is not put forward as a pragmatic perspective, always under the yoke of colonialism, but as an ultimate goal and at the same time an accepted social status which was destroyed by the resistance’s initiative. Peace and security.Since when did security, the main pretext for state and imperialist terrorism, become a revolutionary project capable of inescapably canceling the struggle for freedom and equality? The conflict has begun anew, here is the evil, according to the statement. As if the years-long siege of Gaza by a nation of settlers were not one-sided war. And as if the preceding, “peaceful” status were not based on the threat of the new status, that is, the “final solution”. Did this particular anarchist collective ascertain from the prisoners of the Gaza strip that the state of their genocidal peonage is acceptable? This statement is an exaltation of voluntary servitude, transposed on the peoples by an ideological elite. Are the Iranian insurgents to be deemed deluded, as they fight for their freedom by risking their lives and continuing while the regime’s murderous terror intensifies? Let them be left to the peace and security offered by submission to power… Why is it that in one place freedom is life and in another place, where there is no guarantee of survival and tranquility, freedom is superfluous and the needs of the settlers (peace and security) are prioritized? Simply because the Federation of the Anarchist Era chooses enemies and friends based on localist criteria. Since the Palestinian resistance is led by forces linked to the regime we are directly confronting (Iranian), we are siding with the polemic of the colonizer. This reflects zero political autonomy and a scant utilitarian internationalism. This is of course campism with a sectarian motive. Idealistic neutrality, speaking in the language of counter revolution, is the most insidious form of campism. In the interpretation and utopia of the Federation, anti statism is the completion of liberalism, with class relations remaining intact, with the crimes of imperialism and zionist ethnic cleansing and counter-revolution going unpunished, with memory trashed.
By disregarding the fighting Palestinians and by nullifying their discourse, which declares that this is a war with colonialism, the statement reduces the war to a question of ideologies. The meaning that the Western ideological trend wants to imperiously impose is to strip the real class-political subjects of their class-political determinations. From the point of view of fundamentalist liberal consciousness, ideology is an illusion, without which citizens can peacefully regulate their relations. In the train of thought of liberal metaphysics, Thomas Hobbes’ classic scheme, which describes the state as a necessary evil for the safeguarding of the “social contract”, makes more sense than the version of the Federation, which regresses as to the determination of the cause: if ideology is the cause of the state and of war, then what is the cause of ideology? The answer, if we adhere to this theory, is illusory consciousness. Everything comes down to a question of enlightenment. And as usual, enlightenment is not aimed at promoting direct revolutionary action, but at preventing it and promoting class pacification. What does this metaphysics have to do with the revolutionary anarchist tradition? Nothing, not with any revolutionary tradition. Anarchist ethics and vision is the spawn and development of direct struggle, not an offshoot of bourgeois koinonismos and pacifism.
The reduction of this conflict to ideology agrees with the imperialist ideology about the “war of civilizations”. The aforementioned statement takes this provocative polemic beyond its general formulation; it targets the side of the resistance, describing its ideology as reactionary and inhuman, with the only evidence being its resistance activity. In this way, the counter-revolutionary terrorism of the colonialist regime is transformed into the logical and inevitable consequence of the unacceptable provocation of the resistance. Having assimilated itself to the counter-revolutionary line of imperialist ideology, due to its sectarian perspective, the Federation culminates its attack on the Palestinian resistance by reproducing the pretext of the colonial militarists for the massacre of the Palestinian people: “using innocents as human shields”. How obvious, the army of colonialists is bombing the Palestinian people, slaughtering their children, pushing them towards the Sinai desert, and attacking them on the route, in order to free them from the terrible power of Hamas! Journalists, nurses and international volunteers, who are unaware that they are being used as human shields by the barbarians, are bombarded by the progressive forces in order to free themselves from this delusion! There are several ways to endorse genocide. Erdogan has literally put his signature on drones that are hitting Rojava and Basur. The Federation of the Anarchist Era and others have put their signature on the bombs that flatten hospitals, schools, temples and refugee camps in Gaza and have put the blame up front on the resistance, with their polemic pen. A sign of the bankruptcy of anarchism in the era of liberal illusions.
The so-called libertarians who blame Hamas equally or primarily for the suffering of the people of Gaza are, like the imperialists, silencing the fact that the people of Gaza have been condemned to an exhausting blockade because they elected a government that disobeyed the colonialists. All those who criticize Hamas at the moment it attacked the wall and the settler prison guards are, like the imperialists, demanding that the Palestinians abandon anti-colonial resistance. They demand it by means of genocide. Their anti-statist or democratic sentiment is encapsulated in the disparagement and abandonment of the Palestinian people to genocide because they chose the “wrong” leadership.
According to the logic of liberal fundamentalism, the PKK is responsible for the razing of the Kurdish towns of Bakur in 2015, during the war of Democratic Self-Government, and the Kurdish youth should not get organized with the YDGH and YPS, but against them. In this way one sides with the special warfare of the Grey Wolves and of Mossad.
The Palestinians’ self-organization which the authoritarian liberals, so called libertarians, advocate, will never happen, because it is a historically arbitrary metonymy for submission to zionist colonialism and imperialism. The Palestinian people do not lie in wait for the luminaries of imperialist koinonismos, they are self-organizing in their daily uprising, in their armed struggle, in their survival, in their mutual aid and in the care of the wounds of genocide. The most radical form of self-organization is the collective memory of the martyrs, which turns into revolutionary organization and an endless river of revenge. Only this self-organization that rejects voluntary servitude and the inequality in life and death can be internationalist. Yes,there is a problem. If a statist religious party is leading the resistance and anarchism seems to be on the opposite side, there is a historical problem for anarchism.
Koinonistic neutrality has a common intersection with the leftist defense of counter-revolutionary regimes which are antagonistic to NATO imperialism, around which they complement each other. They both derive from the denial of proletarian and social political autonomy within the unremitting war of capitalism. Pacifist idealism, by denying war, makes the people a passive subject, compromised in the world class hierarchy, while statist anti-imperialism also makes the people a passive subject of the world class hierarchy, unable to change the general relations without the mediation of bourgeois power and unable to change the class and political relations at the grassroots level. This opportunism is a by-product of the historical bankruptcy of marxism. By investing in Islamism in order to have an effective anti-imperialism, leftism comes to terms with its historical end and changes sides, since political Islam was the investment of the imperialist counter-revolution in the South. It is common, and historically explicable, for would-be leaders of the left to shift from one pole of power to another on occasion, in order to hold the position of would-be leadership. It has happened even in the most radical revolutionary organizations. The adherents of the anti-NATO front of Iran, Russia, China or even Turkey, support the counter-revolution in order to continue having a say about the anti-imperialist struggle, because it is necessary for them to gloss over the defeated anti-imperialist strategy of Leninism. Since the leadership has been historically defeated, it demands that the people become servile too. This pretentiously anti-imperialist opportunism, being unable to lead the living subjects of resistance in the global South, refers to Khomeini and Saddam Hussein (16), the butchers of the proletarian movement, of the revolutions and of the marxist left in Iran and Iraq.
The arab and islamic states have sold Palestine out, many decades now. No state will take on a clash with NATO, unless its own existence is threatened. No bourgeoisie can lead the resistance to the end, because it will not risk its own existence, as Bakunin pointed out. The history of the PLO is yet another example. We saw how the Iranian counter-revolution sucked up the execution of Soleimani. No state will seriously go to war over Palestine. No state will throw more resources into the battle for Palestine than are necessary to spend in order to strengthen its own position in the inter-state power relations, by undermining its antagonizers. The pro-Palestinian war crowns are a preventive protection of the counter-revolution in the Middle East and are specifically aimed at maintaining discipline in the armies and paramilitary militias of the arab and islamic states. The above positions and predictions were written before Nasrallah’s backpedaling statement, which confirmed them. Also, before the Houthis take up action, but with knowledge of their expressed threats. The Houthis are a community that recently faced a genocidal war and remains under siege by local exploiters, NATO powers, the saudi monarchy and the Emirates, with the active participation of the greek army.
The revolutionary resurgence of Palestine, the worldwide popular mobilization, especially of the muslim world, and the surge of imperialist terrorism with unprecedented brutality, put the anti-imperialist struggle at the forefront of the internationalist social movement. In the Middle East, the urgency of the popular anti-imperialist resistance strengthens the need to overthrow the state-capitalist regimes, whether religious or purely bourgeois, dictatorial or parliamentary. The opportunists who support the counter-revolution in the name of anti-imperialism also undermine the anti-imperialist resistance, because they have betrayed its popular basis. On the other hand, liberals who separate the social revolution from the anti- imperialist resistance are dividing the popular uprising, giving away living radical forces to nationalist and religious fascism and thus undermining the social revolution.
Turkish fascism in particular, which incorporated Palestine in its neo-Ottoman conquest plans, is doing service to NATO imperialism, in parallel with zionist fascism. Turkish fascism is spreading war, fascism and genocide in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus and Europe. However, it doesn’t make a move, unless it serves the interests of American or Russian imperialism or both. Neo-Turkism was a child of imperialism. Turkish islamic-fascism is the product of the imperialists’ desperate plan to dismantle the revolutionary movement in Kurdistan and the turkish territory. The same plan that led to the transnational conspiracy to capture Abdullah Ocalan. Erdogan’s anti-imperialist speeches are also part of the special counter-revolutionary war that the Turkish state is waging in cooperation with all imperialist and regional reactionary forces. If the AKP-MHP regime offered any support to Hamas, it did so only to undermine revolutionary internationalism, to strengthen the repression and genocide in Kurdistan, to promote its colonialist plans, which also involve Palestine, and to enhance its negotiating position among the hegemonic powers of the World War III imperialist war. Behind the facade, the flow of oil and steel from Turkey to Israel has not been interrupted, according to a recent article (17), and there is direct military involvement of Turkey in the genocide of Palestinians, as the zionists use the Kürecik Radar Station in Malatya province.
