SCENE 10
“The World Beyond American Reach”

Reads Sebastian Adonaev:
It sure is cold. And the worst parts of me just want to die. Life is thankless, and I am aware that it is also very cruel to most of my human people. That all makes me want to fight, but I’m sure I’ll just make myself into a new statistic. The train rattles by on the above ground track next to the room I’m renting. It doesn’t sound like the ocean at all. It sounds like living in poverty next to plenty. I worked 80 hours this week. I still can’t manage to sleep.
“A hero or a hooligan, well that part’s never clear.” I would have them put that on my tombstone if I believed they would ever find my body or figure out how to make me die.
I lean towards Hooligan in depicting myself, lower your expectations. I will not live up to your expectations for me and my agency, me and my powers. I am an easily broken man running from capitalist modernity into dreams, poems and the world beyond American reach.

Reads Maria Silverrtova:
It was the cold night of Purim in the Hebrew year 5777. Super Futuristic. The full moon was huge and it was brick as shit, it was Friday, everyone was drunk. But that had nothing to do with their silly drunk festival called Purim. The coldness goes right though his sheets, through his comforter, the space heater doesn’t start up right away. It’s a fire trap in here with all the subdivided dry walls. But its brik, as the brothers say, no matter how many layers I put over him. That means harshly cold in the Ebony peasant vernacular. He knew that were I so inclined there would be multiple places to fete and masquerade tonight, but I was conserving my finances. Hording up my comfortable sleeps on his big Queen sized mattress made in Brooklyn that he’d lashed now three times to roof of my civic and trafficked about the borough. Moving rooms in safe houses. Working everyday towards my next operation. Nothing is given to you in the movement. You have to earn or take initiate. That can appear attractive to women, sometimes, for a bit. But he’s basically broke.
The safe house wasn’t so bad. It has high ceilings. The train is obnoxious and the neighborhood used to be a war zone. It’s still dirty. There’s still robberies every day. But the rent was a square $800, which was reasonable. Things were gentrifying here in Bed Stuy- Bushwick area. Still looked and felt like the ghetto Adonaev worked the 37 Bravo unit in. It still looked like the dark place Rahula died in. That was their first American Martyr, shot himself twice in the head. But now there were white hipsters and cafes. It was a cute place except a couple little things. Like the no drinking rule which annoyed me and the German intelligence officer slash painter greatly.
Her name was Brit Tully and we did time together in the camps a few years back. She never admitted to being such but this is what my associate Alan Medvinsky told Adon, and he knew about such things. Brit was a metal worker, glass worker and an introvert. Her square job was retail in a fancy SoHo denim outlet. We co-habituated the domicile, a medium spacious loft on the third floor of Broadway across from the J & M above ground rail line and, I can’t say any more precisely where; I can’t tell you; it’s a safe house. It was Brit Tully in the small middle room, with my room to the right and Handler Hicks to the left. A fucking nut. We had all these hippy rules none of us followed and we both kind of hated him, he was a shifty fuck.
The man who set up this little shop was none other than the infamous small time publisher and writer Handler Hicks, who for a lesser intellectual was wild eyed. And somewhat muscular and vigorous looking from being straight edge, being Zen and believing that “God is Good!” He is s total nut who fixates on 9/11 conspiracy theories and has all the tendencies of being a junky off junk. His little boy, when custody allowed as always there every other weekend looking feeble. Looking malnourished and unhappy to be there, yet chipper. Handlers is an endless passive aggressive pain in the ass, but Brit and Sebastian Adonaev needed a house for cash and paper trail and you get what you pay for in this city.

Reads Sebastian Adonaev:
Handler took me in when the safe house just before it got too, hot. Right before I skipped town to Baltimore to get my assignment from the local committee. A safe house falls apart for two main reasons; too much traffic or drama among spies. This place Brooklyn is infested these days with whores, with criminal scum, with sedition and with spies. It’s a good staging area for working in the City with no papers.
Natasha Salzano, which was just her passport name was a cold cunt. Natalia Khiterova, which was her name in Russia had fled almost overnight back to Russian Federation and left me and poor confused student Tanya Drozdova, basically squatting a lovely grand place on Eastern Parkway with the rent supposedly 8,000 plus dollars in arears. I made off with a fancy mirror and my gear in almost the dead of night.
A couple things about a good safe house, it’s hard to find. And, frankly the Russians have too many rules and idiosyncrasies. Like if you live with a woman and you keep leaving the seat up, or water on the floor after you shower; a good fucking or not fucking or two, some talk it out and you can be socialized. In a safe house; whoever is on the lease is the boss.
So Natasha’s whole thing was always “touching her stuff” which was all over the place, but even a slight movement of the cutting board, or moving the walk in storage closet around; she’d flip. She was tall and bleached, she was stern. She claimed she had gotten a Masters in International Communications, but who knew.
She left Tanya and I with a flat where the rent hadn’t been paid in months, the land lord was threatening to evict us; and she took off back to Russia. There was Mongol in her, I could sense it and she never smiled but the now defunct safe house on Church & Eastern Parkway was really quite luxurious for my tastes. She had basically turned the entire living room into my room and with it came actually really, really nice stuff which incrementally she sold, and the Mirror well I guess I stole. Her last words in an email were, “calm the fuck down you’re acting like a stupid fucking American! Everything is gonna be fine!”
And I didn’t pay her last month’s rent because Tanya said she’d just rob it and leave us high and dry anyway. But if one day I bump into her in Russian and she has a tough guy kill me over $735, well, that’s life. I’d kill someone over no less than 5,000 and depends what they’d done to deserve it.
Handler Hicks had written and gotten published two books on 9/11 Truth and was maybe the figure head of that rabble band of conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites. Anti-Zionists, excuse me. His first book was that the government did it, the second was that the Saudis were in on it too and after a recent trip to Iran, well his third book is about the Zionist angle, which I’m sure will go over great here and get rave reviews.
Moving on, it was so damn suddenly cold. It had been jeans and t-shirt weather in March. It had been the most limp, listless winter ever, or maybe I was still traumatized by the two year winter of Boston and the Blizzard of 2010. I had invested in a long heavy Soviet grey coat, and layers of thermal underwear as well as an Ushanka. The furry hat everyone knows and loves.

Reads Maria Silverrtova:
I shudder partly naked in his bed. Why have I done this? I am not sure. No one is allowed to receive a Russian pitty fucking, but that’s what I sort of gave him. Obscenity to fuck a dead man. But I suppose my kind will pitty fuck an artist. Anyway there he was about to deploy again and never even got to wear his tough, beige winter coat I bought him second hand at the Lady’s Village Cultural Society near the family Dacha in East Hampton. It’s a lovely family Dacha I’m told, the family has money but you wouldn’t know it the way he lives. It looks like something Adelina wears, but a little less yellow. He hasn’t heard from her in over a year, Adelina Blazhennaya. She visited his father for dentistry and maybe it was November on my way to meet David Smith in D.C. for a palaver and she called me or he called her advice about the negotiations. He pulled his dented white Honda Civic into a truck stop and she was so sweet and precise. I wasn’t there, he just talks about himself a lot.
“Do not let them talk you out of your intellectual property making token gesture of collaboration, this is business not a movement. You have to be A LOT less Communist.”

Reads Sebastian Adonaev:
And really I never heard from her again. Like someone with a better, more giving dick inside her or maybe her conscience ordered her not speak with ever me. I have three love letters she wrote me and I carry them around in the black leather party envelope I was issued in Haiti. I try quite hard to break that silence of hers. To get friendship or something more or less than that. No dice ever. Legally speaking, I’ve left her 33% of this new shell company if I’m killed in the coming deployment. I’m rambling about nothing useful. My existential first world concerns to my lap top, I’m comparing gear I need to procure. Bags and boots and devices. I’ll expropriate them with a fabricated credit card. About 2,000 worth of kit. Maybe I’ll even get a new lap top. If anyone manages to rob me on the road from Havana to Qamishly, well it would be a damn good haul.
Handlers is out first every night. He sometimes reads in the living room, we wait it out in our rooms. Brit and I are pure night creatures. Once I was fired from my slave job about three weeks ago I immediately reverted to my preferred biological clock. I’d been waking up at 445 am all summer and fall to drive to the ambulance base in the Rockaways. Now I’d wake up at 1 to 2pm go bed at 5am to 6am. I just like working at night, less witnesses? I’m sitting at the big long wooden table Handler built. It’s shoddy work like the bunk beds he builds. He’s a carpenter by trade, like my man Jesus was. But he’s chicken shit. It’s a pretty ok this safe house. Even if we can’t drink here. I think Brit does heroin in her room or at the very least smokes dope on the roof, she’s great though. Never emotional and always objective, she’s going back to Berlin soon, her case work never comes up and isn’t polite conversation.
We were imprisoned in a detention facility in 2013. Now the year is 2017. She had handed me her email address on a green paper with a Walt Whitman quote, something about noting. Well anyway many years later like six months ago I found it and when Handler subdivided the loft into three room I social engineered her in, but she was my second choice. I’d really wanted to live with mulatress Erin Moore who is dark humored and funny and can cook her ass off. But, frankly Handler sketched her out too much. The subdivide room was also not such steal ever for $600 USD, and maybe a little firetrap hazardous.

