I’m a motherfuckin desert person. And I like to wander as long as it’s on a strict timeframe. Because when you’re out in the desert you lose track of how long you’ve been walking and if you don’t budget your water right this can be a serious problem. The desert is place to go to lose yourself in exile but it is a better place to be hardened for a future purpose. You move with as little as possible and what you carry is calculated; (weight) vs. (necessity towards your survival). Like a water canteen, like a pistol, like a blanket or a law degree. You grab and go, you move by night, and you think long and hard about the path that got there in the wasteland.
It’s a misconception that everything in the desert is dead. At night time it is always quite alive. At night you hear rabbits or small dear scurrying across the dunes, and there are snakes and birds; kill the birds and eat them and leave those snakes alone. All manner of the toughest creatures alive thrive out in the wasteland. At night its freezing cold and the wind rips dust across the wilderness. It’s best to wrap yourself a white sheet underneath and black cloak on top. And cover your face. The moon is very bright, bright like you’ve never seen before. Overwhelming is good word to describe it. It is better to move at night for obvious reasons but you have to careful not to lose your path, losing your sense of direction can be quite fatal out there. You have to cover as much ground as possible in fridget conditions and you have to calculate destination such that you can end up in a wadi or a spring to pitch your tent come the break of dawn. The freezing cold rips right to the bones and you wonder what is worse the blazing heat or the frozen nights. You’re stuck with both. You will never see stars like this; there are no city lights or suburban sprawl in a thousand miles to dull their brilliance. You’ll see your first shooting star and then someone will tell you it was an air force exercise; until you see your first shooting star you won’t know the difference.
And you’ve already got your notions about desert by day. When you are in the desert your eyes play tricks on you. It is like sensory bombardment resulting from subsistence deprivation. You’re running on a near empty tank at all times. Out there in that desert; it’s you, and whatever name you call your god, and the freezing cold nights, and the dead by dusk heat that makes you sweat even when you aren’t building pyramids. People have the wrong conception of a mirage. It’s not so much that you think you see a lake or some body of water elusively situated upon the horizon. It’s a twinkle of salvation that stays just as far away each time you move towards it. The mirage represents some supposed place of destination generally always off the path. You could tell yourself it looks like water because water begins to occupy most of your waking consciousness out there; but it’s not water; it’s just another stretch of land you halfway died to get to that yielded oh so little in return. If the cold will end this life by night then yes; it will be the heat that does you in by day. But the reason you let it do so, the reason you wasted all that water; was chasing some mirage that wasn’t on your path at all. And no, this is not a metaphor. I’m just telling you common sense to uphold when you’re out there.
The desert is also a place of extremes and it breeds extremists. It’s not just the night’s cold and burning hot days and animals or mirages or bandits and death. It is that when you take away all those creature comforts, those flashing neon signs, those places to buy some so called happiness; you begin to see. The Misson, the Cause, the Struggle, (the idealized purpose of ones life) become a little more focused; your role in it all becomes more defined. And the profit margins, the cost benefit analysis, your sophomoric, college influenced conception of human nature; none of those things come out here with you. Your family is across an ocean, your friends don’t know where you are, and the cute ethnic Albanian girl in Law class can’t send you adorable text message smiles. When that’s all gone. When the water runs out. When you go off path following a mirage. When you’re out there without anyway to reach your destination, when you have been stripped of all distractions; you learn absolutes, you learn extremes, and you universalize our condition.
When the water runs out you have to think quickly about what matters. You have to conserve your strength, even conserve your thought process. You have to focus on getting out of the desert alive, but this is secondary on ascertaining what you came into the desert to learn. Desert people quicken their process. Time is never on their side. The absolutes are the lessons we’ve learned that translated into righteous action. The extremes are idealized conceptions of your beliefs brought into focus so one might take a stand. And the final realization of a desert person is that out there in the wasteland no matter what nation, what religion, what race, or what people; without water everyone in the desert on a long enough timeline is going to die.
Desert people are out there for a whole lot of reasons. There are whispers in that desert that might give a person a semblance of a plan. We didn’t go out to that desert to fuck a whore in a casino, build a golden calf, or take ecstasy and watch a fifty foot man shaped idol burn. Desert people do not engage in those activities. Not when they want to be right with whatever they call god. It’s place to go when you have to make a decision, it’s a beginning point or an end based on what path you follow; it’s not a weekend retreat or a three hour tour.
I’m proud to be a desert person. It has made my people very strong. I learned things out there that one doesn’t see when restricted to a temple or a mosque. Out there in that desert when the water runs out you and whatever you call your god can take the precious time left to calculate what you’ve been doing with your life.
“A hero or a hooligan, well that part’s never clear.”
It was the cold night of Purim, 5777, the full moon was huge and it was brick as shit. That means harshly cold in the Ebony peasant vernacular. I knew that were I so inclined there would be multiple places to fete and masquerade, but I was conserving my finances, and hording up my comfortable sleeps on the big Queen sized mattress made in Brooklyn.
The safe house wasn’t so bad, except for no drinking which annoyed me and the German intelligence officer greatly. She never admitted to being such but this is what my associate Alan Medvinsky told me, and he knew about such things. 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.
The man who set up this little shop was none other than the infamous small time publisher and writer Sander Hicks, who for a lesser intellectual was wild eyed and somewhat muscular, and vigorous from being straight edge, being Zen and believing that “God is Good”.
He took me in when the safe house before got too, hot.
Natasha Salzano, that was just her passport name; Natalia Khiterova had fled almost overnight back to Russian Federation and left me and poor confused 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 god 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 be over $735, well, that’s life.
Sander 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. Shudder, anyway there I was about to deploy and never even got to wear my tough, beige winter coat I bought second hand, cause it looked like something Elena wears, a little less yellow. I haven’t heard from her in over a year. She visited my father for dentistry and maybe it was November on my way to meet David Smith in DC for a palaver and she called me or I called her advice about the negotiations. I pulled my white Honda Civic into a truck stop and she was so sweet and precise.
“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 less Communist.”
And really I never heard from her again, like someone maybe her conscience ordered her not speak with me. I tried quite hard to break that, get friendship or something. No dice, legally speaking I’ve left her 33% of this new shell company if I’m killed in the coming deployment. I’m rambling my existential fist world concerns to my lap top, I’m comparing gear I’ll expropriate with a fabricated credit card; about 2,000 worth. Maybe I’ll even get a new lap top. If anyone manages to rob me on the road from Erbil to Qamishlu, well it would be a good haul.
Sanders is out first every night, Brit and I are night creatures. Once I was fired from my slave job about three weeks ago I immediately reverted to my preferred biological clock, 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 Sander built; he’s a carpenter by trade, like my man Jesus was. It’s pretty ok this safe house, even if we can’t drink. I think Brit does heroin in her room or at the very least smokes dope on the roof, she’s great.
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, ” “, well anyway many years later like six months ago I found it and when Sander subdivided the loft into three room I social engineered her in, but she was my second choice. I’d really wanted to live with Erin Moore who is dark and fun and can cook her ass off, but frankly Sander sketched her out too much. The subdivide room was also not such steal ever for $600 USD, and maybe a little firetrap hazardous.
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. How do I say that again, the people living in a safe house are 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, Sander a well-known brilliant crack pot; 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 Sander, and behind the hippy Zen retreats, the walls of books that he had in fact read, he was always reading, behind the chirpy banter was a killer.
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 tyrant, but I played several times with his dorky little scientist son, he was precocious, I don’t mean to talk so much shit, I’m working on it. I’m in shit talking recovery!
Sander Hicks was a zealot, 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 hero of this story I’m about to tell.
I am one to think every other high powered person living in the darkness is whore, killer or spy. It’s 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.
So this plane is gonna take off from an airstrip on the south coast of Brooklyn near Queens border and it’s gonna fly me to Cuba, and pretty much I’m gonna sit on a beach and meditate 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 Metropol to meet my new editor and confidant Polina Mazaeva, who I’ve never met but have written to for six months and seen naked many times, more on that later. 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.
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.
But mostly my heart is col, 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.
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 Zalla my colleague and fellow card carrying D/U associate to arrive a week later so we get to Sulymania, contact the resistance and be smuggled into Syrian Kurdistan, over the border into the Rojava free zone. 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.
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, Sander 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 Elena, 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.
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 Liana 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.
“She and I never had that great writing are collabo moment yet.
So much lifetime left I guess.”
“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. Just came from NJ. She will be cremated tomorrow.
I remember maybe two summers ago we 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.
Good night
I’m leaving the states April 12th.
I’m sure maybe you prefer suffering in silence.
But if you’d like to hang out.
I’ll come to where ever you are.
She loved you so much.
We’ll see. Where are you going?
Cuba, Russia, Iraq then Syria.
I leave on the night after Passover.
Be careful.
Yeah
That’s what they say
I have a good team.
Only reason I’m alive so far.
Good night my friend.
I told him;
I’ll try and get you to see more than usual.
I do not feel your pain, but I know it like I know my own 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, ‘cause he could read into me and see my past lives.
I felt so sad, like I hadn’t been sad in so long and I thought about Elena. 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 a endless walk of dreams versus nightmare.”
Don’t leave me alone.
2
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.
Let’s talk about Chanel Chantal Rossi, shall we.
Adler,
I apologize for not responding sooner. As you can imagine, I was quickly drowned in work once I got back. Your letter touched my soul in so many ways. First, your awareness and choice of words and how you articulate them together, are mesmerizing. You are a truly gifted artist with strong depth.
The journey you are about to embark on is one of great respect and inspiration. I know you will touch many lives, however slight, but most likely grand as you have done so far, and I am sure of that. Without knowing you in a material physical aspect (as in only speaking with you for a brief 30 seconds), you have already impacted my life in which I will never forget.
With that being said, I would love to be your pen pal and hear all about the moments you experience. I have so much respect for you, people like you are those who make a difference in our world for the greater good. Even if it is to put a smile on a strangers face.
Send me your address,
We will be hand-writing letters to each other very soon.
Yours truly,
Chanel
Chanie,
Such is the hard work of studying law, and surely it will be daunting but you will persevere). Your words are quite kind and make me feel quite appreciated. It is a very complex task ahead and it makes me glad you will allow such correspondence. Although after 12 April I will be abroad more a year or more and with often a wholly unreliable postal system, we can alternate pen and email as you see fit, and of the letters you send to the address below can be pony expressed or scanned and sent. Any art I make out there, same route. Cuba and Russia will be short wonderful extremes before I get into Iraq in late May and soon after North Syria; a place called Rojava.
I make drawings, and paintings, I make long rhyming poems and I’ve written 5 novels, but I suppose it just makes me very happy to have a chance to put my mind before a stranger and see yours as you reveal it. As said the idea of you was a strange magic, but I long to know the actual you as well and make you the subject of my art. It will also be surely relieving to sometimes hear of Boston, and your woes of scholarship, and your loves and losses and all. I thrive on the attention of strangers and can only be well informed via their impartial critiques. But, as stated, you were fascinating to me.
My permanent address is:
Sebastian Adon
140 Nassau Street #7c
New York, NY 10038
Best wishes, Happy International Woman’s Day. I look forward to our exchange.
Sebastian,
Sebastian,
Words cannot describe, the appreciation I feel. I’ve always felt as if I was maybe underestimated by my looks and at times maybe overestimated in this judgmental society we live in. Everything is based on how you look and not what you offer as a human.
Yet,
You made me feel like although that does come into play, you made me feel much more than that with eyes beyond the physicality of objects of this world with your attention to detail. It is not the mere creation of technique, but what it intends to portray with the story it wants to tell.
I am so thankful to the universe for that day, in so many ways, and one being our casual, brief and meaningful kindle.
Funny story; my over protective brother thought I was giving you my phone number & got a little mad. I explained to him and told him it was okay, he trusts my judgment. And to be honest… it was your old-school way of a note pad and pen that really played well with my instinct. I am an old soul too.
I love candles, how did you know?
I cannot wait and look forward to hearing about your future endeavors.
You will be receiving something from me by early next week 🙂
We, the people of the Democratic Autonomous Regions of North, Central and South America, a confederation of communities, freely and solemnly declare and establish this Charter.
In pursuit of freedom, justice, dignity and democracy and led by principles of equality and environmental sustainability, the Charter proclaims a new social contract, based upon mutual and peaceful coexistence and understanding between all strands of society. It protects fundamental human rights and liberties and reaffirms the peoples’ right to self-determination.
Under the Charter, we, the people of the Autonomous Regions, unite in the spirit of reconciliation, pluralism and democratic participation so that all may express themselves freely in public life. In building a society free from authoritarianism, militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious authority in public affairs, the Charter recognizes national territorial integrity and aspires to maintain domestic and international peace.
In establishing this Charter, we declare a political system and civil administration founded upon a social contract that reconciles the rich mosaic of the Americas through a transitional phase from corporate oligarchy, to avoid civil war and destruction, to a new democratic society where civic life and social justice are preserved.
I General principles
Article 1
The Charter of the Autonomous Regions of Cantons in the Americas, [hereinafter “the Charter”], is a renewed social contract between the peoples of the Autonomous Regions. The Preamble is an integral part of the Charter.
Article 2
a- Authority resides with and emanates from the people of the Autonomous Regions. It is exercised by governing councils and public institutions elected by popular vote.
b- The people constitute the sole source of legitimacy all governing councils and public institutions, which are founded on democratic principles essential to a free society.
Article 3
a – We encourage the genuine development of free, sovereign and democratic states, governed by a congressional systems based on principles of decentralization and pluralism.
b – The Autonomous Regions are to be composed cantons of who have implemented viable structures of democratic autonomy, social services and sustainable economies, forming an integral part of existing national territories. The administrative centers of each Canton are to be established by popular election in cities and towns wishing to organize into Canton governance.
c – The Canton administrative unit is to be ethnically and religiously diverse, with communities peacefully co-existing in solidarity. The elected Legislative Assembly represents all Cantons of the Autonomous Regions.
