A PREAMBLE ON JUSTICE 

PAMPHLET (1)

We will tell you now, what is wrong with this world and our country! No matter what country that it is we are addressing. 

It is that you the people believe in yourselves more than you believe in each other. You believe you are in this world alone.

The fate of the individual has ground under iron heel even the faintest notion of the collective good. And rat racing, pitiless individualism has robbed us as a collective people of both our human conscience as well as our “duty to act”.

There are rights we all have: Women, Men, and Children which are ours by virtue of being born human. 

No deity nor national charter bestowed them. When either religion or the state fails to secure these rights, then these institutions cease to be of value. They become a danger. Both the state system and the ideas of every existing religion present clear and present threats to human rights.

The states by trampling them or failing to enforce them. Religions by explicitly negating women’s role in the world, sanctioning violence against non-believing minorities, and promising a world of plenty in a world you will never live to see, and no one has ever come back from.  

The authority by which we or any other member of a Party of resistance compels you, a civilian, to “take hold of your rights” comes only from the hearts and minds of other women and men just like you. We hold up no religious gospel or ideological flag. These rights for many decades were put to paper, but ignored by all governments.

Let us reiterate what you may already know. It is in fact in every country too hard to feed one’s family. It is too hard to own the roof over one’s head even in nations where TV and mythology lead some to believe the streets ‘are paved in gold’. The governments of all “safe and civilized Northern nations’ currently disparage and despise the immigrant while the natives seem to have forgotten complexly the exodus and plight from which their families once fled. 

The time to even speak of possible pacifism has passed.    

We believe deeply in cutting the knees out from under each and every tyrant and local oligarchy who together bleed and raped over half the nations of this earth. But in all the wars fought, has a single human right ever been advanced or championed? Were not all these “Great Wars”, “Crusades”, “Jihads” and World Wars 1, 2, and 3 all just bloody contests to control the resources below and above the soil, to dispose of an excess working class and to compel foreigners to the economic bondage of some great power? Governments have sent millions of young people to die, maim and get maimed, kill and get killed for nothing other than a cold hard national ambition. The local Oligarchy of the time, used the state system for naked conquest. 

Crusades and Jihads were about the control of religious oligarchy, the Oligarchy of the priests and imams. The World Wars were European, Russian, American, and Japanese bids for empire; control of “the Core”. They didn’t stop fascist dictators from engaging in further atrocity as long as they were proclaimed anti-communist. Neither the Communist nor Capitalist nor Third World ideologies built better worlds. They built up the very instruments of terror we now oppose. Massive armies of spy surveillance, state torture, nuclear war, and armies that if unleashed will finish off the earth. 

They have not ended slavery, they expanded it. They rebranded it, but it still retains the essence of complete bondage and subjugation. There are more forced sweatshop slaves, child slaves, harvesting, mining and sex slave workers, and indentured sweatshop laborers than there ever were plantation slaves or serfs in the 18th century. The West didn’t ‘liberate women’ without completely objectifying them. In America 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted before age 18. 1 in every 147 Americans in the prison system. The West as the gall to compare their advancements via armed struggle to be somehow superior to those of the Monarchists, Fascists, Communists, and Islamist Theocracy. These are all different brands of Oligarchy!

Poverty is a rampant genocide. 7 in 10 people live below $5 a day. 4 in 10 below $2 a day and over 2 billion people, 2 of 8 billion live below $2 a day. Even in so-called wealthy, “Northern” nations, most people work their entire lives, living to work and working to live. A human life expectancy of 120 has been brought below 50 in most nations on earth, even in the wealthy North most die before 80, most black men die by 53. 

Damn the Oligarchy for its callous dominance. Cruel indifference to human suffering, abuse of power, and massive ongoing theft! Those who speak in numbers and fact checks while tens of millions starve or die of easily treatable diseases; and every year hundreds of thousands fall to rape, pillage, and war while millions of women lack control over their bodies and tens of millions remain slaves. Of course, every oligarchy sets up, benefits from a priesthood speaking of unseen God! God of Gods or spirits telling us to be patient, accept hard work, and accept our rough lot; in the world to come all will be “amazing”. They also set up a modern priesthood of management for thought and public opinion. The media and many talking heads explain the “hiccups” to universal progress.  

We tell these men to damn their banal statistics, damn their intractable apathy, their failed policies, and their unwillingness to move in the defense of the powerless. We will launch a war unlike any the world has seen. A war of workers, not blinded by made-up race and unseen magic gods.

If naked you came to your country, then near naked you will depart. And if bandit rapists drove you here or there, or if some planned famine killed ¾ of your family before the rest died reroute of Cholera, or you came here or there shackled beaten, and stolen in the belly of a ship; then you’d better damn never forget where you came from. There is not a safe zone in “the North,” or in the deepest bunkers, or up on Mars. There is racist police violence, poverty, and a plague of fever, cough, and death. When the world gets worse, and it has the potential to; the people of the North will build taller walls. With land mines and robot sentries.   

What is to be done when there is nowhere safe to run or hide oneself?

If the question is “what can be done”, the interlude then is who should do it where. The interesting thing about this manifesto is that we can give it as a speech in Cairo, Damascus or Jerusalem, Paris or London, Moscow or Beijing, Port-Au-Prince, Port of Spain or Kingston Town. When we speak in the local language, we have fire in our eyes and passion in our hearts; then we earn their time as well as their ears too. People know that something has been broken for a long time. 

There are some pretty universal deficits when it comes to global human rights, no one knows they have them. No one knows who grants them. They are a product of Enlightenment values, Socialist pressure, and common sense. They are a list of demands. 

They have already been written down in 39 separate United Nations documents. They are violated everywhere.

Because we are not interested in part freedoms, half freedoms, freedoms just on paper or any abridgment of these 58 noble rights enshrined in the halls of the United Nations and trampled everywhere else: we’d make a good wager that our message speaks as true in the Gaza as it does in the Gully.

What is to be done? What is the way forward? We need to demand that governments adopt these rights as laws, or we bring every single government to its knees.

Who is the primary agent of change? We, all people.   

As Church, Mosque, and State have all failed so colossally we must rise to repossess them. We must not replace a corrupt order, that of the Westphalian State System with a new corrupt order. Nearly every nation is an arbitrary creation; a plantation with a flag. States must become tools in the hands of humanity for justice and rights, not soothe-saying witch doctors urging schism and bloated bureaucracies enriching only themselves. We are students of black history, and a cruel unnatural history is what we have read. We indict the entire state system as lackeys to Oligarchy; Oligarchs must be tried and imprisoned. The bureaucratic bloat of each state must be reigned in. The nation-state is an anachronism. It must be replaced with community-centered, democratic autonomy. This is the underlying message of the Democratic Confederalist Parties, the parties of workers and the oppressed; which is to say nearly all people living today. 