Actually I plan to drug Handlers and burn him alive in his home the night after I leave the states. That’s not because he gets under my skin. It’s because he is working for the Iranians and that’s what Brit and I were paid to do. Burn him alive.
Paid by who you ask? Fuck off then. We are brutal for its own sake. The man is a traitor to all people. Except in Iran they like his seditious theories.
The thing about a safe house is that you don’t tell anyone where it is, you don’t have your name on it, you pay cash and don’t sign anything, and everyone in it is super hero in their own mind. And you don’t pick up a blonde bimbo hipster in a bar and bring her back there to savagely fuck her in every hole in her body with a belt around her neck. How do I say that again, the people living in a safe house are shady fucking gypsies? The people living in safe houses, like me have something to hide? Or for people just too unstable in credit and finances to sign a lease. It could be a number of factors.
But, Brit was supposedly German intelligence, Handler a well-known brilliant crack pot being paid by the Iranians to enlarge the American propaganda base of Press TV. Also the undisputed leader of a 16 year effort to uncover 9/11 Truth. Most things seemed to tick back to that. His father is famous IMF economist. He single handedly helped push an unauthorized biography on George W. Bush to market via his printing house, and then that man “killed himself” and that seemed to weigh on Handler, and behind the hippy Zen retreats, the walls of books that he had in fact read, he was always reading, or pretending to be reading behind the chirpy banter was a killer. And, an Iranian propaganda asset. And I was going to dope him up with benzo sedatives and literally cook him alive.
I say that still having shared Rosh Hashanah with him, that means Hebrew New Years; and we cooked for each other the cuisine of vegetarian poverty goulash, and yes once he threatened to throw me out, and yes like Natasha he was a total tyrant, but I played several times with his dorky little scientist son, the fucker was so precocious. I don’t mean to talk so much shit, I’m working on it. I’m in shit talking recovery!
I am not a great person all of the time. I fucked that little hipster like a Ukrainian by the hour. Her face to the wooden floor and my cock up her ass. For something a lot like rape she took it seven or eight times before I murdered Handlers and jumped country.
Handler Hicks is a zealot, I respect him only for that. And about ten years my senior was in many ways what I worried a failed version of myself might look like complete with child and broken marriage. Fuck, I just did it again. I like him, he likes me, and he’s really not a bad guy in fact, he’s a lesser hero of this story I’m about to tell. But, I will admit that I didn’t mind the idea of killing him. He was annoying and also human trash. Because the truth is Iran doesn’t have any shortage of agents in this city, and his theories on 9/11 aren’t that well received anywhere. And he’s big faggot dork; so why did a two person hit team get sent to cook him?
Well, that’s because loose lips sink ships and traitors get put in the ground.
I am one to think every other high powered person living in the darkness is mental, a whore, a killer or a spy. It’s mostly true. It’s baseless. God only knows what they whisper about me back in the station or worse, the home office. They probably just say I’m crazy. But, I am a paramedic and it took me awhile to reconcile that; helping and saving sometimes, murdering and torturing other times. But a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.
So this small plane is gonna take off from an airstrip on the south coast of Brooklyn near Queens Border and it’s gonna fly me low down the coast to Cuba. And pretty much I’m gonna sit on a beach and meditate with rum and pussy after a meeting with Cuban intelligence about my training system and how it works.
And then I’m gonna fly back to Brooklyn and trade tropical white linen clothes for Spring in Russia clothes and I’m gonna fly to Finland then Moscow and check into the hotel Metropole to meet my new attaché and confidant Ms. Polina Mazaeva, who I’ve never met but have corresponded with for about six months and seen naked many times, more on that later. Thanks to the internet. And she will take me by the trains to Nizhniy Novgorod, check me into a hotel with an Irish Pub, a Sushi restaurant and Strip Club, all a New Yorker really need, and we’re gonna be working on a few things. Getting some paper work and concepts in order before I fly to Erbil, Iraq then infiltrate Syria to reach the Rojava Revolution sometime in the fall. But before I leave my city for a while, perhaps forever. Handler Hicks will die!
Polina is a cozy, coy little red head doll. Died of course. She’s overly attentive to my interests and actually reads my work which is flattering since, honestly most Russian women take all my money and suck on my dick, try and rearrange my wardrobe and ride me for housing and good meals. That’s cheap, but no totally off. Polina is looking at editing my shortest book, which means she’s manipulating me for someone. She has a little kid, she lives in the fifth biggest Russian city Nizhniy Novgorod, looks provincial and bleak.
I’ve never been to the Russian Federation. It won’t be hostile, well it might me a little.
A translation of book about Haiti into Russian, a joint collaboration called ‘Endless Walk’ which you are now reading; and how we can pose as a family with her seven year old son Yazan and secure work visas for Dubai, in the heart of the United Arab Emirates. And then, we fall in love. Or I’ll use her and she’ll use me, and when it stops working we can part as nothing.
But mostly my heart is cold, but I still know how to talk soothingly to a woman and I am governed by both the Code of the Haitian Gentleman, Hebrew tribal law and the desire to be a good communist; so whatever happens between is of course, or course based on consent and mutual admiration for the work of the other. She is talented singer, a painter and really too much and artist for Russia’s third biggest city she should be in Moscow, London or New York; her son has her pinned down though and wages are low in Russia. She make her pittances as graphic designer. They pay her jackbumsquat, which is gibberish for fucking nothing. She lives with her kid, her brother and her parents in what looks worse than an American housing project.
And I’m looking forward to May Day in the Capital and Victory Day in Nizhniy, which according to my research survived the Mongol hoard invasions nicely, combatively speaking. Those savage fucking Mongols.
And then I’ll load into a plane at GOJ Nizhniy fly to Istanbul, then provided I am not arrested and detained, head into Iraqi Kurdistan as we like to call it; Erbil City. And wait for Roj Eli Zalla my colleague and fellow card carrying D/U associate to arrive a week later so we get to Sulymanyia, contact the resistance and be smuggled into Syrian Kurdistan, over the border into the Rojava Federation. It’s very exciting to me anyway, I’ve wanted to see all these places for years, but for two years I’ve been an ambulance slave. My operational budget is a lot leaner than last time, I am trying to get a good price for my car, but all the prices have sucked; I did too much damage to it using it like an ambulance. $2650 is the best price so far for a no-frills 2009 Honda Civic with paramedic plates and 58,000 miles, which Brit says is low, like I only drive in circles in this dark city rat race, with a two year little exile in Boston.
I’ve been to Russia in past life which I hope to see again in my present and future. I spend most of time in the Russian quarter on the Brooklyn coast. I like everything about them. I can go deep or very, very shallow on it. I have read several dozen pieces of Russian literature and deeply admire the effort of the Soviet Union, I was blowing coke of a Bulgarian prostitute’s tits the morning after my 33 birthday. I liked it a lot, but it felt also disgusting and cheap and I couldn’t bring myself to fuck her, so I paid and left. I guess Malcolm Joyles one of our security chiefs who stayed up all night with us, I can’t confirm but I think her passed out there at the Harlem brothel, woke up and fucked her.
So there I was making a procurement list and seeing how I could raise a little cash here and there without breaking too many laws, and safe house, the high ceilings with pipes running across was so quiet only the pitter patter of my key board, and, Handler was asleep since 11:43pm and Brit was out not long after and I just felt compelled to get my inventory logs sorted, my deployment budge square, file the logs; transcribe some poems I found in a little note book to Adelina, send them to her, no response. Svetlana her confidant messaged me on the book face that she did wish me luck, I pretended Elena was there with her watching me type.
Sveta said she had a man now, and was happy. I hope she’s happy and motherfucker isn’t twice her age. It might seem like I have all these lovers laying around, or like I’m a cold confused whore mongering whatever I am; but no. That’s not true. Generally I have a free life partner, she bares me and the movement for a year or two, and she tries to save or fix or improve me; get me out of the movement and into medical school; then ultimately breaks it off when I do some time. I’ve spent 2 ½ years of my life inside.
I’m not a cheat, I don’t beat women up except when they like it bed. Which seems like a lot, leading me to question my own sweetness. I pay for everything. I dress pretty well, I’m smart and an artist. I’m a decorated hero paramedic. I’ve written 8 books. I’m just a little bit crazy. And I’m a communist. And I do think those things are fine in Russian Federation, no cause for alarm like here. I did bring not one but two pairs of hand cuffs to put Polina in, which is kinky but also tasteless.
Tonight, just after midnight the man who helped the most to train me as a paramedic Mikhail Kreminizer messaged me. His wife had just died, would be cremated in the morning.
You have to understand this man is tank. A big Russian-Israeli storm trooper who used to torture people, may or may not be a Mason, has killed man with his bare hands and now operates an ambulance in midtown Manhattan trying to save his own soul which he barely believes in.
After the secret police broke up our attempt to hold the 9th Congress of the Association & Union in North Brooklyn, after they raped my Polina Mazaeva and tortured me for 5 weeks until the underground could force my ransom; after we bombed the five Strip clubs on Victory Day, after we kidnapped the Satmar Rabbi, well I was too hot for a lot of people in 2016 and Michael had to distance himself from me and withdraw his orbit of protection, which was as vast as he is tall.
“Yulia is dead,” he wrote.
A horrible feeling, feeling someone who is very strong buckle, being in the shadow of their horrible feeling.
“She and I never had that great art and writing collabo moment we always talked about.”
“And you never will. She died on Tuesday.”
“Fuck. I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“No, that’s horrible. I’m so sorry Michael. I know how much you loved her.”
“Yup. I just came from New Jersey. She will cremated tomorrow.”
“I remember it was two summers ago. Yulia and I were on the phone and I was so manic and we were talking about her illustrating my book.”
“Well. That won’t happen.”
“Not in this life, no.”
“Agree.”
“In the world to come maybe she will be willing. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m going to get some rest. Good night buddy.”
I hate it when he calls me “buddy” but his chick is dead.
“Good night.”
“I’m leaving the States on April 12th for Adelina’s birthday. I’m sure you prefer to suffer in silence, but if you want to hang out. I’ll drive out your way. She loved you so much.”
“We will see how I feel in the morning. Where are you going this time?” he asks me.
“Cuba. Then Russia. Iraq and then Syria. I’ll leave the night after Passover.”
“Be careful. You were just luck last time.”
“Yeah. But I’ve got more men and training now. A good team. A real fine outfit.”
“Only reason you’re still alive.”
“I’ll try and get to see you more than the one year usual. I do not only feel your pain, but I know it like I know my own mask of a face.”
And he didn’t reply because he doesn’t have to pretend to be strong, but I felt a small cry in me, this man had patiently precepted and apprenticed into paramedicine, my secondary trade, but first love trade; he had shown me how to put IVs in the dark with feel, while in a moving vehicle at high speeds, he’d talked me through heart blocks, and my own blocked heart over Daria, and always treated me like an Israeli, not an American even though I’m really from here, wink. He taught me how to interrogate traffickers with the EKG monitor, how to start or stop the human heart, he was patient with me, he didn’t have to take that time I was on the black list I’d never be allowed on a good truck, a 911 truck again.
I felt this great knot of sadness because Michael Kreminizer suddenly had nothing to live for and not fearing god or devils; his self-destruction was frankly inevitable.
You have to always be ready for suicide watch dealing with out kind, dealing with high energy people, empaths, bipolar ones, bonobos; whatever. We feel too much and frankly get a little self-destructive which is why so many join the service and why so many die off the job where no one can see it happen.
Michael is hard. And maybe he killed so many people he has to stay working to balance it out, but I know, I know he loved her, loves her so much. And this could be the one thing. I have to stop. Stop, the archangel won’t die tonight or tomorrow, and you haven’t even seen him in a year? Two years? Three years? Four years? Stupid time, like a lot of people he said he’d be my reference, but worried about me. And didn’t have time for the hootenanny I get into. He called me Chechen once, because he could read into me and see many of my past lives.
I felt so sad, like I hadn’t been sad in so long and I thought about Adelina. What would I do if she took me back and we made a life and then died?
Suicide rates are actual low in Israel. And I was born in Trinidad and Michael was born in Lithuania, but we’re both Ivory. We’re both paramedics. We’re both parapsychologists. We’re both a lot crazy. We both love Russian woman. And he’s the size of a killer robot made of steel from the future, but this could kill him. If anything could, this could.
“One by one having fun tonight, if she only knew what I did for life, it’s an endless walk of dreams versus nightmare.”
Don’t leave me alone.
Late night later on I joined Brit on the roof for a smoke.
We were sure looking off the safe house roof, the city visible 5 miles out, the evil stack house of Woodhull hospital within rocket range and the tallest city project on Myrtle Ave, the sniper nest in days to come, we were sure it was jeans and t-shirt day, because Brit Tully and I were wearing jeans and t-shirt, well I was.
Brit almost always wore black and on top a black overcoat which had seen its prime days some time ago, like my ideals. We were smoking some of her American Spirit dark greens and I hadn’t slept in 24 hours. And it was real nice out for mid-March it had never gotten cold in December, January or even February.
“They are conserving the weather machine for when it matters,” Brit said, and I agreed.
She was so dark and introverted and cynical, as well as a lesbian. We only went out together a hand full of times, but we smoked on the roof together a lot and both hated the passive aggressive Handlers.
Brit would always say she’d leave for a lover in German soon, I always said I’d leave for revolution in Syria. We were both suffering in the Brooklyn ghetto, in the loft of Handler Hicks the conspiracy theorist and Iranian puppet. Who we had been paid to rub out of circulation. But, you can’t just kill a man and get away with it in the United States. You have to be realistic about that. We weren’t really gonna light him on fire, nobody really paid us to kill him and neither of us were really intelligence agents. We were just living in poverty of conscience and material poverty deep in the Brooklyn ghetto.

SCENE 9
“Free Life v. Meaningful Life, In Motion”

One night at a tavern, about one year after Sebastian arrived first in Cuba, then Russia, then Iraq and then Syria, Maria with shot tray affixed around her neck began a casual conversation with Sebastian, who looked slightly drunk if not slightly crazed. Yes, he looked like a terrifying mad man. He had just gotten in a stupid fist fight and almost been asked to exit. Maria drew him over to a small table, though on duty as shot girl she remained an inquisitive journalist. The Bulgarians never really expelled him from that tavern.
Maria:
Tell me about the civil war. A little bit, enough to have a sense of what anyone is supposed to do about you or your friends who came back to us.
Sebastian:
More good was done than evil. I’m sure the others killed more Jihadists and I did more medical care, but it was all a group effort. But really, most of my friends survived the war. The Arabs and Kurds are just going to grind away until Turkey rolls in to squash the revolution.
Maria:
So, you are aware Afrin is almost completely over run and Mambij is next and the Turkish army will probably undo all if any progress you all had made?
Sebastian:
I don’t sleep anymore. I use combinations of masturbation, drinking and drugs to put the lights out, I guess some emphasis on the drinking too. I get it. We all died or almost died or didn’t die and it was all for nothing. I get it. And Polina and I never saw each other again, and I writhe in pain avoiding my face in the mirror.
Maria:
Prosto! You need a whore! Someone to pay to love you. Not me, I’m too much for you. I want luxury carrots remember, not paintings or poems. The couple times we eye kissed, it just makes me pity you a lot. You’re basically not a man to me. You have no car, no property and for right now no ability to move beyond your own paralysis.
Sebastian:
Neyet Prosto. Not simple. I need a revolver so I can restively and decisively shoot myself in the head like a man! That will be enough. I should have died with my friends in Afrin. Do you even possess the understanding to know what was on the table there? Do you even have the care? They were liberating the women, they were instituting a democracy and they were planting trees. I feel like I briefly defended a utopia, only to be cast out.
Maria:
Prosto! Go back to the begging of the narrative and explain me your motivation! Tell me how your mission began and the connection between your ideas on free life verses a meaningful life in motion. Be, fucking linear! Tell the tale from beginning to end instead of dancing around like a crazy person.

SCENE 7
“Sometimes the Vodka Drinks You”

Maria encounters Sebastian again arriving early at the Tavern.

Reads Maria:
“Sebastian is a tragic, but somewhat romantic man. He is not from the world of 21st century America that is for sure. He is more American than Russian. He is Russian by insertion, and assertion. When I kiss him I kiss air. I kiss a ghost. I kiss a dead man with wings. It’s not unpleasable, but I can’t write back to send mom over with it or my babushka.”
“If we had not brought any of his fucking amazing poetry; this might be akin to a cabaret show with just talk of some tits and some sprinkling of war stories. But we cut it with poems, to liven the mood. Make things classy for you and the comfort of the future! We need it to be all French and shit, so the bleakness and the misery next door can be swept away with smoked tea, black beer and various fish. It’s not Vodka, remember, it’s for the care of spiritual traumatic wounds.”
“Full disclosure, we cannot tell you the audience what any of these men did or didn’t do in Syria because it will be used by their secret polices to persecute them. More talk of love and Vodka! Meddling in U.S. elections is expensive and gets me thirsty all over again.”

#14: Sometimes the Vodka Drinks You
I.

What does an evil half Americano know about the Ghosts of Russian Christmas past?
Arrogance vast!
If sirens of suffering call-free-for-all_
_then have your crew insert wax in their ears and bind your bleeding heart to the mast!
Look at your most tragic failures,
Look at your past!
Your sister, your brother, your comrade, the love of your life: raped and abused
Self-murder imprisoned and her young body used:
The die is cast.
You toast to our fortitude?
Look in the mirror and see the accused!
Who put the world on your shoulders man?!
Whoever asked!
Labriut!
There was nothing one person ever asked you to be,
Nothing they asked you to do.
No one expected a miracle.
You battle demons still in their name,
And when it was done the world was exactly the same, man it’s too true:

Sometimes you drink to remember,
Sometimes you drink to forget.
And sometimes the vodka drinks you.

II.
Reads Sebastian:
The card said:
“Ya tbya verejnum glaz najom.”
So I went up to Brighton Boston.
To consult with a gangster named Medvinsky.
“Droog.”
You had better turn that walk into some kind of fearsome-forward-run.
“Get gone, Get done.”
Get yourself a final lavish Turkish bath,
You lost a lot,
She lost a bit,
We’ve all lost something over flesh chase bullshit,
A fait complit_ it’s done.
Since you won’t take a lap dance down on Brighton 7 as down payment on your solitude,
We can’t build you back until you repay the debt accrued,
Passport change your latitude,
It’s your very Westy attitude we’ve come to question!
So make adjustments to the clout,
You thought you could throw about.
Without suggestion:
Settle up and out.
Take a shot then,
Run.
You have to settle up with the Voorhis down in Oceania,
That won’t be fun.
“Gde bolit tovarish?”
“Did you even stop to think about the things that you two unleashed?
With passion pens, with cold war sword play, and with gun!
It was your morals that she prayed on with her callous kick box on the night she almost killed you.”
“For sport?”
“Not for sport. For fun.”
“You had best turn in your 8 shot, because she’s gone and punched your midnight ticket now!”
“She’s removed the bullets from your gun.”
There’s no blame in this situation. You two just forgot your host nation, class and social station.
And lost in excited trepidation you made war.
But in all that war you’ve been making,
You were changing nothing
See the score?
And shortly one dead Russian escort
And one badly tortured gun man is all there will be to show totality of foolishness:
The things, you and she were fighting for.
Let’s do a shot for good intentions now a bloody mess under duress:

What Medvinsky says is partly true:

“Sometimes you drink to remember,
Sometimes you drink to forget.
And sometimes the vodka drinks you.”