Turkish fascism likens israeli fascism to the Islamic State, just as israeli fascism also identifies the Palestinian resistance with the Islamic State, the demon that NATO and the colonialists bred together. All the massacres carried out by the I.S. inside turkish territory were the plans of the MIT, and of the current Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan personally, as were also the anti-Kurdish assassinations in Europe. On the same day that the Palestinian revolutionary attack took place, the Turkish air force bombed a mosque in the Makhmur refugee camp in Basur, as part of the ongoing war against the social forces of democratic con- federalism. (18) An Israeli army spokesman sarcastically mocked the Turkish regime’s genocide accusations directed at Israeli fascism, pointing out that they are doing the same in northern Syria. Zionism, no longer having anything to gain by adorning imperialist humanism, speaks candidly: only we, the blessed ones, are human – the rest are just flesh, useful for our progress. Neo-Ottomanism is compelled to usurp the revolutionary movement. At the same time that the mercenaries of turkish colonialism in Rojava rape and murder women because the women’s revolution is gaining ground and femicide is multiplying in the turkish territory, Erdogan’s wife and daughter are crowning themselves as leaders of the regime’s “pro-palestine” movement. The political alignment with the staged manipulation of revolutionary internationalism cannot be justified, it has no innocence.
Imperialism must be defeated militarily wherever it lands or places its war proxies. Only the popular movements can achieve this. The zionist military rule must be defeated. In order to socially deconstruct the zionist organization, it is necessary to defeat it in war. Only popular resistance can achieve this. Turkish colonialism must be defeated. The Revolutionary People’s War of the Kurdish Freedom Movement and internationalist confederalism is achieving this. Fascism must be defeated everywhere, the insurrections must win by means of the political autonomy and military might of the proletarian social forces.
Anti-imperialism or social revolution, fascism or imperialist democracy, multiple poles or a single pole in the global capitalist order, european enlightenment or jihadism, anti-occupation or workers’ struggle, war or self-organization, insurrection or armed resistance, Palestine or Kurdistan? Artificial dilemmas. It is the job of the bosses to make such enforced divisions on the internationalist social revolution. The most important consequence of revolutionary anarchism is the immediacy of its commitment to the entirety of all particular points of struggle. This alone builds the cohesion of the revolutionary social front.
In these days of the crucial frontal confrontation with NATO terrorism in the Middle East and in the metropolises of the North, revolutionary internationalism has the responsibility to promote solidarity with the Kurdish and Palestinian resistance on a undivided basis. (19) It is crucial for the revolutionary social and anti-imperialist/anti-colonial character of any expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people to not neglect the task of highlighting the conflict in Kurdistan and informing about the current intensity of colonialist attacks in northern Syria and Armenia. At the same time, contrasting the social gains of the Kurdish movement against the Palestinian resistance is unacceptable. As organizations of the turkish- kurdish political front point out, “we support the struggle of the people of Kurdistan and Palestine without any ifs and buts.” (20) Sectarian attitudes are expressions of the conditions of repression of revolutionary internationalism. In practice, the state-capitalist leaderships that organize the military and bio-political rule of the Middle East and of the whole Earth are the same for both Kurdistan and Palestine. The same imperialist directorates, the same war industries, the same energy trusts, the same logistics chains.
As a revolutionary internationalist movement we have a duty to promote the arab-kurdish alliance, which has spread the social revolution in NE Syria and is defending the battle front against the turkish occupation. To promote it wherever we struggle.
From the message of an HPG guerrilla of Arab origin fighting in Medina of Basur (Siyar Ereb, 14/10) (21): “As a member of the brother Arab nations, I now take my place in the Free Movement. I joined the guerrillas to respond to enemy attacks. I am very happy and proud of this. […] Genocidal wars are being waged everywhere. […] We will resist until we fulfill our defensive duty and defeat the invading forces. Arab peoples must support this honorable struggle. Our young people need to join this struggle and fight against fascism.”
And the account of an internationalist fighter a few years before: “An experience full of hope? There are many in this case too. I can juxtapose another man whom I met, who is a boy from Raqqa, an Arab. He willingly chose to leave Raqqa. He was a worker in a garage, he was 15 years old, and, while at work, a civil guard approached him, one of those who in many Syrian cities goes around like they are a king and does whatever they want, who said to him: “Show me how you pray”. And after he prayed, the guard told him: “You are phony, you don’t believe, you don’t pray right”. Well, the boy said: “I am here in my city, I am working, and here comes someone who is not even from Raqqa to bother me and tell me I don’t know how to pray”. And so he decided to leave and to migrate to the North. In the end he joined the YPG because he saw the Kurdish people like people who behave in the opposite way to what he had experienced.
He was one of the first Arabs to join a force that was initially 100% Kurdish. I met him one year after this happened, and we were in the same Unit. He is an impressive person. Aside from the fact that he explained his plan to me, which was that he would participate in the liberation of Rojava which has then to become the liberation of all Syria. And he wanted to go fight in Turkey, in Iran and in Iraq. “Finally afterwards we will be able to liberate Palestine and in this way also Lebanon”, he would say. And if there was a need also in Italy, he would come here to fight too. He is a person, almost illiterate, who had never seen anything outside of Raqqa, of Kobane and maybe a bit further, but he has a genuine will and perspective, a real one. I am speaking in the present tense, even though I unfortunately cannot be sure if he is still alive, since I left him in September, and in Syria life expectancy is rather short. I fought by his side, and as a fighter he is just impressive, indescribable. There were scenes that, to a westerner like myself, seem like they come out of a movie, how a person can fight like this. As a proletarian and a man with no education, illiterate, condemned by his life to a limited reality, he is a revolutionary of the highest levels in history imaginable. This is how I know that in the north of Syria there are thousands like him, and this is inestimable.
I can say his nom de guerre, Zagros Raqqa, because no one in Rojava uses their real name…
The biggest lessons are two. The first is that there is an inequality, a divide, and I already knew this, between the West and the Middle East, or maybe between the West and the rest of the world. It is so great that you cannot imagine it, it cannot be described, and unfortunately, it is not even enough for one to go there and fight in order to bridge the gap, in the sense that it is a divide between those who have everything and those who have nothing, between one who is well and one who is suffering. This is a realization of the seriousness of this situation, made mainly by the one who goes to fight in such war situations.
The other lesson is that the revolution is just and necessary, however, when we say ‘revolution’ we must be conscientious about the gravity of this word in the sense of the pain, the tragedy and the pain it brings about, because a revolution is still a turning point for society, it is an upheaval of society that doesn’t happen peacefully, even though it is necessary, and so we should not use this term lightly. We don’t need to imagine simply that it is a ‘beautiful thing’. Those who think like this should better give up on politics and do something else, while it would be useful to have people who understand how terrible it is to have to have a revolution, but who continue to think it is necessary.” (Davide Grasso, former YPG fighter, Italy, September 2017)
Stories of spies and saints
“Palestinians have determined to proceed without their Western custodians. Decolonization is a grueling project, generally beyond the acumen of those weaned in comfort. The professional classes are stuck in bourgeois abstractions (from which they derive so many rewards) or profess a material politics they don’t in reality support. They demand a bloodless liberation, but only without the colonizer’s blood, even as the native bleeds out in full view of the world. They demand a revolt without consequence, a caucus of pristine victims politely asking to stay alive. They have taught Fanon but ignored his observation that decolonization ‘cannot be accomplished by the wave of a magic wand, a natural cataclysm, or a gentleman’s agreement.’These erstwhile liberals don’t need to consult Palestinians to see how wrong they are. Zionists have been explaining for decades that Israel must be defeated by force.” (A Voice from Palestine) (22)
It is undeniable that Hamas is working with states. It does not hide it, since it is not ashamed of its statism. It is also plausible that the revolutionary initiative of 7 October was aimed, among other things, at significantly changing the inter-state power relations in the Middle East and at overturning the political relations as regards the imperialist hegemony. As Hamas confirmed after a month of fighting (in an interview with the New York Times), the initiative was founded on a decision to break free from the long and exhausting siege of Gaza, at any cost.
None of the above facts implies that the stated purposes are contrary to the will of the Palestinian people. This implication presupposes as an arbitrary rule that the people always choose peace, even when that means their long-term extermination, over desperate resistance. The lackeys of genocidal colonial peace silence the fact that the news of the invasion against the colonial fortress was greeted with mass celebrations in the besieged Palestinian territories. (23)
No one on the planet could have interpreted Hamas’ move as the product of anti-state struggle, nor of course as independent of any state assistance. However, the statist mediation of popular interests does not make these interests entirely artificial and alien; it does not cancel the existence of needs determined by the class-oppressed communities and exploited classes themselves, which are assigned to the political mediation of an agent of power. From the anarchist point of view, political mediation is a historical problem, precisely because there are always proletarian and social needs, which are confused with antagonistic needs wherever authoritarian mediation takes place. The idea that any mediated will expresses false needs and only hostile interests, expresses a vulgar aristocratic anti-popular elitism. As if the people are a thoughtless passive entity that will be redeemed only when it is enlightened by some blessed ones, or by chance.
Why should the upsurge of the Middle East or even of the whole Earth be a hostile prospect for those who permanently live and die inside the furnace of colonialist rule? How else will Palestine be liberated, if the colonial fortress is not blown up like a powder keg and thus, if the whole world does not flare up first? The scaremongering about ‘escalation’ is a central propaganda line of the imperialists. If there is a specific problem with state mediators here, it is their inherent incompetence and their insufficient motivation to engage in the anti-imperialist struggle to the degree that is necessary for the liberation of Palestine. The ideological elites of any social democracy have even less of a motivation and zero capacity.