If these rogue governments, puppets of Oligarchy cannot be controlled through fair elections, they must be brought to their knees via armed struggle. Not the so-called ‘bourgeoisie’ against the so-called ‘proletariat’, that is an old language. Worker against Oligarchy. People who toil, who strive and spend their life as some kind of slave against a tiny, tiny faction of powerful families. Vampires that use the state system to keep us working, keep us afraid. It is not seditious to say “I am a Worker!” You should say it proudly. The Working Class is the class of most humans, the class of people who make this machine run, and keep the lights on. It is time to paralyze the machine. Turn off the lights and leave the factory floor. 

 We are writing of a class of people that currently cannot feed their children, a class that is still affixed in chattel slavery, a class that dies of curable diseases, and lacks even clean water coming into equality with a far smaller class that has all the world’s good things and far too much more. The basis of all rights is equality before them. 

We are workers and this is a Party for Workers.

Saying who is the responsible party is actually the initiating question of this manifesto. We must believe that it is our duty and destiny as Workers first to set this example, there is no particularist destiny when it comes to human rights. They belong to all women, children, and men. They belong to men who love men, women who love women, and also to people born either woman or man, but don’t identify as such or change it later. If you are alive, and you are a sentient creature with a heart, soul, brain, and conscience; you are entitled to Human Rights. “An Injury to one is an injury to all” As long as a single person has their rights violated, we all have a permissive air of rights violation, a virus. 

Rights for all or rights for none!

So who will be asked to fight? In this struggle of Workers against Oligarchs, Oligarchic Collectives will bring the entire heel of spies, torture, police, military and government abuse on us for these ideas; Every man, woman, and child who is able has to fight. Our unity must be a total unity. No rights will be secure if even one gay, black woman is slurred in closed quarters. We are after all fighting a long and total war. We are fighting internationally. No nation is real, each is an artificial construct to divide the Working Class. We have some allies, but mostly we have an array of well-resourced enemies. With nowhere to run or hide, not even Rojava or Cuba.

If you want to be free, “free” being the full attainment and total implementation of universal human rights as well as one day seeing the end of the war: Not just the several dozen live fire wars raging, but the end of man’s willingness and ability to make war then join humanity’s cause. This is no prelude to a dream. No woman or man ought to fall under the wrath of war, famine, pestilence, or disease, not while in some many gilded ghettos, fear of these horsemen have been nearly obliterated. We look you in the eyes and tell you help is coming and we’re going to win some of these rights or die trying.

This is no “I have a dream”, when the pages end, you open your eyes and help us hold the lines. We will tell you how.

“We’re going to get our Human Rights the old-fashioned way. The settler way, the cowboy-cowgirl way. The Kurdish way. With tenacity and brazen force of will. With zealous persistence. Or more specifically the kibbutz bootstrap way, the way once called “Zionism”. Until the left and Palestinians made such a word a dirty word. A word associated with Occupation. But the idea of “Zionism”, before there was Israel, before Israel became a colony of America; the idea was to build piecemeal institutions of a state that didn’t yet exist. Step, by step set up a Parallel State to whatever unjust order was horse-trading, masquerading as reality. The idea of “Zion ”, the world to come built in the world of the real, is also known by the Hebrew people as “Tikkun Olam”. Zionism today is almost purely associated with Palestinian oppression. Tikkun Olam, a liberal kumbaya for social justice, is in an age of unmitigated bloodshed and terror. 

We’re going to have to build thousands and thousands of forts way up in the mountains and hold out for a human dawn, that will hopefully arrive before the Capitalists bleed the entire earth dry and we are left with a violent, well-armed desert. Killing each other over water.

Democratic Confederalism is the ideological fusion of hated and maligned Jewish Zionism and a Kurdish interpretation of Socialism. It has profound commitments to participatory democracy, women’s equality, environmentalism, and the protection of ethnic/religious minorities. It is the ideological merger of alternatives to a failed Capitalist Modernity, a solution process where the state has collapsed or the state is an agent of great predation.   

These forts, these outposts will radiate the ideals we fight for. They will demonstrate the viability of a human rights-protected world, collective economics, democracy, and non-state solutions to daily problems. Our children and our grandchildren will be given their rights. Our outposts, be they infrastructure, training academies or schools to help, heal and save this sick, sad world are our answer to the failed projects of Capitalism. We will build up our own credit unions, charter schools, vocational programs, volunteer rescue agencies, housing cooperatives, clinics, banks, universities, and major syndicates modeled on justice. Framing Human Rights goals alongside Workers’ power. With Democratic Confederalism and actionable work to achieve Human Rights, we will craft the foundation of thousands of confederated cantons; a series of Parallel States. If the existing states cannot or will not legislate Human Rights Enabling legislation and will not arrest these criminal Oligarchs; we must achieve rights for ourselves and deny the state system our tax revenue.

Democratic Confederalism is the future. It is the full achievement of human rights by social networks and grassroots infrastructure when an elected or self-appointed government fails to provide or threatens us. It is not universally adversarial, but it is a matter of survival. It should be defended with armed self-defense.

Our main foreign policy as a movement and Party is the full and total exportation of the technology and ideas into the hands of our fellow human beings more oppressed than ourselves by man or nature. The weapons of our immediate war are the bootstrap teaching outposts, guerrilla medical programs and clinics; makeshift vocational academies, and security services that prevent inter-ethnic bloodletting, or that of state actors against their own civilians.

We will not, and cannot fight a war purely on ideas like the United Nations has done for 70 years to implement these documents. We must make the governments afraid. This is the only reasonable way any of them will make a change. But we must make them nervous, not terrified, in terror they will only lash out with the entirety of their military and police forces. History is full of this. However, the majority if not all state governments must be removed. They are illegitimate and serve in the Oligarchy of each nation.

We are not the kind of people who build a school to watch it burn down or build a clinic to then see nurses abused and aid workers threatened or a local community victimized for wanting to improve its condition. Every single institution we set up must be defended like a fortress. Defended by a People’s Defense Force. Note carefully from history that our enemy the Oligarchy and the repressive forces of the State will kill rape or torture anyone it believes is a threat. It will rape your loved one in front of you and put whole ethnic groups in death camps. It will torture your activists, kill your leaders and call you a “terrorist”.

But you’re only a terrorist if you are killing unarmed civilians. You’re only a terrorist when you kill people who are not part of the actual war. 

When we build a school or a clinic, we know we plan to defend each and every one we set up with our lives and steel. In East New York, in Cite Soleil, in the Gaza or the Gully or Rome, Istanbul, or Jerusalem we will fight for human rights like a war for Armageddon with the calculated strategy of Machiavelli acting out the Art of War. We have to form quite a lot of something out of almost nothing. In the world today, the world of real Human rights isn’t worth the pages they are printed on.

You have to begin in your own community by feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and teaching ethics to the young people. You must of course begin close to home and enlist the support of your family and friends. You begin small but always dream with grandeur. Question tradition, it perpetuated wrongness. Question impossible, everything was impossible until it was done. 