III.

Maria reads:

Sometimes, I too get drunk. And I drive my car,
In figure eight circles around the Adonaev Loop in Coop city,
The only street which bears my name.
And from the wheel of my Civic I survey a high rise brick kingdom.
All I can see!

Sometimes I drink to remember, sometimes I drink to forget.
And sometimes the vodka drinks me.

It’s a bevy of victimless crimes.
There are no children playing at these midnight hours,
Most of the times,
Or those that are carry various calibers as they carry on trade in West Indian nickels and dimes.
With each kiss of Stolichnaya I get further from all the accusing faces of friends lost,
And, lubricated by the demons still waters I am forgiven for my yet unfulfilled promises.
And, that which such promises cost.
I sip and shoot shot and bottle tip.
And the ghosts of past make clever cheers:
Nazdrovia!
They say as I sip.
More shots!
To the last drop, a fast viscosity, a deadly drip.
Cheers to little Malka who’s daddy abused her, and who’s foreign baby’s father used her like a Siberian doll and fled leaving a teenage mother with child in the slums of Shahoun Daled!
Shot to my useless head.
Cheers to Maya captured and bonded to brothels at the age of sixteen,
Pale white tits all the gawk of Montreal’s flying flesh carnival scene.
Long white lines of supine mortgage,
Traumas of the slave trade never fully known_ what they made her do.
Time supine, also prone.
Third shot for Rahula, also called Jeremy McGaffey,
A soldier, a comrade martyr now dead, and all the dark things he saw before putting two rounds in his tough brilliant head.
For all that they went through these three in particular abused an accosted,
I empty the bottle to my useless gestures exhausted,
Having arrived too late to have saved them and too weak to have healed them, and play pretend knights making promises into a sad mockery.
Sometimes I drink to remember.
Sometimes I drink to forget.
And sometimes the vodka drinks me.

IV.

Reads Sebastian:

I awoke in hand cuffs black hood folded blind.
And it wasn’t just another Saturday night wilding-wild-West Indian
On the loose in Coney Island of the mind,
Truncated by tell-the-boys-in-blue I won’t be easy.
They had laid their hard hands on me.
Stop the tape. Pause.
Rewind.
Wham!
Something struck the Gulliver out of nowhere_ it gyrated my warbles.
This time, maybe; my past had caught me.
That then said;
My first thought was of my baby, my lady who is even tougher than I am.
Good thing your woman’s hidden said the voice in my head.
Simmer-on-sinner,
A loser or a winner is in the end always picking up taps for the devil at dinner.
When I say baby, I should say goddess, she’s a warrior.
Or just several shots short of serial killer,
A base sinner invited into your house for the small talk most certainly, also her chest, high heels and the promise of dinner.

She loves me because I am a good man.
You can, only hurt a Real man by destroying his goodness and if he be a hard man,
No kid’s gloves_
_you can only do that by hurting people he loves.

I’ve been interrogated before.
There many ways to do it,
You can purchase a good deal of information via third party use of shill, mark or whore.
When people don’t know what they’re fighting for…
Or stacked shocks, shock headed peter_a drill with a small bore.
But who’s keeping score, anymore.
I was trained in district Florentine.
I have mental blueprints to up the ante of an occupation, or increase the flicker flame of fire on a low boiling international class war.
What for? What was in it for me?
I was tapped long ago on my shoulder by a series of sirens
And enlisted in a long simmer struggle to even a score,
Against the forces of Razpizdia, general a-pathology bloody feuds based little more than mistranslated folk lore.
To Hit back,
And coordinate the American arm of a general attack on behalf of the wretched run miserable, the abused and the victimized poor!
Oh that’s adorable, he’s a man with ideals. Let’s get him out of his country and rip out his teeth with some plyers so he can see exactly how real change making feels!
The prelude to a good long torturing is an offer you can’t refuse.
Already assume you have nothing to lose.
False positive clues to dissuade and amuse as they work to disfigure,
And of course to abuse.
They said I was born chosen, but I keep on choosing battles that my lady says that I’m destined to lose.
That’s what she said.
And when panting and longing and holding me tightly, through the calling of names
But only she is the one I allow in my head.
The trick is to talk in circles,
Keep asking for cigarettes,
Saying nothing makes them think you know more than you do.
Once the beatings begin you must meditate your way through the blood and the swelling.
So master art of storytelling.
So when that occurs you can only betray yourself via you’re capture and give long accounts of imaginary conspirators.
And try and make sure you don’t know where your woman is being hidden
A pale horse with pale rider will give no account of the devastations witnessed passing though places he’s ridden.
You can beat a man into saying almost anything.
You can try and buy him, make him sing tunes you want him to sing. Strike his face with a truncheon cuffed to chair he’s got nowhere to run.
And if they know who you are they just might do it for fun.
But having done this before, if you want to get to my family you’d better be legion, better have monstrous tentacles, bottomless pockets, or know how to properly swim.
For I know the face of the devil and Invest adequately in keeping my loved ones from him.
I hide my woman in Haiti. Just cause you can see her golden blonde hair from space, well that don’t mean you can fight your way through eleven million Haitians. Has nothing to do with race.
I’m one popular fucking blan these days. They say no good deed goes unpunished, and but I have my ways.

Maria Silverrtova reads:
Russians have counter insurgency down to a T.
The Ts for ‘torture the shit out of everyone’. Best believe these days several are gunning for Vasa, Vasa is near me.
It’s a long game, it’s a late stage in the war.
A fist crunches my face, then a bucket of water.
I’ve brought a box cutter on a plane before.
Before it was cool.
Who am I?
Fool, if you allow yourself to be coffined they will attempt it using descriptive pejoratives.
I’m new school.
I have spoken to you at length in Babylonian, but parable take away, here’s the golden rule:
Don’t pose a question that you do not intend in a timely fashion to unravel.
I am a man of three colors. Red black and green. I’m in the business of Chechen resistance, this involves travel.
In my rounds and deployments you’d have no idea of the suffering I’ve seen.
It’s less a riddle to fuck the answers out of me.
But just in case they get me, know that when my families safe, and Ichkerias’ free, and most of the world is a place where it’s safe for your pasty white children to be,
And then we can agree that when you open your eyes and turn off your TV,
Then you will collaborate with a Chechen like me, and the resistance generally.
These are hard cuffs. I’m not going anywhere. I zone out.
And I dream of the mountains, the scent of my baby’s hair. I know she’s safe, I know they gonna break me out. Unpleasant nights until that occurs, no doubt.
Soon as these wolves know they got Vasa the gunslinger, I can hear them shout.
Ya tbya verjnum glas najum.
I’m gonna cut your fucking eyes out!
Do your worst motherfuckers. I’ve heard these words before.
You ain’t getting nothing but nonsense from the lips of a rebel implore,
Ladies and gentlemen my name is Vasyli Pveada, also called Sebastian Adonaev.
I see what I see,
Also called Blacksmith Winter, my nom de guerre. They gave it to me.
The world is on fire and you’re all in a tower on top of a hill, for the blood that they spill, for our loved ones they kill, listen to we.
The armed wing of the Democratic Confederalism movement has long arms and old soul memories, we will not stop fighting, until every last man woman and child is free.

SCENE 6
“Loose Lips Sink the Ships”

Explains Maria Silverrtova, looking all Russian and hot and shit. She’s just sat with Sebastian at the bar or the tavern for about two hours, listening, pretending her English is only rudimentary. He tells her more than he should.

“Rudely almost arbitrarily, we have introduced Sebastian Adonaev without presenting the Z.O.B. in greater detail. It is the clandestine organization of closet communists and mostly ambulance workers. You can’t be a communist in America, you’re done something wrong to even talk about it. Also of West Indian black market entrepreneurs. A fertile breeding ground for anarchist bomb makers, Russian petty criminals, Irish terrorists, reformed and active sex workers, strippers, vagabond utopian theorists and the secret forces of the great unwashed. A brotherhood and sisterhood that binds many of our friends together into a pact of lawless, perhaps degenerative mutual aid. Masquerading at times in the disguises of workers’ rights, human rights and maybe, maybe sometimes direct democracy the Z.O.B. spawns acronyms as if Kurdish trained to do so. This outfit is known to be persistent and hard to entrap.”

The secret police and intelligence circles focused initially on its bombing campaigns which extend back to 1999. First, using non-lethal white phosphorous smoke ordinances directed against slave labor textile depots. Later early during the Afghan & Iraq war years between 2003-2008, improvised explosive devices in its strategic bombing campaign against brothels and sex trading. Finally using Irish acquired military grade explosives against the cartels bringing cocaine and heroin into the City. The Z.O.B. almost never civilians. Never killed any cops, dirty or straight. Everyone also knew they had infiltrated Corrections and the New York City Police Department which is why the FBI Joint Terrorism task force got involved in 2005.

Steps were taken to suppress its underground newspaper distributed out the backs of ambulances to all the hidden places it went out to. The secret police tried to eliminate the flow of instructional pamphlets and curb the growing number of foreign expeditions its members trained their cadre on mostly in Latin and Central America. But the organization is dynamic, and it never let its members stay in jail very long, though several were martyred over the decade called the War Years; 2001 to 2011. This club and the clusters spun out of it is often called the Banshee Association. That name either came from the FDNY EMTs and paramedics who founded a branch called that or it came from the police. Since they never killed cops, never killed civilians and only blew up things that didn’t contain people, well the local police many admired it. Since everyone knew that anyone could be in it; a ghost shirt operation; hitting things that you couldn’t hit in you were in the system.

The original core of the underground according to the FBI was communists and anarchists, mostly from upper Middle-Class families. It absorbed several large student groups in 2004 who when they graduated infiltrated high and low. They suspected a foreign funding or training connection, but they never verified one. Then in 2009, the bombings slowed down, and the international deployments began. But by then the underground was too decentralized and too deep under the skin of the country to crack.

But these three letters; Z, O, and B better indicate the club’s inner most circle, and its place in the international freedom movement. Its linkage to the rest of the world on fire down the mountain.

“It’s a human rights version of the ‘Westies,’ that’s all I can tell you for now,” says Sebastian when asked. None of the other eight officers in the cadre cared to know for it was not just mere ideas but lived experiences that brought anyone into its ranks.

Taking a revolutionary between your legs does not induce belief via osmosis, or even diffusion.
On the contrary, nothing could make one quite so utterly antagonistic to the ideas of Marxist-Leninism quite like loving or fucking for any prolonged period a determined revolutionist. For both male and female revolutionaries are insane, highly demanding people. They must be as they have set out to make impossible things work as if, possible. And many are also demented by that failure and by protracted murder disguised as ideas.

“The rhetoric has always been ridiculous and dynamic,” once explained Trickovitch, “people began joining when we threw good parties then began punctuating those parties by invading beleaguered countries and executing pimps, bankers and other enemies of the working class.”
“We never kill anyone who doesn’t deserve to die,” Sebastian liked to say, “Just like in EMS.”
“What’s the Westies again,” people sometimes ask. Quite a lot of people have passed through the front groups and splinter groups, the business fronts and the house parties. The bedrooms solidify the rank and file as well, that is almost always a thing. There are always nine at the very core, almost always strangers. The Politburo, the Shura Council, and the Executive Committee all act on the policy created by this hidden leadership. Call it whatever since they always change the name. The FBI thinks it’s called the Committee for Public Safety, but that is further disinformation. The people who make the decisions about surviving the years until the ground war. In actually constitutional terms; the Steering Committee.

“The Westies were a small but ultra-violent, hyper efficient Irish gang from the 1980’s,” he often adds then distracts with some other story.

“What’s that stand for then, the Z.O.B.?” people ask Adon. People on the inner, outer circle, or people that see the pamphlets or the posters on the work trains. People that do associate Banshee with ZOB have put not too much circumstantial evidence together.

“If I told you….” and then he orders a round of water shots. He likes red wine. He likes Rum. He enjoys Vodka all by itself, or with a big feast, but when it is time to do business he is at his most serious, almost sober man. Close to Muslim in his discipline, but of course these are not religious people we are dealing with. Believers, but certainly not answering to imaginary friends in the sky.

People once heard him refer to the “Zealots of Brooklyn,” but sometimes they drank and took amphetamines for days and entered whole new unrealities. Parallel states of being that Sebastian drew and wrote stories about lying on the floor of the Penthouse with huge green eyes that didn’t blink after the third day in wake field. It had been a long time since they locked the Penthouse doors and tried to see the future in seven days.

So many people just call them the Banshee Association, the name of their largest political arm and Newspaper which came out irregularly as funds became available. They were described as ‘an emergency medical service proto-union underground’ in a recent write up expose about them first in DNA Info, later vice and still later in the New York Times. They are always being accused of being Communist infiltrators in the New York Post and Wall Street Journal.

Regardless, some civil servants just called it “the Club.” People come and go, they disappear, and some die. Sometimes people get tortured. Sometimes there is drinking and dancing, often enough to be called fun. There are always glorious toasts. There is always Afro-Caribbean music. Sometimes innocent people get shot up or blown up. That’s a thing. It isn’t ever taken lightly. The battle of ideas was lost a long, long time ago. The dubious morality of their political violence, the future being fought for; is all drowned in the terrors of the past and also present. But tonight was a casual night to talk about Russian women and or girls.

Maria:
Let’s pretend we’re back in an interrogation.

Sebastian:
Is it true you got manhandled?

Maria:
Let’s pretend we’re back in an interrogation.

Sebastian:
If it is true you were terrorized, I’m sorry I wasn’t there.

Maria:
Let’s pretend we’re back in an interrogation.

Sebastian:
I’m sorry you got water fire boarded and there was nothing I could do.

