02

Down Town, Brooklyn
December 15th 2009

Her name is Barbara Albert ; her slave name was Barbara anyway, almost everyone even a Haitian didn’t have a historical name. She works on a Transcare 911 unit out of Brooklyn Hospital.

In her own words:

“Only reason I’m out here this gorgeous Friday evening is that I don’t make a living wage and thus do an insane amount of overtime to keep myself in the lifestyle to which I am accustomed. I want to be a firewoman. I made the list, I passed the physical, and then the recession bullshit happened. Come the fuck on, I said to myself; I’ve paid my dues. It’s time for them to let me the hell out of this chicken shit outfit, this EMS bullshit. Its 1905, and I’m gonna bang out at midnight. The rain is beating down on the windshield, and I’m praying to black baby returning King Seventh Day Adventist Jesus that we don’t get any more damn jobs.”

Now don’t get me wrong; I have no romantic ideas about fire suppression. A woman, a black woman, I know the deck isn’t stacked in my favor over there in the goomba-squad. But you know what? I been asking myself a lot lately; what it is exactly those people do for 90,000 plus a year that makes them so much more valuable to the department than me. My unit is in the shit. We could do ten jobs a day on a summer shift in the Stuy. I don’t wanna say some shit like those fire fighters don’t work, they work a bit. And a real blaze, albeit hard to come by these days happens and yeah they heroically run in.

But number wise; come the fuck on.

In my five years in 911 EMS I’ve gotten fifteen confirmed saves. That’s eleven returns of spontaneous circulation in the field post cardiac arrest and four ‘hauled my ass at the speed of light to King’s county after some young brother got blasted away.’ They only gave me nine little sheets of accommodation because I think one of the arrests bottomed out in the ER 40 hours in. And they don’t give out nothing for shots and stabs. For ass hauling, lifesaving spectaculars.
I done carried three tight asthmatic pediatrics out of projects and got them intubated up in my bus and on the treatment. Nothing for that! I’m saying I don’t want a bonus or nothing but the sum total of my work, of my personal life saving five year total is high as hell. And yeah I buff, but you gotta buff to keep it all interesting.

I’m a fast Haitian motherfucker. My hands move so damn fast at that wheel I can clock under four minutes on any notification anywhere in the borough of Brooklyn. I a demon behind the wheel. And if not for the recession I’d be getting’ mine. I’d make it through their academy and be up on a ladder by now. Savin’ property not life is where the green is. The fame too. Just last week the Daily News ran a two page spread bout a fire engine crew that delivered a baby on the Belt. Not to be a complete hater, but I done delivered six babies now, they even named one after my unit; Sonja “B” Carter. ‘Cause I hold it down in the Stuy.

It’s aggravating that the press loves the fire fighters so much. Not that they don’t deserve it, it’s just we need a little love too. It gets to a tech when year after year they out in the trenches and they feel more like a cab driver than a medical professional. We always post the firefighter saves in the lounge whenever we see them, as if to say we do that shit too you know. We save lives too. It’s been near a decade since the merger and still they shit on us. They still think we’re the red headed step children of the emergency services.

But the cops know. They see us out there more doing our thing with the shots, and stabs, and EDPs. I heard just a week ago some EDP put a gun up in some crews face and demanded that his girlfriend be given Narcs. EMTs don’t carry narcs. We got Aspirin (the ASA), Albuterol, Oral Glucose (a fancy word for a sugar tube) and Oxygen. That’s it. TV has everyone thinking we’re paramedics. Anyhow, I got upwards of thirty recognized and mostly unrecognized saves and I want out. I want my goddamn promotion because I’m closing in on 29 and then they cut ya.

I heard that EDP motherfucker near shot two of our boys last week on 44I in Brownsville. Heard he shot his girlfriend, hit an MOS close range in the leg, then shot himself. The crew member saved the cop by hitting that EDP with his asp thirty times in the face. Bleeding out his damn leg he called a 10-13 and held direct pressure on the wounded cop. Don’t see that in the Daily News. Don’t get any thanks when we have to act like enforcement. But a Fireman who delivers a baby is a god among men. Or a firefighter who does just about anything in front of a camera.

I want out. I want into that Fire Department hustle. I need the stimulus money to stop getting ‘lost’ in paperwork before it trickles down to EMS. I need to stay in shape, not burn out, and not let the resentment over take me. They say it’s for the good of the service, but I’d like the service to do a little good for me.

“31Sam for the Multi Trauma on Livonia,” the dispatcher cuts into my thoughts.
“I hate East New York,” mutters my partner Melvin Clarke. And he’s a 6 foot 6 Jamaican.
“31Sam, I got trauma and I ain’t got any other units available,” the dispatcher Shirley states, too always too camp casual on the air.
She tones us up, the loud extended beep to wake up sleeping crews.
“31Sam pick up your radio!”
“31Sam; sent it over central!” I hoot into the radio. It comes over flashing on the KDT.
“That looks really, really bad,” Melvin mutters. I glance at it without reading anything.
“Yup. Let’s ride,” I say not looking. “Central show us extended!”
Clarke taps me on the shoulder, points me to the screen; he never mentions the job enroute unless it might matter.

Apparently a dog is eating a little girls face.
I move far faster now, faster than the speed of public safety, or life.

01

Manhattan, USA
10 December 2009

The snow dropped open and the sky fell out and then we all had a 7 foot ice coat; so to keep warm I invited pugnacious and highly sassy Yelizaveta Kotlyarova to join me at the Wall Street Baths; called Spa 88.

The date is 10 December of 2009 of the Common Era; this snow still falls heavy on the Isle of Man.
Below ground, in the underground you can hear the rumble of the trains through the walls; three flights down below street level; is the wood ceilinged restaurant of a Russian Bathhouse Spa 88. It stinks of sweat and also vaguely of afterhours fornication, buried below the streets of the Financial District a long conversation is coming to a close. An emergency medical technician named Sebastian Adon is finishing up a supposedly good yarn to a slightly younger Russian-Ukrainian-Jewish medical student named Yelizaveta Alexandrovna Kotlyarova who has recently become his platonic confident.
The aim of such storytelling is that she might let him pour cold water upon her when she gets too hot, let him gaze at her nearly naked body, captivate him with her bright eyes and take in his all his ambulance war stories. Of which he has plenty. He’s been writing her for months. She has full and wavy real blond hair and she smiles with such mischievous knowing that her beauty and bright smile stays with him long after she is gone. But, it’s not romantic never has been, she simply likes to hear him tell his yarns.
And thus so far he has made no motion to kiss her.

And this has been a great success for the last four hours.
Everything is fully dilated.

They know each from a student group many years ago, when all in this country talked more openly about equality. Sebastian Adon is an avid fan of former and post Soviets. And she is the loveliest Ivory he has ever known.
Ivory is he clever rendition of the ethnic group Hebrew which is “EE-vree” when said by Israelis, and Yeli and he debate sometimes at length about the linguistic origins of the word Jew.
They remind him of something that is tough and also fearless; loyal to a red line and of course exceedingly beautiful and open minded in the bed room to just about anything, he inherited his father Avraam’s gift for, curse for? Erotic undertones to everything. Adon has been writing Yelizaveta letters for over two years. He’s not sure why. Attention? It isn’t simply to sleep with her, well of course it is he’s a man. Although as a man of course he would not turn that prospect down for she is surely very beautiful. He’s a man always highly in need of a confidant, for he’s nearly always in some form of emergency mode.