In Greece, a group that brandishes an understanding of politics as an interplay between agents, surpassing even the greek Communist Party, added to the above that “the destruction of Gaza and the displacement of its inhabitants was and is among the plans of Hamas’ agents, was intended and indeed is a precondition for its continuation.” (24) This conclusion negates the fundamental axiom of the state that state expediency takes precedence over all other expediency and therefore of the interests of its citizens, because it completely equates the interests of Hamas with the interests of the supporting states and their interests with the interests of the enemy states (NATO, Israel, etc.). This is the typical Hitlerian reduction (propaganda manual in “My Struggle”), historically anti-Semitic, of all antitheses to the dark designs of a principal enemy. This mystical reduction is the pretext for stripping the meaning from the antitheses and subordinating them to a simplistic monolithic ideology. In this case, the contradictory factors in the imperialistic management of the Palestinian genocide are blatant. It has been shown by official documents that the colonialists are seeking the complete displacement of the disobedient people. But the vassal Arab states do not want the surplus Palestinian precariat and the displaced Palestinian resistance in their territories. Neither do the European imperialists. That’s why the Egyptian junta keeps them corralled in the slaughterhouse. Which state and why would it want the Palestinian resistance to diffuse, except the settlers, who have their own special interest as a priority? The NATOists have pulled out of the drawer the case of a collaborationist palestinian state, the ideal plan for them, however, as much as an open war was necessary in order to attempt the definitive annihilation of resistance throughout occupied Palestine, so too a war makes the prospect of annihilation unrealistically idealistic. The national disregard for the Palestinian Authority, its total weakness on an international level, the resistance’s ultimatums to Abbas (5-6/11/23, Organization ‘Children of Abu Jadal’, from inside the police forces of the Palestinian Authority), and the attack on him (7/11/23, questioned by the Palestinian Authority and the imperialists) confirm these lines, which were written prior to this. The interpretation that open war was a priori necessary and legitimate for the colonialists and imperialists, and by implication, the October 7 attack was a pretext, turns the causes and practical consequences upside down, with a preconceived position that resistance is irrational. Why would the imperialists seek to feed and diffuse anti-colonial anti-imperialist resistance, why would they want to compromise the relations of the Arab states with Israeli colonialism, why would they want to increase Iranian-Shiite influence and to hand over to the mediating Turkish hegemony more bargaining cards, while the Hamas state was quietly managing the Gaza camp? Why would the Iranian regime want the Palestinians scattered around rather than at the feet of the Israeli hinterland? There is only one answer: because this is how it suits the ideology that says that the powerful are always powerful and that they inevitably pull the strings of history.
All the current complications have one driving premise, which alone gives them coherent meaning: the settlers’ and NATO’s expectation to eliminate Palestinian resistance, because on October 7 it manifested itself powerfully. With the unhindered prolonged mass massacre of the people of Gaza, with the repeated bombings of refugee convoys, hospitals, schools and churches turned into refugee shelters, with the killing of 101 volunteers of the UN humanitarian mission (until 12 November), the targeted killing of dozens of Red Crescent nurses and doctors (an article published on 19/10 reports 192 deaths since 7/1025 and of 40 journalists (by the first week of November), the imperialists are sending the message to the people of the whole world, that those who do not get used to poverty, exclusion, displacement, incarceration and slow death, will be brutally exterminated. Resistance is not the pretext for this coordinated operation of global terror, it is its cause, its enemy. The ‘agents’ game’ theorists are capable of making up any nonsense in order to interpret the facts to suit their simplistic ideology, always against the resistance.
The more specific interpretations of the hypothesis that the attack on the colonial fortress was carried out to provoke the war and impose a new occupation of Gaza or an imperialist protectorate regime, refer to marine hydrocarbon deposits and pipelines. Some also link Turkish involvement with competition for energy routes. These interpretations have the advantage of reducing political conspiracies to specific economic interests and thus pretend to flirt with an anti-capitalist or even anti-imperialist perspective. On the specific field of conflict, it is a stupid ideology to suggest that while there was a semblance of capitulation there were more obstacles to the exploitation of the undersea resources west of Gaza than have now arisen due to open warfare. The only ideal footing of this view is the total disparagement of the Palestinian resistance or popular resistance in general. On 7 October a dynamic of total collapse of the colonialist organization was triggered, but the pseudo-intellectuals of the North could see nothing but the endless development of imperialist domination.
It is not only that they cannot see in any other way than through the language of subjugation. They can neither think in any other way than in the mentality of capital. The usual talk about oil is not class analysis, it is vulgar political economy. Besides, something that is a key issue in capitalist competition everywhere, energy resources, is not enough to describe and explain anything relevant to the specific forms that the class-political struggle takes. Then, politics is reduced entirely to the sphere of political economy and, as a corollary, war falls into the category of political guise. This scheme, of course, comes from the most extreme liberal school.
The conspiratorial pseudo-understanding of the October 7 revolutionary initiative offers the greatest ideological service to genocide, having eliminated the existence of resistance by statute. We can passively watch the massacre without guilt, since everything is pre-designed and inevitable and there is no popular resistance on the ground. The aforementioned group spews out its fatalism on the Palestinians: “The residents of [Gaza] are complying [!] with a directive from the Israeli state and are moving from the north to the south despite UN complaints that Israel is imposing a collective punishment, calling the ultimatum ‘horrible’.” Too much compliance by the elite of koinonismos.
Simplistic reductions in order to get rid of the real contradictions are also expressed in more subtle tones. E.g. (from another group’s text): “Hamas is an Islamist organization. Huge differences of all kinds separate us from it, including – but not limited to – the tactic of targeting civilians. Keeping in our hearts the days of the Palestinian intifada, we stand always and wholeheartedly with the Palestinian people and their resistance, but we see ourselves as far removed from any Islamist formation. We cannot ignore the fact that Hamas’s growth is largely due to its strengthening by Israel itself during the period when it was trying to weaken the secular and progressive forces of the Palestinian resistance. In a similar way, the US was funding and arming Islamist forces as a counterweight to the socialist and communist movements in the Arab and Islamic world. The truth is that Israel chose the enemy it considered most easily manageable. What it was trying to achieve (and it succeeded) was to reverse the internationalization of the Palestinian question (which was the greatest conquest of the resistance until the 1990s) and turn it into an issue of the Islamic world alone. This role was played by Hamas. A role destructive to the movement’s prospects. However, we cannot ignore the fact that at the moment Hamas is also the result of decades of oppression and humiliation of a people. That the young people, born and raised in a prison, seeing their families slaughtered again and again, are siding with those who oppose the inhuman conqueror with arms: and that, unfortunately, is Hamas, even though it is part of the problem and at the same time has the role of oppressor for the Palestinian people themselves.” I skip the points where all the positions of imperialist social democracy of counter-revolutionary pseudo-insurrectionalism, which I analyzed at the beginning, are reproduced. We go forward from the fact that, in the last century, political Islam was promoted by the imperialists to inhibit and reverse the revolution in Asia. The aphoristic ideological lumping together all Islamic movements, belongs precisely to the methods of this imperialist strategy, it reproduces the projection of religion as a dominant field, it vindicates Christian racism, since it recognizes the internationalization of a problem of the South only insofar as it speaks in the language of the North and, above all it veils, behind the conspiratorial mysticism, the class and political dynamics that lead an Islamic organization to the leadership of a resistance movement, the left to decline and anarchism to irrelevance, wherever this has happened. Authoritarian Euro-socialism gets away with an “unfortunately”. Without exaggeration I can say that this attitude does more damage to internationalist solidarity than the practice of provocation through funding (such as the scenarios about the funding of Hamas).
The revolutionary answer to political Islam is not atheistic fundamentalism, which can only dictatorially and colonially become a political identity. The answer has been given practically and effectively on the ground by the Kurdish Freedom Movement: democratization of Islam, in the way of social resistance, not in the way of imperialist assimilation and subjugation. Idealist abstractions and totalitarian aphorisms offer precisely the easy escape from the task of the struggle to transform contradictions. In this particular conflict, the clearest answer to the ideological construction of the ‘religious war’ comes from the joined mass demonstrations of rabbis, priests and mullahs against the zionist military rule.
The fundamentalist koinonismos of the above-mentioned group (that uses agents’ game rhetoric) had led it to nationalism a few years ago (the Macedonian issue). Now it mocks “the general prompt for victory to the weapons of Palestine”. It indirectly advocates refusing to support the resistance and accepting colonial peace, so that a new state is not imposed on the Palestinians and does not annihilate dissidents and insurgents, as if they were secure until then. As those who joined arms with Ukrainian fascism say, Zelensky’s racist regime offered more freedom for anarchists and they expect the same from an ideal post- war renewed bourgeois democracy. Revolutionary anarchism is not positioned laterally, and so from my own position I answer that it is the axioms of koinonismos, not the prompts of revolutionary solidarity, that are general and abstract. Victory to the arms of the specific organizations that are fighting the colonialists, victory to their struggle against the colonialists. No political conflict justifies undermining the anti-colonial struggle. To leave no room for intentional confusion, I note that resistance to Palestine’s long-term ethnic cleansing is not an isomorphic phenomenon with Ukrainian-NATO nationalism, nor with the Iranian counter-revolution, despite its nationalist anti-NATO interests. The differences between these struggles are predominantly class-based on a global and local scale, and moreover political.
Biopolitical ethics, based on its self-valorization, extends its polemic claims to a general and absolute distinction between the supposed revolutionary discipline towards it and the subjects who oppose it and are thus placed in the category of the authoritarians. The elitist project of denouncing real resistance begins with the rape of history and the proclamation of the sovereignty of colonialism over memory. In the words of the aforementioned groups: “No purge can ever and nowhere be a project of revolutionary movements”. Incidentally, the severity of the October 7 attack, across the colonialist entity, was not an attempt at purging, nor did it mean that the liberation of Palestine requires the extermination of all settlers. From the text of the aforementioned group: “The October 7 methodical massacre of hundreds of civilians, youth, children, women and elderly, carried out by the butchers sent by Hamas to carry out this religious ‘duty’ on the road to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the hostage-taking of old people, young children and women, the display of savagery even on the bodies of the murdered, is now added to the pantheon of similar acts of savagery that adorn the history of every form of power. But they will never be written in the pages that adorn the history of the struggles for social liberation and dignity, in the pages that adorn the world history of uprisings and revolutions of oppressed and exploited people.” Gentrification against “savagery”.