The Structure of governance in the Autonomous Regions
Article 4
The largest administrative unit of democratic autonomy is the Canton, each with a city or town designated to hold a People’s Congress, appoint and Executive Council and establish a local High Commision of Elections.
The Canton’s Peoples Congress is the highest Canton level administrative unit for governance and legislative matters. It is composed of elected delegates who will appoint the Executive Councils of each Canton.
Every Canton is subdivided into Communes, municipal or provincial units each with an elected council.
1- Legislative Assembly
Highest elected body governing the Democratic Federation of American Cantons.
2 – Executive Councils
Canton Level governance of eligible delegates from the parties, councils and committees elected on the canton and commune levels.
3 – High Commission of Elections
Responsible for all levels of elections.
4 – Supreme Constitutional Courts
Judicial bodies for legal redress at village, town, city and Canton level.
5 – Municipal/Provincial Councils
Commune level deleted authority appointed by the General Assembly of each commune.
6 – Peoples Congress
Highest elected authority of the commune and Canton level governance.
7 – General Assemblies
Municipal and provincial assemblies open to the entire community to address community issues and elect Commune and Canton level delegates.
Article 5
The initial administrative centers of each Canton are to be autonomously declared through registration of individuals and associations into localized General Assemblies. Each general assembly will establish a Commune level of governance and then based on expansion of registration a Canton level. There or more Cantons can then move to establish a Federation through Legislative Assembly.
Article 6
All persons and communities are equal in the eyes of the law and in rights and responsibilities.
Article 7
All cities, towns and villages which accede to this Charter may form Cantons falling within Autonomous Regions.
Article 8
All Cantons in the Autonomous Regions are founded upon the principle of local self-government. Cantons may freely elect their representatives and representative bodies, and may pursue their rights insofar as it does not contravene the articles of the Charter.
Article 9
The official languages of the Cantons are English and Spanish. All communities have the right to teach and be taught in their native language.
Article 10
The Autonomous Regions shall not interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries, and it shall safeguard its relations with neighboring states, resolving any conflicts peacefully.
Article 11
The Autonomous Regions have the right to be represented by their own flag, emblems and anthem. Such symbols shall be defined in a law.
Article 12
The Autonomous Regions form an integral part of the states in which they have been formed. It is a model for a future decentralized system of federal governance.
II Basic Principles
Article 13
There shall be a separation of powers between the legislature, executive and judiciary.
Article 14
The Autonomous Regions shall seek to implement a framework of transitional justice measures. It shall take steps to redress the legacy of chauvinistic and discriminatory State policies, including the payment of reparations to victims, both individuals and communities, in the Autonomous Regions.
Article 15
The People’s Protection Units (PPU) are the sole militia force of the Cantons, with the mandate to protect and defend the security of the Autonomous Regions and its peoples, against both internal and external threats. The People’s Protection Units act in accordance with the recognized inherent right to self-defense. Power of command in respect of the People’s Protection Units is vested in the Body of Defense through its Central Command. Its relation to the armed forces of the central Government shall be defined by the Legislative Assembly in a special law.
The Community Guard forces are charged with civil policing functions in the Autonomous Regions.
Article 16
If a court or any other public body considers that a provision conflicts with a provision of a fundamental law or with a provision of any other superior statute, or that the procedure prescribed was set aside in any important respect when the provision was introduced, the provision shall be nullified.
Article 17
The Charter guarantees the rights of the youth to participate actively in public and political life.
Article 18
Unlawful acts and omissions and the appropriate penalties are defined by criminal and civil law.
Article 19
The system of taxation and other fiscal regulations are defined by law.
Article 20
The Charter holds as inviolable the fundamental rights and freedoms set out in international human rights treaties, conventions and declarations.
III Rights and Liberties
Article 21
The Charter incorporates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as well as other internationally recognized human rights conventions.
Article 22
All international rights and responsibilities pertaining civil, political, cultural, social and economical rights are guaranteed.
Article 23
a – Everyone has the right to express their ethnic, cultural, linguistic and gender rights which includes explicit freedom of sexual orientation and right to one’s personal formulation of gender identity.
b – Everyone has the right to live in a healthy environment, based on ecology balance.
Article 24
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; including freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Freedom of expression and freedom of information may be restricted having regard to the security of the Autonomous Regions, public safety and order, the integrity of the individual, the sanctity of private life, or the prevention and prosecution of crime.
Article 25
a- Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person.
b- All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
c- Prisoners have the right to humane conditions of detention, which protect their inherent dignity. Prisons shall serve the underlying objective of the reformation, education and social rehabilitation of prisoners.
Article 26
Every human being has the inherent right to life. No one within the jurisdiction of the Autonomous Regions shall be executed.
Article 27
Women have the inviolable right to participate in political, social, economic and cultural life.
Article 28
Men and women are equal in the eyes of the law. The Charter guarantees the effective realization of equality of women and mandates public institutions to work towards the elimination of gender discrimination.
Article 29
The Charter guarantees the rights of the child. In particular children shall not suffer economic exploitation, child labor, torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and shall not be married before attaining the age of majority.
Article 30
All persons have the right
1. to personal security in a peaceful and stable society.
2. to free and compulsory primary and secondary education.
3. to work, social security, health, adequate housing.
4. to protect the motherhood and maternal and pediatric care.
5. to adequate health and social care for the disabled, the elderly and those with special needs.
Article 31
Everyone has the right to freedom of worship, to practice one’s own religion either individually or in association with others. No one shall be subjected to persecution on the grounds of their religious beliefs.
Article 32
a)- Everyone has the right to freedom of association with others, including the right to establish and freely join any political party, association, trade union and/or civil assembly.
b) – In exercising the right to freedom of association, political, economic and cultural expression of all communities is protected. This serves to protect the rich and diverse heritage of the peoples of the Autonomous Regions.
c) – The all religious and ideological creeds and their adherents’ rights to freedom of association and expression is explicitly protected. The protection of diverse religious, social and cultural life may be guaranteed through the passage of laws by the Legislative Assembly.
Article 33
Everyone has the freedom to obtain, receive and circulate information and to communicate ideas, opinions and emotions, whether orally, in writing, in pictorial representations, or in any other way.
Article 34
Everyone has the right of peaceful assembly, including the right to peaceful protest, demonstration and strike.
Article 35
Everyone has the right to freely experience and contribute to academic, scientific, artistic and cultural expressions and creations, through individual or joint practice, to have access to and enjoy, and to disseminate their expressions and creations.
Article 36
Everyone has the right to vote and to run for public office, as circumscribed by law.
Article 37
Everyone has the right to seek political asylum. Persons may only be deported following a decision of a competent, impartial and properly constituted judicial body, where all due process rights have been afforded.
Article 38
All persons are equal before the law and are entitled to equal opportunities in public and professional life.
Article 39
Natural resources, located both above and below ground, are the public wealth of society. Extractive processes, management, licensing and other contractual agreements related to such resources shall be regulated by law.
Article 40
All public infrastructure in the Canton directly funded by an existing national authority is to be strengthened in a legal framework. Where inadequate it calls as a primary responsibility of Commune and Canton governing bodies to implement alternative systems to provide improved social services.
All buildings and land in the Autonomous Regions are still considered owned by the title holding authority of the national authority or are the private property of an existing owner.
Administration of public property rests with the national authority. The use and distribution of land and buildings shall be determined by law.
Abandoned land and property should be considered property by use of organized Commune authorities who buy or repossess it.
Article 41
Everyone has the right to the use and enjoyment of his private property. No one shall be deprived of his property except upon payment of just compensation, for reasons of public utility or social interest, and in the cases and according to the forms established by law.
Article 42
The economic system in the provinces shall be directed at providing general welfare and in particular granting funding to science and technology. It shall be aimed at guaranteeing the daily needs of people and to ensure a dignified life. Monopoly is prohibited by law. Labor rights and sustainable development are guaranteed.
Article 43
Everyone has the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his residence within the Autonomous Regions.
Article 44
The enumeration of the rights and freedoms set forth in Section III is non-exhaustive.
The Democratic Self-rule Administration Project
IV Legislative Assembly
Article 45
The Legislative Assembly in the Autonomous Region is elected by the people by direct, secret ballot, and the duration of the course is four (4) years.
Individuals may run for delegate positions alone or as a representative of an association or party.
Article 46
The first meeting of the Legislative Assembly shall be held no later than the 15th day following the announcement of the final results of elections in all Autonomous Regions. Such results will be certified and announced by the Higher Commission of Elections.
The President of the Transitional Executive Council will convene the first meeting of the Legislative Assembly. If compelling reasons dictate that its first meeting cannot be so held, the President of the Transitional Executive Council will determine another date to be held within fifteen days.
Quorum is met by fifty + one (50+1%) percent attendants of the total. The oldest member of the Legislative Assembly will chair its first meeting at which the Co-Presidents and Executive Council will be elected.
The sessions of the Legislative Assembly are public unless necessity demands otherwise. The movement of the Legislative Assembly into closed session is governed by its rules of procedure.
Article 47
There shall be one member of the Supreme Legislature Council per fifteen thousand (15,000) registered voters residing within the Autonomous Region. The Legislative Assembly must be composed of at least forty per cent (40%) of either sex according to the electoral laws. The representation of undocumented persons in a community, as well as youth representation in the election lists, is governed by electoral laws.
Article 48
1- No member of the Legislative Assembly may run for more than two consecutive terms.
2 – The term of the Legislative Assembly may be extended in exceptional cases at the request of one quarter (¼) of its members or at the request of the Office of the President of the Council, with the consent of two-thirds (⅔) of the members of the Council. Such extension shall be for no longer than six (6) months.
Article 49
Every person who has reached the age of eighteen (18) years is eligible to vote. Candidates for the Legislative Assembly must have attained the age of twenty-two (22) years. Conditions for candidacy and election are stipulated by electoral law.
Article 50
Members of the Legislative Assembly enjoy immunity in respect of acts and omissions carried out in the function of official duties. Any prosecutions require the authorization of the Legislative Assembly, with the exception of flagrant crime. At the earliest opportunity, the Office of the President of the Council shall be informed of all pending prosecutions.
Article 51
All members, during their term of office, is permitted any public, private, or other profession that is not a direct conflict of interests with Commune or Canton level governance. Such employment is suspended once he makes the constitutional oath.
Article 52
Local Councils in each province of the Autonomous Regional shall be formed through direct elections. These General Assemblies support the Canton level Peoples Congress and executive.
Article 53
The functions of the Legislative Assembly are to:
– Establish rules and procedures governing the work of the Legislative Assembly.
– Enact legislation and proposed regulations for the Local Councils and other institutions, including permanent and ad hoc committees, under its purview.
– Exercise control over administrative and executive bodies, including use of powers of review.
– Ratification of international treaties and agreements.
– Delegate its powers to the Executive Council or to one of its members and thereafter to withdraw such powers.
– Declare a State of war and peace.
– Ratify the appointment of members of the Supreme Constitutional Court.
– Adopt the general budget.
– Establish general policy and development plans.
– Approve and grant amnesty.
– Adopt decrees promulgated by the Executive Council; and
– Adopt laws for the common governance of the Provincial Councils of the Autonomous Regions.
Part V Executive Council
Article 54
Canton Premier
A- The Canton Premier, together with the Executive Council of the Autonomous Regions, hold executive authority as set forth in this Charter.
B- The candidates to the post of Canton Premier must:
1- Be over thirty-five years of age;
2- Be a resident of the canton; and
3- Have no convictions or conflicts of interest.
4 – establish one Male and one Female co chair to the position for each canton.
C- The procedure governing the candidacy and election of Canton Premier:
1- Within 30 days of the first session of the Legislative Assembly, its President must call for the election of the Canton Premiers.
2- Requests to nominate candidates for the position of Canton Premier must be made, in writing, to the Supreme Court which shall examine and accept or reject not later than ten (10) days after the close of nominations.
3- The Legislative Assembly shall elect the Canton Premier by a simple majority.
4- If no candidate receives the required simple majority, a second electoral round is initiated, with the candidate receiving the highest number of votes, being elected.
5- The term of Canton Premier is four (4) years from the date of the taking of the Oath of Office;
6- The Canton Premier makes the Oath of Office before the Legislative Assembly before commencing official duties.
7- The Canton Premier appointed one or more Deputies, approved by the Legislative Assembly. The Deputies take an Oath of Office before the Canton Premier, after which specified functions may be delegated to them.
8- Should the Canton Premier be unable to fulfill his or her official functions, one of his Deputies shall replace him. Where the Canton Premier and the Deputies are unable to fulfill their duties for any reason, the tasks of the Canton Premier will be carried out by the President of the Legislative Assembly; and
9- The Governor must address any letter of resignation to the Legislative Assembly.
D- The powers and functions of the Canton Premier:
1- The Canton Premier shall ensure respect for the Charter and the protection of the national unity and sovereignty, and at all times performing his functions to the best of ability and conscience.
2- The Canton Premier shall appoint the President of the Executive Council.
3- The Canton Premier shall implement laws passed by the Legislative Assembly, and issue decisions, orders and decrees in accordance with those laws.
4- The Canton Premier must invite the newly elected Legislative Assembly to convene within fifteen (15) days from the announcement of the election results;
5- The Canton Premier may grant medals.
6- The Canton Premier may issue amnesties as recommended by the President of the Executive Council.
E- The Canton Premier is responsible to the people through his representatives in the Legislative Assembly. The Legislative Assembly has the right to bring him before the Supreme Constitutional Court for charges of treason and other forms of sedition.
The Executive Council:
The Executive Council is the highest executive and administrative body in the Autonomous Regions.
It is responsible for the implementation of laws, resolutions and decrees as issued by the Legislative Assembly and judicial institutions. It shall coordinate the institutions of the Autonomous Regions.
There is one Executive Council for the Legislative Assembly, one for each Canton Peoples Congress and corresponding committees of its bodies formed by each Commune level General Assembly.
Article 55
The Executive Council is composed of to c
bi-gendered Co-Chairman, representatives and committees.