You must focus on small victories that build off each other. Feeding free breakfast to children or busing families to visit prisoners, is only revolutionary when it offers service the state does not provide or provides inadequately AND is openly associated with a Party of the resistance. Keeping a few blocks litter free, keeping them safe and then drug-free. Litter free is an act of charity. Safe is an act of community control of policing, drug-free is a challenge to some gangs or the mob. You could work to rehabilitate convicts and junkies, which is charity. You can integrate the disposed into a meaningful role in the community, turning them from a vagrant to a worker. You could teach law and accounting to the poor or volunteer in a shelter making art, the move from a charity to a revolutionary communal institution has a lot to do with intent. Capitalists and Oligarchs fund charities and foundations to appear philanthropic and wash some of their wealth. Most charities, like NGOs, are about pork chop politics; about small solutions to the worst elements of obvious poverty, but they are not revolutionary.

A communal institution is revolutionary because it seeks to take control of the means of development, it seeks to compete with the inadequate or absent service the state provides with the tax base.   

There are many beachheads to secure. Which is to say places so hopeless that any help is something. There are refugee camps so large they go on for all the eye to see, miles and miles of squalor. There are countries where social services are given only to the preferred ethnic group. We will win this war, but we must wage it correctly. The purpose of an emergency group is to set up the beachhead which introduces the skills to develop the initial communal institution, then the strategic planning in place to create backward and forward linkages between these institutions. Until the revolutionary institution is a valid alternative to what the state offers, further de-legitimizing the state. But expect assault in the front and the rear and side upon these mechanisms.

Thus to secure our rights we must control the means to provide social services, the means of development. To transition from pitiless capitalism to socialism or some False Necessitarian fusion, we require organized workers’ cooperatives; to control the means of production. You cannot seize institutions of the state and expect them to behave in a manner that is less corrupt, and less fallible. You cannot take another man’s factory and declare it a worker’s cooperative. In many ways, Democratization of the social and economic spheres of life requires new institutions and Social Entrepreneurship; Democratic Confederalism is an ideology of governance that values empowerment. 

We set up new schools, new clinics, and new infrastructure run by the workers. We set up new enterprises, also run by the workers. This does not mean total equality attributed to communism, or enforced top-down restriction like State Socialism; there is room for elements of both Socialism and Capitalism in a society that is democratic and human rights reinforced.

We have to focus on where the state has failed or is flailing. This is the strategy of an emergency group sent to secure a beach head, build the first forts. But at some stage, at an early stage, the Party must protect its institution and confederated structures. 

WE CANNOT VIOLATE THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS AND HOPE TO SOMEHOW LATER FULLY OBTAIN THEM FOR OURSELVES. WE CANNOT GET SUCKED INTO A PROTRACTED GUERRILLA WAR WITH A DECADENT AND BRUTALLY REPRESSIVE NATION-STATE SYSTEM. 

We must always take preventative measures. There are some very guilty men in the world, probably a few women too, but they’re all going to die of old age just like everyone else. Hopefully in white light tight plastic rooms heavily guarded with the latest life-prolonging health options available in The Hague. We advocate the capture and imprisonment of war criminals, but we cannot call for their assassination. We must isolate them, indemnify them and then better educate their grandchildren. 

The posture of the People’s Defense Forces must always be defensive. There is a large body of precedent to suggest against embarking on a people’s war. Such campaigns are bloody, and decisive and always result in widespread death and destruction. The Defense Forces are to protect communities from aggression, state aggression, non-state paramilitaries, theocratic fundamentalists, or criminal banditry.     

There are ten key pillars to the Democratic Confederalist Party’s basic functionality; 

1. Democratic Autonomy (establishing meaningful participatory democracy in all structures, systems, assemblies, and bodies of governance)

2. Human Rights mass Mobilization ( widespread Human Rights Active Education and Policy Level Implementation/enforcement)

3. Radical Inclusivity– which includes but is not limited to co-gendering of all leadership/ management roles, affirmative action to include and empower ethnic minority groups, total freedom of spiritual practice, and full rights and inclusive safeguards on gender identity, sexual preference, and sexual orientation.

4. Property by Use– connoting that one only has rights to own what one can immediately utilize.

5. Control and Enhancement of all local Social Services (controlling and improving on the means of social and economic development).

6. Control and Democratization of Productive Mechanisms (controlling and democratizing the means of production).

7. Mobilization of a Peoples’ Defense Forces (enlistment of local forces for deterrent self-defense and policing drawn from the communities they serve)

8. Actual Social Ecology and Sustainability– (broad policy commitments to safe environmental practices and resource management)

9. Actual Equality before the law– irrespective of one’s wealth, ethnicity, gender, spiritual views, or nationality.

10. Militant Non-Violence: Understanding of violence to be a fundamentally degrading and consciousness-lowering practice.

Know that you are not alone in questioning why it’s been so bad, for so long. Know that we have had a very long night and you have been born just before dawn. Know that good women and men serve in this Party and that we all stand on the shoulders of giants that fell fighting for an idea whose time has arrived. The only question left is to ask what you can specifically do to end your role as a collaborator or as a civilian and begin training as a champion of our people and our universal rights. And we have a few ideas!

It has long been established that land, or the possession of land does not bring any inherent, long-term security. Its capture in fact is one of the fundamental historical exacerbations of humanity’s many woes and burdens. Defensibility is no sure-fire guarantee of anything other than temporary survivability, but that does not connote fulfillment of human potential. So “new land” therefore always has old problems, and surely now there is no “new land”. Even since time immemorial, there has never been an ‘empty land.’ There is always an indigenous population and a conquering outsider. A colonizer and the colonized. It’s never worked out well to say the least.

So we don’t obtain universal human rights by the settlement of land upon some aggressor-violators’ territory, not in the traditional sense anyway.

There is no uncharted isle, no unclaimed valley: the world is a much-sectioned-off place. Invisible little, bloody lines telling women and men they are forever divided. But we will fight that false notion on the beaches, shores, and airwaves, with the pen and with the rifle. What divides us are invented lines, lines of conquest, colonization, and subjugation. The nation-state is not natural, it is man-made. It is a false consciousness imposing loyalty, a flag, and an anthem along with a mostly made-up history of a global slave population; the working class.

Some slaveries are far worse than others. Some slaveries take on the shape of careers. But make no mistake, you will be kept working until near the day that you die too early from exhaustion and stress.

SO ALWAYS WORKING FROM WHAT IS, not what we’d ideally like it to be, is the first major break from “Traditional Colonial Zionism”. We do not make the capture of a new nation any type of objective or means to our ends. The second defining break is the level of participation. Having a land need not make one a ‘real people’ as any Kurd or Basque can tell you. Nor are the good things of life always enjoyed within a so-called ‘State’ as virtually every Congolese, Sudanese, or Sub-Saharan African can tell you.

So, first things first. Seizure of land solves absolutely nothing. 