Should we erase from revolutionary proletarian history the Makhnovists who set up machine guns and shot at the bourgeoisie and the feudal lords at their feasts? Butchers, when they threw into the furnace of a locomotive a priest-snitch of the German colonialists? (26) The CNT fighters, who during the revolution of ’36 stormed the monasteries and spared no one? The barefoot Somalis who two and a half decades ago paraded as trophies on spikes the flesh of the American soldiers of a downed helicopter, under whose history should we register them? Popular hatred is the heart of liberational evolution, as Walter Benjamin had noted. It is the task of imperialist social democracy to extinguish proletarian hatred, replacing it with appeals for mercy to the theocracy of capitalist war. Thus koinonismos concludes its positions with abstract pacifism. E.g., “Stop the Israeli attack on Gaza now. Stop now the occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza.” Which forces will stop them and how? Not to ask how the return of the Palestinians to the main occupied territories will take place.
The moderate view of the aforementioned comrade with colonial citizenship, restores historical and contemporaneous truth, opening up as topic of discussion the humanitarian law of war. “The images coming from southern Israel the day of the attack 7th of October were of course very hard to process emotionally.Nothing to celebrate about the massacre of many civilians, and by all definitions and standards this is a war crime. Things should be seen in of context though. Also, there are zero examples in history of a pure, ‘clean’ resistance movement and liberation that didn’t kill innocent people. Be it resistance to apartheid in South Africa, the British colonization of India, the fight against slavery in America and resistance to nazi occupation throughout Europe- in all of those cases innocent people died. This is not to justify, but the demand of purism from the Palestinian liberation movement alone is unrealistic. The bigger responsibility is on the occupier.”
The Geneva Convention binds the parties to abide by it regardless of its violation by enemy forces. In any case, no state abides by it. Besides, the inter-state law of war does not apply to internal war, since the internal enemy is not presented as militarily distinct and with represented responsibilities. Indeed, only revolutionary armed forces are self-disciplined in the law of war. The Kurdish Freedom Movement is an example of such an attitude.Does the imperialist humanitarian law of war consist a revolutionary self-worth? For biopolitical ethics, yes. But biopolitical ethics is grounded on the regime of class power inequality, biopolitical terrorism and biopolitical racism, and it is articulated so as to perpetuate these. The biopolitical ethics of war revolves around the ‘civilian’, but he is defined by the archetype of imperialist citizenship. The guerrilla and his community first and foremost, the unruly government and its supporters, the pariah state and its citizens, are excluded from bourgeois law. In this case this applies to all the people of Palestine before and after October 7. The citizen who joins arms with, who votes for and finances the class war of the tyrant is the definition of ‘civilian’, with the archetype of the innocence of the capitalist, the politician, the technocrat, the media baron, the soldier and the cop, who become targets of the revolutionary struggle. The identification of the ‘civilian’ with the ‘unarmed’, masks with the feudal aristocratic code of values, the protection of the capitalist-state division of responsibilities, from its war machine. Imperialist humanist law transforms the genocidal settlers into ‘the people’ and the people into an exemption from bourgeois civilization. That is why the UN officials do not say, “what Israel is doing is genocide,” but they say, “what is being done may amount to genocide.” The boundary between the recognizably real and the typical speculation is deeply classist and savagely lethal.
Thus, subservient koinonismos and pacifism put forward the historical legitimacy of the unstoppable century long genocide as “living in harmony and respecting diversity”. Diversity indeed, where one slaughters and steals the land of the other and the other is slaughtered and persecuted in exile. Some good comrades proposed the mutual rapprochement of the arab and jewish populations on an internationalist and proletarian basis, through the realization that they have nothing to divide and that they can coexist without religious differences, as they did for centuries in the region before the creation of the state of Israel. Both the myth and the utopia are equally true and necessary, but are interspersed with the real history of class struggle. The state of Israel also comes in the way. A history and a present that fatally divides Palestinians and settlers. The former have nothing but chains and death. The others have everything, have seized it with savagery and maintain this relationship with even greater savagery. “Israelis have the right to call the area home”, say some anarchists. “Because whatever happened in the past, all these people live there now.” Except it didn’t happen 3,000 years ago. The present class-political regime of the Palestinian land is the capitalization of the ethnic cleansing (not a vague ‘whatever’) that began in the recent past, a few generations ago, and continues unabated. The koinonists suck up to the colonialists, but the colonialists are not impressed by pacifist cajoling.
On the contrary, a single experience proved capable of instilling humanistic feelings, moderation, a sense of equality in a small part of the colonial nation: the hostage-taking of loved ones. The murderousness of the October 7 attack produced a consciousness of the insurmountable vulnerability of the dominant clan, and mass hostage-taking produced the prospect of a peace with a little more freedom for the class oppressed, which would not have been conceivable without the universal equation to death. “All hostages, for all of their prisoners”, chant the protesting settlers who are turning against their war-mongering government. The fact that these deeply and broadly nationalistic subjects still form the only opposition within the militaristic nation today, demonstrates something important. Dialectically, the barbarians’ method creates social progress, because it brings to light the means and subsequently the motives of capitalist civilization.
The vile tyranny says, “what’s done is done”. Restorative justice for the massacred and displaced Palestinian people requires the uprooting of the settlers. Projecting the ideal consent of the settlers to a peaceful settlement as a precondition, reflects the hypocrisy of imperialist social democracy and glosses over class ethnic cleansing. Revolutionary law directly restores cosmic harmony by the edge of the knife.
“Whatever is necessary for the return”(27)These days my soul dwells in the basements and rubble with the dying fighters who wait and stoically greet the settler army. Revenge! Revenge for all the history of tyranny. Revenge for the bloody hypocrisy of the imperialists and colonialists. Revenge for the children of Palestine.
Unconditionally with Spartacus, for the fall of the Empire.“So it is fortunate that insurrection and revolution still remain absurd, because this is precisely what still remains their only potential to win”(28)
Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis
November-December 2023
Domokos Prison(1) In 1990, the term “κοινωνισμός” [koinonismos] was introduced in the critical thinking of greek speaking anarchists, which is literally translated into english as “socialism”. The word socialism has been conveyed into the greek language without etymological transformations (in greek: “σοσιαλισμός”). The term koinonismos means something different from socialism, so if we were to translate it as socialism based on the language roots, it would result in serious confusion. Writer and translator of this text jointly decided to use the direct transliteration from the greek to english, the word koinonismos, adding this linguistic and conceptual note. In short, the meaning of the term koinonismos, as was first expressed, was the political invocation of an ideologically artificial social whole, which, in communication practice, entails the reproduction of those ideological forms that are produced and infused by the state and capital.
(2) International statement of the clubs (10/10/23) – https://fcstpauliathensclub.wordpress.com/2023/1/10/%cf%83%cf%87%ce %b5%cf%84%ce%b9%ce%ba%ce%ac-%ce%bc%ce%b5-%cf%84%ce%b7%c%bd-%ce%b4%ce%ae%ce%bb%cf%89%cf %83%ce%b7-%cf%84%ce%bf%cf%85-%cf%83%cf%85%ce%bb%ce%bb%cf%8c%ce%b3%ce%bf%cf%85-%cf%84%ce%b7%cf%82-s/, Statement of the Turkish club (28/10/23) – https://twitter.com/StPauli_TR
(3) The issue of Palestine is the issue of statism’s bankruptcy! – https://asranarshism.com/1402/07/18/palestine-issue-statism-failure-en/
(4) tn: The term conspiratorial is the nearest translation of the term that the writer in this text uses to refer not to conspiracy theories, but to an understanding of politics as an interplay between agents or proxies.
(5) On “Pro-Palestine” hypocricy – https://thepublicsource.org/palestine-solidarity
(6) Voices from the Front Line Against the Occupation: Interview with Palestinian Anarchists –
Voices from the Front Line Against the Occupation: Interview with Palestinian Anarchists
(7) We Can’t Afford to Remain Silent – Interview with an Israeli Anarchist – https://itsgoingdown.org/two-new-zines-interviews-with-israeli-and-palestinian-anarchists/
(8) A Practical Appraisal of Palestinian Violence – https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2023/10/21/a-practical-appraisal-of-palestinian-violence/
(9) Israel Can’t Imprison Two Million Gazans Without Paying a Cruel Price – https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/israelis-made-to-suffer-the-cruel-price-for-oppression-of-palestinians-in-gaza
(10) A recent interview with three FAUDA members confirms the commitment to the unity of the resistance and adds the information that FAUDA is involved in the guerrilla struggle. One comrade states that their anarchist movement has opened up a path of popular self-sacrifice. Regarding Hamas, it deconstructs NATO propaganda and describes the political dialogue and cooperation of anarchists with other organizations in the resistance. Importantly, they points out that all resistance organizations have an inclusive political position for all religious communities. The case for Islamic dictatorship is imperialist black propaganda. Just as the addition of a new, Palestinian state is a case of imperialist designs. Anti-authoritarian criticism of the claim of a two-state status and the separation of religious communities throws the discussion off course. Maoists (PFLP), confederationists (DFLP) and pacifist democrats (such as Mussa’ab Bashir, used as a reference by certain ideological opponents of the Palestinian resistance), Islamists (Hamas and Jihad) and anarchists (FAUDA) agree as a program on a single inclusive polity. Such were the declarations of the Israeli constitution as well. Only the imperialists and the would-be exploiters of the Palestinian resistance want two states. But the crucial question is whether we are defending the colonial state as the agent of potential coexistence, against historical and current revolutionary realities, or are we defending the right of the oppressed to reorganize social culture on their own terms, correcting the accumulated injustices? For anarchism the answer is self-evident. Whether the Palestinian revolutionary polity will claim recognition from the inter-state matrix and take the title of state is nobody’s business outside the Palestinian resistance, just as it is nobody’s business outside the Kurdish resistance, the claim of official recognition for the confederation of N-E Syria as a constituent state entity of the unified Syrian territory. (The interview: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/abolishtheusa-fauda-in-depth-interviews-with-3-members-of-fauda )
(11) The revolutionary South responds to the a-historical critique that describes anarchism as a eurocentric project. Only the anchorage to the post-Bakunin deconstructivism, that eroded the anarchist movement after the dissolution of the First International, can see in anti-imperialism conceptual and practical boundaries to anarchism. For example, “Anarchists in the Sahel” (18/9/23), (https://www.alerta.gr/archives/33233 ). Marxism had to go beyond the imperialist philosophy of its writings, with Lenin. Revolutionary anarchism never had that problem. From its birth it ventured all over the Earth.