Article 56
The party or bloc winning a majority of seats in the Legislative Assembly shall form the Executive Council within one month from the date of assignment, with the approval of the simple majority (51%) of the members of the Legislative Assembly.
Article 57
The Head of the Executive Council shall not serve more than two consecutive terms, each term being four (4) years in length. Article 58 The Head of the Executive Council may choose advisers amongst the newly elected members of the Legislative Council.
Article 59
Each adviser shall be responsible for one of the bodies within the Executive Council.
Article 60
The work of the Executive Council, including the Departments, and their relation to other institutions/committees is regulated by law.
Article 61
After the formation and approval of the Executive Council, it shall issue its prospective Program for Government. Following its passage through the Legislative Assembly, the Executive Council is obliged to implement the Program of Government during that legislative term.
Article 62
Senior civil servants and Department representatives shall be nominated by the Executive Council and approved by the Legislative Council.
1- The Cantons of the Autonomous Regions are composed of Provincial Administrative Councils [Municipal Councils] and are managed by the relevant Executive Council which retains the power to amend its functions and regulations;
2- The powers and duties of the Provincial Administrative Councils [Municipal Councils] are founded upon an adherence to a policy of decentralization. The Canton’s supervision of the Provincial Administrative Councils’ [Municipal Councils’] authority, including its budget and finance, public services and mayoral elections are regulated by law.
3- Provincial Administrative Councils [Municipal Councils] are directly elected by the public, using secret ballot.
Part VI The Judicial Council:
Article 63
The independence of the Judiciary is founding principle of the rule of law, which ensures a just and effective disposition of cases by the competent and impartial courts.
Article 64
Everyone charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until and unless proved guilty by a competent and impartial court.
Article 65
All institutions of the Judicial Council must be composed of at least forty per cent (40%) of either sex.
Article 66
The right to defense is sacred and inviolable at all stages of an investigation and trial.
Article 67
The removal of a Judge from office requires a decision from the Judicial Council.
Article 68
Judgments and judicial decisions are issued on behalf of the people.
Article 69
Failure to implement judicial decisions and orders is a violation of law.
Article 70
No civilian shall stand trial before any military court or special or ad hoc tribunals.
Article 71
Searches of houses and other private property must be done in accordance with a properly executed warrant, issued by a judicial authority.
Article 72
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 73
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. No one shall be deprived of his liberty except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedure as are established by law.
Article 74
Anyone who has been the victim of unlawful arrest or detention or otherwise suffered damage or harm as a result of the acts and omissions of public authorities has an enforceable right to compensation.
Article 75
The Judicial Council is established by law.
VII The Higher Commission of Elections
Article 76
The Higher Commission of Elections is an independent body competent to oversee and run the electoral process. It is composed of members, representing all cantons, who are appointed by the Legislative Assembly.
1. Decisions in the Commission require a qualified simple majority of votes.
2. Member of the Higher Commission of Elections may not stand for office in the Legislative Assembly.
3. The Higher Commission of Elections determines the date on which elections are held, the announcement of the results, and receive the nominations of eligible candidates for the Legislative Assembly.
4. As stated in paragraph 51, the Higher Commission of Elections verifies the eligibility of candidates seeking election to the Legislative Assembly. The Higher Commission of Elections is the sole body competent to receive allegations of electoral fraud, voter intimidation or illegal interference with the process of an election.
5. The Higher Commission of Elections is monitored by the Supreme Court and may be monitored by observers from the United Nations and civil society organizations.
6. The Higher Commission of Elections, together with the Judicial Council, shall convene a meeting of all candidates seeking election to the Legislative Assembly to announce the names of eligible candidates.
VIII The Supreme Constitutional Court
Article 77
a)- The Supreme Constitutional Court is composed of seven (7) members, all of whom are nominated by the Legislative Assembly. Its members are drawn from Judges, legal experts and lawyers, all of whom must have no less than fifteen (15) years of professional experience.
b)- No member of the Supreme Constitutional Court shall not be eligible to serve on the Executive Council or in the Legislative Assembly or to hold any other office or position of emolument, as defined by law.
c)- A member’s term of office runs for four (4) years. No member may serve more than two terms.
The functions of the Supreme Constitutional Court
Article 78
1. To interpret the articles and underlying principles of the Charter.
2. To determine the constitutionality of laws enacted by the Legislative Assembly and decisions taken by Executive Council.
3. To judicially review legislative acts and executive decisions, where such acts and decisions may be in the conflict with the letter and spirit of the Charter and the Constitution.
4. Canton Premiers, members of the Legislative Assembly and Executive Council may be brought before the Supreme Constitutional Court, when alleged to have acted in breach of the Charter.
5. Its decisions are reached through simple majority vote.
Article 79
A member of the Supreme Constitutional Court shall not be removed from office except for stated misbehavior or incapacity. The provisions and procedures governing the work of the Supreme Constitutional Court shall be set out in a special law.
Article 80
Procedure for determination of the constitutionality of laws as follow:
1- The decision for the non-constitutional of any law will be as follow:
a)- Where, prior to a law’s enactment, more than twenty per cent (20%) of the Legislative Assembly objects to its constitutionality, the Supreme Constitutional Court is seized of the matter and shall render its decision within fifteen (15) days; if the law is to be urgently enacted, a decision shall be rendered within seven (7) days.
b)-Where, following the rendering of the Judgment of the Supreme Constitutional Court, more than twenty per cent (20%) of the Legislative Assembly still objects to its constitutionality, an appeal may be lodged.
c)- If, on appeal, the Supreme Constitutional Court rules the law to be enacted as unconstitutional, the law shall be considered null and void.
2. If an argument is raised in a court concerning the constitutionality of a law as follow:
a)- If parties to a case raise a challenge to the constitutionality of a law and the court so holds, the matter is stayed while it is referred to the Supreme Constitutional Court
b)- The Supreme Constitutional Court must deliver its judgment within thirty (30) days.
IX General Rules
Article 81
The Charter applies within the Autonomous Regions. It may only be amended by a qualified majority of two-thirds (⅔) of the Legislative Assembly.
Article 82
The Charter shall be laid before the Transitional Legislative Assembly for review and ratification.
Article 83
Citizens holding dual nationality are barred from assuming leading positions in the Office of the Canton Premier, the Provincial Council, and the Supreme Constitutional Court.
Delete
Article 84
The Charter sets out the legislative framework through which laws, decrees, and states of emergency shall be formally implemented.
Article 85
Elections to form the Legislative Assembly shall be held within four (4) months of the ratification of the Charter by the Transitional Legislative Assembly. The Transitional Legislative Assembly retains the right to extend the time period if exceptional circumstances arise.
Article 86
The Oath of Office to be taken by members of the Legislative Assembly
“I solemnly swear, in the name of the community, to abide by the Charter and laws of the Autonomous Regions, to defend the liberty and interests of the people, to ensure the security of the Autonomous Regions, to protect the rights of legitimate self-defense and to strive for social justice, in accordance with the principles of democratic rules enshrined herein.”
Article 87
All governing bodies, institutions and committees shall be made up of at least forty percent (40%) of either sex.
Article 88
National criminal and civil legislation is applicable in the Autonomous Regions except where it contradicts provisions of this Charter.
Article 89
In the case of conflict between laws passed by the Legislative Assembly and legislation of the central government, the Supreme Constitutional Court will rule upon the applicable law, based on the best interest of the Autonomous Regions.
Article 90
The Charter guarantees the protection of the environment and regards the sustainable development of natural ecosystems as a moral and a sacred national duty.
Article 91
The education system of the Autonomous Regions shall be based upon the values of reconciliation, dignity, and pluralism. It is a marked departure from prior education policies founded upon racist and chauvinistic principles.
Education within the Autonomous Regions rejects prior education policies based on racist and chauvinistic principles. Founded upon the values of reconciliation, dignity, and pluralism,
a)- The new educational curriculum of the cantons shall recognize the rich history, culture and heritage of the peoples of the Autonomous Regions.
b)-The education system, public service channels and academic institutions shall promote human rights and democracy.
Article 92
a)- The Charter enshrines the principle of separation of religion and State.
b)- Freedom of religion shall be protected. All religions and faiths in the Autonomous Regions shall be respected. The right to exercise religious beliefs shall be guaranteed, insofar as it does not adversely affect the public good.
Article 93
a)- The promotion of cultural, social and economic advancement by administrative institutions ensures enhanced stability and public welfare within the Autonomous Regions.
b)- There is no legitimacy for authority which contradicts this charter. Article 94 Martial law may be invoked and revoked by a qualified majority of two-thirds (⅔) of the Executive Council, in a special session chaired by the Canton Premier. The decision must then be presented to and unanimously adopted by the Legislative Assembly, with its provisions contained in a special law.
The Executive Council Bodies
Article 95
1. Body of Foreign Relations
2. Body of Defense
3. Body of Internal Affairs
4. Body of Justice
5. Body of Cantonal and Municipal Councils and affiliated to it Committee of Planning and Census
6. Body of Finance, and affiliated to it a)-Committee on Banking Regulations. b)- Committee of Customs and Excise.
7. Body of Social Affairs
8. Body of Education
9. Body of Agriculture
10. Body of Energy.
11. Body of Health
12. Body of Trade and Economic Cooperation
13. Body of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs
14. Body of Culture
15. Body of Transport
16. Body of Youth and Sports
17. Body of Environment, Tourism and Historical Objects
18. Body of Religious Affairs
19. Body of Family and Gender Equality
20. Body of Human Rights.
21. Body of Communications
22. Body of Food and Agriculture
Security Article 96
The Charter shall be published once ratified by participating members and associated groups invited to form a Confederation.
I ask you now friend, in whose reality do you live?
We all dedicate our actions to the future. But, what is it that we claim to do with our little lives as that future narrows? Have we all lost our faith in outer generations or a glorious world to come? Of course, all lives are both great and also quite little, but it was a matter of sure and soulful pretension; crossed of course a bit with the “sollidaritous” desire to teach a nation of certain newly freed slaves to fish. Allegorically speaking. The fishing and the slaves. More to the sharp of the point, we were training quietly amidst the dust and rubble the fourth detachment of a growing underground medical battalion, to aid a coming Great Revolt. A guerilla army of young rescue workers and student teachers preparing to accomplish the basic yet audacious task of combatting meaningless death and diseases of poverty pandemic on the island of Hispaniola.
The effects of 210 plus years of chattel servitude, rancorous massacre, ceaseless uprisings and putdownings; quarantines, blan occupations and an induced poverty inflicted upon this people, mostly from the outside.
In short, we are the latest reinforcements penetrating a long besieged slave revolt.
These long abused stalwarts, there are believed to be eight million poor unfortunate souls on the Haitian side of the line, but the number is truly anyone’s guess; no realistic census has been taken since the last coup against President Aristide in year of 2004.
Which was ten years ago. The date is presently 4 June, 2014. Thus 210 years and six months since the declared success of the initial rising.
Year Zero, After Revolt (AR).
I will tell you now where power comes from. It comes from any grouping of people that can devise a just means to secure ones Maslow hierarchy of needs and elevate then a given population toward their droits de moun, human rights. The power is not in any violence or coercion and fear but in the bravery of provisioning hope. Ah, yes indomitable hope. Hope for the rights of man are an issue of freedom and freedom is well and good but what is freedom to misery and deprivation. What say I on due process when I must mix dirt with my flour to watch my family starve at a decreased pace! Or, watch my fallow fields yield nothing as my children die not long after birth of .Or, when my parents perish in a brown and vivacious filth of their own vomit shit and piss from contaminated water. What are our rights when we cannot read and we cannot flee and we cannot work and there are no schools and we die by the age of mid fifty.
Thankless faceless and unknown niggers. Statistics the UN tallies on we slaves. Power comes from control of the means of development! To those who run the schools the clinics or the farms the means to secure basic things so that hope is alive again and then once fed clothed housed secure I can wonder on about my so-called “rights”.
The trouble with the utilization of stranger volunteers in any operation of stress and seriousness is tri-part for vast complication. Since there is no material compensation it is hard to prevent adventurism and privateering. Since they are all mostly strangers it is hard to enforce the chain of command flat as it may be. And since they are often multidisciplinary; a linguist, a paramedic, a marine, a fire commissioner, a spook and an inner city transport e.m.t. they are all mostly unfamiliar with the dynamic of free association based two tiered consensus utilized by the People’s Army. The third part of the problem beyond privateering and command control is loyalnost. Sebastian and Adelina are lovers living together for the last nine months in the exile of Massachusetts so despite it, or her total lack of interest not one shit given not a shit of a shit on the subject of politics or dialectics, she does truly love him and he loves her as well and therefore she controls him. Abstaining from the politics of the coming operation she can dispassionately suggest the common sense approach.
This approach is hardly common for here if you wonder about the chicken and the egg you are working often with a sea of self-proclaimed experts that expertise on shells or eggs or how they crack. Or chickens and how to raise them. Or which comes first. But all the local people the Haitians on the street are not concerned with theories like this. They are concerned with survival for themselves and their families. Once everyone has survived peaceably for some time then maybe there would be time for speaking of the perfect egg the just economy or the chicken the functional state. If that’s what chickens and eggs are really about. And all these experts these NGO technocrats speaking English or Portuguese, Spanish or French they don’t trust governments and seeing nothing in the economy to so easily carry off. For there is nothing; they devise ways to raise chickens from broken eggs from sick diseased chickens. Then they blame the Haitians in languages they don’t speak. But they are still just fighting to survive.