Maria:

But, let’s pretend we’re back in an interrogation. It happened to Daria not to me. I never suffered for your idealism, at best, I’ll call it. What’s a midnight rape at the hands of the boss? You sure terrorized those Albanians for no reason, imagining if you didn’t something terrible was going to happen to me. Nothing terrible happened to me, they called me a cab.

Sebastian:
I’m sorry anyone knew that part of me, or ever came across me crazed like that. When the gun arrives I’ll bring an end to all of the bullshit as fast as one spinning bullet can allow.

Maria:
I won’t let you Russian roulette yourself on my watch. I’m not heartless about you. I’m actually a little sentimental about the way you go crazy over me. You have a futuristic future being something great, probably. Something heroic or if not just heroic, artistic and recognized. If you take salt pills and stop giving away yourself to a tragic world. Maybe more people would listen to your songs. Maybe Polina and you will be re-united and it will be the Russian American Dream for you both; a condo in Brighton Beach! Maybe, just maybe you don’t have to be antagonist-protagonist; you can just live your life. Stop playing with guns and building bombs! Live your life and make yourself happy.

Sebastian:
These aren’t songs for people who build bombs.

Maria:
I won’t let you kill yourself. The capitalists can’t rid of you that easily!

SCENE 5
“A Radical Love Song”

Sebastian Adonaev reads:

Sometimes, old friend, I cry from own weakness. I bash my Jew face against various mirrors around town angered by my own lack of force, lack of seed, and lack of ability to carry my band more truly into glorious and successful battle. I beat my frail fists on concrete walls which always win! I ask my God why it untrusted me with anything at all. For I am so small and so unable it seems to be a good fighter, an adequate lover, or a good leader, or a good son, or a good husband to Adelina, a good much of anything. I started the game with such a strong position but have not leveraged that to advance my people and cause, even protect those I loved the most!

And then I remember my actual role, not the role my mad ego ascribes. I am but one single partial partisan. One isolated man with such true friends.

I am commanding, a funny word “commanding”, more appropriate term coordinating for can one even give orders to a volunteer? A force that numbers at any given time no more than ten to maybe twenty women and men. And no God nor man nor foreign government gave us marching orders; well at times a Russian woman gave me some directions, but only when at most desperate and bleak junctures, I had to no council to turn to. But, I brought almost all this chaos upon my house unaided! But this is hardly a wide conspiracy. But looking into my own soul I am not doing this for God or man, I am not simply avenging my losses, nor am I simply working off a duty to act. No, no; I am self-propelled and highly lucky. I am doing this because my eyes see fire. I am doing this because I have seen the view from the top of the Mountain, I have seen the killing fields too. I have a great empathy with my kind. I wish good to triumph over callous and well planned evil.

And the responsibilities that were impressed on me by the old leadership, they were small bits. And I say to myself that if our little band with no weapons and no training and no funding and the protection provided us only by our passports and various skin tones could do so much! Still we did accomplish a range of small things in the Americas and beyond. We took over buildings, and organized demonstrations, built unions, operated a substantial underground press. If we could build youth brigades and lay cells across four continents; if we could operate clandestine supply chains, raise tens of thousands in equipment and supplies, conduct hundreds of underground political trainings, infiltrate major city civil service organizations, if we could smuggle activists and trainers into distant countries uninvited and opposed by government. If we could do all of this with no outside support and do it with keeping all our partisans out of long term prison, and have only buried three men in seventeen years of war under questionable circumstances. Well perhaps we are all still young and the war shows no sign of being over. Perhaps we have a small latent talent for freedom fighting and if not killed or imprisoned could with a little guidance grow more professional.

And we have not killed one single person in seventeen years, in fact we have with our own hands saved the lives of thousands and counting.

“I’ve always said he has a fucking ton of potential! For good, for self or for evil, wherever his own heart ultimately sends him,” Daria once declared.

So, really as was explained to me then in 2012 before the uprising in Brooklyn by my confidant Dasha Andreavna; I could either surrender, collaborate or be utterly destroyed. But as she gauged my nature was highly American, she guessed correctly I would never tolerate a life of collaboration, so thus death or some impossible victory were the only moves coming.

I have been imprisoned twenty times. My brothers and sisters have never allowed them to take me for long. Each time they have chained me to beds, administered electricity, loaded me with drugs, asked millions of stupid questions to attempt to make me alter my perspective, denounce my own logic. I have observed members of the band lose their very homes and their livelihoods and their freedom and their health. I have seen men thrown through Plexiglas glass windows. We have been held in cages and also tortured. The deaths of McGaffey, Becker and Black were all sudden and violent and unexplained. I remember little Paul behind bars, I remember harassment and humiliation of Comrade Vik, I remember how much was sacrificed vainly in the name of this struggle. This struggle which absorbs my beingness as though it were the love of a woman, but I am a zealot. I am not good for anything but this. I am in love with my entire people and I have resolved that it would be better to be killed, to lose my privileges of skin and class, than to live in a world where a tiny vile few make the lives of the many, the lives of all I know and love a wretched grinding torture. Truly a half-life.

I cry sometimes, no longer in the presence of any others. Dasha mocked me so each time I failed to be a man. I cry because the horror is so vast and the injustice so great. And I have but ten to twenty partisans, several with wives and children. I worry that I am not going to be able to shoulder this struggle, that I lead my closest to sedition and doom. I worry I have not the moral fortitude, the calm patience of humble leadership, the organizational skills the funds we will need, the weapons, the uniforms, the petrol, the Planes, the will. For I am a man and I am seduced sometimes by wanting more good life, wanting to walk away. This is not your fight, she said, no one asked you to struggle!!

Friends, they torture me once a year. They tell me I have an unstable mind. They drag me away over and over and over again. I am grateful for such friends as you, who refuse to accept surrender. Who know that we can win the war! I wanted to tell you all, see what we do with just ten women and men. You have that many fighters too. Here we all are at the top of the mountain, assembled in the ghettos encircling the Isle of Man.

I loved her so much. Maybe only one or two of you know what I’m talking about. They took from me the only thing a man should care about.

I’m thankful for the resistance. I’m thankful for our little Otriad in Brooklyn. For the cells in Chicago, Philly, Baltimore and DC. The underground in Moldova, Cambodia, Haiti and occupied Israel. Thankful for Commander Reed in Mosul, Commander Bonhomie in Port Au Prince. Inspired deeply by the teachings of Solomon and DeBuitléirs. I love my family and my wife, I hope this is the year we go pro.

She is a million miles away, but she can hear me. She can see me. She liked me better before I found communism, liked me better before I rediscovered my religion. She even liked my used suits better than the grey uniform I wear now.

I raise glass to the East, for there somewhere out there I hope she is waiting for me, waiting for us to win. I raise my glass, I look my men and women in the eyes when I toast, “Long live the resistance, God protect the blood line of the prophets and the Meshiach and the Mahdi. God keep us moving along the straight path, not the path of those who are cowards, or those who have been lost and lead astray.”

For those of you who are joining us from home, for those listening from the trenches, from the fields or from the big house, or as servants in the towers. This is just a love song.
Yes, an epic Russian American love ballad set mostly in the Middle East. This is not a song for people that don’t know how to fire guns.

SCENE 3
“The Chechnyans”
Her waist was tight and breasts quite ample. It was all contained under a little black cock tail dress. Holding around forty plastic bullets of Vodka; she sells them in the Tavern for $4 a piece. Ethnically speaking she was clearly one of Russia’s 157 sub-ethnicities, perhaps a Chechen, perhaps part Tajik or Uzbek. I think she is very good listener, thinks Sebastian.
He has just returned from Syria. The duration of the deployment was around nine months were he to include Cuba and Russia and Iraq. He is haunted and despondent, a veteran of the People’s Protection Units; called the Y.P.G, you pronounce the G as ‘gay’. But officially there are no gay people in Russia, Iraq or Syria. As for Cuba, it’s a new tolerance.
Says Maria Silverrtova, “Let me roll up my sleeves and also my skirt, a little! Look at me in the eyes! I have all my teeth to bite. So sexy and educated and multi-lingual. What, a, catch to catch. I am a wild debutante, elusive and amazing. I am a journalist of course, forced to pour men off shots in a tavern downtown.”
“Zdrastvistia! The purpose of this play is to buy and sell luxury carrots. Also a flying carpet to get you home after all the bullshit we will make you sit through telling Russian American tales. Also to warn you about Chechnyans, and also to distribute out a phone number where slaves with abused lives can get J 1, S 1 or go to college. There is singing and poems. We will try and pour you things called Vodka, but it’s not vodka; to us it’s like water for wound care.”
Maria continues, “Good and bad men went to war and women also went to war, and Americans and Russians watched out the corner of the Newspaper or telescreen. And of course supplied the arsenal and the airstrikes.”
“The papers called them “the Chechnyans” because when the war kept going, people came back trained in god-only-knows how much carnage capability. The war I’m referring to is the Syrian Civil War/ the Revolution in Rojava which was a phantom menace to all. But it was more a dark dream based on improbable odds. Chechens, are in fact a very real jihadist menace that fought us to the last bullet in Mosul, Raqqa and Deir-A-Zor. They brought their whole families into the Jihad. These re-moniquored “Chechnyans” weren’t like them. They were secular and young, and mostly on the Kurdish or Shi’a side, or the Pesh Merga. They all left our families at home. There were plenty of war path teams and factions, mine/ ours was the most moral, but lived in a state of total delusion. They were following a pudgy faced aging man in Turkish solitary confinement. We thought breaking rocks was a useful form of soliloquy.”
Interjects Sebastian Adonaev, “I kissed her very hard against both our better judgment. Last time I kissed her like air. I saw her un-marked unpacked, un-made-up Slavic beauty face on her birthday, before we did one last job on St. Pat’s day. We weren’t supposed to do jobs like that in Midtown, people get upset.”
“I pulled her through to my reality, for the last time and she was completely pissed. The reality wasn’t very nice because it wasn’t the American dream she had set out to conquer on someone else’s name. That name and those papers had failed her mightily. I yanked her through to the other side. The serf side, the Warsaw ghetto side. I was still just a petty gun slinger, Syrian Civil War vet on the run from the war in Syria and my own mind. I did 80 days in Bellevue City hospital and filth was still on my fingers, elbows and toes. I hadn’t slept well even one night.
She was still just a high end whore a year later? Not fair but probably true. But she wasn’t like Maria from Moscow anymore, doing what she did and still does with her tits and high ball shots and take home party favors. She was way over long walks with artists. She was regressing into Capitalist Modernity, the place she’d always wanted to end up, was now boring. Her suitors never waned. Especially the pesky Brahman roommate.”
“It has been a long road from Havana to Brooklyn to Russia, into the Middle East and back. With stopovers in where civilization has come to a resolute end in the Fertile Crescent. Burning down river by river shore to deep sands of desolation.”
“My name was once Sebastian Adonaev, but the Kurds named me Blacksmith Winter, or Kawa Zivistan. The Arabs, they needed to name me too so they called me Zacharias Abu Yazan. Because my then girlfriend correspondent Polina has a son named Yazan. I was 33 when I deployed but looked and felt younger. Her name, my timeless old Muse was Dasha, but this isn’t about her. The other books were all about her. This is about the time a Syrian war vet caught feelings about Maria Silverrtova, a buxom little Chechnyan, like him. No, it was about picking up the shattered pieces of this nightmare, resiliently.”
“This is a cry for some extra hands, some Hamsas, that survived to talk about the Syrian Civil War. This is a love song after a series of hard fucks in Spanish and love making in Russian. This is a Post-Soviet Lullaby, written in Imperial English. I have heard on the wire that Anya is losing her mind in Baghdad and Ana Campbell, that optimistic young woman I have hand grenades to; well she dead and here I am in Capitalist Modernity’s heart, doing nothing but stupid love songs.”
In video recording a deceased Ana Campbell tells us, “Yes, forgive me loved ones, I died immediately in an airstrike in Afrin. My body was in, smithereens. Afrin was until it was overrun by Jihadists and the Turkish state, the Western most canton of Rojava; the besieged revolutionary movement called Democratic Confederalism that defeated ISIS and took over 45% of Syria, until the Turks began to genocide us in April 2017. I died pretty. I was a true believer. Sebastian blames himself for my death, but really I was a true believer in the cause. I could have died much worse if the Turkish Army or its proxies took my alive. I would have been gang raped. And had my head cut off eventually.”
“Sebastian lives with his guilt but Dan Newey another guerrilla I almost kissed, he does not. Dan Newey is in in British prison accused of terrorism. He mourns me loudly. Honestly, we all lost a lot defending the Rojava Revolution, but we internationalists that the papers call the new Chechnyans, we were actors on a stage of world events, but we didn’t do that much. Now I’m dead, which I’ll tell you seems like being on the mountain without being shot at. It’s peaceful, I’ll have him tell you that. I died with my AK in hand. I believed in this, I wasn’t mentally ill. I wasn’t a bandit girlfriend. This was, this is, big and important, but sadly as far as self-defense; a mirage. Without American airstrikes to back us up we melted under Turkish airpower.”
“At the time of writing this my corpse is still behind Turkish lines and it looks like Mambij and then all of Rojava will fall to the Turkish Army, a U.S. ally and second biggest in NATO. I am happy and dead. But vicariously I grieve for my Arab and Kurdish comrades who prepare to make Shahid Namorey, immortal martyrdom.”
Says Cancer, pronounced ‘Jansher’ the Guerrilla from his notes, “Actually, I tried to prepare them for a lifestyle of revolutionary militancy. Kill the enemy. Kill the enemy before the enemy can airstrike, execute, torture or disappear you and your friends. I don’t think they all got it. The training was just too short. They retained much of their Western bourgeoisie privileges. They thought it would maybe be like a movie. It’s a shame the woman died, she was the one with possibly the very most potential, excluding the Germans. That’s all I can say about that, Heval.”
Heval is the Kurdish Kurmanji word for friend, or comrade.