(12) https://www.alerta.gr/archives/33399
(13) https://www.efsyn.gr/kosmos/boreia-ameriki/408433_i-starbucks-poinikopoiei-tin-allileggyi-stin-palaistini
(14) One group writes, “Clearly, we do not intend to dictate to the oppressed and exploited how they should fight […]”. Just before they wrote, “The only self-defense that we recognize -ethically and politically- is the collective social self-defense and social counter violence that the exploited and the oppressed co-opt to emancipate themselves and to shake off the bonds of authority over them”. What does this group mean behind the unclear invocation of collectivity and cooption? And who cares whether these here pharisees of anarchism recognize the Palestinian resistance as self-defense or not? To put the question in a different context: a person who has suffered patriarchal violence, do they need the opinion of these conclaves so as to decide whether to resort to the police, to the state, or if they will cut off the balls of the rapist or whatever else? This same group, ten years ago, in order not to spoil the self interest of some of its members, had covered up an attack against a squat, legitimized by the fact that they refused to recognize the squat as a community, refused to recognize the community’s egalitarian institutions and practices, the political dynamic proletarian social development taking place there, its autonomy in social self- direction and its self-defense. This is what “we do not recognize” means in the world of violence and terrorism: let Netanyahu do his dirty work. However, the Palestinian resistance is winning and the aforementioned squat, which offers refuge to the persecuted and has not put any terms on the Palestinian resistance, is still standing.
(15) https://asranarshism.com/1402/07/18/palestine-issue-statism-failure-en/
(16) Artistic intervention for Palestine, ΚΕΔ – https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1627014/ & https://avantgarde2009.wordpress.com/2023/10/12/palaistinh-dikh-mas-ypothesh/ Two months after writing this text I received a text from Solidarity with migrants entitled “The avant-garde of retrogression: notes on the pro-russian and pro-china political tendencies in the greek society” (https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1628404/). The political line of anti-american campism and its political conclusions that this text describes, make up a stance of active counter-revolution on the field. Political directions and practices that are anti-labour, anti-feminist, pro-imperialist and pro- fascist, anti-internationalist and totalitarian. The text correctly argues that the two tendencies inside the pro-Palestine movement are clashing and they will continue to do so. I will further note that this clash is not related only to the movement for Palestine. The fields of struggle are intersecting as is shown in the text. Social-fascism is lurking everywhere and is manifesting itself respectively to political priorities. The contradictions of the social-fascist lines are interesting. Eg, political subjects who converge in their defense of the Assad regime and in their anti kurdish stance, and who have allied in the past as a friendly opposition to SYRIZA in the re-negotiation of the greek state’s position in the imperialist pyramid, have taken antagonistic positions in the conflict over (or against) the capitalist-statist public health control. The former, who openly defend the anti-NATO imperialist front, openly supported the resistance to the unhealthy health-control repression and the dictatorial bio-technocratic subjugation. The latter, who are intensively trying to take the lead of the movement with reformist positions, joined arms with the vanguard of capitalist and statist progress. Despite this, the leftist group that the aforementioned text is denouncing has not “infiltrated” the movement; it comprises one of its constitutive subjects. Particularly in reference to the Palestinian struggle, where the subjects of the struggle are collaborating with state agents in their periphery, it is illogical to demand that the struggle be cleansed of statist ideological tendencies within the solidarity movement. In general, I have put down at length my arguments against the automated logic of exclusions.
(17) Middle East: Economy and Geo-strategy, https://trohia.espivblogs.net/2024/01/03/mesanatoliko-oikonomia-kai-geostratigiki/
(18) https://anfenglishmobile.com/features/kck-calls-on-muslim-peoples-to-take-a-stance-against-turkish-bombing-of-mosque-in-maxmur-69767
(19) A simple practical example: Larissa, solidarity gathering for the Palestinian and the Kurdish peoples, from Dugru Squat- https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1627002/
(20) https://anfenglishmobile.com/news/kahilogullari-peace-in-the-middle-east-will-only-be-possible-if-people-struggle-together-69791
(21) https://anfenglishmobile.com/kurdistan/hpg-guerrilla-ereb-calls-on-arab-young-people-to-support-the-struggle-69811
(22) https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2023/10/21/a-practical-appraisal-of-palestinian-violence/
(23) as above
(24) The massacres of Hamas, the brutality of the Israeli state and the imminent global conflict, Syspeirosi Anarxikon-
https://anarchypress.wordpress.com/2023/10/14/%ce%bf%ce%b9-%cf%83%cf%86%ce%b1%ce%b3%ce%b5%cf%83-%cf%84%ce%b7%cf%83-%cf%87%ce%b1%ce%bc%ce%b1%cf%83-%ce%bf%c%b9-%ce%b8%ce%b7%cf%81%ce%b9%cf%89%ce%b4%ce%b9%ce%b5%cf%83-%cf%84%ce%bf%cf%85-%ce%b9%cf%83/(25) Gaza 2023 — High-Tech War Revisited – https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2023/11/19/gaza-2023-high-tech-war-revisited/
(26) The roads of Nestor Makhno, B. Bielas & A. Bielas, Babylonia Press, October 2007 –
(27) https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2023/10/21/a-practical-appraisal-of-palestinian-violence/
(28) Nikos Nikanoras, The right to self-defense – https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1627291/
#anarchism #counterRevolution #DimitrisChatzivasiliadis #greece #palestine #platformism
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Issue 15: Poetry
Photo: Weightless Throne by Shinara Weathersby, Issue 15.
Here’s our poetry digest from Issue 15:
I fell down the subway station stairs and shattered
my ankle, and all I could do was say sorry.
My leg swelled green like a new balloon
and the shock set me on fire, vision swimming,
a shrinking vignette, and I kept saying, “I’m sorry,”
“Thank you,” and “What do you need me to do?”
with artificial bright eyes, like tumbling
down concrete wasn’t a thing I did, like I wasn’t expanding
with new bruises, like they needed me.
“What can I do?” … READ MORE >Richard A. Decker
On Becoming a Better ManI tend to write rain checks that bounce but I decide to put myself out there by brushing shoulders and making the best of a get-together.
I bring cheddar sour cream chips and a case of Coke ‘cause I want to somehow break the bad habits from my upbringing and somehow show them that I know how to be polite even though the host said she should be good on snacks.
I want to show them that I can take care of myself — that I’m my own man. … READ MORE >
Regina McMorris
PedestrianTonight the silver moon reveals its lower half
through translucent clouds, the shape
like a watermelon slice. As the clouds shift,
I forget the weight of my dirty laundry as I dragmy suitcase down Colton Avenue, and I don’t
miss having a ride to the coin-op.
The hidden half of the moon, larger
than the half I can see. … READ MORE >Kyler Littlejohn
Hard FaithWe were born to red earth
and hand-me-down prayers,
to mothers who knelt in the fields
and called that kneeling faith.Our fathers were men of silence,
their ghosts planted deep,
roots tangled in grief and duty,
their shadows stretching farther
than the cotton rows. … READ MORE >Elle Rosamilia
Recurring DreamsI.
I hear my father’s footsteps coming closer.
I can’t drive, but I’m still trapped behind the wheel.
The people I love keep disappearing through empty doorways.
There is a face I used to trust and a stranger who plans to do me harm.
II.
The space between bedtime and morning becomes a tunnel
through my brain. As I sleep, I wander corridors in search of symbols that will show
me all the ways I haven’t healed, dig through chests in childhood bedrooms
whose furniture shifts every time I blink my eyes. … READ MORE >Sarah Goldston
Melee DiamondAs small as a poppyseed
Almost an appleseed
These comparisons seem
So unfittingAs if disregarded muffin crumbs
Or apple pits
Could capture the significance
Of a child … READ MORE >Ellen Jane Powers
On being the first woman in this worldThe soles of my feet are dull gray,
years of dirt I couldn’t avoid, and
they no longer come clean. I taught
myself to step aside, to not answer questions
from silver-eyed strangers who test me —
are you lost? No. I turn toward unexpected
paths. I look for a river bed, the one that’s lined
with late spring lilacs, nectar as sweet
as what I tasted long ago. … READ MORE >David Anson Lee
The Weight of GodThe sky does not split.
No curtain lifts.
Afternoon keeps its appointments:
dogs barking,
bread cooling on windowsills,
a child practicing scales
in the next room
while God bleeds outside the city.They finish efficiently.
Iron through flesh,
flesh through bone:
a skill perfected by repetition. … READ MORE >Sarah Tate
Eden Writing Her Own ObituaryTHE GARDEN OF EDEN — brutally murdered by words twisted like smoke and buried to rot under sloughs of snakeskins. Do you smell my cries? I wanted to leave something of account: a bard’s song, maybe, some sad rhymes for the poets, a couple words thrown onto a Wikipedia page. My story like an arc for the unborn, you know. Instead, you consider my paradise lost like you would chew on a vague memory. … READ MORE >
David Athey
Slithering, TwitchingIn the tropical dead of day,
a grey squirrel with twitching tail
makes his rounds with gifts
for the community garden.