It has been a rocky road of activism, repeated arrest, trial and tribulation since he first came back from the State of Israel nearly ten years ago in 2001 shortly after the 9-11 martyr operation. He should have stayed, how he’s Babylonian, and locked in at FDNY.

To her he’s a fiery train wreck of comedy and tragic idealism. She observed him younger early in his student movement days, then briefly at Hunter University, once at yoga and on the Book Face for some time intermittently making snarky chatter. He cannot possibly be cut of normal Amerikanski cloth, he’s weird. He is a curiosity to which she can devote sporadic time. A minor deviation from her studies at Stony Brook.
They are now on Winter break and she need a distraction from her bickering parents; her Jewish father former Soviet dentist, now descending into light madness and her Ukrainian mother; a maid at the Benjamin hotel, a cattle driver toward her being a doctor.

The story this time has been about his moral descent post deportation from the State of Israel, which just occurred a couple weeks before. He had recently attempted to return there to visit a long lost associate by the name of Maya Solomon.
He was immediately arrested at the airport.
His two days in Lod Prison were recounted and about Israelis not taking kindly to him working on a Palestinian ambulance for a week; four years prior was much of today’s yarn. The Israelis kind of hold a “whose suicide are you on” type grudge. About them beating him, water boarding him, hitting him with lights, electricity and kicking him repeatedly in the groin bellowing in Russian.
Sebastian Adon ethnically speaking is one quarter Irish; one quarter Russian; one quarter German; and some part Polish Jew; therefore he makes a good little Brooklyn mutt. Or perhaps at best an exceedingly good liberal New Yorker. He drives ambulances for FDNY going on two years in the South Bronx; he sometimes drinks too much liquor and brutalizes a girlfriend sexually; but nothing rapey or ultra-violent. Cuffs, anal, threesomes with whores, foursomes with couples, loads on tits and faces. Family oriented fun like that. The product of a generation raised on porn. He’s got loose and transient morals that he justifies with his ambiguous vocation. He likes the idea of human rights, but isn’t sure if humans know they have any, or sometimes if they deserve them. He likes the idea of communism, but isn’t clear why the communist revolutions were mostly violent autocracies. He has basic values that are in essence good, Yelizaveta agrees, though she is vaguely appalled to hear him speak of his sexacapades’ and depravities, they cheapen him profoundly in her eyes.

She heard that Maria his longest running ex left him because he got drunk and swam into the Atlantic last September after a fight. The Russian rumor mill was faster medium than Book Face.
Sebastian has led a small revolutionist club since his return from Israel in 2001 that has caused him considerable trouble; but alas capitalism still rules in the USA, despite his and others best efforts to defeat it.

“There’s a half black president promising to end the wars, forgive student debt and provide universal free healthcare,” Yelizaveta says, “we weren’t all totally defeated.”
She had at one time organized a chapter of the movement at her all girl school Chapin, but that was in almost another life.
Occupy was two years away and the general uprising called the Great Revolt about three.
“Why are you an ambulance man again?” she asks him”

He says to her:

‘An ambulance is a vehicle for transporting sick or injured people, to, from or between places of treatment for an illness or injury, or to heaven or hell. The term ambulance is used to describe a vehicle used to bring medical care to patients outside of the hospital or to transport the patient to hospital for follow-up care and further testing, or bring their souls to other vessels should they be fit enough to live again. The word is most commonly associated with the land-based, emergency motor vehicles that administer emergency care to those with acute illnesses or injuries, hereafter known as emergency ambulances, but in numerous developing and socialist nations community health workers have performed this work on foot and commandeered vehicles when needed. These are usually fitted with flashing warning lights and sirens to facilitate their movement through traffic. It is these emergency ambulances that are most likely to display the Star of Life, which represents the six stages of pre-hospital medical care. Other vehicles used as ambulances include trucks, vans, station wagons, buses, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, boats, and even hospital ships.’

“So says Wikipedia,” smirks Emergency Medical Technician Sebastian Adon reading off his half smart phone, a little black android.

“Why do you have to quote Wikipedia, like every six conversations”, mutters Yelizaveta Kotlyarova, perhaps the object of his desire, a perky, tough as nails golden blue eyed, blond haired, shut up he thinks, making words rhyme doesn’t make you any kind of poet.

While completing a degree in Political Science at City University Sebastian took a job as an emergency medical technician and this seems to have tempered some of his previous radical fervor, but not by much.

“I like helping my people,” comes his scripted response.
“Your people?” she replies.
“Everybody, who needs some help.”

Sebastian is just under six feet tall. After they get dressed and meet in the banya lobby where she tries to pay and makes sure not to let her. He’s wearing a blue FDNY job shirt he’s gotten personally emblazoned with the Israeli flag, an irony under the circumstances of recent events. The Irish had been putting on such patches for years, however the window for other ethnicities was about to be cut short once the West Indians began wearing their flags into battle so to speak. He has bags under his eyes because he works life’s night shift. He wants her in every way a man can desire a woman but has never told her thus so far in the two years he’s known her. After Maria left he intensified the courtship. That is largely because he at first was fooled into loving another, lesser woman, second because he’s a coward when it comes to his actual emotions and did little to pursue the more likely reaction to his affections; which was surely bewilderment and rejection. So he just kept the letters about big ideas not passions.

“I like collectively written documents. And you’re just being a snob because your Oberlin teachers always tell you never use it. It’s a fucking great definition of an ambulance if you ask me.”
Yeli likes things with scientific references. She likes looking up anything that seems suspect, which when it comes to Adon, is a lot.
“I like some of your collectively written documents. But you go on and on sometimes and need to get to the point,” she says.
“Sometimes your art is overdone, over drawn, you make the boobs big and gross and subtract from your bold uniqueness, in my opinion,” she smiles.
Yelizaveta likes things with references. But she is fully an artist at her core, in her heart and soul. She likes looking up almost anything that seems suspect, which when it comes to Adon, is a lot. She knows he keeps things from her to preserve a somewhat sanctimonious appearance of some kind of bohemian revolutionary ambulance hero.

Just fifteen minutes before they’d both been lying near naked in a Russian Banya called Spa 88. He was putting the story on her about something crazy that had just gone down on what was supposed to be his first vacation in three years. After some other story about a threesome with Maria his ex. Which didn’t ever really happen, it was just something that turned him on to say in front of her. In reality, he had gotten into a fight with her in September on Block Island and followed Jeremey McGaffey’s ghost out to sea for several hours. The local police found him several hours later walking naked down the road with and carrying an enormous rock.
He has a very subjective reality compared to the rest of us she thinks.
She knows he keeps things from her to preserve a sanctimonious appearance of bohemian revolutionary ambulance hero.

“I think you need to go back to school and get more medical training,” she says, “you’re a glorified cab driver with an oxygen tank. You’re not living up to your expectations of yourself.”
“I’ll forgive your lack of appreciation; we’re god’s avenging angels with sirens I’ll have you know.”

When Adon feels cornered he typically drops into even more grandiose rhetoric.