Second, tactics of economic and political Zionism can be harnessed without the politics of identity-based nationalism and that is called Democratic Confederalism. An ideological theory established by Murray Bookchin was; Jew, Zionist then Anarchist but was put into practice by Abdullah Ocalan; first a third-world liberation nationalist, then a Maoist then a Democratic Confederalist. Ocalan built on Bookchin who built on Wallerstein who built on Marx. 

Thirdly, the mobilization of a wealthy Diaspora is often a detriment. Always better to mobilize the working-class Diaspora. Rich people really do all think quite alike. Much of a diaspora is riddled with collaborators, people who defected from confrontation, and their children, and children’s children who culturally have imbibed the rapid individualism of the North and the West. 

We must reject all forms of nationalism. The only valid nationalism is nationalism as a cultural sentimentality, not as a unifying identity. Nationalism is a structural implementation of slavery and a re-conceptualization of the feudal order. 

No nation on earth has clean historical hands! The particularism of the United States of America is that it was a colony that shed its metro-pol Great Britain quite early on. And on top of that within three hundred years came to age as a world empire; presiding over the Globalization Epoch of Capitalist Modernity. It is now in decline and the People’s Republic of China is emergent.

Who can blame the United States that cannot blame Russia, China, Spain, Japan, France, England, and virtually every European country? Every nation on earth took part in genocide & atrocity of some kind pre, post, or during slavery and colonialism. And to the cultural nationalists of the undeveloped world and their Diaspora, we remind them that there is no well-documented golden age in Africa, South America, and Asia either, even before violent pale monkeys barged in with some germs, guns, and steel.

THE IMMEDIATE AIM OF THE MOVEMENT IS TO DEMONSTRATE A RANGE OF TACTICS WITHIN A SCHOOL OF THOUGHT CALLED “DEMOCRATIC CONFEDERALISM” TO IMPLEMENT “PARA-STATE INFRASTRUCTURE” THROUGHOUT THE WORLD. TO FIGHT FOR AND OBTAIN UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS AS OUTLINED IN THE UNITED NATIONS DOCUMENTS BEARING THE SAME NAME AS FACTS ON THE GROUND. ESTABLISHED BY “WORKERS’ PARTIES”, “COMMUNAL INSTITUTIONS”, AND “WORKERS’ COOPERATIVES” AND DEFENDED BY “PEOPLE’S DEFENSE FORCES”.

We are not simply content to document or apprehend war criminals, we need real infrastructure and we need it now. No more after-the-fact, agonizing atrocities. We need emergency groups, we need flying columns, and a reserve army of human rights professionals and labor. 

Since 1948 there have been few positive developments in the cause of human rights. No army will enforce them; no champions have risen with arms to heroically bring them into a state of real being. 

Once again, until the time the United Nations or any state actor will actually protect and enshrine these rights then the women and men of the Workers Parties, and the hundreds of international formations like our own will take this burden on our shoulders for the sake of our future. 

We lay claim to our 58 codified rights and bellow help is coming, pushing forward to inevitable victory! We don’t want a state, or some land and we don’t crave power for the sake of power, or the ease of doing some business. Using the following tactics outlined in this program we seek a massive and overlapping set of infrastructures generated by civilians, through Workers Parties to enforce and enact these rights without the blessing or endorsement of any government. Where others have failed we will succeed; because we must succeed if we are to survive.

Humanity, this is your call to arms!

Signed the Delegates of the 5th Congress

Block Island, November 6th, 2009

TWENTY ONE (XXI)

руки не доходят

Pronunciation: RUkee ni daHOHdyat

Literal translation: the hands don’t reach it Meaning: to not find the time to do (something) Example: Да все до уборки руки не доходят.

“ I can never get around to cleaning.”

In Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, “The so-called Russian Quarter”, “the Little Odessa.” Depending how you Post-Soviet identify. The Russian Quarter is always teeming with life behind the wall. Were I to put my finger in it; my nostril to the whiff beyond her buxom chest; it smells like potato pancakes, cherry perfume, cigarette smoke and fish. Smoked fish. It runs along and below the above ground Yellow Q and Orange B Express train line which rumbles above like a mechanical wave breaking in the six story tenement row houses made of red brown brick. Following the Q line above ground the architecture of the quarter goes from a mix of these artless, durable six stories inter mixed with modest suburban homes running towards the coast. The Northernmost boundary of the quarter is Kings Highway because it is here that street signs appear in Cyrillic. Although the Midwood Ivoryish zone overlaps with the Russian quarter until avenue H where the Haitian Bar Lev line was drawn in 1996. Drugs nor guns nor traffic can move north of that line or south. District Midwood is one of eleven Ivoryish ghettos in the greater New York area, a place of prayer and tunnels and coming and going. Kawa Zivistan lived in that district for eight years on Ocean and H. He knows its comings and goings.

The Russian quarter is awash with small restaurants with live music sung by comical Tamidahs and various slender, busty, well made up on every level Slavic goddesses. And price fixed meals. Its western border is Coney Island Avenue, which at Kings Highway becomes a Pakistani district where Shar’iah law is secretly enforced. Coney Island Avenue runs parallel to Ocean Avenue to the east and ocean parkway to the west, and these three routes had to be thoroughly barricaded to turn back the advance of the National Guard and the 104^th and 116th tank column of Christmas Eve; 2015 or in the parlance of the rebels AR 3. That is still three years to come.  The eastern border of the quarter was Nostrand Avenue. Where the Russian quarter ends and the West Indian quarter begins, largely composed of Haitians and Jamaicans. There were never walls around the quarter, not before the revolt or after not even when the southern rim of Brighton and Coney Island because the internationally famous green light district once the Soviet was recognized by Russia and China in AR 7, or 2019 Common Era. There were not physical walks but perhaps linguistic mental walls that trapped the mentality of those.in the quarter somewhere between the 18th and 21st century. Perhaps between the old world and the new. Perhaps rendering the seditious place it was and is, a place unlike any others where huddled refugees and expatriate radicals were walled in Breukelen habitations in a space that was neither Russia nor America, a purgatory. For had the three million souls of the future Breuklyn, excuse me Breuklyn Soviet ever been embraced by the Americans perhaps they would not have enjoined the rising. For what solidarity did those in the quarter have with Ivoryish spies and black revolutionaries? Nothing. Less than nothing. So little nothing that the majority of the quarter might have seated the whole thing out, we’re that an option. But with all the other tribes in arms and the National Guard shelling so indiscriminately well most joined in the rising before long simply to avenge or protect their own.