The squirrel keeps to the shadow side
and fills the soil with the usual thistle
seeds emptied from a lady’s bird feeder.
It’s rather funny … READ MORE >Kimberly Beck
Pocket PrayerI carry it around with me
in a message on my phone, typed
and re-typed;
on the torn page of a leather journal, folded
in my pocket like a sleeping
crane, or a heron, or
a swan. Now and then it stretches
and lifts its wings, feathers brushing
over the tips of my fingers as I reach
for the ink, for the soft, snow-bright page. … READ MORE >Jonathan Darren Garcia
Amos, when you are in the DesertI have stared into headlights,
And felt the car move through me —
like a phantom
I have fallen on the sharp branches of an oak tree —
swallowed splinters like food
I have felt the night kiss me goodbye —
woke with red eyes,
carrying the sky’s golden, amber flamesPrayers, Prayers, Prayers … READ MORE >
Scott Schuleit
A Precious Soulstanding at a busy corner in neon-glittered night,
red dress exposing skin, perfume wafting pleasure
to passerby. Half-lidded eyes tracing her shape,
some indifferent, a few soft, expressing pity, compassion.
Need some money for drugs and her babies, no other reason.
Dangers, fights for best places to work, violent customers.
No exits out of this room, she figured. Difficult to see
through thickening smoke, rising heat, greed of flame.
She saw no way out of the city. … READ MORE >Patrick T. Reardon
Harsh anglesChill valley. Hallelujah waters.
Hear nobody. Hear nobody.Outshout the light of God.
Outrun the word.
Outdistance.Jordan troubles. Burden dreams.
Cross the kingdom into the Canaanite land.
Take by force.Hear the unsaid. … READ MORE >
Lucy Swan
the -ologies of memoryphilosophers posit that the past only
exists in the mind; settled in the spongy,
gray-matter of your cerebrum, in fluid
through the narrow tubules between synapses,
budding in the engram cells of your neuronal
ensembles. but i see it as an ugly discoloration
clinging to the epidermis, a pink ghost of a
scab, action’s irreversible consequence. … READ MORE >Cody Adams
Thunder Put AsunderWhen my ex-wife refused to halt
the affair
I reminded her of the time our preacher screeched
a sermon about God’s answer to Job,
and how, with climactic timing that felt cinematic,
lightning struck in the city street just outside
the stained glass, animating illustrations of
Judgment Day for one terrifying instant. … READ MORE >Alexandria Marianne Leon
The jar still thereshifting the weight —
forearms tight,handle slick from sun
water pulling low.small fingers tug
at my pant leg.the thought —
drop it. … READ MORE >Alexis Leigh Ragan
HeartpineThere is no handle here,
on the face of a door overgrown
with the after-rot of harvest
loss, where persimmons split
along the worn frame, ombré
abandon embellishing the hingethat was sealed shut with such
severity, one might believe
the owner of the home lives
bent on keeping secrets
silent — in a forest that thinks
it’s forgotten, not knowing
its own carver. … READ MORE >Adam Burrell
Let It Be SoDo you come to me? Do you come to this trash heap playground?
You tread on the mud, kick past the dirty magazines and sit,
silent and unassuming, on that swing. I’m still hiding inside
this rusted, metal climbing dome next to the merry-go-round.
You shouldn’t be here, plain and simple. It’s a place for snotty kids
and maybe drug dealers after dark. It’s a place for teenage makeout sessions,
for raccoons and garbage cans and broken bottles and old shoes — and me. … READ MORE >Margaret Adams Birth
A Rush of Angels’ WingsFlashes from the chrome on cars
passing by on the street outside —easy enough to confuse
with a rush of angels’ wingsreleasing a little shaft of light
from the heavenly realm —remind me that where the wheels
meet the asphalt, there’s wherethe world, and this life, is grounded … READ MORE >
Meg Freer
Still Here, WaitingFifty years ago, she yelled at the old vagrant
in London, Put her down! when he hoisted up
my sister in the Finchley Road pharmacy.
Now she yells at God, Stop picking me up!
after every infection, every hospital stay.
She doesn’t want to remain on this earth.She phones and says, I’m still here.
God doesn’t listen to me.
I have to keep living this awful life. … READ MORE >Jo Taylor
Entrances and ExitsTwo weeks into December we are
all coming and going in my brother’s
house, Hospice nurses attending
to his needs, some family whispering
of days to come, others partaking
of a meal prepared by community and
church friends. Outside, a lone red bird
thuds against the plate-glass window,
and the day wears on like a controlled burn. … READ MORE >READ ISSUE 15:
#christian #digest #God #HolySpirit #issue #jesus #new #poem #poems #poet #poetry #poets #writers #writing
Online | Download | Buy Print Copy -
Issue 15: Poetry
Photo: Weightless Throne by Shinara Weathersby, Issue 15.
Here’s our poetry digest from Issue 15:
I fell down the subway station stairs and shattered
my ankle, and all I could do was say sorry.
My leg swelled green like a new balloon
and the shock set me on fire, vision swimming,
a shrinking vignette, and I kept saying, “I’m sorry,”
“Thank you,” and “What do you need me to do?”
with artificial bright eyes, like tumbling
down concrete wasn’t a thing I did, like I wasn’t expanding
with new bruises, like they needed me.
“What can I do?” … READ MORE >Richard A. Decker
On Becoming a Better ManI tend to write rain checks that bounce but I decide to put myself out there by brushing shoulders and making the best of a get-together.
I bring cheddar sour cream chips and a case of Coke ‘cause I want to somehow break the bad habits from my upbringing and somehow show them that I know how to be polite even though the host said she should be good on snacks.
I want to show them that I can take care of myself — that I’m my own man. … READ MORE >
Regina McMorris
PedestrianTonight the silver moon reveals its lower half
through translucent clouds, the shape
like a watermelon slice. As the clouds shift,
I forget the weight of my dirty laundry as I dragmy suitcase down Colton Avenue, and I don’t
miss having a ride to the coin-op.
The hidden half of the moon, larger
than the half I can see. … READ MORE >Kyler Littlejohn
Hard FaithWe were born to red earth
and hand-me-down prayers,
to mothers who knelt in the fields
and called that kneeling faith.Our fathers were men of silence,
their ghosts planted deep,
roots tangled in grief and duty,
their shadows stretching farther
than the cotton rows. … READ MORE >Elle Rosamilia
Recurring DreamsI.
I hear my father’s footsteps coming closer.
I can’t drive, but I’m still trapped behind the wheel.
The people I love keep disappearing through empty doorways.
There is a face I used to trust and a stranger who plans to do me harm.
II.
The space between bedtime and morning becomes a tunnel
through my brain. As I sleep, I wander corridors in search of symbols that will show
me all the ways I haven’t healed, dig through chests in childhood bedrooms
whose furniture shifts every time I blink my eyes. … READ MORE >Sarah Goldston
Melee DiamondAs small as a poppyseed
Almost an appleseed
These comparisons seem
So unfittingAs if disregarded muffin crumbs
Or apple pits
Could capture the significance
Of a child … READ MORE >Ellen Jane Powers
On being the first woman in this worldThe soles of my feet are dull gray,
years of dirt I couldn’t avoid, and
they no longer come clean. I taught
myself to step aside, to not answer questions
from silver-eyed strangers who test me —
are you lost? No. I turn toward unexpected
paths. I look for a river bed, the one that’s lined
with late spring lilacs, nectar as sweet
as what I tasted long ago. … READ MORE >David Anson Lee
The Weight of GodThe sky does not split.
No curtain lifts.
Afternoon keeps its appointments:
dogs barking,
bread cooling on windowsills,
a child practicing scales
in the next room
while God bleeds outside the city.They finish efficiently.
Iron through flesh,
flesh through bone:
a skill perfected by repetition. … READ MORE >Sarah Tate
Eden Writing Her Own ObituaryTHE GARDEN OF EDEN — brutally murdered by words twisted like smoke and buried to rot under sloughs of snakeskins. Do you smell my cries? I wanted to leave something of account: a bard’s song, maybe, some sad rhymes for the poets, a couple words thrown onto a Wikipedia page. My story like an arc for the unborn, you know. Instead, you consider my paradise lost like you would chew on a vague memory. … READ MORE >
David Athey
Slithering, TwitchingIn the tropical dead of day,
a grey squirrel with twitching tail
makes his rounds with gifts
for the community garden.
The squirrel keeps to the shadow side
and fills the soil with the usual thistle
seeds emptied from a lady’s bird feeder.
It’s rather funny … READ MORE >Kimberly Beck
Pocket PrayerI carry it around with me
in a message on my phone, typed
and re-typed;
on the torn page of a leather journal, folded
in my pocket like a sleeping
crane, or a heron, or
a swan. Now and then it stretches
and lifts its wings, feathers brushing
over the tips of my fingers as I reach
for the ink, for the soft, snow-bright page. … READ MORE >Jonathan Darren Garcia
Amos, when you are in the DesertI have stared into headlights,
And felt the car move through me —
like a phantom
I have fallen on the sharp branches of an oak tree —
swallowed splinters like food
I have felt the night kiss me goodbye —
woke with red eyes,
carrying the sky’s golden, amber flamesPrayers, Prayers, Prayers … READ MORE >
Scott Schuleit
A Precious Soulstanding at a busy corner in neon-glittered night,
red dress exposing skin, perfume wafting pleasure
to passerby. Half-lidded eyes tracing her shape,
some indifferent, a few soft, expressing pity, compassion.
Need some money for drugs and her babies, no other reason.
Dangers, fights for best places to work, violent customers.
No exits out of this room, she figured. Difficult to see
through thickening smoke, rising heat, greed of flame.
She saw no way out of the city. … READ MORE >Patrick T. Reardon
Harsh anglesChill valley. Hallelujah waters.