SCENE 2
“The Task is to Warn You”

I once tasked myself with building a small, disciplined revolutionary organization in Israel and the United American that could strike at human traffickers and or oligarchs as readily as it could train medical workers in zones of atrocity and deprivation or war. It was like herding drunk cats first of all. The State forces never even ever needed to repress it. I turned abroad to find my Fidel as it were. I liked the general idea of Che, I sought to apply myself as the revolutionary and the medical worker hand in hand. First, I went to Palestine and saw the nasty apartheid wall. I noticed the moral sickness as well in Israeli society, but this flirtation with a drunken peace process waned as I got older. In 2010 I was deported for good from Israel. Second, I went to Haiti and wet my hands with the blood of 316,000 plus or minus who died in the great quake. My otriad trained hundreds and it was here I developed the basic idea of medical capacity building, mass capacity building and remote application of Cuban medical internationalism. Then, I sucked in my chest and got ready for the death I thought immanent Syrian Civil War. I couldn’t look away from the atrocities in Aleppo. Then, reading of Democratic Confederalism I came to understand that most of my own rhetoric was being implemented by the PKK and its allies, following the mandate of Abdullah Ocalan, imprisoned by the Turks forever on Imrili Island…merciless Turks.
This organization which seemed to re-spawn itself in varying configurations eventually managed to outlive its purpose once we discovered Kurdistan. It now seemed superfluous. Almost an anachronism to see American allies as useful. Except as directly in the fight. For these endless agitations were all very fourth rate compared to the advanced Worker’s Party in the mountains battling both Turkey and the Islamic State.
I used the field hospital Wi-Fi and a Syrian sim card to let everyone who was listening know I’m alive. It’s not that many people anymore. It’s a blonde debutante in Midtown, following me out the corner or her eye from a high tower of captive luxury. There’s a sexy Harvard lawyer who gave me Mindfulness on the Go, and her cute little sentimental blessings. My parents say almost nothing, my brother especially. Polina Mazaeva, my lover, she has shut be off right during the final battle for Mosul. But I write to her anyway; “I’m alive, motivation is high!” “I’m alive, tell me the weather in Boston, New York and Nizhny Novgorod. Besides Ms. Chanie Rossi, Ms. Daria Skorobogatova and before Polina; no one seems to be keeping any track of my exploits. That mighty revolutionary organization we’d tried to build, well it crumbled in my absence amounting to zero less than nothing.
And all these three lovely ladies ever asked or said; “Are you alive, come home,” as if there was something good about the home I was from or life I had before the war. Secretly I always believed that I would fall gloriously as a shahid in patriotic defense of Rojava. Well so far 43 of 500 volunteers had. Mines had felled over half. Prepared, not eager, but certainly prepared to die I wished to be in two places that seemingly I could associate with a happy vacation, or at least one place it was logical I visit before I pass into the world to come.
I began in Cuba, then Russian Federation, then popularly mobilized Shi’a Iraq, also Kurdish referendum North Iraq and then into the hell of Syria. It all took about 9 months to ruin my resolve and completely lose my mind. Then in Cairo I waited two days in February and then into indefinite detention in the New York Hospital Camps; which swore I was a mad man. I recite in my cell a poem that was my 88th; made for one Elena Komarova, a confidant who can’t deal with my lifestyle anymore. It was about red and white Russians, about Moscow and exile and death and love and what I will refer to as my Special Period; my special period of love and war.
I had been to Cuba once before. It occupied a special place in the revolutionary epoch and I timed my arrival in Russia with May Day and Victory Day; in order to sort of pay tribute to the legends of the USSR.
First I must warn you, I’m a very powerful as a man in my own mind, half the year or more, in that I do not fear death and consider my well plotted deeds heroic. But, I’m jointly powerless before a woman who believes in me and so it was fate, misplaced silly fate, that when the war ended for me and none of my confidants were attentive, obsessively, yes obsessively I made a new muse out of a tavern shot girl. Not amorous, not frivolous. I just wanted that pretty stranger with the Vodka bullets to care if I was alive. I wanted her to believe in my seriousness as a hero and an artist, I wanted her to trust in my, ineffable might. And clearly I simply wanted to go to bed with her, because it had been one whole year since the last kiss of Polina Mazaeva until the unruly discharge from Bellevue hospital.
I’m about to try and tell you a story about my year in Kurdistan, but there is something hard about even doing that. For one thing, the ghosts of the dead haunt me. For another, many of my friends are dead, Rojava is being overrun by the Turkish military and I’m far from the front in America; survived to live my life and feel like nothing is where it should be.

SCENE 1
“A Pontification on the Middle East”