That is a characteristic that certainly embodies the Russian quarter. They are rugged social individualists. Very few are actually Russian. There are several hundred thousand former Soviet refugees that speak Russian. But few are slavic. They are Ukrainians, Ivory, Bulgarians, Tartars, Uzbeks, Kazaks, Chuvash, Turkmen, Armenians, Georgians, Bukharians, even a few war like Chechens. They all are in-grained with the Russian Mentality. As in their circle of live work and loyalty contracts rapidly even in the face of minor hardship. No other race has ever been fully enslaved by its own people first via brutal serfdom then via even more brutal Stalinism. It ruined them as a collective or idealist species. That circle of loyalty contracts down to one. In a way few other races do. At a certain point they might throw their children and wives into the rising seas. A wretched generalization but their individual will is harder than any. It is impossible to break. The social nature of their individualism is the solidity of the alliances they form. With anyone that properly secures their ends of individual betterment. They are turtle loyal and truly blind for those that aid them. They go inside a hard shell indeed and not god or insects can crack it. It is made of the strongest stuff. Perhaps always having anything but predators as presidents and thieves for kings? Often the Russian quarter was festive, often feisty, often a place of lawless abuses. You couldn’t ever know unless you knew the name of a song in Cyrillic. 

Daria Andrevna meets Sebastian called Kawa on the boardwalk. Kawa stands there smoking a Newport sizing up the Green from the Blue Tatiana not knowing how different they really are. He looks sleep deprived. Daria then tells him this rambling story about being the great granddaughter of a German baroness. This seemed like the kinds of stories all White Russian women concoct to erect a regal lineage that the revolution had maligned. Yelizaveta and Maria hadn’t made up such stories, they had others though that were comparable. But Yelizaveta and Maria’s fathers had been Red Russians and inner party members. They were less fixated on the 19^th century it seemed. There were always these vague and ambiguous narratives Kawa noticed about what their fathers did or didn’t do during the Soviet Union. Maria’s father had completely disappeared in Chechnya, allegedly been shot by friendly fire; he had been a General, but was dead before she was four or the family joined the exodus. Yelizaveta’s father had been a “dentist”. Or perhaps an expert interrogator. It was hard to deduce. What was the truth and what was the darkness that creeps out into his world any time he encounters them, these post and former Soviets. 

Anyhow, Dasha was claiming to be part Ivoryish via her German Baroness Great Grandmother and that was her story for now. Her father apparently had just been a tramp and ran out on her mom at fairly a young age. She kisses him on each cheek and takes out a picture, wrapped up in papers and a bow.

“For you,” she states.

He opens it and it’s quite something, so black and dark and vivid. A heart. A black, black heart. But, his or hers? To what symbolic level goes it?

“Amazing, I love it,” he replies.

And for the nearly the first time in his life, he means it.

“I’m just so glad.” She says with her big blue person eyes beaming?

“Shall we go get some red wine?” she suggests. 

That night long after midnight, late, late after a few shots, and some wine and a few dozen shared cigarettes in Cafes in and around Manhattan Beach they walked their walk, tumbling really toward the yacht yards and mansion of Sheepshead Bay.  

At one point she yanks his collar close and says; “taste me”; she puts wine into him mouth to mouth. The night gets early, he’s lost chasing her.

He runs his fingers through her thick blond lion’s mane. She leans into him on bar stools or when they go outside to speak, let her tits rest on him, brush against him.

“So you’re really an Ivory?” she asks.

“Yes at least partly.”

“I want to ask you silly questions and you will answer them off, she smiles rolling up into his arms, “and you will get a prize if you win, understand. True answers only.”

“Would you denounce your Ivoryish G-d and become an Eastern Orthodox Christian to please my mother?”

“I don’t believe in either G-d’s monopoly, why not?”

“If we were poor would you work on Saturdays to support me?”

“As I have for years.”

“Would you steal for me?

“The moon itself. And whatever was needed.”

“Would you make love to me with my husband sleeping in the next room?”

“Your cries of passion would wake him, so only if he were drugged.”

“Would you kill to protect me?”

“Without a thought.”

“If I killed someone would you help me cover it up?”

“Yes of course I’d try.”

“Try?”

“Try. Depends on the mess not the risk.”

A mental picture flashes in his head of a memory. Was it real? The two of them dismembering corpses and melting them in acid?

“If I asked you to kill for me would you do it?”

“Are you in trouble?” he asks like a stupid American.

“You know I’m a married woman?”

“I’d like to suggest it lacks certain integrity.”

“Does it? How could you know? You’ve known me what, five weeks?”

“Time is relative.”

“Maybe. My husbands a total monster and my boyfriend is a bit boring,” is all she says and pulls away from him.

She shows him marks on her poorly hidden.

She has black and blue marks on her chest and under both arms. Like she got herself fucked ruthlessly. She has handcuff marks on her wrists.

“What do you want me to do about your situation?”

“There is nothing that can be done.”

“I could take you away.”

“You could try.”

“You have to tell me what you want me to do, not what you assume is possible.”

“What’s the thing you Americans say, oh yes: You and what army.”

“What are those marks from?”

“Me being loved by three men.”

He looks sad, it breaks through. Sad for her and him both.

“You could leave with me. Tonight. I have enough money to get us away.”

“I doubt that.  I have expensive tastes.”

“Curb them?”

“Are you going to give me new clothes? And a beautiful home; and pay for my school. And give me a credit card. Give me money to send to my ailing mother in Penza? Ivory.”

“I think I could give you a better life than this shit, this life. In this miserable city.”

“You can’t give me what I need. As sweet as you are.”

“I don’t think you’d be with me if you didn’t think I could try.”

“You’re broke. You’re in school. You’re up to shit, I know. Don’t think I don’t know what you and your friends are up to. You’re all gonna die.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you think I don’t know?”

“What do you think you know?”

“I got to know a lot of guys when they brought me here.”

“Who?”

“The Perchevney Bratva.”  

“You’ve told me so many fucking stories about how you got here. Who keeps you, what’s even true? What! You play mind games like the best of us.”

“My girlfriend and I were hired to let a couple bankers work us up two nights ago. When I told you I was studying. I was being fucked by two Wall Street guys, swapping my friend and I for hours. These marks are from them, not my fake ass paperwork husband. Not my most generous boyfriend Serge.”

He wonders what if any of the story is real.

“The Wall Street guys were fucked out their minds. They were going at us for hours. Taking long breaks to do coke and talk about shit they own.”

He has been asleep because she keeps feeding him booze. He wakes up sometimes and knows his role, but then goes to sleep and forgets what is about to go down. 

“They know you and the rest of so-called resistance are going to attack the stock exchange on 17 Fructidor. In but two days. They know that you’re all going to try and take over the whole district and provoke a state of emergency. They know everything. The cops know. The National Guard know. The F.B.I. know. The Bureau of Homeland Security knows. Breria, too he certainly knows. They are going to lure you all into those very narrow streets and spaces. They’re going to wait under one day. They’re going to kill every single one of you with a gas. Now you tell me. What horse am I betting on? My fat American paperwork husband. My Russian accountant boyfriend washing money at the biggest hotel in the Midtown? My boss, the Illubadori pimp who pays me one grand every night I take a Wall Street guy, a banker or celebrity out to dinner? Or you? The charming but totally bipolar ambulance man, who has less than 400 in the bank, is on the Department of Homeland Security tertiary kill list, can’t buy me a new life, and can’t save me. All you have is happy noble Amerikanski ideals and some poems. You probably shouldn’t ever see me again.”