Hear nobody. Hear nobody.Outshout the light of God.
Outrun the word.
Outdistance.Jordan troubles. Burden dreams.
Cross the kingdom into the Canaanite land.
Take by force.Hear the unsaid. … READ MORE >
Lucy Swan
the -ologies of memoryphilosophers posit that the past only
exists in the mind; settled in the spongy,
gray-matter of your cerebrum, in fluid
through the narrow tubules between synapses,
budding in the engram cells of your neuronal
ensembles. but i see it as an ugly discoloration
clinging to the epidermis, a pink ghost of a
scab, action’s irreversible consequence. … READ MORE >Cody Adams
Thunder Put AsunderWhen my ex-wife refused to halt
the affair
I reminded her of the time our preacher screeched
a sermon about God’s answer to Job,
and how, with climactic timing that felt cinematic,
lightning struck in the city street just outside
the stained glass, animating illustrations of
Judgment Day for one terrifying instant. … READ MORE >Alexandria Marianne Leon
The jar still thereshifting the weight —
forearms tight,handle slick from sun
water pulling low.small fingers tug
at my pant leg.the thought —
drop it. … READ MORE >Alexis Leigh Ragan
HeartpineThere is no handle here,
on the face of a door overgrown
with the after-rot of harvest
loss, where persimmons split
along the worn frame, ombré
abandon embellishing the hingethat was sealed shut with such
severity, one might believe
the owner of the home lives
bent on keeping secrets
silent — in a forest that thinks
it’s forgotten, not knowing
its own carver. … READ MORE >Adam Burrell
Let It Be SoDo you come to me? Do you come to this trash heap playground?
You tread on the mud, kick past the dirty magazines and sit,
silent and unassuming, on that swing. I’m still hiding inside
this rusted, metal climbing dome next to the merry-go-round.
You shouldn’t be here, plain and simple. It’s a place for snotty kids
and maybe drug dealers after dark. It’s a place for teenage makeout sessions,
for raccoons and garbage cans and broken bottles and old shoes — and me. … READ MORE >Margaret Adams Birth
A Rush of Angels’ WingsFlashes from the chrome on cars
passing by on the street outside —easy enough to confuse
with a rush of angels’ wingsreleasing a little shaft of light
from the heavenly realm —remind me that where the wheels
meet the asphalt, there’s wherethe world, and this life, is grounded … READ MORE >
Meg Freer
Still Here, WaitingFifty years ago, she yelled at the old vagrant
in London, Put her down! when he hoisted up
my sister in the Finchley Road pharmacy.
Now she yells at God, Stop picking me up!
after every infection, every hospital stay.
She doesn’t want to remain on this earth.She phones and says, I’m still here.
God doesn’t listen to me.
I have to keep living this awful life. … READ MORE >Jo Taylor
Entrances and ExitsTwo weeks into December we are
all coming and going in my brother’s
house, Hospice nurses attending
to his needs, some family whispering
of days to come, others partaking
of a meal prepared by community and
church friends. Outside, a lone red bird
thuds against the plate-glass window,
and the day wears on like a controlled burn. … READ MORE >READ ISSUE 15:
#christian #digest #God #HolySpirit #issue #jesus #new #poem #poems #poet #poetry #poets #writers #writing
Online | Download | Buy Print Copy -
Issue 15: Poetry
Photo: Weightless Throne by Shinara Weathersby, Issue 15.
Here’s our poetry digest from Issue 15:
I fell down the subway station stairs and shattered
my ankle, and all I could do was say sorry.
My leg swelled green like a new balloon
and the shock set me on fire, vision swimming,
a shrinking vignette, and I kept saying, “I’m sorry,”
“Thank you,” and “What do you need me to do?”
with artificial bright eyes, like tumbling
down concrete wasn’t a thing I did, like I wasn’t expanding
with new bruises, like they needed me.
“What can I do?” … READ MORE >Richard A. Decker
On Becoming a Better ManI tend to write rain checks that bounce but I decide to put myself out there by brushing shoulders and making the best of a get-together.
I bring cheddar sour cream chips and a case of Coke ‘cause I want to somehow break the bad habits from my upbringing and somehow show them that I know how to be polite even though the host said she should be good on snacks.
I want to show them that I can take care of myself — that I’m my own man. … READ MORE >
Regina McMorris
PedestrianTonight the silver moon reveals its lower half
through translucent clouds, the shape
like a watermelon slice. As the clouds shift,
I forget the weight of my dirty laundry as I dragmy suitcase down Colton Avenue, and I don’t
miss having a ride to the coin-op.
The hidden half of the moon, larger
than the half I can see. … READ MORE >Kyler Littlejohn
Hard FaithWe were born to red earth
and hand-me-down prayers,
to mothers who knelt in the fields
and called that kneeling faith.Our fathers were men of silence,
their ghosts planted deep,
roots tangled in grief and duty,
their shadows stretching farther
than the cotton rows. … READ MORE >Elle Rosamilia
Recurring DreamsI.
I hear my father’s footsteps coming closer.
I can’t drive, but I’m still trapped behind the wheel.
The people I love keep disappearing through empty doorways.
There is a face I used to trust and a stranger who plans to do me harm.
II.
The space between bedtime and morning becomes a tunnel
through my brain. As I sleep, I wander corridors in search of symbols that will show
me all the ways I haven’t healed, dig through chests in childhood bedrooms
whose furniture shifts every time I blink my eyes. … READ MORE >Sarah Goldston
Melee DiamondAs small as a poppyseed
Almost an appleseed
These comparisons seem
So unfittingAs if disregarded muffin crumbs
Or apple pits
Could capture the significance
Of a child … READ MORE >Ellen Jane Powers
On being the first woman in this worldThe soles of my feet are dull gray,
years of dirt I couldn’t avoid, and
they no longer come clean. I taught
myself to step aside, to not answer questions
from silver-eyed strangers who test me —
are you lost? No. I turn toward unexpected
paths. I look for a river bed, the one that’s lined
with late spring lilacs, nectar as sweet
as what I tasted long ago. … READ MORE >David Anson Lee
The Weight of GodThe sky does not split.
No curtain lifts.
Afternoon keeps its appointments:
dogs barking,
bread cooling on windowsills,
a child practicing scales
in the next room
while God bleeds outside the city.They finish efficiently.
Iron through flesh,
flesh through bone:
a skill perfected by repetition. … READ MORE >Sarah Tate
Eden Writing Her Own ObituaryTHE GARDEN OF EDEN — brutally murdered by words twisted like smoke and buried to rot under sloughs of snakeskins. Do you smell my cries? I wanted to leave something of account: a bard’s song, maybe, some sad rhymes for the poets, a couple words thrown onto a Wikipedia page. My story like an arc for the unborn, you know. Instead, you consider my paradise lost like you would chew on a vague memory. … READ MORE >
David Athey
Slithering, TwitchingIn the tropical dead of day,
a grey squirrel with twitching tail
makes his rounds with gifts
for the community garden.
The squirrel keeps to the shadow side
and fills the soil with the usual thistle
seeds emptied from a lady’s bird feeder.
It’s rather funny … READ MORE >Kimberly Beck
Pocket PrayerI carry it around with me
in a message on my phone, typed
and re-typed;
on the torn page of a leather journal, folded
in my pocket like a sleeping
crane, or a heron, or
a swan. Now and then it stretches
and lifts its wings, feathers brushing
over the tips of my fingers as I reach
for the ink, for the soft, snow-bright page. … READ MORE >Jonathan Darren Garcia
Amos, when you are in the DesertI have stared into headlights,
And felt the car move through me —
like a phantom
I have fallen on the sharp branches of an oak tree —
swallowed splinters like food
I have felt the night kiss me goodbye —
woke with red eyes,
carrying the sky’s golden, amber flamesPrayers, Prayers, Prayers … READ MORE >
Scott Schuleit
A Precious Soulstanding at a busy corner in neon-glittered night,
red dress exposing skin, perfume wafting pleasure
to passerby. Half-lidded eyes tracing her shape,
some indifferent, a few soft, expressing pity, compassion.
Need some money for drugs and her babies, no other reason.
Dangers, fights for best places to work, violent customers.
No exits out of this room, she figured. Difficult to see
through thickening smoke, rising heat, greed of flame.
She saw no way out of the city. … READ MORE >Patrick T. Reardon
Harsh anglesChill valley. Hallelujah waters.
Hear nobody. Hear nobody.Outshout the light of God.
Outrun the word.
Outdistance.Jordan troubles. Burden dreams.
Cross the kingdom into the Canaanite land.
Take by force.Hear the unsaid. … READ MORE >
Lucy Swan
the -ologies of memoryphilosophers posit that the past only
exists in the mind; settled in the spongy,
gray-matter of your cerebrum, in fluid
through the narrow tubules between synapses,
budding in the engram cells of your neuronal
ensembles. but i see it as an ugly discoloration
clinging to the epidermis, a pink ghost of a
scab, action’s irreversible consequence. … READ MORE >Cody Adams
Thunder Put AsunderWhen my ex-wife refused to halt
the affair
I reminded her of the time our preacher screeched
a sermon about God’s answer to Job,
and how, with climactic timing that felt cinematic,
lightning struck in the city street just outside
the stained glass, animating illustrations of
Judgment Day for one terrifying instant. … READ MORE >Alexandria Marianne Leon
The jar still thereshifting the weight —
forearms tight,handle slick from sun
water pulling low.small fingers tug
at my pant leg.the thought —
drop it. … READ MORE >Alexis Leigh Ragan
HeartpineThere is no handle here,
on the face of a door overgrown
with the after-rot of harvest
loss, where persimmons split
along the worn frame, ombré
abandon embellishing the hingethat was sealed shut with such
severity, one might believe
the owner of the home lives
bent on keeping secrets
silent — in a forest that thinks
it’s forgotten, not knowing
its own carver. … READ MORE >Adam Burrell
Let It Be SoDo you come to me? Do you come to this trash heap playground?