“Sebastian. You, are a terrific story teller, but let’s not forget where we stand in life’s chain of command shall we. I am a student and you are a truck driver with a stethoscope, if we wish to be more than that there is such a long road ahead. ”
He wishes she was less coy; less belittling of his profession and what was left of his idealism. He guesses it isn’t truly love, not when sentiments of rough degrading sex run across the conscience. But if it was simply do her in the back of an ambulance type love, she’d have seen right through it, likely been appalled. He believes in impossible, undoable things. Kids himself into thinking he’s the man for the job.
But she’s not impressed by all that.

Sebastian Adon, is of course in the twilight of his young adult life. He has been driving an ambulance for three years thinking someone would call him a hero at some point, hoping, believing that there was gonna be a chance to save some lives.
“I’ve saved eight lives,” he informs her as he sometimes has before. It’s a justification for why he hasn’t quit the job yet.
“Well don’t let anybody take that from you,” she retorts.
“I want to reiterate that the reason we civil servants feel so entitled is that the rest of you are unwilling to work the conditions we are and face the raw un-adulterated bullshit the people of this city are quite willing to put us through. We guard you while you sleep and you pay us like pizza men. I think this job has taken more from us than we were able to give to our city. And when the city is gone I assure you it is because we have abandoned hope in it.”

“You’re so preachy and poetic, I kinda hate, sort of love it,” she utters as she rubs her fingers together, “That, tovarish is the world’s smallest violin playing just for you.”

Adon is the kind of man who at this juncture can still be motivated by even the world’s smallest violin. At least to him life then has a theme song.

ACT ONE:
“Toussaint”

Prelude

Croix-des Bouquets, Haiti
4 June 2014

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.

3

Says Maria Silverrtova, “Let me roll up my sleeves and also my skirt, a little! Look at me in the eyes! I have all my teeth to bite. So sexy and educated and multi-lingual. What, a, catch to catch. I am a wild debutante, elusive and amazing. I am a journalist of course, forced to pour men off shots in a tavern downtown.”
“Zdrastvistia! The purpose of this play is to buy and sell luxury carrots. Also a flying carpet to get you home after all the bullshit we will make you sit through telling Russian American tales. Also to warn you about Chechnyans, and also to distribute out a phone number where slaves with abused lives can get J 1, S 1 or go to college. There is singing and poems. We will try and pour you things called Vodka, but it’s not vodka; to us it’s like water for wound care.”
Maria continues, “Good and bad men went to war and women also went to war, and Americans and Russians watched out the corner of the Newspaper or telescreen. And of course supplied the arsenal and the airstrikes.”
“The papers called them “the Chechnyans” because when the war kept going, people came back trained in god-only-knows how much carnage capability. The war I’m referring to is the Syrian Civil War/ the Revolution in Rojava which was a phantom menace to all. But it was more a dark dream based on improbable odds. Chechens, are in fact a very real jihadist menace that fought us to the last bullet in Mosul, Raqqa and Deir-A-Zor. They brought their whole families into the Jihad. These re-moniquored “Chechnyans” weren’t like them. They were secular and young, and mostly on the Kurdish or Shi’a side, or the Pesh Merga. They all left our families at home. There were plenty of war path teams and factions, mine/ ours was the most moral, but lived in a state of total delusion. They were following a pudgy faced aging man in Turkish solitary confinement. We thought breaking rocks was a useful form of soliloquy.”

Interjects Sebastian Adonaev, “I kissed her very hard against both our better judgment. Last time I kissed her like air. I saw her un-maked unpacked, un-made-up Slavic beauty face on her birthday, before we did one last job on St. Pat’s day. We weren’t supposed to do jobs like that in Midtown, people get upset.”
“I pulled her through to my reality, for the last time and she was completely pissed. The reality wasn’t very nice because it wasn’t the American dream she had set out to conquer on someone else’s name. That name and those papers had failed her mightily. I yanked her through to the other side. The serf side, the Warsaw ghetto side. I was still just a petty gun slinger, Syrian Civil War vet on the run from the war in Syria and my own mind. I did 80 days in Bellevue City hospital and filth was still on my fingers, elbows and toes. I hadn’t slept well even one night.
She was still just a high end whore a year later? Not fair but probably true. But she wasn’t like Maria from Moscow anymore, doing what she did and still does with her tits and high ball shots and take home party favors. She was way over long walks with artists. She was regressing into Capitalist Modernity, the place she’d always wanted to end up, was now boring. Her suitors never waned. Especially the pesky Brahman roommate.”
“It has been a long road from Havana to Brooklyn to Russia, into the Middle East and back. With stopovers in where civilization has come to a resolute end in the Fertile Crescent. Burning down river by river shore to deep sands of desolation.”
“My name was once Sebastian Adonaev, but the Kurds named me Blacksmith Winter, or Kawa Zivistan. The Arabs, they needed to name me too so they called me Zacharias Abu Yazan. Because my then girlfriend correspondent Polina has a son named Yazan. I was 33 when I deployed but looked and felt younger. Her name, my timeless old Muse was Dasha, but this isn’t about her. The other books were all about her. This is about the time a Syrian war vet caught feelings about Maria Silverrtova, a buxom little Chechnyan, like him. No, it was about picking up the shattered pieces of this nightmare, resiliently.”
“This is a cry for some extra hands, some Hamsas, that survived to talk about the Syrian Civil War. This is a love song after a series of hard fucks in Spanish and love making in Russian. This is a Post-Soviet Lullaby, written in Imperial English. I have heard on the wire that Anya is losing her mind in Baghdad and Ana Campbell, that optimistic young woman I have hand grenades to; well she dead and here I am in Capitalist Modernity’s heart, doing nothing but stupid love songs.”

In video recording a deceased Ana Campbell tells us, “Yes, forgive me loved ones, I died immediately in an airstrike in Afrin. My body was in, smithereens. Afrin was until it was overrun by Jihadists and the Turkish state, the Western most canton of Rojava; the besieged revolutionary movement called Democratic Confederalism that defeated ISIS and took over 45% of Syria, until the Turks began to genocide us in April 2017. I died pretty. I was a true believer. Sebastian blames himself for my death, but really I was a true believer in the cause. I could have died much worse if the Turkish Army or its proxies took my alive. I would have been gang raped. And had my head cut off eventually.”
“Sebastian lives with his guilt but Dan Newey another guerrilla I almost kissed, he does not. Dan Newey is in in British prison accused of terrorism. He mourns me loudly. Honestly, we all lost a lot defending the Rojava Revolution, but we internationalists that the papers call the new Chechnyans, we were actors on a stage of world events, but we didn’t do that much. Now I’m dead, which I’ll tell you seems like being on the mountain without being shot at. It’s peaceful, I’ll have him tell you that. I died with my AK in hand. I believed in this, I wasn’t mentally ill. I wasn’t a bandit girlfriend. This was, this is, big and important, but sadly as far as self-defense; a mirage. Without American airstrikes to back us up we melted under Turkish airpower.”
“At the time of writing this my corpse is still behind Turkish lines and it looks like Mambij and then all of Rojava will fall to the Turkish Army, a U.S. ally and second biggest in NATO. I am happy and dead. But vicariously I grieve for my Arab and Kurdish comrades who prepare to make Shahid Namorey, immortal martyrdom.”