He knows she’s right about at least what’s in his account.

“I can get us out of this city, I can take you away from this life,” Kawa says, “I…”

“You are going to tell me you love me?” she asks him.

He doesn’t respond, that word means nothing anyway in English.

“You better not even fucking dare say it.”

“I’ll give you my life and I kill anyone who is hurting you. I’ll bury your husband, your boyfriend and your handlers. I’ll bury Breria himself.”

She kisses him hard. Fuck it, she thinks he’ll probably be dead again in a couple of days.

And that was how she began to suspect that he truly was the man she’d dreamed about as a younger girl with the powers she was born with, from a line of old soul sorceresses; and she of course recorded the entire conversation on her smart phone recorder as evidence for her handlers, well we all have them really. 

Shortly they could cross this very, very loose and erratic cannon off their growing shorter list. He was so fucking out there, he was not to be allowed to walk off the map this time.

“I know a little inn at the boardwalk end with mirrors on the ceiling,” she whispers to him, “I have to sleep at home tonight but he’s not gonna come home tomorrow. You can’t save my soul or fix my life, but you can do what you want to my body, if I like it.” Now that was a value proposition, if he had ever heard one. Because he believed in his heart, that sometimes things were like Russian literature and sometimes they were like American movies, but if you fucked a woman good enough and hard enough she would, could, might really love you. ‘I think that I may have been listening to lots of music from the Caribbean, culturally speaking. That’s what made me think like that.’

“Yalla,” she says to him and winks.

SCENE TWENTY (XX)

Я тебе покажу, где раки зимуют

Pronunciation: yah tebbe pokaZHU gdeh raki zimuYUT

Literal translation: I am going to show you where lobsters spend the winter.

Meaning: 

AN ABSTRACT THREAT, “Or else!”

On 10 Fructidor the Bronks Okrug is being completely surrounded by the National Guard and U.A.S. Federal military forces under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security. All of the bridges into Strong Island are check-pointed close. The National Guard opened the day with artilaeary stikes which caused uncontorleld fires in the North Bronks. The smoke from the Okrug can be scene for many miles. Today at a large demonstration shortly before midnight targeted air stikes wiped out most of the deputies gathered at Hostos for the People’s Assmebly. This was still the Bronks though, so the militia foces of Bronks fired back. The siege of central Breuklyn continues, smoldering on. The Ivory New Year begins right before sundown. A strange new year, counted out across time way past 5,000 and change. 

“What year do you people think it is,” Sasho asks Kawa.

“We believe it is 5773.”

“My phone says different. Says, it is actually just 2012 my friend,” Sasho says, “Martina is it 2012?” 

“It’s 2011 on Bulgarian post Soviet time sir, but the Americans think its 2012.”

Kawa interjects,“What if the year we were all told it to be was utterly a lie?”

“What a question!” exclaims Martina.

“What if something terrible once happened and they lost control. The powers that be. So theory wipred it all out. Wipred out memory, history, and time. Then just reset. They reset reality for us all by about 3,000 year out of wach.”

“What a wild assertion!” says Sasho, “You people think its deep in the future?”

“What is the year wasn’t 2012 at all,” explains Kawa, “ but instead it was 5773! Where did nearly three thousand years of human devleopment go? No one ever asks that. Why are some people using the moon and others the sun to track the months? Why was the Gregoran calender and the Julian calender so far off the date the Ivory have set? The phone devices, the shift calenders, even google say the year is 2012. The year the Mayans say the world will end. The phones and calenders they have in the work camps sat it is THURSDAY. But why does the week have seven days, not ten? Who decided on that? According to the Ivory the month is called Tishrei, and this is the evening of a new year. 1 Tishrei 5773.

But, Sebastian doesn’t keep time on the clock of bondage, deception, or the clock of invisble friends. To him and the members of this club, it isn’t really September, it isn’t actually Tishrei. The week has ten days not seven. There are ACTUALLY two days of work. Then two days of rest. Then two days of work, followed by four days of rest.  And this is the month of Fructidor. The month of Fruits.

“There is no J letter in old Ivory, so I don’t know how we can be called the Jews, or Jewish, or Judean. I was a Y sound; Yehud, Yudea, Yudean. The romans used the J sound.”

“Ivory is an Americanization of Eivrei; where they get the world Hebrew from.”

At a tavern of very ill repute on Ludlow Street some friends are getting ready for “A JUDEAN NEW YEAR’S PREGAME PARTY” on a Thursday evening, or such it was billed at on the place cards.

“Why are some of you called Ask-a-Nazi? And others called Suffer-dick?” Martina asks Kawa pouring him some Astika into a glass.

“I think some of us just took the name the master oppressor gave us,” Kawa replies, “and some did not.”

Slavi Perchevney the sullen enforcer doesn’t need a list, not even the drop of a name. He’s killed many people before. He will have to do so again, “That’s how the news is looking these days”. He either knows the faces of the regulars. Or you pay and that’s it. Maybe you look like the $20 mark or maybe $40 mark, it’s a call he can make quickly and quietly. Mostly if one is a big chested female, or a big spender type the price per ticket goes down. For a regular though, it costs nothing. He takes responsibility for the trouble caused by those he or she brings to the Tavern. Mehanata is lit up this Thursday for almost Ivory New Years, mostly an excuse for Z.O.B. officers to congregate, report and share a beverage. The city is going up in flames around them.

Step down the hall, go straight, not upstairs, go past the coat check unless you want to be robbed, open the second wooden door and leave the time, space zone. The lights are now quite dim, the place is still cast in a dead, red light and loud gypsy Jazz is playing from the band below. Welcome to Mehanata, the Bulgarian Tavern in the wilderness of North America.

Rafael laughs off the varying contradictions and swills back his cold Astika beer. The Bulgarian bartenders by now know the sober pensive Kawa as well as the dumb faltering drunk Kawa and they wonder what metamorphosis this latest tale will bring. Although he acts like a humble outsider he is known in this haunt since 2001. Bottles have been broken over heads! Guns have been drawn and unloaded. Disaster has befallen him and glory too. And he is not like all the other Americans people know who come here. Kawa believes in things which are dangerous to speak of. Kawa has always been under Sasho’s roof. The tavern attracts many good tales and vice mongering spirits. The tavern has been the roof on which Kawa has laid huge plots and fallen down with no teeth. But he is not just a regular. He is the favorite American of the Voorhi Alexander Pervechnvny. Surprisingly he never gloats on that or uses it to drink on the house. Perhaps because some person or group of people keeps wiping out his mind.   

Justin, Sasho, and a troop of little Mexican wet backs are down in the sub-basement digging with pick axes and shovels. There is a hatch under the basement chamber called ‘the ice cage’. The wall-to-wall ice box where wall-to-wall two minutes of binge vodka drinking happens at fifteen dollars a minute. It’s all the exact same vodka bottled up and cut in various ways. Well the floor has a hidden hatchway that drops you quite deep into a smuggling tunnel out to Breuklyn via the old train lines and then out to a pier in Coney Island’s Sea Gate City.  