I was watching the news from the safe house, then the power went out. They’re killing Palestinians in Jerusalem again for the third day straight over metal detectors near the Dome of the Rock. Syria is completely on fire; the Russians are making slow, and decimating progress. Iran is fighting Saudi Arabia in Yemen. Iraq is on fire, the Americans are directing the Coalition of crusaders, and Mosul has almost fallen. Libya is on fire; they say life was normal just five years ago. There are rumblings about a major American troop increase in Afghanistan. The entire region is one powder keg after another. One group of after another ready to kill each other so the big powers get their oil.
The temperature reached 112 degrees today, the power goes out several times a day in this city. I’m on the roof of a housing complex to the South of the 60-meter road in Erbil. A referendum for independence is coming in two months. It’s a two-hour drive in any direction to an atrocity, but I’m bored. I’m drained, and I’m bored, and I’m wondering what my place in this is. There are things I can tell a person, and they think I’ve read a lot or traveled a lot, but mostly there are things I tell people that they can’t see and they can’t hear, so they shut down. They can’t believe the conclusions I’ve come to since they condemn me, they condemn where I’m from; they are uncomfortable conclusions about why this war is happening. Why it has always been happening. Who and what are to blame.
I have about 48 hours before the car picks me. These Kurdish gangsters with sympathies toward the resistance are going to put me and four duffle bags of supplies in a car and bring me to another city, to wait for a truck and then I’ll be moving on the road to where I’m supposed to be. Where I’ve been invited to work. I have many detractors. But I also have unfathomable love for the game.
Erbil is stunning in its dull mediocrity. It’s wasted potential and its sprawl. I’m seated in the fading dusk and dead lights; I’m about to make my last broadcast before I go over the border and then really, who knows. The city is shaped like a melted clock, a 7,000-year-old time piece with a citadel at its center. I’m on the roof of the New Ishkan apartment complex; I’m about to try and explain what’s happening here. For anyone who cares. Probably a couple of officers in the underground, only my mother and maybe Daria watch the whole broadcast. No, I’m lying to myself, probably I’m only talking to myself on the roof.
The trouble with seeing things no one else sees is that they call you insane. But, I’m not crazy. The world is crazy, the world is fucking insane. I don’t have a broad audience, and I have a small, devoted following from my previous works. I wonder what to say this time at the fire station; the rebel radio I send back to Brooklyn and places outside this wasteland.
Is there a message from all the things I’ve learned? Is there anything anyone needs to hear? Isn’t there anyone left to tell a story too? I don’t think so. Everyone knows what I’m doing here and how it will end. For I am not writing a novel, I am diffusing a series of dreams into a manuscript in English for a tiny chapter of the book of life that was manifested a year ago.
I smoke a cigarette. I comb my hair. I imagine she’s watching me. I look out over the city that never was and probably won’t be ‘the next Dubai.’ I pick up my notes and turn on the camera. I try and explain to the resistance and those who love me, the context of massive events that brought my unit here to Kurdistan.
I read and record segments one minute apart. As if anyone actually follows my posts on social media or has anything vital to contribute.
When you open your paper, turn on your TV, or boot up your smart phone and attempt to understand what is happening; you are already tuned into people paid well to validate a view you already had. One such view is that there is a war going on between Islam and the mainly Christian Eastern & Western Bloc that affects China too. Both Russia and the United States have been poorly managing Wahhabi-Salafist terror in their countries since long before the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991. The United States by funding it and Russia by committing war crimes against whoever deploys it against them or their interests. China has been battling Islamic separatists that wish to section off 1/5 of its country to the Northwest in Xinjiang province. Perhaps what you tune into tells you it’s all some massive clash of civilizations. This ridiculous idea was popularized by Samuel Huntington in 1992. Other writers and pundits declare the events all part of a long running proxy war extending past when Francis Fukuyama ended history after the Cold War. If you’re are deeply religious, and much of the human race is, you might periodically wonder if this is the end of times. As humans have wondered many, many times before. Neither the media nor the thought leaders nor your religious intuitions are paid by telling the truth. They are paid because you like how they interpret horrifying, unpredictable events for you. You subscribe to their interpretations because they assist you in rationalizing, wholly irrational human behavior, predatory government malfeasance and social policies that enable an endless war.
From your house of worship or via your TV screen you might try to rationalize what’s happening here in the killing fields of the Middle East through the prism of your respective prophet’s scriptures or favorite pundit’s words. The news is a nasty circular addiction. A part of religion is a repetitive act of denial. You almost have always to deny that vast portions of the rest of your species are even loved or protected by God. Which allows a dynamic whereby you systematically begin to not care as much about whole blocks of other humans, based on something you must have faith is real, but cannot be proved by science or reason. So in many regards, any group of religious practitioners that equate a Godly protection to a set of scriptures always provably re-written and re-translated by fallible man. It is implicit to accept the belief that your hands are washed of much of humanities manifest suffering. But the wretched of the earth are statistically Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu in relatively equal proportions. But let’s look at the flood of violence from this phase of this longest war today. Let’s try and be dispassionate, objective and ration without losing our solidarity or our souls.
I could only assure you on the political science and international development level it is wholly rational what is happening in the world today. Outside of wars for diminishing resources, prophetic revelations and clashing civilizations. It is the product of high-level planning and an absence of low-level care. We might extend that to the human tragedy generally and the Middle East Highly specifically.
The steak is just as tender in New York, London, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, St. Petersburg and Moscow. The politicians in these places and those who manage them live in the similar style of homes. People that own energy companies, big financial firms, manage banks, own the arms or information tech companies; their mansions and yachts have similar styles and elite luxury amenities. The suits that their businessmen wear are of similar styles and fine materials. The sports cars their kid’s drive are all around the same speeds, and costs since luxury items are all price fixed. The women for sale in all three power blocks have the same price tags and services for sale.
Thank God the “Cold War” is supposedly over because, for a cold war, a kind of hot series of medium scale wars, civil wars, and highly bloody armed events occurred in almost every single country on earth between 1945 and 1991. Although most respective national histories are total propaganda by omission, it has been agreed in the West that Communism was soundly disproven and defeated and of course the West “won.”
We are supposedly all very democratic in the West. We have Republican or Parliamentary governments with generally only two major opposing parties and free-market economies. The Russians supposedly are that thing called Democracy as well. After all the looting that happened in the gangland 90’s under the Shock Doctrines. Nigeria will tell you it’s a democracy and so will a lot of other people. It’s hard to find a Kurdish political party without the word Democracy in it. The absolute most war town, brutal, depraved place on earth is called the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In reality, we all have highly Managed-Democracies. Scripted even. They are managed differently in Russia than in the West. Also generally with two parties of angry, loud ambitious lawyers, technocrats and oligarchs trying their hands in populism. In European social democracies, after looting the entire earth, they raised taxes and funded social services. Well certainly in Russia with only one relevant party Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia), democracy is slightly easier to implement. In Russia, the Communist Party is still the second biggest party. Anyone effectively opposing United Russia or even writing about in a negative way is promptly killed. Its corruption is referred to as the “party of crooks and thieves.” But most Russians agree that Vladimir Putin has restored security and dignity to Russia. So America is a two party state and Russia is also two party state. Designer consumer goods are readily available in both places. Russians as the losers of the Cold War are demographically poorer than Americans, but Russians have higher rates of university graduation and literacy. Both have pretty enormous domestic reserves of fossil fuels. Which is why their ferocious Middle Eastern proxy war can’t be just about oil at all.
China has a one party state, and it is run by the Communist Party. Its impressive economic growth since embracing of State Capitalism in 1986 has propelled it to be a clear contester to the Western Hegemony. China is disinterested in both military interventions and experiments in the Middle East. All three powers have increasing energy needs which American and Russia can meet in their borders and China cannot, who therefore has elected to colonize every country in Africa. However, energy resources; oil and natural gas are the engines of both war and development.
America in 2017 has willing proxies in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. Its base for all Central Command, Military operations is in Qatar. The USA invaded Iraq in 2003. It mostly withdrew in 2011 but has returned to contain ISIS in 2014. Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf States are Western oil clients, but all of them have intrinsic ties to the propagation of radical Islam.
Russia has a long term client relationship with Syria and it’s only Mediterranean Naval base there. Along with Crimea which it annexed in 2014 on the black sea, this is one of only two warm water ports. They key Russian regional ally is Iran. Iran as a result of the American invasion of Iraq controls everything in Iraq that is not Iraqi Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle and the remains of the ISIS held areas (Ar Raqqah, Anbar, Al-Hawijab, Deir-Ez-Zur). Most people here call them Daesh, the ac
For over 2/3rds of the human race the very events critical to their respective, overlapping and at times contradictory faiths took place in Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia. For followers of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha’i, and numerous sub-sects of each this is where their very prophets were all born, raised and communicated with the source.
From the very moment, according to their own religious texts, that the Israelites arrived out of Egypt there has never, accept for several long authoritarian periods of Islamic Caliphate rule been one even year of continuous peace. The Crusades were a several hundred year attempt to establish a genocidal, white supremacist Catholic foot hold in an area only slightly larger than modern Israel. When not seeking to expand Islam into ¼ of the earth or repulsing Christian incursions; the Abbasids, the Umayyads and the Ottomans were fighting constant wars with Mongol hordes, each other or the long running Sunni v. Shi’a wars.
There is nothing that can be written academically or rhetorically, presented on any medium to give the West or the East a new conscience. It is now a simple matter of public record that the developed world has accepted that the only obligations it has to the maldeveloped world is periodic mitigation. Famines, wars, floods and disease epidemics are to be poorly managed by direct aid. Multilateral efforts though the United Nations are to be the extent of collaboration. NGOs will proliferate as donor trends determine. Regular military intervention will remove or shore up state systems intrinsically hostile to any of the three centers of global power; named Washington, Moscow and Beijing.
The World Wars and Cold Wars brought humanity closest it has come to total self-destruction. But, there was nothing particularly stable about the Pax-American from 1991 to 2001. The Russian and Chinese embrace of free market capitalism has not altered in the slightest way how they maneuver as states toward their citizens and world. Albeit with fewer disasters periods of social engineering. There is nothing particularly comforting about the Chinese hegemony when it fully arrives.
Consistent for nearly 100 years has been the Middle Eastern theater of a war which changes locations, ideologies, factions and names; but is in fact a singular ongoing war.
If we accept the validity of real politics being intrinsically hostile an equity in the international order; if we excuse every type of growing human rights violation as explained in national interest; the center cannot hold. The earth has only so much capacity economic pillage. The weapons of war are exponentially more destructive. The exodus towards the West is overwhelming. We cannot prove broad conspiracy nor do we have to. We cannot confirm or deny something in the human nature is self-interested, violent and cruel.
But, we can truly verify a coherent, consistent willingness for wealthy nations to prey on the developing ones and keep them deliberately dependent and maldeveloped.
The Middle East has been in flames since 1919 and it is irresponsible to pretend that has something to do with civilization, religion, or cultural clashes. It fundamentally has to do with two forces pushing from the East and the West toward an energy resource. But that is in itself simplistic since both the United States and Russia have some of the largest proven reserves under their own territory. A Middle Eastern market for the weapons needed for constant warfare a vital aspect. Both the Western and Eastern Blocs are seeking to control the oil in the ground and sell the dozens of Middle Eastern players’ advanced and simple tools for defense but mostly more killing. The various holy sites for the innumerous religious believers who convolutes the basic thesis, but is the third pillar to the equation. Were there no oil, there would be no willingness to arm so many opposing players. Observe Somalia where Muslims in a desert and absolutely no Western powers really care until high profile piracy occurs.
Were there no arms racing there could only be small wars. Without political actors in Moscow as well as Washington, London and Berlin there couldn’t be such a cauldron of bloodshed. There have been countless stated rationales for intervention, proxy arming and invasion. It is nearly impossible to convince the democracies they ever did anything to escalate this. The war with the Islamic State has become a focal point, almost an obsession for everyone, but it is the latest manifestation of a long running problem.
Before there was ever such a thing as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the usual pundits and politicians screamed Cold War. Then East and West heavily armed everyone. Israel then tripled its land mass, Syria became the Russian proxy, and Egypt changed opportunistically sides. Next, they screamed contain the Iranian Revolution than the West armed Saddam Hussain. A gruesome eight-year war later Iraq genocided the Kurds. During this period to give the USSR their own Vietnam, the Saudis, Pakistanis, and American created Al-Qaeda and turned then Communist Afghanistan into the ungovernable Islamist warzone it is today. Then Saddam annexed Kuwait, and the West invaded. Several atrocities against Shi’a and Kurds later he remained in power. The pundits screamed loudest after September 11th, 2001 and the Global War on Terror began. Russian atrocities in Chechnya in 1990’s where 1 in 7 Chechens was killed were replied to with the 2002 Beslan and 2004 Ord Nost Hostage crises. Hundreds of innocent Russian hostages died in both events. An estimated 240,000 people had died in Chechnya in two wars which leveled the separatist state. Most regimes including Israel saw waves of protest in 2011 over domestic grievances and inequality during the Arab Spring. Virtually all regimes besides Tunisia quelled the uprisings. Civil War broke out in Libya and Syria. By 2014 Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria were all in total unrest, ashes, and anarchy. The corrupt military dictatorship of Egypt had been overthrown, then restored with U.S. intervention. Saudi Arabia and Iran were fighting proxy wars all over the region.
Turkey has clearly logistically enabled the creation of a Sunni oriented, Wahhabi Salafist ultra-fundamentalist Jihadist entity which took the world by complete surprise. Saudi Arabia has long provided it with a hateful Sunni version of Islam. Qatari actors gave its sophisticated propaganda and branding. Pakistan coordinated it as they had in Yemen and Afghanistan.
Then Islamic State took dozens of Syrian and Iraqi cities including Mosul, had come dangerously close to taking Baghdad, before turned back by Iranian coordinated militias and Kurdish Democratic Confederalists. The Peshmerga and the Iraqi military had fled in varying ways exposing civilians to atrocity.
It is actually not important to indict who thought up the Islamic State, who planned it. Some say Gulf States, some say Iran, Israel and the West. The evidence though is clear that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all fueled its development and Pakistan has the only intelligence service capable of working out the variables. It is child like to believe it was created by Islamists and Ba’athist officers in U.S. custody.
I take a little break to watch the last lights of the sun dip below the low range to the West of the city. The whole roof is lit up in white neon lights. I continue the broadcast.
It can be difficult to figure out what’s happening out here in the Middle East. It can become an abstraction of alien cultures, conflicts and ethnic configurations that are easily blurred to an uncaring or untrained eye. It is hard to get your head around how the alleged cradle of human civilization became such an everlasting intractable bloodbath. Perhaps it is only the responsibility of the Western audience to know what is happening because the collateral of the carnage is spilling over into their European and American cities. No one will perhaps admit that, but yes. And it is also important to render the Middle East more human because the weapons distributed here are from the West or Russia. The oil being pumped is being bought and sold by Western or Russian firms. Most people living in the West don’t actually know what Kurdistan is, but that doesn’t say so much as most people in the West don’t know where a lot of things are. I would go so far as to say the majority don’t care.
Most probably won’t admit that they didn’t know that the Kurdish ethnic group existed until 2014. It was not until various pundits made it clear “the Kurds” were actively fighting the Islamic State did anyone ever hear about things like the Peshmerga, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) or about Kurds in general. The perversity and violence of ISIS kept it in the headlines for the past three years and the Kurdish issue has increasingly been at the forefront of understating geopolitics in the region. Particularly because Iraqi Kurdistan, administered by the Kurdish Regional Government as an autonomous area since 2003 is set to hold it next referendum vote for independence on September 27th, 2017. And it is sitting on top of the fifth largest proven crude oil reserve on earth. No one should totally wash their hands of what happens in the Middle East because its conflicts are fought with Western and Russian weapons, paid for by American and Russian tax dollars. The companies pumping out the oil are largely Western or Russian based firms.
There are in fact a lot of players, but all of them fall into four big tents; Western Allies led by the United States Military and Coalition forces. Russian Allies most prominently Syria and Iran. Gulf Sunni Client States that claim they are Western Allies but can call be linked to the Islamic State through one or two acts of deductive reasoning. And the 40 million Kurds spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. The Kurds, who are world’s largest stateless people are seeking some viable means to safe guard their long abused community and of course, get rich off the oil under their Iraqi territory.
I plan to be very repetitive with names and places that matter. Or places that have more than one name so the reader can try and learn them. There are a lot of overlapping players, a lot of acronyms, national interests, international interests and underlying religious and ethnic antagonisms that go back thousands of years. There is a very long history of desert prophesy. This is certainly the land of Zoroaster, Abraham, Bab & Bahaullah (Iran); Moses (Egypt), Jesus (Israel/Palestine) and Muhammed (Saudi Arabia). Well documented and repetitive ethnic killing is reality of life here for over 4,000 years punctuated by foreign occupations, colonies and Islamic empires. Devastating foreign invasions on behalf of Mongolia and Europe altered the entire composition of the region; culturally, politically and genetically. There is deep rooted tribalism which has to be understood as a means of both loyalty and social organization. There are monarchy’s created by Europeans to crown their favored Bedouins as oil clients. There was the re-birth of the Jewish State for the third time in three thousand years. There was the re-birth of the revolutionary Shi’a State in Iran which carries a similar sense of Messianic optimism and zealous indoctrination to preserve for Shi’a what the Jewish one does for Jews. There is absolutely a more recent history since 1947 of several large and also small wars and protracted atrocities. Such as those experienced by the Palestinians at the hands of almost everyone in the region. You could rightfully say with a straight face that since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919; there has been a constant war playing out inside every single country of the region.
The Western Media’s linguistic and cultural detachment from these antagonistic protagonists’ borders on being a crude Orientalism. An anti-Islamism mixed with a thirst for covering and sensationalizing bloodshed. The fact that suicide bombs are regularly going off in Western cities has made everything more immediate, more visceral. But it is undeniable now that some of the biggest beneficiaries of being Western petro-colony clients (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman) can be linked to funding and supporting Wahhabi Salafist doctrines when not being caught outright funding the Islamic State.
And frankly the enduring miserable heat doesn’t help anything. While obsessing, that is the word I would use; obsessing about the about the regions 5 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians of Greater Israel, West Bank and Gaza takes up a lot of printed word on the subject. The enduring issue, the issue that everyone needs to become more fluent in is the question of Kurdistan.
Beyond the wars, the ceaseless violence and the conservative, mostly intolerant, male dominated nature of Middle Eastern society in general; and Arab, Kurdish and Persian society in particular. All anthropological and political variants are made worse by what I would call a claustrophobia. A feeling of being trapped in small spaces disguised as holy lands with nowhere to really go. Or fear of impending genocide, which affects all the players out here, and there are many. As I did not write this article for academics, let me paint with broad brushstrokes a paragraph on demographics.
There are 35-40 million Kurds mostly spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are mostly Sunni Muslims., There are two primary types of Muslims; Sunni and Shi’a which differ on a range of practices and beliefs, but are mostly divided over who was the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhamad. Shi’a declare it was Muhammad’s cousin and son in law Ali and have been historically persecuted by the Sunni caliphates and rulers. Sunni Islam, which is the majority sectarian faction of global Islam (say 70-90%) Shi’ism is the smaller (say 10-20%) faction of the Ummah, or Global Muslim community which is about 1/3 of the human race.
Kurds are also the world’s largest stateless people. Linguistically, culturally, spiritually and often militarily Kurds are great deal like Persians.
The nation of Iran which is a Revolutionary Shiite Islamic State since 1979, is about 65% Persian or say 50 of its 80 million people. There are also 9-10 million Kurds living there. While they are certainly not free from Iranian Shar’iah law; they are generally better treated than everywhere else in their historic lands of settlement. In Iraq a genocide called Anfal happened in 1988 which brutally killed 180,000 Kurds. In Turkey Kurds and Turks have been in an open civil war since 1984. In Syria, Arabization campaigns and forced resettlement made them third class citizens. Iran had an anti-Western, anti-Shah revolution in 1979. The United States promptly armed U.S. client Saddam Hussain to the teeth. Then sold guns secretly to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair. While North Korea, Libya and Israel all sold arms and also secretly advised the Iranians. An 8 year war occurred fought in the style of World War I with trenches and poison gas where over a million people were killed. In the last days of the war Saddam Hussain ordered Al-Anfal or the systematic killing of 180,000 Kurdish Iraqis.
The nation that used to be Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussain and the Ba’ath Party until 2003 when the US successfully “liberated” the nation. Only the Kurds would call it liberation as both the Shi’a and Sunni Iraqi Arabs both for the most part hate the United States. The Ba’ath party which was nominally Arab-Socialism but really a one man dictatorship is also found in Syria. It is the political party of President Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite, but we will come back to that.
It is certainly neither irrational nor poorly documented that historically everyone out here has at one point tried to annihilate each other. As most of the groups out here have at one point, or are actively today trying to obliterate each other. None of this is helped by the obvious fact that biggest Western powers & Russia cannot and will not allow control of natural resources under Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States to go unspoken for. Or be nationalized. Or be made inaccessible by virtually endless conflict.
Hewler (which again is Erbil in Arabic) is a city of 2-3 million, the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. It has a tall mound fortification in the very center. The Citadel which has been the fortress defending Erbil (Hewler s all Kurds call it) for nearly 5,000 years. Like Moscow, Hewler is a series of ring roads; the 30 meter, the 60 meter, the 100 meter and the 120 meter which are punctuated nearly every other block by a 5 Star Hotel. In 2011-2014 a building boom erupted and everyone was making money.
By the time I arrived in Iraq, or Kurdistan (as it is called by most of the Kurds living in this KRG zone); ISIS was fully driven back into Iraq proper by Peshmerga forces. Mosul was completely besieged by the Iraqi Military with nightly airstrikes hitting the positions in the Old City and Medical City.
The city of Hewler was once dubbed “the next Dubai”, but that’s a very dubious claim. For one thing, Hewler or Erbil isn’t any fun. For another, however you define that word fun, Erbil is not either pretty or architecturally impressive. That is because it is estimated that under the region of North Iraq; called the Kurdish Regional Government, autonomous since 2003 and home to 5 million Kurds and various minorities such as Turkmen (former Turkish administrative class of the Ottoman empire), Assyrian Christians (Syriacs & Chaldeans), Yazidis (recently genocided by ISIS), whatever is left of Iraq’s Baha’i community and a growing community of Western expats; the KRG sits on top of what might the fifth largest proven oil reserve.
But, in 2014 ISIS got about half an hour west of Erbil and was stopped by Coalition airstrikes in Makhmar. Everyone panicked and had begun evacuating their family’s hours before. ISIS had taken Mosul, then a city of over 2 million and Iraq’s second biggest with under 400 fighters. ISIS had invaded Sinjar (Shengal), the historic home of the Yazidis, murdered over 5,000 men; carried an unknown number of women into sexual slavery and trapped most of the remaining Yazidis up in the mountains. The Peshmerga, the military forces of KRG’s two main parties; KDP (Democratic Party of Kurdistan which controls Erbil) and PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan which controls Sulymanyia, which is also called Slemani) had basically retreated from both Sinjar and their positions in Makhmar and were incapable of repulsing the 2014 ISIS offensive. What is now a matter of historical records; the US air force hammered ISIS positions in Makhmar and stopped the advance there and the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) proxies; YPG Militia (People’s Protection Units) and the PKK armed wing People’s Defense Forces invaded Sinjar, cracked open a corridor for safety and by all accounts saved the majority of the remaining trapped civilians there.
Speaking on the subject of claustrophobia. There are an estimated 35-40 million Kurds; 14.3-20 million in south east Turkey, 8.2-12 million in Iran, 5.6-8.5 million in the Kurdistan autonomous region in North Iraq and 2-3.6 million in Northern Syria (Rojava). Armenia, Azerbaijan & Georgia all have populations which total under 50,000. 2 million Kurds live in the diaspora; particularly concentrated in Germany, France, Sweden and Netherlands. As well as in Russian Federation, Belgium, United Kingdom, Kazakhstan, Switzerland, Denmark, Jordan, Austria, Greece, USA, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, Finland and Australia (highest to lowest concentrations).
As you can see from the spreads of these numbers; no on actually knows how many Kurds there are. Politically speaking these numbers are very problematic, since Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran in their own various ways and strategies would all prefer the Kurds not to even exist.
As stated in 1988, towards the end brutal eight year of the Iraq-Iran War, in Chamchamal Iraq, the Baath Party under Saddam Hussein began a genocide against the Iraqi Kurds. 180,000 Iraqi Kurds were loaded onto trucks, placed in concentration camps, driven to the south of the country, ordered to dig a ditch then shot and buried. Poison gas was used in the city it Halabja. Tens of thousands of villages around Chumchumal were emptied. The majority of the Kurdish population in that region fled to Iran. Only the US invasion of 1991 slowed the genocide. The invasion in 2003 basically allowed the PUK and KDP to seize northern Iraq and make it autonomous. In 2014 the KRG was fiscally cut off from Baghdad and began selling oil directly to Turkish, Russian, American and Israeli companies.
There are only Iraqi flag in Erbil inside 5 Star Hotels and most government buildings. But the red, white, green emblazoned with a yellow multipronged star is virtually everywhere else.
The Kurds a saying, “Our only friend in the mountains,” which related their historic persecution at the hands of an unending series of foreign occupiers’ particularly but limited to Arabs and Turks. Whenever invaded, without fail in thousands of recorded engagements Kurds fall back to the mountains which make up the majority of their imagined, and historic territory; and promptly begin guerrilla wars.
In Turkey, the Turkish government has long banned Kurdish language and culture for years. It has been described as “highly effective cultural genocide” For decades the Kurds were assimilated, repressed and told they were “Mountain Turks”. In 1914 the Ottoman Empire conscripted the Kurds to help carry out the Armenian genocide. Because of official apology, long running dialogues for reconciliation and a common enemy; Turkey, Armenia is one of the biggest supporters of the PKK’s (Kurdish Workers Party) war against the Turkish state. In 1984 the PKK began it’s insurgency against the Turkish state. More than 50,000 Turkish citizens, mostly of Kurdish descent were killed in this still running war. In 1999 PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was arrested, tortured and placed in solitary confinement on an island prison near Istanbul. Reading the works of Murray Bookchan; Ocalan renounced Marxist-Leninism in favor of his own non-state, pro-democratic, gender co-equal, ecologist vision called “Democratic Confederalism” which is now the official PKK ideology. After several failed rounds of ceasefire and peace talks, after the arrest of all Kurdish parliamentarians after the 2017 Coup in Turkey and after repeated bombardment of PKK positions in Iraq, Turkey and Syria as well as great complacency if not active support of the Turkish state to allow ISIS fighters to come and go over its territory; the PKK has been physically pushed back to mountain bunkers in the Qandil Mountains of Northern Iraq and positions in Sinjar, but enjoys enduring popular support amongst Turkish and Syrian Kurds. Its political parties repeatedly are elected to Turkish Parliament, subsequently banned and their leaders jailed.
In 2004 the PKK Syrian affiliate PYD (Democratic Union Party) began rapidly organizing a militia and administrative structures which later protected, then effectively occupied Kurdish areas in Syria during the atrocities of the Syrian Civil War (which has led to the deaths of over 550,000 people largely civilians and displaced over 13 million internally or into neighboring countries in vast miserable series of camps.
In 2014 the PYD (Democratic Union Party) and its militia force the YPG/YPJ (YPG is People’s Protection Units [male] and YPJ is Women’s Protection Units [female]; now numbering around 45,000 light infantry fighters) defeated ISIS in the Siege of Kobani with Peshmerga, PKK and coalition air support. In the past three years the PYD, through its civil society organ the Tev Dem (Movement for Democratic Society); is for the most part governing a 4 million person non-recognized parallel state; three cantons in Northern Syria called the Democratic Federation of Rojava- Northern Syria.
Afrin Canton (to the West of Rojava, but still land locked) is isolated by a Turkish supported incursion toward Aleppo, Syria. Kobani the central canton is connected by land to Jazira Canton which borders the Kurdish Regional Governorate (KRG). Because the KDP (Democratic Party of Kurdistan), majority KRG party based in Hewler/Erbil is incredibly dependent on Turkey for exporting oil and development assistance, actually most of the 5 Star Hotels, apartment towers, and consumer goods in Iraqi Kurdistan are a product of that economic relationship; Rojava is quarantined on all sides. The only people getting in are well resources journalists, NGO workers and people getting smuggled mostly over the Iraq-Syria border through a combination of bribes or Kurdish family loyalties.
The Turkish border to the north is completely sealed. The Free Syrian Army/ Turkish forces occupy a land strip from the Turkish border to the city of al-Bab, which cuts Rojava’s Afrin canton from the Kobani & Jazira Cantons. Jazira borders Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Sinjar Mountains are partly under YPG/PKK/PYD control and partly under Peshmerga/KDP control. All flights to Qamishly go through Damascus. Most of the Syrian territory south of Raqqa is in the hands of ISIS or the Nusra Front (another Al-Qaeda rebrand). The Assad government and its military control of the Qamishly airport make it possible to have supplies airlifted in and about 20 NGOs, can go over the Syrian/Iraqi border.
The YPG/YPJ making up the majority of the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) has pushed ISIS back to Raqqa (which is now completely surrounded by Syrian Democratic Forces). The YPG/YPJ has been politically dressed up as the SDF incorporating varying smaller militia forced from ethnic minorities and various rebranded Syrian Free Army groups. This pluralism for US Government and military intelligence foreign donors has occurred because of two reasons:
1) Virtually every Western nation has declared the PKK a terrorist group, so overtly supporting the PYD militia YPG/YPJ is outrageous and offensive to Turkey, a critical regional ally. Who spends way more time bombing the Kurds in PKK and YPG rather than do anything constructive to oppose ISIS. So SDF is a thinly veiled way for the United States to say it isn’t directly funding a group it called a terrorist group to fight another terrorist group, but that is exactly what is happening. Turkey has bombed Iraq and invaded Syria by proxy forces cutting off the Western most Rojava canton Afrin from its two eastern cantons Kobani & Jazira.
2) The YPG/YPJ is along with the Iran controlled Iraqi Shiite PMU (Popular Mobilization Forces, also called Al-Hashd Al-Sha’abi the only credible ground forces in consistently rolling back ISIS. Without the PMU, ISIS might have taken Baghdad in 2014. Without YPG, Rojava would have been over run. The PMU is regularly accused of atrocities and is controlled via Shi’a clerics loyal to Iran. The YPG/YPJ should be viewed as a military asset of the PKK militarily expedient to the U.S. led Coalition “Enduring Resolve” Operational needs.
3) When ISIS is defeated, the PMU will be used against Peshmerga in Kirkuk. Turkey, the Baathist Military and NUSRA front will be attacking Rojava in different configurations. SDF is an effort on the PYD part to make the militia forces more multiethnic.
Mosul fell to the Iraqi military around July 9th, 2017 after nine months of fierce urban warfare. Raqqa is expected to fall by the end of the summer. ISIS redoubts in Tel Afar, Iraq (a historic Turkman city) were predicted to fall by September, but mysteriously the city was found to be empty after just eight days of fighting by the end of August. Hawijja, Iraq historically a Kurdish city long emptied and Arabized by the genocide is widely believed to be one of the most pro-Wahhabi Salafist centers as far as the population’s sympathies. Its population supported Al Qaeda, currently supports ISIS and regularly launches terror attacks in neighboring Kirkuk. There is desolate barren zone in the Anbar a province (outside Kurdish zone) which also needs to be pacified.
All of this leads analysts to conclude ISIS will be militarily defeated in all major remaining Iraqi and Syrian cities by January 2019. Importantly Raqqa, it’s only remaining official headquarters could be over by November. The mop up operations in and around Deir Azure will pale in comparison to the possibility of war between the Pesh Merga against the Hashid al Shabi and Iraqi Army in Kirkuk.