Say Jansher the Guerrilla from his notes, “Actually, I tried to prepare them for a lifestyle of revolutionary militancy. Kill the enemy. Kill the enemy before the enemy can airstrike, execute, torture or disappear you and your friends. I don’t think they all got it. The training was just too short. They retained much of their Western bourgeoisie privileges. They thought it would maybe be like a movie. It’s a shame the woman died, she was the one with possibly the very most potential, excluding the Germans. That’s all I can say about that, Heval.”
Heval is the Kurdish Kurmanji word for friend, or comrade.

2

I once tasked myself with building a small, disciplined revolutionary organization in Israel and the United American that could strike at human traffickers and or oligarchs as readily as it could train medical workers in zones of atrocity and deprivation or war. First, I went to Palestine and saw the nasty apartheid wall. Second, I went to Haiti and wet my hands with the blood of 300,000 who died in the great quake. Then, I sucked in my chest and got ready for the death I thought immanent Syrian Civil War.
I used the field hospital Wi-Fi and a Syrian sim card to let everyone who was listening know I’m alive. It’s not that many people anymore. It’s a blonde debutante in Midtown, following me out the corner or her eye from a high tower of captive luxury. There’s a sexy Harvard lawyer who gave me Mindfulness on the Go, and her cute little sentimental blessings. My parents say almost nothing, my brother especially. Polina Mazaeva, my lover, she has shut be off right during the final battle for Mosul. But I write to her anyway; “I’m alive, motivation is high!” “I’m alive, tell me the weather in Boston, New York and Nizhny Novgorod. Besides Ms. Chanie Rossi, Ms. Daria Skorobogatova and before Polina; no one seems to be keeping any track of my exploits. That mighty revolutionary organization we’d tried to build, well it crumbled in my absence amounting to zero less than nothing.
I began in Cuba, then Russian Federation, then popularly mobilized Shi’a Iraq, also Kurdish referendum North Iraq and then into the hell of Syria. It all took about 9 months to ruin my resolve and lose my mind. Then in Cairo I waited two days in February and then into indefinite detention in the New York Hospital Camps; which swore I was a mad man. I recite in my cell a poem that was my 88th; made for one Elena Komarova, a confidant who can’t deal with my lifestyle anymore. It was about red and white Russians, about Moscow and exile and death and love and what I will refer to as my Special Period; my special period of love and war.
First I must warn you, I’m a very powerful as a man in my own mind, half the year or more, in that I do not fear death and consider my well plotted deeds heroic. But, I’m jointly powerless before a woman who believes in me and so it was fate, misplaced silly fate, that when the war ended for me and none of my confidants were attentive, obsessively, yes obessivively I made a new muse out of a tavern shot girl. Not amorous, not frivolous. I just wanted that pretty stranger with the Vodka bullets to care if I was alive. I wanted her to believe in my seriousness as a hero and an artist, I wanted her to trust in my, ineffable might.