The quarantine, such as we call it is 210 years old. It began the day the revolution was declared victorious with the separation of the tri color into the red and blue bicolor ripped by JJ Dessalines. The revolution which had begun by the Jacobins in France whose ideas spread to the blood soaked paradise of St. Domingue purged the entire island of foreign rulers, resulted in a loss of life of an estimated 500, 400 inhabitants and 60,000 soldiers from France, Spain and Greater Britain. It began in 1791 and culminated in the only victorious slave uprising in 1804. Shortly after the quarantine and civil war between blacks and mulattos began; JJ Dessalines signed a purge order of all whites of the island which remained. And by 1805 there were less than 300 blan alive in greater Hispaniola, mostly female, Polish or medically trained. White physicians and Polish conscripts had also fought for newly freed Haiti. The quarantine was not about race or racial antagonism. Whites Negs and Mulats fought on both sides of the great revolt. The issue for Napoleon and other leaders of European powers was that of newly freed slaves. With weapons and armies cannons and turf proclaiming rights of man that had been defeated in the cradle of the uprising France. The issue was still that in the Americas in Europe, Africa, Asia and most of humanity remained a type of slave and this revolt might spread rapidly.
To the other islands of the Wild West Indies; to all of Latin America; to the USA and reverberating out back to Europe and the surfs of Russia and China. In fact the defeat of the Haitian revolution was one of the greatest foreign policy objectives shared by nearly every power. And since the armies of Spain, France and England had not been able to re-impose the hated regime of chattel servitude the new policy was containment.
They had by 1802 captured, tortured and killed the only man Toussaint L’Ouvature who had the moral authority and military genius to secure a multi-racial Hispaniola as a rebel base. He was the father of the revolution. The great powers stirred racial tensions inside and lock Haiti off from the world. And by 1806 JJ Dessalines had been assassinated and rebel Generals Petion a Mulatto in the south was at war with Christophe in the north and these exhausted former slaves were freed to a country mostly burned to the ground in 13 years of violence. Most of the people functionally illiterate content to retreat to tiny plots allotted to them and world their own land staying away from the intrigues and civil conflict between Cap Haitian and Emperor Christophe and President Alexander Petion in Port-au-Prince. And the outside world whispered sedition and tightened the quarantine. The revolt which could not be suppressed had to be buried. Economically this was a success. Haiti no longer had her sugar infrastructure or the means to export anything. So Alexander Petion in a historic meeting with Simon de Bolivar in Jamel the southern port city agreed to export the revolution. In exchange for Haitian guns and fighters bolivar agreed to liberate Latin America and free all the slaves there. By 1820 both colonialism and slavery in Latin America were finished. But newly freed slaves and revolutions do not always quickly make chickens eggs or democrats and by the time Bolivar was dead there were new oligarchies laying claim to all of the newly freed turf. By 1822 Haiti was unified under Haitian President Boyer who surrounded by French war ships signed the indemnity. These freed slaves would pay back France. 21 billion USD between then and 1947. To end the quarantine the economic blockade Haiti would impoverish herself further. And there would be coups. 22 coups until 1915 when the US occupied Haiti with troops until 1934. Imposing a new slavery. Building roads and new plantation infrastructure. And an army which a man named Francois Duvalier would use to come to total power in 1957. And he and his son Jean Claude would rule until 1986 with vile secret police the Maccoutes supported by us money and CIA support for the killing of communists. And a revolt from the peasants and church brought to power a priest. The liberation theologian Aristede. Toppled in 1991 after serving 9 months. And then more bloodshed and coup and more us occupation. And then came a quake which killed 300,000 perhaps. Or 220,000 or 100,000; no one actually knows. As rounded numbers suggest. But, it leveled the capital and the technocrats descended and missionaries. And now four years since the quake a pop singer and Duvalierist is president. A UN occupation is in its tenth year and there are still over 10,800 small, medium and international NGO taking about chickens and eggs and such. The quarantine never really ended. And now 98 percent of the trees are gone. Life expectancy is 56. Half the population cannot read. And a cholera epidemic introduced by the UN troops has killed 9,000 and crippled over 600,000. And yet still people speak of building back better with the Sai Ah Industrial park mega sweat shop or the tourist build up in Ile-a-Vache or new plans to link Haiti into the globalized economy.
But the typical Haitian wonders about the power which goes on for two hours day for the world cup. Or the water supply. Or how to afford two meals a day. It is not so much that one must believe in this narrative but one must listen for a narrative. Or the quarantine succeeds. It succeeds by painting these newly freed slaves as savage primates unable to have a country. Haiti instead of being a triumph of will for human rights and freedom is used then as a cautionary tale. For the long suffering Haitian people do not always get their new except by radio. And since most cannot read French there are only irregular reports in Haitian Creole about the success of failure of this revolt they began. That it spread to Russia, China, and Cuba and then to Algeria, Congo, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Iran and dozens of others plantations. That for those with the ability to read history and current events it seems to be spreading like fire into the Middle East.
This revolt is an apolitical desire to enjoy the human rights codified by the UN in 1945. It isn’t about government or economic organization. After the abolitionist battles and legal end of slavery there are still 37 million slaves worldwide. The great powers and their oligarchies propagate the race hatred and then utilized the quarantine of the Soviet Union as blackest proof this socialist modal was unsound. But there remain bastions. And again it is not about the politics or the economy but about justice. About no spending a half-life fighting only to survive like an animal.
We have broken the quarantine the physical quarantine with ease because our passports are blue and we have 15 USD and a base of operations in this dusty old fort. But perhaps we will have to spend the rest of lives breaking the secondary quarantine. The false consciousness. The separation of fakeness and real imposed by the oligarchy telling us who is white and who is black. Man and woman. Haitian and foreigner. Capitalist and communist. It is a matter of knowing that all of these divisions are lies. Separating us from our human rights. Rights such as healthcare, education, food water, living wages unions, the right to speak or write our opinion without being put in a bag by masked men. Raped. Cut into pieces. And dumped by the roadside at night.
Sebastian and Adelina, shortly joined by the Marine Peter Reed and e.m.t. and Jean Louis a Haitian American e.m.t. and Eric Admen a fire fighter paramedic from Seattle Soviet none shared a simple identity or view. If such labels were too imposed about nationality all were card carrying Americans. And it was this exploitation of privilege that we hoped to use to win. The oligarchy of any country relies on division. And therefore our greatest strength is not our nationality or privilege but that we are forcing an opening. Haitian leadership in Haiti. A simple objective; teach more 40 Haitians to save lives. But we have a narrative though not agreed to by all of this ad hock unit; it forms the underpinning. If there is to be change here and abroad we must control our own means to human development. As a means to human rights.
Covered in dust and baked by heat and surrounded by endless miles of corrugated shanty dwellings and walled compounds no will pay much attention to us. The revolution began by murdering the oppressor. For 210 plus years that fight has been fought to a stalemate. And the resulting rights have been transient and largely un-won.
So we are switching the tactic in accordance with orders from rebel leadership here and abroad. We are internationalists. We are willing to travel country to country to go where needed to most remote jungle or mountain. The oppression is real. The violence is real. The slavery is still real. Our oppressor will still stick a gun in our face and drag us away in a sac and torture us over rights. The way we win is make our oppressors irrelevant. For they wish to read us some Machiavelli or Hobbes and tell as we are but violent little monkeys. That without them wed eat each other. I will say that when men and women can fish; can educate heal and keep roads open and trash free then we will not need them. We will not pay them taxes. We will not let them use our money or hard earned money to buy guns and kill people just like us over their ideas on chickens and eggs.
We are not alone on this island with this idea. My place in the chain of command is that of a staff sergeant. They day we got here we were but five more reinforcements. We have broken the first level of the quarantine by penetrating the siege. And now with but a few devices carried in supported by the local arm of the resistance we train 40 more souls how to save a life. The insurgency began with weapons and ideas. I will not survive this war to see Zion. But that is not my role. Nor Adelina or Pete Reed or Eric Admen or Jean Louis. You give a slave a gun and say freedom and you will wash the blood of an entire generation onto the sea and streets. You give a slave training to heal and save and the blow to the oppressors on the mountain is fully sustained. We are but an army of newly freed slaves who have choose to build the world we wish to see, rather than again set on fire a world already burning.
Within the confines of a dusty but patriotic fort barely held together by cinderblocks rebar pillions and chipped paint; partially over run by cats a small internationalist unit composed of but five volunteers who will garrison the outpost beginning 3 June, Gregorian Year 2014. Behind a mammoth red iron door is the concrete skeleton of a school called “Ecole Shalom des Frères”, which means a ‘school of the brothers of peace’ being intermittently erected, year by year and brick by brick. And in the adjacent courtyard is a two story maze of chalk board dimly lit classrooms, a small mess hall and some ten second floor rooms worth bunks to accommodate the inbound reinforcements.
There is a water tower that supplies clean chlorinated water to the locals at 5 goudes a liter. There is a parade ground field covered now completely in debris an impassible dumping ground occupying half the forts enclosure. There is a field kitchen and a wrangle of mangy creatures that when bled or squeezed make what passes as food. Or, eggs. There is a small partially compensated staff of locals. There are two former restoviks one 12 and one 22. They accomplish various tasks of carpentry banditry plumbing an electric work. Three female cooks live in town. One is old women is young and the third of medium age. There is transporter named Colbert; a former taptap driver on staff along with several other useful quasi useful or only vaguely advantageous adjunct personnel with vague if not wholly nepotistic function. And the ground commander gong on his business card as a “country director” is one Mr. Avinadav DeBuitléirs educated at the University Of Stony Brook in Long Island who affiliates himself with the diaspora aspirations of various movements in Brooklyn. But, he directs little outside the walls of this miserable fort; and even here he often prefers delegation.
And, Avinadav was directly support by a petit blan named Laura Levi, but since she was on some business in Ethiopia she had been replaced by a temperamental wench a Quebecois from Montréal named ‘lady Catherine’. Her last name was completely unpronounceable except by the haughtiest of francophone so we said Lady or ‘Madam Catherine’, or Catherine Q because there was universal contempt for her amongst the volunteers. She has too well assimilated into the habit of barking orders at Brown people.
And that is as we say “what it was”.
On 3 June two members of this unit crossed the rocky road called a National Highway from Santo Domingo to the City of Port-Au-Prince on the Capital Cruiser armored bus service which showed the movie Fast and the Furious part 5, at least five times. At first, it was quite loud but by the third run it was silent as no one on the bus spoke anything besides Spanish, French or Haitian Creole, and the initial plot points of the rock and Vin Diesel the most famous of Mulat action heroes had been grasped. And now it was all tits giggling and exploding cars. And the road fell apart right after the Jimani checkpoint crossing. They served us a ham sandwich a bottle of cold water. Sebastian Adon could see the color slowly leave Adelina Blazhennaya’s pretty and petit face as the border was crossed. He could see and via the omnibus rattling feel the road become not road. The structures of the country side become not structures. The lush foliage become barrens. And as the color of his partners face fades Sebastian also wonders how she will react to what is to come. Jostling jolts hit the bus and traffic slows to a trickles pace as the driver forms a one lane convoy behind mac trucks build in East Asia shuttle merchanting goods from Dominican Republic into Haiti. Sneakers and such. Also cocaine or people sealed a valise.
In the mind of Sebastian Adon whose hair was brown and heart was neg. He imagines this infiltration as a patriotic duty for there was some Haitian blood in him for once we took an oath.
The trappings of normal human development crumble each kilometer the bus rumbles into Haiti and the endless dust. A cloud of whirling particulate swallowing the charmless and desolate environs.
At the border, there was nothing to buy except Pringles. In addition, soda of every kind. The customs agent asked Adon in Creole what was his business in Haiti; tourism.
Adelina Blazhennaya and Sebastian both crossed the border in black boots and blue uniform pants and black shirts and therefor the customs agent knew that tourism wasn’t really what they were doing in Haiti. But, no one cared. The Brazilians, Chileans, Argentinians, and a poperee of other lesser nations were running the functions of the disbanded military. The Americans were subsidizing the state. The Cubans were running the hospitals and several thousand NGOS perhaps as many as 10800 were the only economy besides transshipment, allegedly of bulk packaged cocaine.
No cares given in a meaningful way. Much less an under compensated customs agent. They both had blue American passports. Crisp and newly issued. Who cared what their intention was if they had such blue passports and fifteen USD a piece. The two enormous satchel valise roller bags went completely unexamined. As did their two green voodoo tactical rucksacks. Who cared?
The omnibus continued two hours west down the national highway. There was corrugated tin shack after shack. Contrasting the anything to D.R. is an exercise in futility. One can simply see that this the same island and anthropologically speaking that is where it ends. Without a lengthy discourse on history colonialism and superficialities of cultural antagonism well honestly it’s night and day except they both like cock fighting.
Three months ago the president of the Dominican Republic signed an executive order denationalizing of over 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent.
They had the tenor of slightly over fed happy slaves noted Blazhennaya. Not the Haitians. Neither happy nor well fed. At each juncture of slow down as she grew more pale seeing the descent into some land before time some utter desolation. Naked children drooling covered in flies. Tents and shanties. Everywhere unfinished construction sites and partially erected edifices. And the cloud of dust hovered over the endless misery.
When they finally reached Port-Au-Prince it was just before tusk and Avinadav DeBuitléir accompanied by Marco Balan the light skinned apparatchik and Colbert the driver loaded them in and shuttled them both away to Croix des Bouquets down the unlit impasses to 808 Rue Double Barrel They were given a choice of three rooms all very dusty and Spartan. Settled a little before midnight. Adelina Blazhennaya sat on their twin bed in a room with no window coverings just a window space with sheet nailed to cover it.
And then she cried heavily.
Not at the overwhelming poverty; the blight scorched earth of the quarantine. Not for fallen friends and those surely to fall. The quiet tears of Adelina Blazhennaya were for herself. For to protect the man she loves and is so devoted she will lose everything and everyone she has ever known. This was a dying place. A ruined pocked and parched Island at or near the bottom of the mountain. Horror has exhausted tears, thinks she. She cries because what hope have they or humanity in general to win. There enemies are hunting them. She is so far from Chelyabinsk Tank City. She cries and Sebastian holds her. Darkness seeps in. They take their place in the trenches joining the reality, the tragic ranks of newly freed slaves.
It was one thing to follow a man into hell, it was another thing all together to fight your way from that hell to the heights of Mt. Olympus if not higher! No part of the stated American dream included any of this.