We have to get the unit into Syria and remain on the ground for around two years without being captured by the revolution or the enemy. There’s eight of us scheduled to go in, I recruited all the others one by one over three years. This entire context will not be affected by the tiny move, a maneuver of smuggling in foreigners into the Rojava Federation; there are many much bigger plots afoot. The commitment on the part of the resistance being minimal, this is a campaign of medical force multiplication. Surely any faction is worthy of the training and the system; this one is most in line with the fundamental analysis I have presented.
And that’s all I have to broadcast tonight. Probably not anything most analysts didn’t come to in varying degrees. If Daria saw it she’s bored. If Polina Mazaeva, my Russian lover and confidant saw it she’s annoyed, or worried or both. Daria is my old partner back in Brooklyn. Polina is my editor and my lover in theory. She lives in the City of Nizhny Novgorod in Russia. In reality Polina only has a little bit of emotional skin in this game.
I had my tongue between the legs of a foreign correspondent at a party a few weeks ago and she told about a room she found in Mosul filled with Turkish visa stamps, it was just the latest piece of conspicuous circumstantial evidence.
Everybody thought Talafar would be a battle not a ghost town.
The forces assembled in Rojava are democratic, feminist, ecological and non-aligned. They are multi ethnic, they are armed for defense. They are on good terms with the US and Russia alike. There isn’t any room here for mistakes. I will leave in two days with my companions are we will begin implementation of the training program as soon it is possible. My time in Iraq has been a series of disappointing nightmares, but that is not all fair. For I have seen some very heroic things amid all the catastrophes. But I will first the stories of many of the heroes and villains I met along the roads here as I awaited by passage to a place that inspires so much hope and fear. For everything out here is a circus of death, but it is not as though this is unusual for the region or the world. Life continues here amid all this. For both the foreigners, the colonists and locals all have human intentions. Human lives that the media and carnage obstructs the story of.
There are things I could teach you about politics and religion, that are lost on the great mass of self-interested and self-serving antagonistic protagonists described here. But those things are the back drop for our tale.
This story will attempt to provide a glimpse of the people that lived in or were drawn toward the fires of the killing fields when one world ended and new world began.

Prologue

“Hand Cuffs or a Bag”

The air ship lands in Erbil. Welcoming me on the morning of Ramadan 2017 to the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth, are bored but friendly police and overweight militia men. Erbil was voted “the next Dubai” a few years ago. Before it almost fell to the Islamic State bandits and the price of its illegal oil sales dropped out. It’s still busy and modern and very, very secret policed. The Iraqi Kurds and their Peshmerga militia of the KDP; Kurdistan Democratic Party based here almost fled in sand person baggy mass when ISIS got within half-an-hour away and got turned back by the god fire called coalition airstrikes.
When I leave this place, it will be in hand cuffs or a bag. Or I will walk out the door of a plane in Cuban made linen shirt, with a fake gold watch and a green partisan cap. One of the brothers will show up with a stolen car and get me at the airport. A Russian woman is going to throw her arms around me, and then I’m going to go to medical school. Or I’m gonna die here ingloriously and get buried in an unmarked grave, probably after being badly tortured.
But this is what they trained me for. Grandiose dreams verses nightmares.
The other night I helped the Kurdish Mafia sell a list of 5,700 ISIS fighters to an unknown foreign intelligence buyers in Beirut, probably Russia or Israel. In return for my traffic and troubles, they gave me the keys to an empty apartment in the South of the City or Erbil, and $300 to buy some food. Since I’ve been here about two months; I arrived on the day Ramadan began in late May I’ve traded medical skills and cunning, also hard drives and flags for food and shelter. The supporting mini-brigade of volunteers will all be coming in on different flights, on various days. I’m the second man in. The rest will come in the summer and fall. Some are healers and some a professional killers, but I think we’re all a little crazy to be doing this pro bono.
I arrived in Erbil, called Hewler by the Kurds, with $200 dollars American and two black boxes of cargo; the necessary instruments I need to establish a clandestine camp for emergency medical training somewhere inside Greater Kurdistan, but most likely in Northern Syria. In the autonomous zone called Rojava. The quickly expanding liberated territory with what reports describe as an obsession with Abdullah Ocalan, and his paradigms about women’s liberation, ecology and non-state democracy. Anything could be happening there, but all I know is they are crush the ISIS Cheta kilometer by kilometer at rapid speeds. Raqqa is completely besieged by the YPG, which stands for People’s Protection Units, the largest mostly Kurdish fighting force the U.S. backed coalition fights through in Syria. Cheta, means bandit, which is what we all equate the Islamic State fanatics with being.
I am a non-ideological man. Well, I was until recently. I have to say much of the writing of Abdullah Ocalan is very compelling. The Kurds declare that every life needs a leader, and perhaps that is true; because I am not as hard as Apo, he sets a path of incredible elevation. He demonstrates the impossible is sometimes possible, he does it from prison. Though I play an activist of sorts on the stage of life, I’m not one to take a creed and make it my religion. I am also a non-sentimental man. Though I cry sometimes for myself and my predicament as an agent of progress. An aspiring revolutionary or a real one maybe. Though it is my profession to indiscriminately prolong human life. I’m a paramedic. Waiting for me back in Russia, though how long she will wait is anyone’s guess; is a lover with a young son who isn’t mine. An age seven Syrian Russian Druse, his father fucked off to Dubai. Waiting for me back in New York City is a mother and father who are scared, my father is also slowly dying. My brother runs a racket in Barcelona. It’s a growing but benign racket. Waiting back in Brooklyn and Haiti is an underground army of nearly 2,000 ambulance workers and their sympathizers. My 33 birthday was very well attended as was my Passover Seder. Though history if it remembers will both absolve me, but call me a Jew, it is only half of me. My sentimental half you ask? No, my cunning, ruthless and deceptive half.
You will have to forgive me when I say that out here I know I am completely alone. What I see, and what drives me day by day up the treacherous mountain out of this wasteland toward my goals is bigger than me. But it is not a political theory or an imaginary friend.