1

I was watching the news from the safe house. They’re killing Palestinians in Jerusalem again for the third day straight over metal detectors near the Dome of the Rock. Syria is completely on fire; the Russians are making slow, and decimating progress. Iran is fighting Saudi Arabia in Yemen. Iraq is on fire, the Americans are directing the Coalition of crusaders, and Mosul has almost fallen. Libya is on fire; they say life was normal just five years ago. There are rumblings about a major American troop increase in Afghanistan. The entire region is one powder keg after another. One group of after another ready to kill each other so the big powers get their oil.
The temperature reached 112 degrees today, the power goes out several times a day in this city. I’m on the roof of a housing complex to the South of the 60-meter road in Erbil. A referendum for independence is coming in two months. It’s a two-hour drive in any direction to an atrocity, but I’m bored. I’m drained, and I’m bored, and I’m wondering what my place in this is. There are things I can tell a person, and they think I’ve read a lot or traveled a lot, but mostly there are things I tell people that they can’t see and they can’t hear, so they shut down. They can’t believe the conclusions I’ve come to since they condemn me, they condemn where I’m from; they are uncomfortable conclusions about why this war is happening. Why it has always been happening. Who and what are to blame.
I have about 48 hours before the car picks me. These Kurdish gangsters with sympathies toward the resistance are going to put me and four duffle bags of supplies in a car and bring me to another city, to wait for a truck and then I’ll be moving on the road to where I’m supposed to be. Where I’ve been invited to work. I have many detractors. But I also have unfathomable love for the game.
Erbil is stunning in its dull mediocrity. It’s wasted potential and its sprawl. I’m seated in the fading dusk and dead lights; I’m about to make my last broadcast before I go over the border and then really, who knows. The city is shaped like a melted clock, a 7,000-year-old time piece with a citadel at its center. I’m on the roof of the New Ishkan apartment complex; I’m about to try and explain what’s happening here. For anyone who cares. Probably a couple of officers in the underground, only my mother and maybe Daria watch the whole broadcast. No, I’m lying to myself, probably I’m only talking to myself on the roof.
The trouble with seeing things no one else sees is that they call you insane. But, I’m not crazy. The world is crazy, the world is fucking insane. I don’t have a broad audience, and I have a small, devoted following from my previous works. I wonder what to say this time at the fire station; the rebel radio I send back to Brooklyn and places outside this wasteland.
Is there a message from all the things I’ve learned? Is there anything anyone needs to hear? Isn’t there anyone left to tell a story too? I don’t think so. Everyone knows what I’m doing here and how it will end. For I am not writing a novel, I am diffusing a series of dreams into a manuscript in English for a tiny chapter of the book of life that was manifested a year ago.
I smoke a cigarette. I comb my hair. I imagine she’s watching me. I look out over the city that never was and probably won’t be ‘the next Dubai.’ I pick up my notes and turn on the camera. I try and explain to the resistance and those who love me, the context of massive events that brought my unit here to Kurdistan.
I read and record segments one minute apart. As if anyone actually follows my posts on social media or has anything vital to contribute.
When you open your paper, turn on your TV, or boot up your smart phone and attempt to understand what is happening; you are already tuned into people paid well to validate a view you already had. One such view is that there is a war going on between Islam and the mainly Christian Eastern & Western Bloc that affects China too. Both Russia and the United States have been poorly managing Wahhabi-Salafist terror in their countries since long before the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991. The United States by funding it and Russia by committing war crimes against whoever deploys it against them or their interests. China has been battling Islamic separatists that wish to section off 1/5 of its country to the Northwest in Xinjiang province. Perhaps what you tune into tells you it’s all some massive clash of civilizations. This ridiculous idea was popularized by Samuel Huntington in 1992. Other writers and pundits declare the events all part of a long running proxy war extending past when Francis Fukuyama ended history after the Cold War. If you’re are deeply religious, and much of the human race is, you might periodically wonder if this is the end of times. As humans have wondered many, many times before. Neither the media nor the thought leaders nor your religious intuitions are paid by telling the truth. They are paid because you like how they interpret horrifying, unpredictable events for you. You subscribe to their interpretations because they assist you in rationalizing, wholly irrational human behavior, predatory government malfeasance and social policies that enable an endless war.
From your house of worship or via your TV screen you might try to rationalize what’s happening here in the killing fields of the Middle East through the prism of your respective prophet’s scriptures or favorite pundit’s words. The news is a nasty circular addiction. A part of religion is a repetitive act of denial. You almost have always to deny that vast portions of the rest of your species are even loved or protected by God. Which allows a dynamic whereby you systematically begin to not care as much about whole blocks of other humans, based on something you must have faith is real, but cannot be proved by science or reason. So in many regards, any group of religious practitioners that equate a Godly protection to a set of scriptures always provably re-written and re-translated by fallible man. It is implicit to accept the belief that your hands are washed of much of humanities manifest suffering. But the wretched of the earth are statistically Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu in relatively equal proportions. But let’s look at the flood of violence from this phase of this longest war today. Let’s try and be dispassionate, objective and ration without losing our solidarity or our souls.
I could only assure you on the political science and international development level it is wholly rational what is happening in the world today. Outside of wars for diminishing resources, prophetic revelations and clashing civilizations. It is the product of high-level planning and an absence of low-level care. We might extend that to the human tragedy generally and the Middle East Highly specifically.
The steak is just as tender in New York, London, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, St. Petersburg and Moscow. The politicians in these places and those who manage them live in the similar style of homes. People that own energy companies, big financial firms, manage banks, own the arms or information tech companies; their mansions and yachts have similar styles and elite luxury amenities. The suits that their businessmen wear are of similar styles and fine materials. The sports cars their kid’s drive are all around the same speeds, and costs since luxury items are all price fixed. The women for sale in all three power blocks have the same price tags and services for sale.
Thank God the “Cold War” is supposedly over because, for a cold war, a kind of hot series of medium scale wars, civil wars, and highly bloody armed events occurred in almost every single country on earth between 1945 and 1991. Although most respective national histories are total propaganda by omission, it has been agreed in the West that Communism was soundly disproven and defeated and of course the West “won.”
We are supposedly all very democratic in the West. We have Republican or Parliamentary governments with generally only two major opposing parties and free-market economies. The Russians supposedly are that thing called Democracy as well. After all the looting that happened in the gangland 90’s under the Shock Doctrines. Nigeria will tell you it’s a democracy and so will a lot of other people. It’s hard to find a Kurdish political party without the word Democracy in it. The absolute most war town, brutal, depraved place on earth is called the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In reality, we all have highly Managed-Democracies. Scripted even. They are managed differently in Russia than in the West. Also generally with two parties of angry, loud ambitious lawyers, technocrats and oligarchs trying their hands in populism. In European social democracies, after looting the entire earth, they raised taxes and funded social services. Well certainly in Russia with only one relevant party Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia), democracy is slightly easier to implement. In Russia, the Communist Party is still the second biggest party. Anyone effectively opposing United Russia or even writing about in a negative way is promptly killed. Its corruption is referred to as the “party of crooks and thieves.” But most Russians agree that Vladimir Putin has restored security and dignity to Russia. So America is a two party state and Russia is also two party state. Designer consumer goods are readily available in both places. Russians as the losers of the Cold War are demographically poorer than Americans, but Russians have higher rates of university graduation and literacy. Both have pretty enormous domestic reserves of fossil fuels. Which is why their ferocious Middle Eastern proxy war can’t be just about oil at all.