But before there was a Haitian Emergency Group, before there was a resistance movement winning ground in both Haiti, Syria and the United American States; there was a mighty quake which took the lives of somewhere between 100,000 to 316,000 men, women and children, which struck the county on the morning of 12 January, 2010.
Round large disparate numbers which revealed a great unknowing and uncaring. For when the oligarchy cannot crush, kill or discredit a thing they quarantine it.
It was a spirit of solidarity that brought us from Brooklyn to stand beside our Haitian brothers and sisters in their darkest hour; it was the Haitian defiance of empires and the world system itself that made us stay in Hispaniola and continue the battle for freedom beside them.
Adler’s punchdrunkery! The Brazen, the uncouth way you talk! You talk in their company as if no men or adult supervision heard; picture plays parkour of the ageist line division. And the flush! You ante up terror in ideas. The flush of your young punch drunk; slight blush of a Charles River crossing, where the Amazon broached the Mississippi; and then nothing remained of we. When the dinner parties are all over, you’re gonna start a war.
As if the lead and casket was just as comphy as chornay making us cotton. And loving you for just wanting to steal things; drunk or play music as you were drunk for the past three hours, old, I brood. Yoga, yes yoga. Carlos Castaneda, I’ll read it. “I love you baby, they’re killing my people.” “Who are your people?” She looks in my eyes and sees murder.
For me, one night in Tehran, In the dead still night, I should sleep. But, I persist in composition. I assume my position, Which is to say two staogs worth of turmoil. A hard shot of pastness. And a bouncing whiff of if! Your sweet smile is lyrical you know, you know. A gift to me, too sift through my mind is to tinker with a land mine. “So I hold my hope inside, and wait until the sun comes up?” There is a flying carpet in my room. There are castles out in Burma, there are mountains worth our climbing, I am tired of this capitalistic digging, my grave is deep enough I think, slaves before we left the womb. There are strange exotic lands; an in your eyes I see shimmers of a future without martyrdom or doom! As if those castles, those mountains were surpassible, via conspiracy. As if those castles, we could live in them, but for a second I wonder on your investment; of hope of and fuel. Do you want big dreams or American dreams? American, it comes up in conversation. It seems. Petrol poured into my lips I will make a full scale assault on the grim gods of our fathers, and finance, this romance my catalyst, but I am a pittance, my magic carpet carries me clear, Sit on my face, a passion play a midnight. For if I can see your smile! The very next day! Too soon, you say. Is not my measure of time dear little teacher endearing? All things future and past, as still now to me. All things future and present and past, a vast and disparate wait for the moon at the gate, for the food on one’s plate! For the zeal of the pistol and honing of hate. “Darling, Zhdat (wait), always looking backwards is the basket of black cats.” She says temper yourself. Let unseen energies absorb you, court woo, and the past passes through! She, twice she then you. Look; at me with bright eyed hopefulness, peacefulness that’s what we saw. I looked into that frail, pale Komarova; I saw goddess I saw power I saw awe.
What now? As cascades over broken backs of marching season bear down on Boston’s rackets; side walk cracks, you see a fiery optimism in small places where transfixed; I court dissidents. With small talks and dinner parties. Does she know I’m raising an army, and a family later? Stitch back my wounds with her powers of healing; banners and tirades; against the elite, against the untouchable castes on top, against capital one. But tonight, we have Havana Club and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, it’s still charming time for exile, it’s still capable of being fun! And without distain or interruption, you remove the blood bandages of my past lives, you remove my clothes and yours. Pock marks of bullets, the cut of a million passionate knives. “They’re gonna kill you. That’s why we can’t ever be together for real,” “You’re a gun slinging rebel, disguised as a student, but this is my life, I live here for keeps, I need this, I have friends here, I need a life I can see has a legitimate future, I’m human, I feel.”
Oh, gun slinger cut of Ali, but I’m reduced to student when you’re looking into me, looking at me, Elena Komarova I’m not planning on dying in Water Town, I’m here for the secrets, and now the idea of we. And as we paint Pall Mall a colorful insurrection I try and sketch the how; the contours of your slim and happy soul. I see all its parts and I want them around me. But, I fail to capture but for new lips, and usuality of drawing obscene huge breasts, I am unseeing in early art of the universal Komarova, the epic you. I fail. I try again. I fail. I spend some money. I nearly burn the house down and your car is towed, true story. I’m not classically trained at anything, except being a paramedic. My own palm ought to be backhanding myself, strained and refrained from the lack of substance of my duck lips and tits, the things I can draw.
Madness. You always knew I had madness in the blood. Many nights, I recount out best must useless fights. Many nights, the blackness drowned out the magic of the stars.
The fog of war tucked me to bed into a light coma, seeing and feeling nothing; they build me layers of prison bars.
What is left of me for you to love is a happy corpse reanimated. You gave me the possibility of life, but I squandered it with my duties to the resistance and my hate. There was always still a little hope left. (Tam Po, Prezhnemu nadeyyus chtovnoch) What about counting stars seemed like a good idea? Until we found rest, I’ll count your smiles and well laid lines, excuse my right eyes glare; the lips and breasts. Your Russian lullabies sustain me I’m bleeding you saved me I love you don’t leave me, there are some many things I repent, Not time not days we spent, I am cut different in cock and cloth from the sea of other suitors, some calling themselves men. Loyalnost fierce, I can’t derail, can’t let go. You know, so you tuck me in with silence, why do you fuck men with no hair, I’m trying, I’m failing, the story is over, I get it, I know.
I’d carry you again, if you’ll carry me, any load. I can take care of monsters, I can bring back some of the dead; if you came to Haiti for love, just know this is only the beginning of the rebellions road. Feed me some hope. I’ll dine with you again, one day. When the worst is over and it’s time for a little more fun, you and the Marine Pete Reed, the three of us were the first in the struggle to come, after the battles are over and castles are conquered. I lost you, but the war well the war it has to be won. And I’ll promise nothing with bald bastard near, for the earth and the sky are venues for my unwritten stories, battles we lost but better the stories of battles because you we won; No more swords! She declares unless you’re fighting for me, not fighting for me you’re fight to get free just warm me with that fire and I’ll open your eyes to the world right here, pleasing us both with the possibilities of beautiful things we can make and also to be. Touch the ground. Breathe the air, Speak not a word off your communist lips, Or my body and softness, Folds of my cerebellum, reacting to the caress of your hand on my hips, and my hair. Fall red leaves will tumble as I mount the soap box in Cambridge. We will create! “Let some of the things you’re creating with me, absolve of your aloneness, your impossible war, and maybe even some of your hate!” Look at me each night. “I’m dead, not dying, you know what those devils took!” She replies, “In the real, or your head?” Look at me each night, it kills me, kiss my cheeks, and I will carry your hopes into life. And if nothing is promised, but promises on the pages of the paper they are printed.
And if nothing is promised that fails delivery. If not one trespass occurs, then I will pour you a glass of cold hope, she says. You will be my favorite character if I can earn more nights, more time. My face cracked twenty times at least against the bathroom mirror of the empire hotel, the night in November she left me.
“If you’d like in year, we can revisit this.” “I’m gone.” “I’ll do anything.” If you’d like to wait a year in old soul time and find me in another life? There are carpets to Tehran that leave at dawn and you could leave him and come with me, to anywhere. The wild is rapture, the sky is glee. And we were born free, or less than not free loyal and happy and humble live we; When you look at the sky, smile, I’m looking at you and you’re looking at me.
Sandra Santiestiban has jet black hair and is petite. She’s vaguely malnourished for a Cuban, but still attractive and dynamic. Of course. She is and always will be a member of the Committees for Defense of the Revolution. The vigilant internal defense mechanism against Yankee imperialist aggression and unrestrained, insatiable sex tourism.
“The U.S.S.R. was the sun and we were just a proud and tiny fortress; that when the sun went out, when we lost our greatest, sturdiest ally; we would be in the dark and there were many things in the dark that could ruin us.”
There would be no more petrol for the cars and tractors, buses and power plants. There would not be fertilizer for growing food. There would be shortages of absolutely everything on every level of consumption. There would be long lines and no electricity. There would be no fans or air conditioners, there would be zip-zero-nada. And in this proverbial darkness of our times ahead, our enemy which had sought to ruin us from the very day of our independence would move in, emboldened by the so called end of history.
I have some understanding that were it not for decisions made during the revolution, if not for our Russian friends and of course the own solid base of our people in the historical context; we could be living in an illiterate and deeply unhealthy place; with a brothel and gambling embankment running from Miramar to Varadero. 500 kilometers long where foreigners could just cheaply, scenically fuck our women, drink our rum and smoke our cigars in the sun.
And I knew, I knew the minute I was called to the office that we would not surrender, our great leaders, well the two brothers still alive; would not for one human second consider that the fight was lost.
I was there the day they called us all together. The top nine, the big two; the Ministers and the deputies of industry, defense, finance, agriculture, espionage later. We had known it was coming the fall of our protector and benefactor. In embassy cables and diplomatic whispers; we also knew, it was our job to know that when the big bear fell down, died, and became reborn as god only knows what under American guidance! And its brightest, newest oldest and also highly questionable satellites began dropping from the sky; that nothing not one thing would stop the aggressors to the north from moving in upon us.
We knew this was the beginning of the end of the revolution as we understood it, but what could we do? We suspected the Syrians and the Libyans would not give in easily to them at all. And we watched one after another as communist regimes collapsed in Eastern Europe and Africa. It was really our estimation, that by the time the dust settled; it would be only us, the Vietnamese, the People’s Republic of China (both which had embraced capitalism in most regards five years ago, Laos, and whatever the backwards hell they were doing in North Korea!
We assumed Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Namibia and Angola would remember what we did for them but be in no position to reciprocate. And between 1989 and 1994, it would all come tumbling down. The failed architecture of a dystopian dream.
We sat together at a time when even the leaders were hungry and when anyone looked in a mirror they would not always recognize their own faces, for a look of despair had set in, inside oneself. All that we had willed as a people could be undone in just one year. We were all the same outside, for the siege had not begun yet, it would begin tomorrow and the next day and for the next ten years.
And the Yankee enemy in the North, the pale colder place just a few days out by raft or one hour by plane; it would either soon invade, or try and starve us out. The ten million that had refused to defect. And the accomplishments of the last fifty years could go up in smoke, or simply in a long whimper, as the Dominoes began to fall.
But I understood, it was my training from Moscow to understand and my own Cuban sense of putting it together and taking it apart and refashioning. I knew that there was only one thing that could hold the country together, and so did Fidel and Raul. We needed to buy the time it required us to shore up.
And I am not sure that we prepared adequately for this day, actually. I’m not sure really we believed this day would come.
And they drove us out to, well of course they didn’t tell us and we didn’t ask. And we were told in a meeting this was going to be a special period in times of peace, which was to say all the conditions of a siege and a war were to be upon us and really the only question was how long could we last until the U.S. gets bored, not tired for they have never been in a rush. More until the empire is bored with us, less obsessed with us. Long enough for the opposition to imperialism to recoup.
I remember in the car to the ranch which disguised the room for these situations. I remember wondering if this was the end of our experiment and life as we understood it.
“This comes right from the chief; you’re all going abroad in a week. Some of you will join embassy staff or medical missions, some as private people with foreign passports. You will be going to allied countries and Western countries, you will be going to make some hasty business.”
Well really the whole speech was so much longer. But this was the short of it. We were not told in any specific terms how long supplies and foreign currency reserves could hold out on the island. We were told in no uncertain terms that things were going to run out, and that our job was to generate hard currency through the operation of a variety of legal and illegal businesses to shore up the essential purchase; food, fuel and probably armaments.
“They’re rioting in Moscow and Warsaw and Budapest. It’s all coming down. Even the Chinese are talking about calling it something else.”
I tell you it wasn’t all cigar smoke and mirrors and fake foreign names, Cubans look like everyone and we had trained long ago to act like anyone, and we’d been assimilating for years into the second world and there was a contingency planned for a cut off over time from USSR foreign aid, not overnight.
“What brought it all down?” someone named Sandra Santiestiban asks.
“This wasn’t a polite or immediate question,” she was told. But the answer was several things. First, the West was economically more exploitative and comparatively more ruthless. Second, the Russian Communist Party lost its popular imperative, and third, the endless wars in proxy had sapped its will.
But there was something else no one said, which was being said in the West; that Capitalism was simply a better system, no-no no one would say that. But everyone was always hoping blue jeans and popular gringo music would fall of a favela cart or plane hatch back from Miami. And it often did. Luxury carrots for all or for none says the evil murderous and often sloppy C.I.A.! But ours was a hard won thing that had the support of the people and would not be defeated by American imperialism and temptation.
We will do what we have to do to survive this. Too much is historically on the line, if we fall like the others this idea and all our sacrifices and gains will have been for nothing. We would plot and organize, mobilize and do anything we had to do to secure the revolution. We would survive this coming Special Period in Times of Peace.
We will break the grim Yankee blockade and ensure the relevancy of Cuban style Marxist Leninism for ten thousand years to come! And I will wear blue jeans when I have to.
As told by Heval Kawa Ahmedi a Bakuri Kurdish Guerrilla:
“The legend goes that in a meeting in a tea house in the village of Lice near Diyarbakir City, on November 25th of 1978 a group of young students lead by Abdullah Ocalan founded the Kurdistan Workers Party and launched a revolution unlike anything the world had ever seen before it.”
I was born in Diyarbakir City, a poetic place. An ancient citadel of giant black stone walls and total martial law. A town of prisons, stories, heroes and valance in the epoch of the Kurdish people. Little wine bars, a thriving literary scene. It cannot decide whether to be eastern or western, Turkish or Kurdish. The epicenter of a great revolt, or the dystopian mockery of the full blown repression of a colonizing power forcing a boot heel on our neck. As Kurdistan is a powerful and long repressed enduring idea, that idea is becoming a reality on the barricades here and long running fight in the mountains. An imagined community of over forty million souls who are wrongfully, shamefully divided between the imposed nation states of Turkey, Syia, Iraq and Iran all things have two names, all things are both real and imposed upon us. As if to be a Kurd requires an act of insanity, and an act of double thinking. A persistent zealous fight to make the world acknowledge our rights and identity. To admit we have a right to survive as a nation beset with enemies on all sides.