They’re not digging a new tunnel. They’re digging a demolition bin so they can completely blow apart and seal the hatch and the tunnel to Breuklyn behind them in the event of a big police raid. Which will not be long coming. Especially with all these terrorists and spies fucking about in the Tavern every weekend for the past six weeks. 

Kawa Zivistan has a short palaver with Rafael and Viktoria on the subject of Daria Andreavna, then stands outside the social club with the Fenian bouncer James White.

“You’re becoming quite a regular again,” says James White the former cop, “That’s what they call a real poor life decision.”

“I used to come here when it was on Canal.”

“The old place eh.”

Raided often and burned to the ground in 2005. Many were killed.

The burly Fenian bouncer looks every bit like an off-duty cop. Maybe, just maybe he smiles a little bit more.

They’ve spoken amicably of their blue-collar nights many times previously. When Kawa is heartbroken as both Maria and Yelizaveta rendered him the past four years, when those two relationships ended he took back to the tavern. Because the best way to get over a woman is to get under another woman, as everyone knows. But his will as man was vanquished. That is a polite way of saying he had no ability or will to entice women on the dance or make small talk with young loose women that so fill the dance hall. It was in these periods he got to know Rafael and Viktoria in different capacities. Got to palaver with a lot of the insiders he used to know in other forgotten lives like Justin, James, James, Hella, Tanya and Sasho sometimes.

They had all supposedly met three years prior at the Tabor Gypsy festival on Floyd Bennett Field and he had become a confidant to Rafael ’s revolutionist notions and Viktoria’s worries on her husbands’ ways. His cheating. Rafael it seemed lack anyone to palaver with on the issues of the world, philosophy or his long held beliefs in socialism, and Victoria on whose shoulder Kawa cried about his lost loves was also quite willing to console her about Rafael ’s alleged philander which was not quite real, but wasn’t either quite imagined. 

“You’re becoming quite a regular again. I’d say for sure. Slavi lets you in without paying? I’d say that means you’re carrying the card now, again.”

“It’s supposedly a rebel friendly place.”

“For now. It’s quite getting bad up in the Bronx. Maybe you heard. We may switch loyalties back to those with the truest monopoly on violence. The state. You might have to eat your fix somewhere else before the stakes get too high. Before the cheese leads you to the mouse trap.”

“Good to know!”

“All we partly retired civil servants have to stick together,” says James White, “no matter which foreign government might be paying either of our bills this week. Don’t come here on a Wednesday though whatever you do, it’s a whole other crowd.”

“Worried I’ll shoot the place up?”

“I’m worried you’ll see things you don’t really want to see, again. Or remember, things people might have done to you,” says James White the Fenian, “remember things about yourself. That is highly dangerous to remember.” 

Card stock place holders on candle lit tables towards the back of the third floor declare several long wooden tables: “Reserved for the Banshee Otriad ”. Sixty some core and provisional Kadro members of the Newyorkgrad Banshee Association, a clandestine organization of EMTS, Paramedics and Emergency workers are drunk or drinking, loudly occupying the third floor mezzanine of the Mehanata Social Club.

Except for the club’s current ‘Chief-of-Staff’ the Haitian Paramedic Emile Cange, who is a nominally straight laced Seventh Day Adventist and his fiance Praise Augustus, well it’s almost midnight and the music is blaring dancehall in their honor, and Zivistan is calling for a toast. A running joke in the club was that for the past decade or so they never seemed to miss an opportunity to go hard drinking on an Ivoryish holiday.

There are a lot of Ivoryish holidays, approximately twenty of them resulting in innumerous number of work days to be taken off on top of the Friday into Saturday Sabbath, which man of the club members had paperwork submitted to their employers, were their shops union stating that they couldn’t work on these assorted holidays and also, Fridays past 3pm.

At some point Trickovitch had sat down with a calendar and made the calculation that utilizing the Ivoryish religion’s observances, one could get a whole lot of rest. And it caught on. Pretty soon over half the club carried bonafide conversion papers, certificates of Bar Mitzvah and bris where appropriate, kutb marriage contracts, the world.

Nikholai and the man named Lt. Moishe Klein, the clubs only actually practicing Orthodox Ivory had made some Russian rabbis in Brighton a good price and long term agreement they couldn’t refuse.

“Hamesh, Arba, Sheloash, Styeim, Ehkhad!, Happy Jewish new year!” yells Kawa Zivistan slapping Mickhi Dbrisk on the back. Although, there are still two actual days to Ivory New Year, this being the Rosh Hashanah Pregame Party for the club’s inner circle. The New Year itself doesn’t fall on a weekend. But Thursday is an adequate party night too, sometimes near the end of the world.

Kawa Zivistan, with a gray flash in his eyes, is now dead sober somehow. As if the drinks he’d pounded, all five Astikas and three Stoli shots, and the bottle of red, then white there were glasses, real cold glasses of bubbly Borjomi mineral water.

Somehow in the Melee of the dancehall, in the flashing light and flickering candles of this tavern he had tuned out his fun and put upon the game face mask of his title, Chief Planning Officer of the Banshee Association. Surely not all thirty two of the guests were beyond all pale of corruption, but Banshee was a proto trade union with a 10-13 fund and an underground ambulance newspaper. Anyone could sign up. 

But now at the round dimly lit table at the end of the long catwalk above the main dance floor, past an easily removed barricade was seated Dbrisk, the Bajan businessman Magnus Goldbar Allamby, who always carried in his own sweet wine bottles; Mara the half pint Fenian always drunk at these things, Trickovitch, paramedic biker Anya Drovtich, Nicholas Mapfre (only there under peer pressure and perpetually nervous), Chief-of-Staff Emile Cange, a paramedic and Zivistan the leadership as it were, out of sight, out of mind looking over a document printed on gray card stock, downloaded and translated just the night before.

The Anonymous, the vast anarchist hacker underground, had circulated a cut and paste manifesto. One which Banshee could never overtly endorse, but certainly various operatives of its armed wing, the Z.O.B. were certain to lend their talents behind. It is to be a collective response to the uprising and its grievances.

At all major Banshee gatherings, there was copious amounts of booze consumed, the Mehanata Social Club such a choice place for meetings and for gatherings for it was loud and rowdy and hard to bug, or hard to track the ins and outs, hard to see who signed what, under who’s name, easy to deny anything.

A version of this document had circulated for weeks, the uprising though aborted on the labor day weekend had to meet the popular response, the demonstrations happening in all the boroughs; the wild anarchy about to happen on 17 Fructidor, 2011 when the anarchist federations, unions, socialist parties, student groups and the usual left suspects sought to again storm the District Financial. This thing they’re all signing, it’s written in Ivory.

That following evening of Fructidor  11^th Kawa and dozens of other activists using the Signal text dispatch system, boarded the subway cars with flicker masks and blue fatigues. They took nearly every train line hostage across 5 boroughs, all numbers, letters and colors. Terror and spectacle abound! Not even one lethal bullet in the guns, which almost no units even had to brandish; the captive audiences were petrified or participatory in the action.