China has a one party state, and it is run by the Communist Party. Its impressive economic growth since embracing of State Capitalism in 1986 has propelled it to be a clear contester to the Western Hegemony. China is disinterested in both military interventions and experiments in the Middle East. All three powers have increasing energy needs which American and Russia can meet in their borders and China cannot, who therefore has elected to colonize every country in Africa. However, energy resources; oil and natural gas are the engines of both war and development.
America in 2017 has willing proxies in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. Its base for all Central Command, Military operations is in Qatar. The USA invaded Iraq in 2003. It mostly withdrew in 2011 but has returned to contain ISIS in 2014. Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf States are Western oil clients, but all of them have intrinsic ties to the propagation of radical Islam.
Russia has a long term client relationship with Syria and it’s only Mediterranean Naval base there. Along with Crimea which it annexed in 2014 on the black sea, this is one of only two warm water ports. They key Russian regional ally is Iran. Iran as a result of the American invasion of Iraq controls everything in Iraq that is not Iraqi Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle and the remains of the ISIS held areas (Ar Raqqah, Anbar, Al-Hawijab, Deir-Ez-Zur). Most people here call them Daesh, the ac
For over 2/3rds of the human race the very events critical to their respective, overlapping and at times contradictory faiths took place in Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia. For followers of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha’i, and numerous sub-sects of each this is where their very prophets were all born, raised and communicated with the source.
From the very moment, according to their own religious texts, that the Israelites arrived out of Egypt there has never, accept for several long authoritarian periods of Islamic Caliphate rule been one even year of continuous peace. The Crusades were a several hundred year attempt to establish a genocidal, white supremacist Catholic foot hold in an area only slightly larger than modern Israel. When not seeking to expand Islam into ¼ of the earth or repulsing Christian incursions; the Abbasids, the Umayyads and the Ottomans were fighting constant wars with Mongol hordes, each other or the long running Sunni v. Shi’a wars.
There is nothing that can be written academically or rhetorically, presented on any medium to give the West or the East a new conscience. It is now a simple matter of public record that the developed world has accepted that the only obligations it has to the maldeveloped world is periodic mitigation. Famines, wars, floods and disease epidemics are to be poorly managed by direct aid. Multilateral efforts though the United Nations are to be the extent of collaboration. NGOs will proliferate as donor trends determine. Regular military intervention will remove or shore up state systems intrinsically hostile to any of the three centers of global power; named Washington, Moscow and Beijing.
The World Wars and Cold Wars brought humanity closest it has come to total self-destruction. But, there was nothing particularly stable about the Pax-American from 1991 to 2001. The Russian and Chinese embrace of free market capitalism has not altered in the slightest way how they maneuver as states toward their citizens and world. Albeit with fewer disasters periods of social engineering. There is nothing particularly comforting about the Chinese hegemony when it fully arrives.
Consistent for nearly 100 years has been the Middle Eastern theater of a war which changes locations, ideologies, factions and names; but is in fact a singular ongoing war.
If we accept the validity of real politics being intrinsically hostile an equity in the international order; if we excuse every type of growing human rights violation as explained in national interest; the center cannot hold. The earth has only so much capacity economic pillage. The weapons of war are exponentially more destructive. The exodus towards the West is overwhelming. We cannot prove broad conspiracy nor do we have to. We cannot confirm or deny something in the human nature is self-interested, violent and cruel.
But, we can truly verify a coherent, consistent willingness for wealthy nations to prey on the developing ones and keep them deliberately dependent and maldeveloped.
The Middle East has been in flames since 1919 and it is irresponsible to pretend that has something to do with civilization, religion, or cultural clashes. It fundamentally has to do with two forces pushing from the East and the West toward an energy resource. But that is in itself simplistic since both the United States and Russia have some of the largest proven reserves under their own territory. A Middle Eastern market for the weapons needed for constant warfare a vital aspect. Both the Western and Eastern Blocs are seeking to control the oil in the ground and sell the dozens of Middle Eastern players’ advanced and simple tools for defense but mostly more killing. The various holy sites for the innumerous religious believers who convolutes the basic thesis, but is the third pillar to the equation. Were there no oil, there would be no willingness to arm so many opposing players. Observe Somalia where Muslims in a desert and absolutely no Western powers really care until high profile piracy occurs.
Were there no arms racing there could only be small wars. Without political actors in Moscow as well as Washington, London and Berlin there couldn’t be such a cauldron of bloodshed. There have been countless stated rationales for intervention, proxy arming and invasion. It is nearly impossible to convince the democracies they ever did anything to escalate this. The war with the Islamic State has become a focal point, almost an obsession for everyone, but it is the latest manifestation of a long running problem.
Before there was ever such a thing as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the usual pundits and politicians screamed Cold War. Then East and West heavily armed everyone. Israel then tripled its land mass, Syria became the Russian proxy, and Egypt changed opportunistically sides. Next, they screamed contain the Iranian Revolution than the West armed Saddam Hussain. A gruesome eight-year war later Iraq genocided the Kurds. During this period to give the USSR their own Vietnam, the Saudis, Pakistanis, and American created Al-Qaeda and turned then Communist Afghanistan into the ungovernable Islamist warzone it is today. Then Saddam annexed Kuwait, and the West invaded. Several atrocities against Shi’a and Kurds later he remained in power. The pundits screamed loudest after September 11th, 2001 and the Global War on Terror began. Russian atrocities in Chechnya in 1990’s where 1 in 7 Chechens was killed were replied to with the 2002 Beslan and 2004 Ord Nost Hostage crises. Hundreds of innocent Russian hostages died in both events. An estimated 240,000 people had died in Chechnya in two wars which leveled the separatist state. Most regimes including Israel saw waves of protest in 2011 over domestic grievances and inequality during the Arab Spring. Virtually all regimes besides Tunisia quelled the uprisings. Civil War broke out in Libya and Syria. By 2014 Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria were all in total unrest, ashes, and anarchy. The corrupt military dictatorship of Egypt had been overthrown, then restored with U.S. intervention. Saudi Arabia and Iran were fighting proxy wars all over the region.
Turkey has clearly logistically enabled the creation of a Sunni oriented, Wahhabi Salafist ultra-fundamentalist Jihadist entity which took the world by complete surprise. Saudi Arabia has long provided it with a hateful Sunni version of Islam. Qatari actors gave its sophisticated propaganda and branding. Pakistan coordinated it as they had in Yemen and Afghanistan.
Then Islamic State took dozens of Syrian and Iraqi cities including Mosul, had come dangerously close to taking Baghdad, before turned back by Iranian coordinated militias and Kurdish Democratic Confederalists. The Peshmerga and the Iraqi military had fled in varying ways exposing civilians to atrocity.
It is actually not important to indict who thought up the Islamic State, who planned it. Some say Gulf States, some say Iran, Israel and the West. The evidence though is clear that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all fueled its development and Pakistan has the only intelligence service capable of working out the variables. It is child like to believe it was created by Islamists and Ba’athist officers in U.S. custody.