Following the Turkish military coup of 1980, the Kurdish language was prohibited in public and private life. The prison of Diyarbakir filled up and the endless wails of rape and torture propelled the movement to full mobilization and to take up arms again.
Diyarbakir, which in my people’s tradition is also called Ahmed has now swollen to nearly 4 million people since the eradication and ethnic cleansing of over 5,000 Kurdish villages in the great ranges of mountains to the east. The priamry battle grounds between the Party and the Turkish State. Growing up there, there was of course no Kurdish allowed in school, no Kurdish books or music except deeply underground. Were in within the Turkish State’s power, we would not even have Kurdish names! We would admit to being a backwards people of “Mountain Turks”. I was born in the year of the largest, latest and greatest uprising. And although since the days of the Medes there have been “one thousands sighs and one thousand failed revolts”, this uprising was to be completely different.
In 1984 Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdistan Workers Party simultaneously attacked three Turkish army posts and police stations in Bashur and announced the beginning of their revolution. For the next thirty years, almost without pause the P.K.K. and it’s armed guerrilla would battle the Turkish military across Bashur, the name we call the Turkish occupied zone of Kurdistan which means “the North”. Over 50,000 would die, the Turks would engage in vast acts of scorched earth barbarism and we in the Party would eventually turn to out right terror. In the end, the majority of the deaths were Kurdish civilians. In the end the only liberated ground was a handful of villages deep in the mountains of North Iraq, the Qandil.
Now, Kawa is not my real name. It is the name given to me by the guerrillas of the P.K.K. when I joined the Party at age 16. In the year 2000. By that time we were fully surrounded in Qandil being attacked on all sides and death seemed certain. Total defeat as well. Our great leader had been kidnapped in Kenya. Major leaders of the movement including the brother of Abdullah Ocalan, Osman, had completely betrayed us. Our own Iraqi Kurdish brothers in the K.D.P. and P.U.K. Peshmerga were collaborating with Turkey and American to annihilate us.
How do I tell you my story? How does this even begin or end for an outsider. For people who do not even know where Kurdistan begins of ends, or even care. As Turkey is a NATO ally, and no matter what it says or does will remain a beneficiary of great power largesse.
I cannot tell you my real name. I cannot speak for the Party, not can I fully disclose the deepness of my hope and my hate to a stranger.
I will try and say somethings for the benefit of doubt, that non-Kurds could care about us so much that they would come to our land by the hundreds. To fight and die alongside us not simply fighting in resistance to Islamic radicalism, genocide and repression, but also because they grasp the larger idea. The total an utter radicalism and implications of Abdullah Ocalan’s vision. For the survival of the revolution rests not in securing a Kurdish State, but instead to export these ideas abroad. To make the blood of the martyrs raise the flood waters of all mankind and provide a blueprint for liberation.
Of course we began as communists, we began admiring the Cubans and it was the Russians and Palestinians that first trained armed the resistance in the early days in the Bekka Valley of Lebanon. But we are not Communists or Nationalists anymore. Our thinking on the subject of liberation has evolved. The Cuban connection and the Palestinians connection are very real and enduring parts of the story.
But, when we all almost died on the mountain top, surrounded and out gunned in 2000 there were no Cubans, or Russians or Palestinians to help us as they were all defeated or fully besieged. By some miracle, or just by sheer will the Party survived. And the 1989 defeat of Communism internationally required us to climb higher, dig deeper to criticize and self-criticize. To adopt an evolution in our thinking. With our ranks decimated, the armed struggle In a complete stalemate, declared a terrorist organization by almost every European country; we evolved. The revolution could not ever be won with arms and ideology alone. Nor could we secure Kurdistan while every other nation on earth embraced Capitalist Modernity. To secure our victory and survival as a people in Bakur, Bashur, Rojalat and Rojava we would embrace the ideas of a Jewish anarchist from Vermont, as re-interpreted in prison by Ocalan and implemented by the new largely female leadership of the Party. This methodology called “Democratic Confederalism”, adopted by the Party in 2004 would soon find actual expression in Rojava. The Wild West of Kurdistan, the North most area of Syria. In 2014 when the Civil War broke out the Party and its allied militias seized control of major towns and cities across Syria abandoned by the Assad regime.
And thus we came down from the mountains, out of the underground and prepared to make stand in Rojava where the radicals of the Islamic State were terrorizing out people and butchering everyone in the their path. If we go back to the mountains it will signal only our isolation and defeat. If we hold these cities, if we showcase that we are fighting to defend not just for Kurds but for Arabs, Assyrians, Yazidis, Circassaians, Chechens and Turkmen too; if we show that Democratic Confederalism is the solution, the way ahead for all oppressed peoples; then others will join us. And like the Nawruz mountain fires this uprising will spread everywhere.
“On a Cold and Bloody Front near the River Euphrates”
November 25th, 2017
As told by Heval Ciya a Scottish Soldier & YPG Volunteer;
“There’s dust in my beard and men dying all around me.”
As we grew closer to the Euphrates we can see fire in the sky and the night is lit up with heavy coalition airstrikes somewhere far away to the south. The convoy of nine trucks had left Al Hasakah the largest rebel held city in the morning and drove about five hours south toward some forward operating base. The eight of us internationals had not been issued weapons until half way to the front. We stopped of course several times for obligatory tea and some volleyball. The sport of Apoist revolution. Sometimes we’d stop at what seemed like the same identical store front kiosk, next to well stocked pharmacies. The road bodega of Kurdistan stocked with energy drinks, smokes and Turkish day to day items, never toilet paper. All the toilet paper in Syria was now gone. There we bought energy drinks and cigarettes of a more potent type, as the party issued Ardens were lights or ultra lights at best. There was Pepsi, but no Coca-Cola throughout the liberated zones. Real freedom was not won yet.
In the first battle that I participated in during the Syrian Civil War five Arab soldiers in our S.D.F./ Y.P.G. unit were blown to bits by mines and mortars as we stormed the river basin a little after midnight. Evidently, there were far more Daesh entrenched than we had thought. From a dirt sand trench I fired my AK-47 shiftlessly over the wall, peaking out I saw an Arab comrade ripped apart by gun fire an collapse in the sand.
The fire fight resumed immediately after a short re-calibration of the battle plan, after Heval Commander Dalil’s men were buried. A larger number of Kasadeh were trucked in, barely trained. Half or more might have fought for Daesh or the Regime at some point. Child soldiers all over the place. A major conscription drive happened, even some cadro tabors were moved in. This was a race to secure as much turf north of the Euphrates as we could as quickly as we could, creating a defensible buffer against the regime, Russians and Iranians to secure the oil fields. Of course, implicit in all that was to finish Daesh for good. Smash their final positions along 60 to 100 hamlets and boney towns leading to Hajin, the last stand of the caliphate. Very bad intelligence. The bandits were still very well dug in, refugee were swarming out and among them suicide bombers. Five so far. it was impossible to know anymore who was Daesh or not among the refugees flooding out. Some two dozen Arab Hevals were martyred the first night of operation. We were down the hardcore of the elite, the foreign fighter zealots, their families. Motor cycles with snipers affixed to re-position. Sleeper cell deployment, suicide bombers, booby traps, tunnel mines, the usual. Now they would in four battalions capture about fifty tiny key destitute towns working south in several prongs toward the river. “If you see a helicopter, don’t shoot at it!” Dalal had said, it was our new resupply drop copters. we allegedly had an very, very small airforce now. “Do not shoot at the helicopters in general,” was repeated several times in Arabic and Kurdish. “Also, also! If the regime forces fire, return fire, but do not engage them. Unless they actually cross the river.” Declared Commander Heval Brusk, which means ‘commander lightning’. Commander lightning then personally presided over a few hours on conscript drills. None of these bearded partisans were trusted with grenades. So the very next day, at early dawn, ten of the destitution ridden little seemingly strategic ISIS hamlets were again stormed. There was chaotic gun fire erupting everywhere. There were utterly ransacked two story brown buildings all unfinished, all about the same shattered look. From several positionsTakimcommandos were firing endlessly from roof tops and sniper holes out toward where it was believed the enemy was hiding. A mosque about half a kilometer away. Well of course every Daesh postion was in a mosque, hospital or granary since nothing else was defensible. This was a mostly one sided AK-47 and mortar barrage. Much of the war had proceeded like this, pick up trucks dripping light infantry to storm abandoned Arab homes and light up anything that moved. Loot absolutely anything that wasn’t made of sand and carry it back north. One pipe, one water basin one carpet at a time. A small child ran out into the road was blown away. Briefly a pause, until he was clearly limp and dead. A day or two more of endless AK fire, sometimes at night too. Eventually the Americans were told to bomb the mosque. Spotters transmit grid coordinates. Soon, about 5 minutes later an airstrike riots apart the mosque. Battle won!
Many people have written at length about “how boring” it can be to be at war, but it is more terrifying than boring, actually Heval. You do your best to not think about how men and women far more prepared than yourself took a wrong turn and then exploded. Or how a sniper cut them down. Or how they died in a Turkish airstrike. Or contracted hepatitis because of poor local appreciation of pooping with toilet paper and hand washing, then eating. The boredom of war Heval is perhaps a cover for a sneaking debilitating fear, so that is what people write about. Being bored, instead of being afraid. And in a war such as this certainly you sit around quite a lot drinking tea, smoking weak Party issued cigarettes and standing guard. Or looking for strategic places to jerk off or poop without setting off a mine. But nothing for us was the same for very long and thus all the time you spend sitting around was better spend conversating on the Revolution’s future, or studying some Kurdish, or horsing around with the Arabs. Who loved to try and communicate actually. And also show you pornography and awkwardly try and steal, trade for or buy your hand grenades. Or ask you to bring them to America or Europe hidden in a bag. Jokes abound, but really it is only you who will be brought back to Europe or America in a bag. While very few of us actually spoke any real Kurmanji Kurdish or Arabic, it seemed that the Arabs were far more interested in us than the Kurds though. I would call the Kurdish commanders attitude, begrudging appreciation and that of the rank and file borderline insulting. I would go so far as to say that at this stage in the war, being fought in majority Arab zones now by the Euphrates river that an increasing number of the front line fighters were Kasedeah, non Kurdish Arab S.D.F. fighters. The Assyrians too had a small group, less than a few hundred men many little kids and old men. Many poorly trained and poorly paid semi conscripts. Many not even very against the Islamic state more eager to shoot at the Russians and regime forces on the other side of the river. With the Kadrosbeing withheld in clear preparation for the impending defense of Afrin Canton.
In retrospect I assume that Heval Fermander Dalil probably saved our lives by abandoning us in a rear fox hole in the dead of night. The ten internationalists that I was aware of were placed further back in the rear, but Heval Shervan ‘the Irish gypsy’ commandeered a Humvee and caught us up, without any invitation to the troops of Fermander Dalil.
I remember freezing out in the dunes all night long while the Arab fighters shared neither bedding nor blanket. It was so bitterly god damn cold!
Sometimes Heval Kawa the New Yorker and I talk about the girls back home. I talk about my Ashley. He talks about his Daria.
“Sometimes I close my eyes and remember your lips. Late into the long trip back to Brighton to you home. I have no home, only ugly little flats around Brooklyn soviet which I rent out of poverty, artless and shared. Decorated with trinkets.I’ll never go back! To you or to Russia, or Haiti, nor to Mehanata the tavern or even dear Cuba. All these things are a form of slavery now. Your lingering Daria, it takes the form of ruminations on WhatsApp messages telling me to “come home”.But to what? To nothing. Life here is hard, but it is free life as they say.”
He was more a poet medic, me just a Scottish warrior.
I was deployed into the Deir Ez-Zor Province wastelands about ten days ago to the front near Omar, Daesh is nearly completely defeated they say, but everyday we are taking martyr bodies back to Al Hasake. Assigned briefly to the Tabor Shahid Lawrence; we lost fifty men in the first few battles to advance south on the mighty Euphrates river. After all that initial death it seems they aim to break up our group of internationalists into different places. The do not want us all to die at once. They do not really seem to have achieved consensus or a plan on where we should be or when and if we should die, or what we are actually even good for. Or what to do when ISIS is finished, and America abandons them and the Turkish Army rolls over the border to kill us all. A heated internal debate is constantly held in both Turkish and Kurdish. Sometimes also in Arabic. Which always ends inconclusively. Well its a complex matter anyway. So many ways to die out here for the greatest cause of our time.
On this Kawa and I agree, that whatever motives brought us all to this wasteland, this place of dying and suffering over made up Gods and ideologies, invented ethnicities and world war three style great power politics; this was the resistance of the age. This was a battle good men, bad men and crazy men could not sit out. Because when the smoke clears there will be a different Middle East, a different world. I am no ideologue. I am no dreamer or religious fanatic. I am a professional soldier. While it is not unreasonable to say the Assad Regime backed by Russia and Iran, the Turks, Al Qaeda and of course the Daesh, are unequivocal the forces of religious fanatical reaction, of fascism, or totalitarianism and death, well they are. While the Kurds and Arabs of Y.P.G./Y.P.J./S.D.F. are not saints, are not angels they are fighting for democracy, feminism, ecology and tolerance in the heart of the Middle East.
Did you know that when you take off a person’s uniform to bury them, you cannot tell a fascist corpse, from a democratic corpse from a Daesh corpse not even from the beard.
“Night falls on the Oldest Continually Inhabited City on Earth”
May 28th, 2017
As told by Heval Kawa Zivistan a New Yorker, Jew, Paramedic and committed Partizan:
The air ship lands in Erbil. Everyone claps, as if they don’t know this is exactly what a plane should do. Everyone on the plane proceeds to take their safety belts off and clog the passage way. 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 K.D.P.; 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. It all been that close.
“Did I do it all for a woman? Or a series of women? I might have.”