On Non-Governmental Organizations

To prey upon the poorest of the poor once must invent an ethical pretext. I now will explore the relationship between non-governmental organizations and this great crime from the standpoint of our ethical development theorists. From Port-Au-Prince to Kigali; people must know the truth.

Poverty is a form of genocide. To disguise its vast and incorrigibly destructive effects a vast architecture has been erected in all sectors to carry out a massive & distracting scheme. It has perpetrators, beneficiaries and collaborators. I wish to briefly explore instances and dynamics of such collaboration within the global system illustrating their role in incredible structural violence (Galtung, 1969)(Farmer, 2003). Paramount to the maintenance of both dependency and ensuing extractive atrocities are both plausible deniability and diffusion of responsibility. The role and utilization of the NGO within the scheme of the development enterprise meets both ends.

In 1876 King Leopold of Belgium called a grand congress of scientists, explorers, cartographers and dignitaries to Brussels to found the International African Association. Its stated purpose was humanitarian intervention and the propagation of civilization in Central Africa. In 1884 the USA recognized his claims and later that year at the infamous Berlin Conference, all of Europe followed suit. By the 1908 an international movement lead by Roger Casement & E.D. Morel had helped expose the truth and strip Leopold of his territorial claims. Under the guise of humanitarian imperatives between 5-10 million Congolese had been systematically butchered in a gruesome wholesale rape of the nation (Hochschild, 1998). Rubber cultivation for bicycles harvested via a barbarous slave enterprise owned by one man. The very worst crimes against humanity have always occurred in plain sight but they are always obscured under the pretexts of some civilizing mission or police action.

Horton & Roche begin their ethical analysis dividing the NGO world into four distinct but increasingly overlapping Sectors; Emergency Relief, Service Delivery, Development & Advocacy. A series of complex political-financial configurations have thrust these rapidly proliferating actors into the heart of every former colony under the ethical pretext of poverty alleviation or humanitarian imperative. While seemingly issue based and independent; the majority of NGO funding comes from OECD countries that each have national interests (Dambisa, 2009). There are far more nefarious issues than ‘the pornography of poverty’. The vast deficits of coordination, accountability, fundraising, corporatization and cultural harm are just a starting place (Horton & Roche, p.8). The highest indictment is that not only are NGOs inefficient at all of the four sector objectives; they are a mangy carrot to a robust military intelligence stick. Paul Ronalds may speak of some liberal notion of ‘ethical responsibility of wealthy states; but in the Cold War context; their aim (and that of aid in general) was to keep a developing world nations from going Communist (Rostow, 1960)(Easterly, 2002). Not because of the ideological justifications but because every single nation that aligned with Russia & China was (regardless of one’s ideological imperative) being pulled out of the traditional world economic system (Wallerstein, 1991).
The Cold War is supposedly won; but the core nation status are shifting from the temporary hyperpower U.S.A. & E.U. to a new more multipolar economic alliance of Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa.

What was always more straight forward about doing business with the USSR and in post-Cold War era with China is that they were/are less concerned with the pretense of ethics. Developing national leaders then and today realize the flagrant hypocrisy of former Colonizers that continue the colonial extractive process under the veneer of human rights and democratization. Economically speaking the proof is in on the Washington Consensus; sustained GDP growth occurred only in 4 micro-nations of South-East Asia largely under strict military rule, Chile which was subjected to a CIA backed coup and direct supervision of Chicago School economists and Poland. The real development ‘miracles’ occurred in Vietnam and China (both still lead by the Communist Party) and India (non-aligned) which all completely rejected neoliberal theory (Rodrik, 2002). The ‘ideological war’ was not a contest of objective and belief it was for economic dominance over the world system core; the flow of commodities and trade back to an oligarchic collective. The Russian oligarchy as it is understood today was merely defeated in imperial intention and has diversified its trade systems from central planning to extra-legal trafficking and sale of oil and natural gas to Europe.

Chris Roche writes on ‘donor accountability’ but the macro issue is that money from OECD states have funded global NGO operations that not only failed alleviate poverty; in Sub Saharan Africa it worsened. Realist principles dictated that only nations with market economies could receive aid and direct foreign investment. But that aid was just the basis for dependency. Neo-colonialism as such was about using development aid to buy the loyalty of foreign governments and NGOs to fill the structural void that followed as nation after nation privatized their civil services, sold of state run enterprises to foreign nationals; and marshalled their populations often at gunpoint to fulfil economic imperatives of the ‘North’ in the name of comparative advantage. It is not that the donors were unethical, it was that they were utilized unethically. Adopting children, building orphanages, handing out malaria nets; this substitution effect takes the immediate imperative of welfare off corrupt foreign governments while still providing highly questionable social services. As Chris Roche stresses welfare is a right, aid is not. Which is say states are duty bound to provide social services to their own citizens but not to foreign populations (the Right to Development was voted down by the U.S. and not supported by 8 critical OECD countries.) Das asks if aid agencies are harmful. Not on their own. But regardless of what core power is re-organizing a developing national economy, or how corrupt a developing government is, Cold War over, or not; the effect of NGO proliferation has been to field an entire sector of so-called change agents that simultaneously shield political intent and perpetuate under-development.
How?
Lenneberg examines the dichotomy of ‘local’ respect’ v. ‘radical social change’ in the ethical performance of NGOs; but again subjectivity dominates. Local respect for culture or governmental authority? Propagating radical social change inside the former Soviet Union has been a favorite activity instanced explicitly in Color Revolutions & Open Society Empire. Horton writes about definitions of Cosmopolitanism; which at best is liberal fantasy of globalized New York City and at worst a rose colored lens to project deluded solidarity via increased charitable giving. Wheeler asks if humanitarian aid and intervention is violation of popular sovereignty. Brown replies that those governments that violate human rights have forfeited full sovereignty. Rawls writes on the subject of ‘distributive justice’ but frankly most of the developing nations are run by military dictatorships, plutocrats and leadership that has stolen billions from their population into Swiss banks without batting an eye. The vapid liberal rhetoric such as that of Bull calls for ‘moral concern with the welfare on a world scale’ but all of the liberal development economists live in developed nations, bellies full and secure off resources pillaged by their host governments right hand, while the left introduced a legion of NGOS.

We are in full agreement with Pogge; that poverty is an institutional arrangement. And so is aid and NGO development. Manufactured inefficiencies aside on the operational level, collaboration with vile regimes. If Linklater posits do no harm and cosmopolitanism I retort that what makes an NGO Class so nefarious is that they are middle persons between the carnage and beneficiaries; used in this context to mean the citizens of the developed nations that are the proven monetary beneficiaries of aid. Measured against the often far less than 0.7 % GDP pledged by developed nations they make a lion’s share in interest debt, commodity transfer and favorable access to resources. Singer’s utilitarian maximalism is another useless and offensive impetus. While I agree that maximizing good for the greatest number is clearly a wonderful liberal theory; all of these ethical practitioners ignore the scope of devastation and point blame to components not systemic parts. The nearly criminal collaboration of Stiglitz and Sachs informs us that ‘clinical economic’ neoliberalism tailored is a way forward. But, Shiva takes a more forward approach perhaps further than Pogge; globalization is inconsistent with justice; it is a ‘war on the poor (Shiva, 2005). It may well be that the theorists have been living too many days in the developed world, benefiting off its security and forgetting that cosmopolitanism is vain self-serving liberal paradigm, at its realistic best a cocktail. At its worst globetrotting development practitioners paying lip service to rights and capabilities but openly colluding with tyrants and exploiters.

The rise of the BRICS will mean that aid as such will shift from NGO meddling technocracy and international welfare; debilitating dependency to a new dependency. China’s rise especially means that developing nation oligarchies do not have to pay lip service to human rights. They do not have to allow meddling structural adjustment. Hardin’s lifeboat ethics will set in deeper in the so-called Global North as China consolidates. More Euro-Americans will doubt the efficacy of NGOs and call for limits on the already meager aid. Shue’s ethics over nationalism; its call for achieving basic rights in a structural way is not enough. Human rights discourse is unknown still to vast segments of humanity and when needs are not met there can be no talk of rights. Nussbaum has her short list. As does Sen. In varying ways theses are pathetic cop outs and pedantic simplifications. The Human Rights treaties are unenforceable and the lip service they are paid is still grim mockery. Kieran Donahue writes that collaboration amongst NGOs is the exception not the rule (Uvin, 2002)(Slim, 2002). Uvin demonstrates in a careful case study of the Rwandan genocide that the NGOs were aware of everything. That full genocide planning went on in front of all the biggest players and right up until the genocide the IMF was calling Rwanda a poster child of development (Uvin, 1998).

Roche talks about factors that inhibit organization learning, why in place like Haiti with more NGOs per capita (10,800 +) than any state besides India dependency thrives and the poor remain extremely poor; belief perseverance, conformity, vivid/pallid dimensions, and wishful thinking dominate. Congo, Rwanda and Haiti are perhaps extreme examples; in other places the NGO class is more or less subtle, more or less deceptive, more or less embracing monitoring and evaluation. More or less aware of the world system changing hands. Lenneberg writes of a cultural relativism; the rights of the North and the culture of the South. But there cannot be any rights without meeting needs. The likes of Sen and Nussbaum and their desire to articulate capabilities, or underlying values that transcend this enforced relativism are frankly offensive. Kelly gives us three brands; the missionaries, the liberal technocrats and the bright eyed cowboys all heading out into the wilderness of poverty and conflict ready to save and make change. In the end, history will and has already passed judgement.
As the poorest of the poor become self-aware and empowered, as needs pass to capabilities, pass to rights and pass to emancipation the unwritten history books will declare; while the collaborators of the NGO class tried to clear their conscience with talk of ethics: we confined them to obsoletion, we called them out as the middlemen of our devastation & dependence; and those simple things they lorded over us; their development, professionalism and privilege; these were things called rights we grasped intuitively. Once the iron heel was off our necks, once the bellies of our crying children were made full; we asked the questions: who asked you to come here? And what was it that you left behind that added value? I suspect the ethical question of the highest regard is; do people, any people have a right to come making changes, dangerous changes to place they have the ability to flee.

History will ask each and every citizen of developed nations and certainly every development practitioner; how did you leverage your privilege? For Leopold’s Ghost will whisper things you do want to hear; that in the name of humanitarian values and rights worth the paper they are printed on; “we participated in a holocaust.”

On Absolute Poverty

The oft repeated number is that absolute poverty means living at or below $1.25 a day and that there are 1.2 billion such people living at that level of deprivation mostly in the semi-periphery and periphery. Absolute poverty is a type of death sentence. It is the result of governments making choices. Choices such as buying armies not building schools. Choices such as stealing the tax payers money and putting it into Swiss Bank accounts not health spending. It is the systematic usage of the state architecture as means to steal from one’s own people. Corruption is so widespread, such an accepted reality that it is heard to even grasp what separates most politicians from polished thieves. Africa is notorious for this, but it is present in all governments.

Absolute poverty and relative poverty occur because of expropriation. Governments make decisions, rational decisions to spend on certain things. The United Nations is the global non-binding world government. Well-fed and well leveraged their diplomats have codified a shockingly prolific array of documents extolling each other forward toward a brave new and verdant world.

But poverty persists because of political choices. The choice between a well fed, literate population healthy body and mind is where the rhetoric truly crumbles away. For starving and dying of preventable disease in the ball mark of a billion lie and die a vanquished mass of human kind. A choice was made and policy signed that all of oligarchs could find no issue with; poverty is the price that is paid to keep us on our plantations.

On Relative Poverty

Poverty is not like weather conditions or the fate of a romance. It is result of deliberate and planned social policy, utilized to exploit the productive power of the vulnerable at the lowest possible wage or extract the resources from a powerless of corrupt regime collaborating with a hegemon power.

Poverty is pervasive multi-dimensional suffering that is the result of deprivation. It is an integral violation of human rights and an assault on human needs. Poverty is found everywhere, but hidden in plain sight at the core. Measuring poverty is controversial, so they do it as often as they can changing the yard stick every decade or so. First by GDP, then HDI now MDPI. However they (they being the United Nations and NGOs) are relaying on data provided by the 206 governments; all on massively divergent levels of capacity, transparency and ability to conduct a meaningful census.

Relative poverty is not like purchasing power parity, poverty is actually a reasonably objective multifaceted assault on wellbeing caused by deliberate distributive inequality. The solution to poverty in any country is a massive investment in healthcare, education and infrastructure. The kind that the Soviet Union (Russia), China and Cuba used to convert nations of starving, illiterate serfs and peasants into economic super powers. But the Development Enterprise is not actually about alleviating poverty it is about structural adjustment, wrapped in the form of an imagined humanitarian imperative to socially engineer and tinker with globalized supply linkages. Development in Europe yielded the world order of the North West as the US pumped reconstruction money into war ravaged former imperial powers. The final result was the Bilderberg group to coordinate policy and the World Bank to set up lending to third world nations and elf proclaimed neutrals.

Poverty according to the United Nations has halved with 680 less humans living at 1.25 a day since 2000. That has been attributed to China and India’s rapid ascent not development NGOs and aid. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and Haiti extreme poverty doubled in the same period. If we can get our head around this rough estimate that 3.5 billion humans throughout the five zones are living below $3.00 a day and that up to 5 million humans are under $10.00 a day and that means family per day; then we see poverty as very pervasive social phenomenon. Relative poverty is the idea that living at $4.00 a day is somehow normal in a place like Brazil or Haiti. That these people should consider themselves fortunate to not live in extreme poverty, or absolute poverty. I will assure you that no matter what nonsense you tell me about purchasing power parity; a plate of basic food in a Styrofoam tray in Brooklyn costs $5.00, in Sao Paulo costs $3.00 and in Port-Au-Prince costs $1.25; but I assure you in all three places living even at $10.00 a day is burden.

The GINI coefficient measures income inequality. The Palma does the same calculating for the radical jump in the upper quintile. Oxfam says that 85 people have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion, said it before and might say state it one more time before the essay is over.

Relative Poverty is a relative term, all forms of poverty are a hardship, humiliation and violation of human rights. But for the sake of this argument let us call relative poverty awareness of ‘starving in the shadow of plenty’, while absolute poverty is simply knowing you are starving and about to die terrified and abandoned.