You tread on the mud, kick past the dirty magazines and sit,
silent and unassuming, on that swing. I’m still hiding inside
this rusted, metal climbing dome next to the merry-go-round.
You shouldn’t be here, plain and simple. It’s a place for snotty kids
and maybe drug dealers after dark. It’s a place for teenage makeout sessions,
for raccoons and garbage cans and broken bottles and old shoes — and me. … READ MORE >Margaret Adams Birth
A Rush of Angels’ WingsFlashes from the chrome on cars
passing by on the street outside —easy enough to confuse
with a rush of angels’ wingsreleasing a little shaft of light
from the heavenly realm —remind me that where the wheels
meet the asphalt, there’s wherethe world, and this life, is grounded … READ MORE >
Meg Freer
Still Here, WaitingFifty years ago, she yelled at the old vagrant
in London, Put her down! when he hoisted up
my sister in the Finchley Road pharmacy.
Now she yells at God, Stop picking me up!
after every infection, every hospital stay.
She doesn’t want to remain on this earth.She phones and says, I’m still here.
God doesn’t listen to me.
I have to keep living this awful life. … READ MORE >Jo Taylor
Entrances and ExitsTwo weeks into December we are
all coming and going in my brother’s
house, Hospice nurses attending
to his needs, some family whispering
of days to come, others partaking
of a meal prepared by community and
church friends. Outside, a lone red bird
thuds against the plate-glass window,
and the day wears on like a controlled burn. … READ MORE >READ ISSUE 15:
#christian #digest #God #HolySpirit #issue #jesus #new #poem #poems #poet #poetry #poets #writers #writing
Online | Download | Buy Print Copy -
Issue 15: Poetry
Photo: Weightless Throne by Shinara Weathersby, Issue 15.
Here’s our poetry digest from Issue 15:
I fell down the subway station stairs and shattered
my ankle, and all I could do was say sorry.
My leg swelled green like a new balloon
and the shock set me on fire, vision swimming,
a shrinking vignette, and I kept saying, “I’m sorry,”
“Thank you,” and “What do you need me to do?”
with artificial bright eyes, like tumbling
down concrete wasn’t a thing I did, like I wasn’t expanding
with new bruises, like they needed me.
“What can I do?” … READ MORE >Richard A. Decker
On Becoming a Better ManI tend to write rain checks that bounce but I decide to put myself out there by brushing shoulders and making the best of a get-together.
I bring cheddar sour cream chips and a case of Coke ‘cause I want to somehow break the bad habits from my upbringing and somehow show them that I know how to be polite even though the host said she should be good on snacks.
I want to show them that I can take care of myself — that I’m my own man. … READ MORE >
Regina McMorris
PedestrianTonight the silver moon reveals its lower half
through translucent clouds, the shape
like a watermelon slice. As the clouds shift,
I forget the weight of my dirty laundry as I dragmy suitcase down Colton Avenue, and I don’t
miss having a ride to the coin-op.
The hidden half of the moon, larger
than the half I can see. … READ MORE >Kyler Littlejohn
Hard FaithWe were born to red earth
and hand-me-down prayers,
to mothers who knelt in the fields
and called that kneeling faith.Our fathers were men of silence,
their ghosts planted deep,
roots tangled in grief and duty,
their shadows stretching farther
than the cotton rows. … READ MORE >Elle Rosamilia
Recurring DreamsI.
I hear my father’s footsteps coming closer.
I can’t drive, but I’m still trapped behind the wheel.
The people I love keep disappearing through empty doorways.
There is a face I used to trust and a stranger who plans to do me harm.
II.
The space between bedtime and morning becomes a tunnel
through my brain. As I sleep, I wander corridors in search of symbols that will show
me all the ways I haven’t healed, dig through chests in childhood bedrooms
whose furniture shifts every time I blink my eyes. … READ MORE >Sarah Goldston
Melee DiamondAs small as a poppyseed
Almost an appleseed
These comparisons seem
So unfittingAs if disregarded muffin crumbs
Or apple pits
Could capture the significance
Of a child … READ MORE >Ellen Jane Powers
On being the first woman in this worldThe soles of my feet are dull gray,
years of dirt I couldn’t avoid, and
they no longer come clean. I taught
myself to step aside, to not answer questions
from silver-eyed strangers who test me —
are you lost? No. I turn toward unexpected
paths. I look for a river bed, the one that’s lined
with late spring lilacs, nectar as sweet
as what I tasted long ago. … READ MORE >David Anson Lee
The Weight of GodThe sky does not split.
No curtain lifts.
Afternoon keeps its appointments:
dogs barking,
bread cooling on windowsills,
a child practicing scales
in the next room
while God bleeds outside the city.They finish efficiently.
Iron through flesh,
flesh through bone:
a skill perfected by repetition. … READ MORE >Sarah Tate
Eden Writing Her Own ObituaryTHE GARDEN OF EDEN — brutally murdered by words twisted like smoke and buried to rot under sloughs of snakeskins. Do you smell my cries? I wanted to leave something of account: a bard’s song, maybe, some sad rhymes for the poets, a couple words thrown onto a Wikipedia page. My story like an arc for the unborn, you know. Instead, you consider my paradise lost like you would chew on a vague memory. … READ MORE >
David Athey
Slithering, TwitchingIn the tropical dead of day,
a grey squirrel with twitching tail
makes his rounds with gifts
for the community garden.
The squirrel keeps to the shadow side
and fills the soil with the usual thistle
seeds emptied from a lady’s bird feeder.
It’s rather funny … READ MORE >Kimberly Beck
Pocket PrayerI carry it around with me
in a message on my phone, typed
and re-typed;
on the torn page of a leather journal, folded
in my pocket like a sleeping
crane, or a heron, or
a swan. Now and then it stretches
and lifts its wings, feathers brushing
over the tips of my fingers as I reach
for the ink, for the soft, snow-bright page. … READ MORE >Jonathan Darren Garcia
Amos, when you are in the DesertI have stared into headlights,
And felt the car move through me —
like a phantom
I have fallen on the sharp branches of an oak tree —
swallowed splinters like food
I have felt the night kiss me goodbye —
woke with red eyes,
carrying the sky’s golden, amber flamesPrayers, Prayers, Prayers … READ MORE >
Scott Schuleit
A Precious Soulstanding at a busy corner in neon-glittered night,
red dress exposing skin, perfume wafting pleasure
to passerby. Half-lidded eyes tracing her shape,
some indifferent, a few soft, expressing pity, compassion.
Need some money for drugs and her babies, no other reason.
Dangers, fights for best places to work, violent customers.
No exits out of this room, she figured. Difficult to see
through thickening smoke, rising heat, greed of flame.
She saw no way out of the city. … READ MORE >Patrick T. Reardon
Harsh anglesChill valley. Hallelujah waters.
Hear nobody. Hear nobody.Outshout the light of God.
Outrun the word.
Outdistance.Jordan troubles. Burden dreams.
Cross the kingdom into the Canaanite land.
Take by force.Hear the unsaid. … READ MORE >
Lucy Swan
the -ologies of memoryphilosophers posit that the past only
exists in the mind; settled in the spongy,
gray-matter of your cerebrum, in fluid
through the narrow tubules between synapses,
budding in the engram cells of your neuronal
ensembles. but i see it as an ugly discoloration
clinging to the epidermis, a pink ghost of a
scab, action’s irreversible consequence. … READ MORE >Cody Adams
Thunder Put AsunderWhen my ex-wife refused to halt
the affair
I reminded her of the time our preacher screeched
a sermon about God’s answer to Job,
and how, with climactic timing that felt cinematic,
lightning struck in the city street just outside
the stained glass, animating illustrations of
Judgment Day for one terrifying instant. … READ MORE >Alexandria Marianne Leon
The jar still thereshifting the weight —
forearms tight,handle slick from sun
water pulling low.small fingers tug
at my pant leg.the thought —
drop it. … READ MORE >Alexis Leigh Ragan
HeartpineThere is no handle here,
on the face of a door overgrown
with the after-rot of harvest
loss, where persimmons split
along the worn frame, ombré
abandon embellishing the hingethat was sealed shut with such
severity, one might believe
the owner of the home lives
bent on keeping secrets
silent — in a forest that thinks
it’s forgotten, not knowing
its own carver. … READ MORE >Adam Burrell
Let It Be SoDo you come to me? Do you come to this trash heap playground?
You tread on the mud, kick past the dirty magazines and sit,
silent and unassuming, on that swing. I’m still hiding inside
this rusted, metal climbing dome next to the merry-go-round.
You shouldn’t be here, plain and simple. It’s a place for snotty kids
and maybe drug dealers after dark. It’s a place for teenage makeout sessions,
for raccoons and garbage cans and broken bottles and old shoes — and me. … READ MORE >Margaret Adams Birth
A Rush of Angels’ WingsFlashes from the chrome on cars
passing by on the street outside —easy enough to confuse
with a rush of angels’ wingsreleasing a little shaft of light
from the heavenly realm —remind me that where the wheels
meet the asphalt, there’s wherethe world, and this life, is grounded … READ MORE >
Meg Freer
Still Here, WaitingFifty years ago, she yelled at the old vagrant
in London, Put her down! when he hoisted up
my sister in the Finchley Road pharmacy.
Now she yells at God, Stop picking me up!
after every infection, every hospital stay.
She doesn’t want to remain on this earth.She phones and says, I’m still here.
God doesn’t listen to me.
I have to keep living this awful life. … READ MORE >Jo Taylor
Entrances and ExitsTwo weeks into December we are
all coming and going in my brother’s
house, Hospice nurses attending
to his needs, some family whispering
of days to come, others partaking
of a meal prepared by community and
church friends. Outside, a lone red bird
thuds against the plate-glass window,
and the day wears on like a controlled burn. … READ MORE >READ ISSUE 15:
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