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 in Russia I helped the Kurdish Mafia sell a list of 5,700 foreign ISIS fighters to an unknown foreign intelligence buyers in Beirut, probably Russian or Israeli. 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 faceless 300,000 Iraqi dinar to buy some street food, get a cell phone and see the city. I arrived as planned on the day Ramadan began in late May. When airport security was believed to be at its least inquisitive in Turkey and Iraq. I will trade my medical skills and my cunning, also hard drives and enemy 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. At least half of us believe in ’the Revolution’ and wish it to succeed, survive and spread. Some, I’d imagine are big game hunting Islamic fundamentalists.
“I don’t think she’s gonna meet me at the airport, dead or alive. War or medical victory. In triumph or a corpse. If I some how make it back to New York in a year or so after this is over, well over for me as a volunteer. I will return to only a small group of supporters and friends.”
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 radical paradigms about womens’ liberation, ecology and non-state democracy. Anything could be happening there, but all I know is they are crush the ISIS Chetakilometer by kilometer at rapid speeds. Raqqa is completely besieged by the Y.P.G., 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. The phrase denies their ‘Islamic-ness’, their political grievances which in many ways are valid as well as their ecclesiastical claims to be a Caliphate. But, some could suggest that the internationalists have bandit qualities too. Angels and devil, vagabonds and misfits, even cannibals they say in the oral history of the war.
I am only a semi-ideological man. In that some of the varying Utopian currents of the ideologies speak to my better half. Well, I was until recently a bit more of neutral humanist. I will now call myself a highly sober and reasonably well-read man experimenting with Kurdish ideology. I have to say much of the writings of Abdullah Ocalan are 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 Druze, his father fucked off back to Dubai. This woman has low expectations of my happy return. She presumes I will probably die in Syria. The Druze are highly secretive religion which is something like Islam and something like Hinduism, which amongst other hidden details believes in the reincarnation of their people, with documented memory of past lives.
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. Guiding the wealthy towards football games and wine. Waiting back in Brooklyn and Haiti is an underground army of nearly 2,000 ambulance workers and their sympathizers, theoretically. My 33 birthday was very well attended as was my Passover Seder held the night before I departed to Havana. 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. No, just a half. I’ve become a bit anti-Semitic in my middle age, from self-hatred. The blood is neither a help nor a hindrance. I am at a loss to say, except for perhaps one occasion, when being a half Jew never got me anywhere or anything extra or adventitious.
You will have to forgive me when I say that out here, I know I am completely alone. Now of course there are the hevals, the stranger comrade friends. And some I think I feel real solidarity with, some. Even the Kurds and Arabs with whom we can barely even communicate. I get that politically speaking, militarily speaking even I have friends. But the feeling of being alone is based on this inner sense of what I’m doing here. What I see, and what drives me day by day up the treacherous mountain out of this wasteland toward my goals is clearly much bigger than me. But it is not a political theory or an imaginary friend. It always feels so pejorative when Americans accuse me of ‘trying to save the world’, which this is clearly not. And this time, it is not a Russian woman pushing me along. Though certainly a few them of can be found hanging around feigning excitement or outrage in regards to my work. Actually both my lover and my artful muse both begged me into their own ways of begging to not undertake this at all.
Regarding the nature of my work, well it is of course the training of emergency medical technicians with overlapping with training instructing them how to self-sustain medicine and Democratic Confederalism, which is to say ‘bold freedom fighting for stateless democracy’. But I emphasize importantly that I am impartial as to the success of the training if the success of the revolution is accomplished. Of course I do not have total megalomaniacal self-importance. I know quite well I am a tiny historical semi colon, not even a foot note. Probably only remembered, if at all because I kept a journal and wrote it all down. In the Cuban tradition which I have studied and admire one mixes politics and medicine in service of the poor and oppressed.
I have a non-linear mind. I remember the day I founded my first ‘American Workers Party’ about as well the deaths of most of Hevals in defense of Rojava. There were tens of thousands of Arabs, Kurds, Yazidis, Chechens, Armenians in the glorious Syrian Democratic Forces who died before I arrived and perhaps only forty something international volunteers who fell. Numerically and militarily I’m not sure how much we mattered alive, but martyred we brought a global flurry of attention and headlines. Well that’s a simplistic deduction. Just like to say all of my woman and men of the tabors in which I fought perished in a physical sense. Since of course shahid nemarin, martyrs never die!But some of us came back in boxes. Some they never found the bodies. But did we all die in Rojava, the West? Did we lose something inside us trying to discover something? I am confident that we travelled to that war torn land with great optimism in our hearts, and we all left with partial understandings. Feeling as though we lived and others died, many other died for something that was not yet secure as a fact on the ground.
For in “the West, the Land where the Sun Sets” amid that Rojavan Revolution I almost died both physically and mentally many, many times. But their saying held true, ‘martyrs never actually die.’ To have survived my tour I should consider myself lucky, but luck is not what I feel. I feel shame, pure and total shame. More so I feel that I went up a mountain to attempt to validate the better feelings I hold of an optimistic human nature. And now back in Capitalist Modernity all I can do is watch my friends die on a telescreen. Knowing what I know, the secrets I am forced to keep; I have become somewhere in between a phantasm and a Martian. But, though I do not recognize my face anymore, I recall my motives and I am impressed with all the things we attempted. But I am not the same man who left for Kurdistan a year ago.
A member of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) flashes the victory gesture with his hand as he stands next to the SDF’s unfurled flag while on watch duty in the village of Baghouz in Syria’s eastern Deir Ezzor province near the Iraqi border on March 24, 2019, a day after the Islamic State (IS) group’s “caliphate” was declared defeated by the US-backed Kurdish-led SDF. (Photo by GIUSEPPE CACACE / AFP) (Photo credit should read GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP/Getty Images)
Notes
I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to hide and what I can give away. I’m actually very detached from Western thinking so don’t even know what makes compelling propaganda in the West anyway. Actually, the sly and looming enemy knows most of our real names, and frankly were there not many informants amongst us, it is simply a matter of sad fact that to get their passports back many of the French and British volunteers gave us away. Not to snitch jacket, but with a little lean on anyone can make a person flip. Really, there were not that many of us internationalists to keep track of. As the mad China-man Andok said, “the hard drives containing our data were barely even secured and this place is awash in spies.” Our overall numbers were estimated to be around 500 strong of which around 50 perished. Mostly in combat, some later from a wave of alleged suicides. We were small enough therefore for the various security services to keep track of.
So what is the actual purpose of this manuscript? It is certainly not to glorify or denigrate the volunteers. I think it brave we went there but I don’t think we game changed a single thing. Perhaps we were all only there to bear witness that the revolution has even happened. It is surely not my aim give away military secrets and name names, because I am many things but not a Josh, a ‘donkey ass betrayer’. Suffice to say the C.I.A. and the M.I.T. know all our names. I heard some comrades sang like little opera singers to get their European passports back. All speculation, none can actually say. Americans, we had the easiest deal. After ISIS is finished maybe it will not be so black and white, fighting a NATO ally and what not. Assisting a revolution for stateless democracy, womens’ emancipation and social ecology in the heart of the war torn Middle East. ‘Heval Ciya’ the Scott always used to say that the 231 Sniper Unit changed the entire game, but really only the United States and the Coalition airstrikes probably, certainly did. When the last of the under 2,500 U.S. Special Forces leave the Turks will invade in force and try and undo everything. There’s a story we heard about a Y.P.G. Euro volunteer vacationing in Turkey immediately after his tour. He was of course arrested and will serve life in prison. He probably should have made better choices for leave and decompression. There are lots of crazy people here. You have to be little crazy to travel half way across the earth to enlist in a revolution inside a bloody brutal civil war amid a great power confrontation placing Russia and Iran directly against the United States and N.A.T.O. I was told by ‘Heval Jansher’ the Y.P.G. guerrilla who helped train us that, that if I survive the war I should “write something about Rojava that does justice to the over 12,000 martyrs. That does justice to the cause of Kurdistan. Honors Abdullah Ocalan and upholds the values of the revolution.” That it should humanize this resistance struggle inside a revolution inside a civil war inside a great game for the Middle East.
“Maybe, just make it a kind of strange love story,” Jansher joked with me over cigarettes and endless tea. So I hope this account manages some of that, compiling the oral history, experiences and many martyrdom’s shared amongst the approximate 500 foreign Y.P.G./Y.P.J./I.F.B. Internationalist fighters. At the very least I’d like to capture what it was that made us enlist in this hell to take part, to fight and die and kill and try and help, to be less than a foot note in the epic tale of Kurdistan. But still a part. “It has to be a love story or they will never make a movie about it comrade,” Heval Jansher once said, “to the West without a Movie, it is perhaps like this struggle is not even happening at all.” But he also said a ‘real revolutionist’ has no love except for his or her people. That any romantic love is a “bourgeois luxury for civilians”.
“Our love story is for the Resistance of the Age” he used to say, but then Heval Jansher also laughed and noted Jake Gillenhaul was then already shopping around a script where he plays an anarchist falling in love for a beautiful Y.P.J. fighter and another action exploitation of the Y.P.J. was coming out soon in France. But that will likely not go anywhere useful. “You see, in real life we would probably platform and deport this stupid volunteer and the Y.P.J. comrade, she would be shamed and sent briefly to prison” Heval Jansher told me. A famous saying states that the “Kurds have no friends besides the mountains.” Well that’s no longer completely true. The 500 who served and the 45 who died besides the 10,000 Kurdish and Arab martyrs of the battle to defeat ISIS and defend the Rojava Revolution will live forever in the Kurdish tradition, since in Kurdistan ‘Martyrs never die’. Shahid Namarin. These were kind of talks we had at theQerechow Academy.
That then said this is not a love story at all. It’s not ever a Middle Eastern Western. The revolution itself has hardly been secured. The struggle is hardly over. The iron heel and might of the Turkish army looms right over the border to the North. Ready to descend quickly and murder us all. Undo everything that has been fought for against the so-called Islamic State. The Forces of the bloody dictator Assad backed by the Russian army and Hezbollah dig in to the south of the Euphrates river. The collaborationist Iraqi Kurdish K.D.P. Peshmerga, the Iranian supported Hashid Ashabi popular mobilization forces, the Shi’a dominated Iraqi Army and all manners of Iranian revolutionary guards to the south east in Sinjar. To the West the Jihadists of Al Qaeda’s latest rebrand and Islamists of different types in Idlib.
Enemies of the revolution on every single side! In fulfillment of my promises I will try and present our little part of the story, as the defense has really only just begun. And everything might be wiped away before you even paid attention to vastness and hope of it.
No healthy society longs for war. To your average person war is a nasty reality of human history to be avoided if possible and fought quickly if necessary. Because we claim to be a democracy, the government must convince enough of the populace that war is justified. Your average person does not need statistics, an objective history, or even a clear-cut plan of action. All they need is a simple reason to make them believe. While the New New Left draws attention to the root causes of terrorism, the State takes a much easier route. To justify war all one must do is convince Joe average that his security is threatened and that decisive action is necessary to keep him safe. To make the masses support the actions of the government, the reasons must be simplified and the objectives must be dumbed down.
The State believes that the most effective way to fight terrorism is through the use of military force. With the exception of a few politicians, Congress has enabled the President to declare preemptive war and given him the funds necessary to maintain an indefinite occupation. Through an effective media campaign the Bush administration has alienated the radicals and put the bulk of the American public opinion into two camps: those who think the war was justified and those who were against the war but believe that we can no longer pull out now that our troops are there. To bring much of the public into the complacent liberal camp, the Administration relied on four basic arguments to justify their War on Terror. These arguments were not complicated, nor were they intended to be. But, they were persuasive enough to be effective.
The primary argument that carries the most weight in the minds of the American people is that it is the irrational objective of the international terrorist to destroy our way of life. September 11th clearly demonstrated to the American public that we had an enemy that was capable of inflicting a direct attack against US citizens. That day, much of the security felt by the bulk of our populace was shattered by the realization that we were not invincible and there were those ready to fight us with unconventional tactics. The government tells us to “never forget” and part of that means to never forgive. It has been made clear by both the pundits and the State that the terrorists aren’t just attacking us to redress grievances they have with the West; they are attacking freedom and democracy itself.
This quickly ties into their second argument. We are told that the terrorists’ actions cannot be justified or explained by looking for root causes. Their causes are made irrelevant by the tactics they employ. This statement in itself insures that no one thinks too hard about why a substantial global population is willing to take their own lives to fight us. Rather than address the issue of why, the administration has us focus on the irrationality of their actions and the brutality of their methods. Claiming moral superiority our use of force can justified without having to deal with the nuances of our foreign policy in the Middle East. Now the ante must be upped. It is not enough to say that they irrationally seek to destroy our way of life and that their causes are made irrelevant by their method of warfare. The state now must argue that soon the terrorists will poses weapons of mass destruction necessary to carry out large scale attacks against Western cities. Boat bombs sinking the Cole, men that explode in public places, and planes flying into buildings are apparently not the only threat. Now, we must deal with the prospect of a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon being brought to America and detonated in a major city. This makes the threat seem more deadly; this serves as a lead in to point four.
The final point is the lynch pin. The terrorist network cannot exist without the support of rogue states. As a result, to stop terrorism we must enact regime changes in any country in which terrorists operate lest the rogue nation supply a terrorist group with weapons of mass destruction. The biggest threat to our security has supplied the ultimate justification for war.
These four arguments serve as the rational for supporting the war or being complacent enough to not actively oppose it. While the New New Left points out the record numbers of people in the streets of New York on 2/15 (500,000) and 3/22 (200,000) prior to the war, they do not account for why there were few people attending the demonstrations once the hostilities began. The reality lies in the inadequacy of their arguments. The bulk of the New New Left is composed of upper middle class, white college students that oppose war simply because they feel war in itself is bad. The intelligentsia of the movement, more articulate and more capable of presenting reasons for terror comes across as justifying terrorist actions rather than proposing a means to peacefully stop them. They simply are not making the type of arguments that Joe average can relate to either because they are too complex (ex: the ramifications of globalization) or they are too impractical (ex: ending aid to Israel). While the New New Left is quick to protest, empty rhetoric is no solution to terrorism and their solutions do not answer the one question on every Joe and Jane Average’s mind; will I be safe?