Kawa’s unit takes over the A train Manhattan bound from the Rockaways alongside an anarchist named Spiker, the actor Siegfried Sassoon, Fenian Mara Fitzduff and an Otriad film maker named Nicholas Mapfre. Mapfre, a childhood friend of Sebastian had at some point realized that when the revolution did break out, he’d like to be able to film it.

Dasha called out to him earlier on the black berry smartphone to ask him to be careful. She is no damsel in distress and he is no Shamel Basayev, this time. But she knows him much better than he knows she or she works for. She knows he’s waking up from a daydream.

Trains are stormed all over the city for mostly militant public addresses and passing out of homework assignments from big gray bags. Although, all of them are emptied right before the District financial where many cross. Emptied and dynamited. The bankers take cabs to work, caps or ferries or are driven. This is to keep all of their surfs away. Deter servitude.

The speech needs to be cut short because he gives it over each transfer of the cars. Sometimes Spiker Timchenko or Siggy Sassoon or Mara Fitzduff gave speeches. It begins with, “My name is Zachariah Artstien, an organizer with the human rights resistance! Affiliated with the Z.O.B., we are not here to hurt anyone or take your money! We are here to declare that you have human rights and we must now link arms and fight for them.”

“Today is the 11^th of Fructidor, when ten years ago the Oligarchs manufactured an attack on us to secure their power and control. In six days the People’s Army of the General Resistance Alliance will attack the District Financial itself! If you ain’t running with it, run from it!”

Newyorkgrad is the city of such theatrical disturbances. It’s also a mind-your-fucking business city. Its people are also heavily armed. But no one pulls on them tonight.

“Please don’t get yourself shot to ferment hope for you alone,” Dasha warns him and she hopes he isn’t killed because he is capable of making a woman care about him. But perhaps not her on a long enough time line.

Kawa and his associates with their scary flicker masks, one with a video camera, tell tales of the People’s Protection Units of Rojava. Of Ivory apartheid. Of the one Noire or Mestizo youth killed every 48 hours by the police. Of the 1 in 8 American Noire men in prison. Of war, endless war consuming all around for the dubious purposes of Afghan and Iraqi and Persian “liberations”. The conspirators film the whole thing, in case they are captured or killed. For the viewers at home on the Live-streams.

After all the tales end, told by the three hostage taking narrators, “We are sorry for our operations washing aside considerations of your health and safety. You cannot join us, we are organized tight as a drum, but go to your churches, mosques and temples, your gangs, crews and neighborhood councils, stay strong and carry on as we are all under siege together.”

And to a captive train load, an adaptive audience held hostage, the cameras of Nicholas Mapfre running, Kawa began a speech, about a four minute speech per car. 

“Hyper-development is the physical and moral state of core country populations that result from proximity to overabundance!” 

“While each core country maintains an underclass of newly arrived immigrants, ethnic subturns, welfare subsidiaries, helot serfs and others are utilized for domestic exploitation on a variety of levels. Low cost wage labor, military or police service, undesirable or dangerous work, service sectors and prostitution; jobs considered below the acceptability of core ethnic identity in power.”

No one got up to open fire on them yet, which was good, as they were wearing blue uniforms and crazed masks in the age of public transport terror. 

“Noires in the United States, Algerians in France, Turks in Germany or various former colonial groups in England. However, nearly every person citizen or undocumented migrant residing in a core country can despite low probability of achieving meaningful wealth; access a range of social services, enjoy relative security and purchase a full range of consumer goods. Hyper-development affects all within the territories of the Core.”

“While clearly some of the highest Palma Index and GINI coefficient variances occur within the core at a rate in the United States of 47 to 1 in wealth difference; hyper development is the result of goods, commodities and general capital flows back to the centers of financial hegemony; New York, Berlin, Geneva and London.”

Now Spike Timchenko jumped in, his mask was a grimacing ghost sleep no more mask; “While the political directives of the U.S.A. form the overt course of policy and international relations; shared race, history and basic cultural religious values have allowed for Euro-American elite consensus to function more fluidly than its 1945-1989 core contender and nemesis the Soviet Union grappling with a far wider ethnic elite, a less structurally manageable economic system and a far new set of oligarchs; the inner circle Kadro of the Democratic Confederalist Party, K.G.B. and subsequent energy moguls.”

He wonders if they understand anything he’s saying, wonders if they have unplugged from their smartphones and iPods. 

Spiker the anarcho syndicalist continues;

“Hyper development leads to things like the U.S. obesity epidemic, high levels of moral decay such as the feminist consensus that 1/3 women in the US is a victim of sexual assault before age 18. It is access to too much food, constant imperatives to purchase more of everything, the owning of multiple vehicles per family, the imagined entitlement to home ownership and the ownership of homes far in excess of what a family unit requires. It is an exaggerated sense of importance and uniqueness.” 

He concludes as the train rumbles into the upcoming station.

“It is a complete apathy as to what is occurring not only in one’s own community but certainly the rest of the world. It is media oversaturation; constantly plugged in cell phones, movies, music and video games. It is a decline in meaningful literacy, a tacit embrace of ethnocentric white (in the case of the current hegemonic order) supremacy. It is over availability of print media and pundit debate, but relatively poor engagement of the political machine itself. It is the right to vote between red and blue flavors. It is a severely myopic worldview manufactured by the educational system and media.”

“Power to the people!” an old Noire man says and pumps his fist.

“We are asking for you to work in sympathy with the resistance,” says Zivistan, “we have a bag of homework assignments. Simple ways to assist the general strike and uprising coming on 17 Fructidor. The best way you can assist it is to join us in the streets. If you cannot stay at home. Wall Street will be a battlefield. Support the American division of the Resistance anyway you are able.” 

They were mostly greeted with quiet applause, but no one shoots at them or turns them in. And in this city that counts for something. Most people take home work, perhaps largely out of curiosity. Later Kawa Zivistan and his three cohorts are at the end of the line and the job has been carried without any of the possible predictions of arrest by the authorities or mob violence against them. A sigh of relief.

“It’s nice to see that on the eve of Fructidor  11^th, 11 years later, security is tight as drum,” notes Spiker Timchenko an anarchist, also a childhood friend of ‘Zachariah’, the sometimes nom de guerre of Kawa Zivistan in the Middle East.

So when Kawa gets back to the financial district and he confirms around 2am with Dasha he’s un-arrested and also alive and she breathes back a sign. He writes a new poem for her. Place it in old school gold painted stationary. Dedicating resistance to her, although to her, it is more like street theater carried up on a moving, highly privileged stage.

Daria texts him;

“Don’t disappear jsut yet man. I made you a painting of your bleeding heart.”

Bleeding out yes, unasked for and unheeded, a mighty pump. His heart was quite known to hemorrhage over little and for nothing at all.