I take a little break to watch the last lights of the sun dip below the low range to the West of the city. The whole roof is lit up in white neon lights. I continue the broadcast.

It can be difficult to figure out what’s happening out here in the Middle East. It can become an abstraction of alien cultures, conflicts and ethnic configurations that are easily blurred to an uncaring or untrained eye. It is hard to get your head around how the alleged cradle of human civilization became such an everlasting intractable bloodbath. Perhaps it is only the responsibility of the Western audience to know what is happening because the collateral of the carnage is spilling over into their European and American cities. No one will perhaps admit that, but yes. And it is also important to render the Middle East more human because the weapons distributed here are from the West or Russia. The oil being pumped is being bought and sold by Western or Russian firms. Most people living in the West don’t actually know what Kurdistan is, but that doesn’t say so much as most people in the West don’t know where a lot of things are. I would go so far as to say the majority don’t care.
Most probably won’t admit that they didn’t know that the Kurdish ethnic group existed until 2014. It was not until various pundits made it clear “the Kurds” were actively fighting the Islamic State did anyone ever hear about things like the Peshmerga, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) or about Kurds in general. The perversity and violence of ISIS kept it in the headlines for the past three years and the Kurdish issue has increasingly been at the forefront of understating geopolitics in the region. Particularly because Iraqi Kurdistan, administered by the Kurdish Regional Government as an autonomous area since 2003 is set to hold it next referendum vote for independence on September 27th, 2017. And it is sitting on top of the fifth largest proven crude oil reserve on earth. No one should totally wash their hands of what happens in the Middle East because its conflicts are fought with Western and Russian weapons, paid for by American and Russian tax dollars. The companies pumping out the oil are largely Western or Russian based firms.
There are in fact a lot of players, but all of them fall into four big tents; Western Allies led by the United States Military and Coalition forces. Russian Allies most prominently Syria and Iran. Gulf Sunni Client States that claim they are Western Allies but can call be linked to the Islamic State through one or two acts of deductive reasoning. And the 40 million Kurds spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. The Kurds, who are world’s largest stateless people are seeking some viable means to safe guard their long abused community and of course, get rich off the oil under their Iraqi territory.
I plan to be very repetitive with names and places that matter. Or places that have more than one name so the reader can try and learn them. There are a lot of overlapping players, a lot of acronyms, national interests, international interests and underlying religious and ethnic antagonisms that go back thousands of years. There is a very long history of desert prophesy. This is certainly the land of Zoroaster, Abraham, Bab & Bahaullah (Iran); Moses (Egypt), Jesus (Israel/Palestine) and Muhammed (Saudi Arabia). Well documented and repetitive ethnic killing is reality of life here for over 4,000 years punctuated by foreign occupations, colonies and Islamic empires. Devastating foreign invasions on behalf of Mongolia and Europe altered the entire composition of the region; culturally, politically and genetically. There is deep rooted tribalism which has to be understood as a means of both loyalty and social organization. There are monarchy’s created by Europeans to crown their favored Bedouins as oil clients. There was the re-birth of the Jewish State for the third time in three thousand years. There was the re-birth of the revolutionary Shi’a State in Iran which carries a similar sense of Messianic optimism and zealous indoctrination to preserve for Shi’a what the Jewish one does for Jews. There is absolutely a more recent history since 1947 of several large and also small wars and protracted atrocities. Such as those experienced by the Palestinians at the hands of almost everyone in the region. You could rightfully say with a straight face that since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919; there has been a constant war playing out inside every single country of the region.
The Western Media’s linguistic and cultural detachment from these antagonistic protagonists’ borders on being a crude Orientalism. An anti-Islamism mixed with a thirst for covering and sensationalizing bloodshed. The fact that suicide bombs are regularly going off in Western cities has made everything more immediate, more visceral. But it is undeniable now that some of the biggest beneficiaries of being Western petro-colony clients (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman) can be linked to funding and supporting Wahhabi Salafist doctrines when not being caught outright funding the Islamic State.
And frankly the enduring miserable heat doesn’t help anything. While obsessing, that is the word I would use; obsessing about the about the regions 5 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians of Greater Israel, West Bank and Gaza takes up a lot of printed word on the subject. The enduring issue, the issue that everyone needs to become more fluent in is the question of Kurdistan.
Beyond the wars, the ceaseless violence and the conservative, mostly intolerant, male dominated nature of Middle Eastern society in general; and Arab, Kurdish and Persian society in particular. All anthropological and political variants are made worse by what I would call a claustrophobia. A feeling of being trapped in small spaces disguised as holy lands with nowhere to really go. Or fear of impending genocide, which affects all the players out here, and there are many. As I did not write this article for academics, let me paint with broad brushstrokes a paragraph on demographics.
There are 35-40 million Kurds mostly spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are mostly Sunni Muslims., There are two primary types of Muslims; Sunni and Shi’a which differ on a range of practices and beliefs, but are mostly divided over who was the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhamad. Shi’a declare it was Muhammad’s cousin and son in law Ali and have been historically persecuted by the Sunni caliphates and rulers. Sunni Islam, which is the majority sectarian faction of global Islam (say 70-90%) Shi’ism is the smaller (say 10-20%) faction of the Ummah, or Global Muslim community which is about 1/3 of the human race.
Kurds are also the world’s largest stateless people. Linguistically, culturally, spiritually and often militarily Kurds are great deal like Persians.
The nation of Iran which is a Revolutionary Shiite Islamic State since 1979, is about 65% Persian or say 50 of its 80 million people. There are also 9-10 million Kurds living there. While they are certainly not free from Iranian Shar’iah law; they are generally better treated than everywhere else in their historic lands of settlement. In Iraq a genocide called Anfal happened in 1988 which brutally killed 180,000 Kurds. In Turkey Kurds and Turks have been in an open civil war since 1984. In Syria, Arabization campaigns and forced resettlement made them third class citizens. Iran had an anti-Western, anti-Shah revolution in 1979. The United States promptly armed U.S. client Saddam Hussain to the teeth. Then sold guns secretly to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair. While North Korea, Libya and Israel all sold arms and also secretly advised the Iranians. An 8 year war occurred fought in the style of World War I with trenches and poison gas where over a million people were killed. In the last days of the war Saddam Hussain ordered Al-Anfal or the systematic killing of 180,000 Kurdish Iraqis.
The nation that used to be Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussain and the Ba’ath Party until 2003 when the US successfully “liberated” the nation. Only the Kurds would call it liberation as both the Shi’a and Sunni Iraqi Arabs both for the most part hate the United States. The Ba’ath party which was nominally Arab-Socialism but really a one man dictatorship is also found in Syria. It is the political party of President Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite, but we will come back to that.
It is certainly neither irrational nor poorly documented that historically everyone out here has at one point tried to annihilate each other. As most of the groups out here have at one point, or are actively today trying to obliterate each other. None of this is helped by the obvious fact that biggest Western powers & Russia cannot and will not allow control of natural resources under Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States to go unspoken for. Or be nationalized. Or be made inaccessible by virtually endless conflict.
Hewler (which again is Erbil in Arabic) is a city of 2-3 million, the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. It has a tall mound fortification in the very center. The Citadel which has been the fortress defending Erbil (Hewler s all Kurds call it) for nearly 5,000 years. Like Moscow, Hewler is a series of ring roads; the 30 meter, the 60 meter, the 100 meter and the 120 meter which are punctuated nearly every other block by a 5 Star Hotel. In 2011-2014 a building boom erupted and everyone was making money.
By the time I arrived in Iraq, or Kurdistan (as it is called by most of the Kurds living in this KRG zone); ISIS was fully driven back into Iraq proper by Peshmerga forces. Mosul was completely besieged by the Iraqi Military with nightly airstrikes hitting the positions in the Old City and Medical City.
The city of Hewler was once dubbed “the next Dubai”, but that’s a very dubious claim. For one thing, Hewler or Erbil isn’t any fun. For another, however you define that word fun, Erbil is not either pretty or architecturally impressive. That is because it is estimated that under the region of North Iraq; called the Kurdish Regional Government, autonomous since 2003 and home to 5 million Kurds and various minorities such as Turkmen (former Turkish administrative class of the Ottoman empire), Assyrian Christians (Syriacs & Chaldeans), Yazidis (recently genocided by ISIS), whatever is left of Iraq’s Baha’i community and a growing community of Western expats; the KRG sits on top of what might the fifth largest proven oil reserve.
But, in 2014 ISIS got about half an hour west of Erbil and was stopped by Coalition airstrikes in Makhmar. Everyone panicked and had begun evacuating their family’s hours before. ISIS had taken Mosul, then a city of over 2 million and Iraq’s second biggest with under 400 fighters. ISIS had invaded Sinjar (Shengal), the historic home of the Yazidis, murdered over 5,000 men; carried an unknown number of women into sexual slavery and trapped most of the remaining Yazidis up in the mountains. The Peshmerga, the military forces of KRG’s two main parties; KDP (Democratic Party of Kurdistan which controls Erbil) and PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan which controls Sulymanyia, which is also called Slemani) had basically retreated from both Sinjar and their positions in Makhmar and were incapable of repulsing the 2014 ISIS offensive. What is now a matter of historical records; the US air force hammered ISIS positions in Makhmar and stopped the advance there and the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) proxies; YPG Militia (People’s Protection Units) and the PKK armed wing People’s Defense Forces invaded Sinjar, cracked open a corridor for safety and by all accounts saved the majority of the remaining trapped civilians there.