Safety is key and national security is paramount in the mind of both the US citizen and the US government. Whatever side can convince the majority that their solution can offer a more secure country; that is the side that will sway public opinion. The government’s platform (the use of military force) has not succeeded because it is practical and it has not succeeded because it offers a clear-cut solution. It has been successful because it is easy to understand. A sad reality about our society is that not enough people are curious enough to look beyond what they are familiar with to arrive at a conclusion. If any force in this country, be it the democrats, the radicals, or the New New Left, seek to challenge the foreign policy decisions of the State they must remember two things: First, that no solution will be acceptable if it does not guarantee safety. Second, it is not enough to oppose a policy; one must present a plausible solution in the language Joe Average can understand.
Your Government Makes You Accountable
When one regards the modern state, it is important to differentiate between the people and their government. The distinction is indeed quite blurred when a nation proclaims itself a democracy. To an outside observer, the actions of the democratic state, be they foreign policy or imperialist war, seem as though sanctioned by a national consensus. After all, America does tell the world that her people have freedom, and freedom implies choice. To the world it seems that Americans have chosen hegemony over international democracy and national self determination. To nations directly affected by our foreign policies, the rational conclusion is that our democracy and freedom is intended only for Americans and the reaction to that conclusion is hate. If one had always been told America was a democracy and had heard any US national rhetoric on TV, the inevitable conclusion would be that whatever was done by the US government could be blamed on the American people. It is that rational that made our civilians legitimate targets in the eyes of the terrorists. Against the strongest military power on earth, all those opposed to our presence must fight a poor man’s guerrilla war; we call such war terrorism, and to understand why they hate us we must first define who they are.
What would make someone give their life to attack the American system? It safe to say it is a combination of two factors; a profound hatred for the US and a deep sense of hopelessness that anything can change without the use of force. Force being the modus operandi of the US, it must be widely believed that it is the only thing to which our government will respond. These individuals do not necessarily wear kafias. While it may happen that most of the more visible terrorism has its objectives rooted in the US’s involvement in the Middle East, we cannot forget that our foreign policy in both Asia and Latin America has made numerous populations wary if not resentful of the American role international politics. Due to resent media coverage our perception of terrorism is that of Arabs hijacking planes and strapping bombs to themselves. This is not the case. The threat is broader and more complex than what our government tells us.
We’ve been a prominent hegemonic power for over fifty years and have retained hyperpower status since ’91. We, as a hyperpower, are the dominant player in the international community and our tendency to play fair often does not coincide with our desire to retain power. The “international terrorists” are not some isolated community of fundamentalist crazies. It is more pragmatic to assume that on many levels they are supported by the peoples of the third world. “Throughout the Muslim world there is widespread bitterness against America, even among well educated businessmen and professionals, who…resent the way the Western Powers have behaved in their countries”.Just because the bulk of the third world is not ready to commit themselves to a war of attrition with the US, does not mean they do not support one. This is not to say that all third world populations completely support the tactic of political violence. It is quite possible to hate America both culturally and ideologically without necessarily taking action. What is important to realize is that for these groups to continue functioning they need a ready source of funding and volunteers. The governments of Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq undoubtedly lent state support to terrorist organizations. However, many groups base themselves in nations controlled by governments that are relatively secular, corrupt, and admittedly pro-US. “Hatred of the United States is not peculiar to the Middle East, nor does it translate directly into a desire to launch terrorist attacks. The relationship between the two is more complicated and indirect, akin in many ways to that between oxygen and fire. Oxygen does not cause fires-the spark must come from something else-but fire requires oxygen to rage. In the same fashion, terrorists need anti-American sentiment…it provides them with people willing to give aid and comfort.” It is obvious that they hate us, now the real question is why.
hate us because of our history. Analyzing the last fifty years of American foreign policy one must acknowledge that the US government has done some questionable things in the its war on communism. In 1953 the CIA overthrew the prime minister of Iran because he sought to nationalize the country’s oil and was thought to be leaning left toward Moscow at a time when nationalism was oft confused with the global communist revolution. We restored the Shah to power, a brutal dictator who then went about torturing and killing all opposition to his regime. Amnesty International summed up the situation in 1976 by noting that Iran had the “highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts, and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse history in human rights than Iran” This would sow the seeds for a fundamentalist take over in ‘79 making the country markedly anti-American. When Israel launched the six day war in ‘67 and achieved a decisive victory against its neighbors using American made weapons, the already substantial Palestinian refugee problem was worsened. With most of the Arab world regarding Israel as the 51st US state much of the animosity that arose from this conflict was redirected against the US. During the war between Iraq and Iran we sold weapons to both sides fueling a long drawn out conflict that would leave thousands dead. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in ’81 the US armed, financed and trained cadres of what would become today’s terrorist leaders to fight the invading Red Army. “Sunnis from all parts of the Islamic world fought in Afghanistan, and then returned home with the will, confidence, and training to begin terrorist operations against weak domestic governments.”When the Russians withdrew the nation was left with no infrastructure and no aid from the US. As a result the nation was left to the warlords of feudal anarchy and the Al Qaeda network would receive training camps and material support. The fighters, having beaten back the Red Army returned home ready to continue the Jihad. In ’82 when Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon in a joint action with the US, it was quite clear that the US was willing to use force to support its democratic allies. Combine all this with the corrupt dictators we supported, and continue to support, in most of the Arab world, the Gulf War, our military presence in the spiritual capital of the Middle East; Saudi Arabia, the devastating sanctions on Iraq, and its eventual invasion and occupation, we get some idea that perhaps some of the animosity they have for us is explained if not justified.
They hate us because of our government. The third world fails to differentiate between the people and the apparatus of the state. When our president makes statements calling groups of nations with no apparent interlinking policy or leadership (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) an Axis of Evil, how is the international community expected to react? Our government is believed to be composed and elected by the American people, so when Congress votes on war appropriations it appears to many that it was a nationally made group decision. In reality the government tends to operate without much direct involvement on behalf of its people. It is clear that our government thinks it is upholding the national interest, but at what cost must the third world pay for our economic security? Morgenthau could not have hoped to have his theories better put to practice. The US government does not seem to have many moral scruples, despite the rhetoric spouted by politicians. It has proven time and time again, from Hanoi to Mogadishu that we will kill to protect our security. Some Americans are slowly coming to this realization, but most have not. To the bulk of American society September 11th was an unprovoked attack on freedom, not the culmination of fifty years of Middle Eastern foreign policy. To the terrorists, hating the American government is the same as hating the American people that enable its existence.
They believe that all Americans are accountable. America is a complex society with a vocal minority on both the left and the right in polarized extremes. However, the bulk of middle class America, an enormous demographic, does not choose to voice a concrete opinion or take definite side for or against the government. Only 45% of Americans are registered to vote. The third world interprets this as a combination of indifference and support for the state, for in this case not saying anything maintains the status quo. That status quo is what we are hated for. Your typical American neither cares nor understands the ramifications of globalized capitalism or the reality of our military interventions. Their inaction makes them accountable. Our troops have been involved in hundreds of wars, conflicts, and interventions over the past fifty years. Our economic policies in the third world have led to destabilized economies and American control of valuable resources. Our citizens just want to watch CNN, eat Big Macs, and drive an SUV with a sense of security that they feel can be provided by their government. This gross disregard on behalf of our populace enables our leaders to enact the policies that taint our image in the global community. The hawks refer to terrorism as a protracted campaign of violence directed against non-combatants. But on many levels our non-combatants enable the deaths of civilians in the countries we invade.
Now that we understand the motives of the terrorists we must address the root issue: how do we stop terrorism? We do not fight terror by killing the terrorists as the Palestinian Intifada has shown us, for every terrorist we kill we create four more. These fighters have both the zeal and the resolve necessary to continue fighting no matter what we throw at them. They may change their national power bases, they may lose key leaders, they may suffer annihilation on an individual basis, but they retain popular support and as long as our government makes the foreign policy decisions that initiated these conflicts, they will continue to. We can never stop violent opposition to America as long as it functions as a capitalist hyperpower. We must address our history; our people must know, acknowledge, and admit to what their government has done. Most of all; we must become accountable. We the American people are responsible for what our government does, it must be made clear that not only do we oppose the state; we will actively work to change it. They will only stop hating us when America becomes what it was intended to be. One nation, under the people, indivisible, with liberty and justice for both itself and the global community.
Raise that black chai high!
Serchevan! Nine hours of fire later and for now the tea is now gone.
A flat land of wheat and Masood is where I start.
I can read the human heart, I can take over crowds with no mike. Kurdish, Assyrian, Arab alike.
I was trained to fire from a dirt bike. At close range into enemy face not vest,
You cannot run from an airstrike. We’re doing our best.
The terror, the horror is rife,
And you know I’m all about that struggle person life.
And you know I’m living wrong.
I save lives sometimes, but sometimes we take them with an AK or the edge of a knife.
I need a Dragonov wife.
I gave her something to believe, and then death flowed freely.
Laela Naesh (live your life), believe me ill need you to see me. Indomitably!
Go in, crowd control it, and survive if you can to sort the plot points out,
Was your vision clear, motivation high, did you walk away understanding what this revolt was all about?
Live your life!
It’s not more important! A smile and a blush formed over the thrill of a save or a kill.
I have to hold you tight, into the life of night, show you the strength of my resilience, my sheer Kurdish will.
Black tea for you, for us all, here comes the debka circle dance, for those about to stand, and those about to fall. Middle East says winner take all.
Shahid namaray, were dancing for the dead. Put that bright kafia around your neck, and visions in your head.
And believe me, was the last thing she said, we believe in this struggle as if it were love,
Push came shove,
And then she was dead.
When the great revolt is over I’ll take ya,
To far away Haiti and also to Jamaica.
To wine ya, to shake ya.
Trinidad is the place I’m secretly from. Wickedest wine and brownest rum. Take away all my suffering pain,
Return me soon to the city of Port of Spain.
Perwerde,
You cannot run from an airstrike.
But you can kill a man with gun play from a dirt bike.
These are dangerous front lines where freedom will die or prevail in bullets hail,
I’m a medium dangerous man so I’ll take you there in the event of a hike, a hike toward some violent truth, things the future will need not the present will like.
We’ve been fighting so long it breaks my resolve, I many times bleed, I have no longer some sense of those things that I loved, I wanted for happy or id likely even need.
I’m not highly seduced by TV or the material creed. I have a militant mind set developed to fight, ethically sound and morally right, based on what loved comrades suffered not things we read.
Black tea for you, for us all, here comes the debka circle dance, for those about to stand, and those about to fall. Middle East says winner take all.
Shahid namaray, were dancing for the dead. Put that bright kafia around your neck, and visions in your head.
And believe me, was the last thing she said, we believe in this struggle as if it were love,
Push came shove,
And then she was dead.
It’s harder now to breathe,
It’s a struggle sometimes, just to remember to believe.
Now im treading water for the loose ends. Capitalist modernity has the manacles for loyalists, serfs as well as the play pretends.
I remember breaking pita bread with hand grenades traded, I remember the names of my latest dead friends read on the TV, signal style far faded. And we all try to see,
What they took from Syria and your people wasn’t exactly what was taken from me.
Of course the jihadists also attacked my city, never again, that’s what patriots still say. Never forget 911, means never pity or play.
And it’s wonderful, to get to see your bright eyes. It’s wonderful to not be judged for the monster or the radical some would make me out to be. They say I believe too much Middle Eastern logic, thinking too democratic confederally.
Black tea for you, for us all, here comes the debka circle dance, for those about to stand and those about to fall.
Shahid namaray, were dancing for the living and the dead. Put that bright kafia around your neck, and motivations in your head.
I was just trying to live life free. I was trying to get my blade marks into the tree of history, maybe. I was trying to give my big apple comrades something to believe, but there was nothing up my sleeve.
No reinforcements to release us, quite a lot of cadro talk is still land of make deceive.
What’s an AK to an airstrike? What’s a dvotchka with a dotchka to a modern tank? Before we treaded in the ghettos and mountain bunkers, then we soared and then Afrin sank.
Now watch me run the crowd control, on these trains airplanes and human tapestry of crowds. I do it confident and loud, they trained the craziest for the best, and those of us who would survive the war were no faster than the rest.
The changes we made with Kalashnikovs was not what this revolution needed most or particularly Best.
Thunder, lightning now many of our hevals are one by one dead. Martyrs never die. I
In Rojava, you point to your poster, they nod and say what a truly dangerous gal or ideological guy.
But we keep the red, green yellow flying high.
And you can bury yourself when the right moment comes, but they still know how to kill us from the sky.
Black tea for you, for us all, here comes the debka circle dance, for those about to stand, and those about to fall. Middle East says winner take all.
Shahid namaray, were dancing for the dead. Put that bright kafia around your neck, and visions in your head.
And believe me, was the last thing she said, we believe in this struggle as if it were love,
Push came shove,
And then she was dead.
The only suitable ‘policy’; since we are playing a game that is set up for us to inherently remain powerless is a new resistance strategy, which incorporates nine broad elements; (1) Analyze precisely how Israelis, Irish, Cubans, Iranians and Bangladeshis have utilized ‘development technology’ to secure their states; then apply it to a more localized nation. (2) Decentralization, decentralization and decentralization. (3) Utilization of the Human Rights instruments as a base line set of demands. (4) Utilization of ‘militant non-violence’ to resist daily rights violations carried out in every country. (5) Securing the means of development via a broad application of ‘development technology’ poured into ‘mass capacity’ training modules. (6) Formation of ‘parallel state’ formations to deny the existing governments’ tax revenue and stated functional purpose. (7) Harnessing bloc purchasing power to boycott all goods corporately owned by the domestic or foreign oligarchy at the periphery and semi-periphery. (8) Disruption of all supply chains back to the core; (9) Emancipation.
WALTER ADLER 