Speaking on the subject of claustrophobia. There are an estimated 35-40 million Kurds; 14.3-20 million in south east Turkey, 8.2-12 million in Iran, 5.6-8.5 million in the Kurdistan autonomous region in North Iraq and 2-3.6 million in Northern Syria (Rojava). Armenia, Azerbaijan & Georgia all have populations which total under 50,000. 2 million Kurds live in the diaspora; particularly concentrated in Germany, France, Sweden and Netherlands. As well as in Russian Federation, Belgium, United Kingdom, Kazakhstan, Switzerland, Denmark, Jordan, Austria, Greece, USA, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, Finland and Australia (highest to lowest concentrations).
As you can see from the spreads of these numbers; no on actually knows how many Kurds there are. Politically speaking these numbers are very problematic, since Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran in their own various ways and strategies would all prefer the Kurds not to even exist.
As stated in 1988, towards the end brutal eight year of the Iraq-Iran War, in Chamchamal Iraq, the Baath Party under Saddam Hussein began a genocide against the Iraqi Kurds. 180,000 Iraqi Kurds were loaded onto trucks, placed in concentration camps, driven to the south of the country, ordered to dig a ditch then shot and buried. Poison gas was used in the city it Halabja. Tens of thousands of villages around Chamchamal were emptied. The majority of the Kurdish population in that region fled to Iran. Only the US invasion of 1991 slowed the genocide. The invasion in 2003 basically allowed the PUK and KDP to seize northern Iraq and make it autonomous. In 2014 the KRG was fiscally cut off from Baghdad and began selling oil directly to Turkish, Russian, American and Israeli companies.
There are only Iraqi flag in Erbil inside 5 Star Hotels and most government buildings. But the red, white, green emblazoned with a yellow multipronged star is virtually everywhere else.
The Kurds a saying, “Our only friend in the mountains,” which related their historic persecution at the hands of an unending series of foreign occupiers’ particularly but limited to Arabs and Turks. Whenever invaded, without fail in thousands of recorded engagements Kurds fall back to the mountains which make up the majority of their imagined, and historic territory; and promptly begin guerrilla wars.
In Turkey, the Turkish government has long banned Kurdish language and culture for years. It has been described as “highly effective cultural genocide” For decades the Kurds were assimilated, repressed and told they were “Mountain Turks”. In 1914 the Ottoman Empire conscripted the Kurds to help carry out the Armenian genocide. Because of official apology, long running dialogues for reconciliation and a common enemy; Turkey, Armenia is one of the biggest supporters of the PKK’s (Kurdish Workers Party) war against the Turkish state. In 1984 the PKK began it’s insurgency against the Turkish state. More than 50,000 Turkish citizens, mostly of Kurdish descent were killed in this still running war. In 1999 PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was arrested, tortured and placed in solitary confinement on an island prison near Istanbul. Reading the works of Murray Bookchan; Ocalan renounced Marxist-Leninism in favor of his own non-state, pro-democratic, gender co-equal, ecologist vision called “Democratic Confederalism” which is now the official PKK ideology. After several failed rounds of ceasefire and peace talks, after the arrest of all Kurdish parliamentarians after the 2017 Coup in Turkey and after repeated bombardment of PKK positions in Iraq, Turkey and Syria as well as great complacency if not active support of the Turkish state to allow ISIS fighters to come and go over its territory; the PKK has been physically pushed back to mountain bunkers in the Qandil Mountains of Northern Iraq and positions in Sinjar, but enjoys enduring popular support amongst Turkish and Syrian Kurds. Its political parties repeatedly are elected to Turkish Parliament, subsequently banned and their leaders jailed.
In 2004 the PKK Syrian affiliate PYD (Democratic Union Party) began rapidly organizing a militia and administrative structures which later protected, then effectively occupied Kurdish areas in Syria during the atrocities of the Syrian Civil War (which has led to the deaths of over 550,000 people largely civilians and displaced over 13 million internally or into neighboring countries in vast miserable series of camps.
In 2014 the PYD (Democratic Union Party) and its militia force the YPG/YPJ (YPG is People’s Protection Units [male] and YPJ is Women’s Protection Units [female]; now numbering around 45,000 light infantry fighters) defeated ISIS in the Siege of Kobani with Peshmerga, PKK and coalition air support. In the past three years the PYD, through its civil society organ the Tev Dem (Movement for Democratic Society); is for the most part governing a 4 million person non-recognized parallel state; three cantons in Northern Syria called the Democratic Federation of Rojava- Northern Syria.
Afrin Canton (to the West of Rojava, but still land locked) is isolated by a Turkish supported incursion toward Aleppo, Syria. Kobani the central canton is connected by land to Jazira Canton which borders the Kurdish Regional Governorate (KRG). Because the KDP (Democratic Party of Kurdistan), majority KRG party based in Hewler/Erbil is incredibly dependent on Turkey for exporting oil and development assistance, actually most of the 5 Star Hotels, apartment towers, and consumer goods in Iraqi Kurdistan are a product of that economic relationship; Rojava is quarantined on all sides. The only people getting in are well resources journalists, NGO workers and people getting smuggled mostly over the Iraq-Syria border through a combination of bribes or Kurdish family loyalties.
The Turkish border to the north is completely sealed. The Free Syrian Army/ Turkish forces occupy a land strip from the Turkish border to the city of al-Bab, which cuts Rojava’s Afrin canton from the Kobani & Jazira Cantons. Jazira borders Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Sinjar Mountains are partly under YPG/PKK/PYD control and partly under Peshmerga/KDP control. All flights to Qamishly go through Damascus. Most of the Syrian territory south of Raqqa is in the hands of ISIS or the Nusra Front (another Al-Qaeda rebrand). The Assad government and its military control of the Qamishly airport make it possible to have supplies airlifted in and about 20 NGOs, can go over the Syrian/Iraqi border.
The YPG/YPJ making up the majority of the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) has pushed ISIS back to Raqqa (which is now completely surrounded by Syrian Democratic Forces). The YPG/YPJ has been politically dressed up as the SDF incorporating varying smaller militia forced from ethnic minorities and various rebranded Syrian Free Army groups. This pluralism for US Government and military intelligence foreign donors has occurred because of two reasons:
1) Virtually every Western nation has declared the PKK a terrorist group, so overtly supporting the PYD militia YPG/YPJ is outrageous and offensive to Turkey, a critical regional ally. Who spends way more time bombing the Kurds in PKK and YPG rather than do anything constructive to oppose ISIS. So SDF is a thinly veiled way for the United States to say it isn’t directly funding a group it called a terrorist group to fight another terrorist group, but that is exactly what is happening. Turkey has bombed Iraq and invaded Syria by proxy forces cutting off the Western most Rojava canton Afrin from its two eastern cantons Kobani & Jazira.
2) The YPG/YPJ is along with the Iran controlled Iraqi Shiite PMU (Popular Mobilization Forces, also called Al-Hashd Al-Sha’abi the only credible ground forces in consistently rolling back ISIS. Without the PMU, ISIS might have taken Baghdad in 2014. Without YPG, Rojava would have been over run. The PMU is regularly accused of atrocities and is controlled via Shi’a clerics loyal to Iran. The YPG/YPJ should be viewed as a military asset of the PKK militarily expedient to the U.S. led Coalition “Enduring Resolve” Operational needs.
3) When ISIS is defeated, the PMU will be used against Peshmerga in Kirkuk. Turkey, the Baathist Military and NUSRA front will be attacking Rojava in different configurations. SDF is an effort on the PYD part to make the militia forces more multiethnic.
Mosul fell to the Iraqi military around July 9th, 2017 after nine months of fierce urban warfare. Raqqa is expected to fall by the end of the summer. ISIS redoubts in Tel Afar, Iraq (a historic Turkman city) were predicted to fall by September, but mysteriously the city was found to be empty after just eight days of fighting by the end of August. Hawijja, Iraq historically a Kurdish city long emptied and Arabized by the genocide is widely believed to be one of the most pro-Wahhabi Salafist centers as far as the population’s sympathies. Its population supported Al Qaeda, currently supports ISIS and regularly launches terror attacks in neighboring Kirkuk. There is desolate barren zone in the Anbar a province (outside Kurdish zone) which also needs to be pacified.
All of this leads analysts to conclude ISIS will be militarily defeated in all major remaining Iraqi and Syrian cities by January 2019. Importantly Raqqa, it’s only remaining official headquarters could be over by November. The mop up operations in and around Deir Azure will pale in comparison to the possibility of war between the Pesh Merga against the Hashid al Shabi and Iraqi Army in Kirkuk.

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

Prologue

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

#24:
Looks_Like_a_Love_Battle Field

Cold Warriors come out and play!

“If you’re feeling a sudden rush of strong emotions for me, I recommend we act on them, immediately.”

Quick draw, action hero!
A pass was made on the Aryan side;
She’s SO far half past buxom, radiant even, and I’m 3:5 past Yuma to dashing.
Everyone else is awash in our tumults,
Just swept along for the ride!

Shoot, shoot_bullets, bullets: my love for you is a deadly game aflame!
Chess with switchblades, Risk with ruthless Russian armies, mongol whords,
Make Americana gladiation, look mighty-goddamn-tame.
Ironclad is your hard heart to the jousts of my chivilraic offensive. No white flags here!
Yet how now still so apprehensive?
My methods are asymmetric, but surely my motives are clear.
Coming going, running throwing, your gold locks spill down a window sill on Banner Ave still:
I am to blame, for these wasted exuberances_ however I’m glad that you came.
We are but hopeless star crossed buccaneers. We have little shame.

You plunder my City for treasures. While I bare-knuckle-box devils alone for my name.
You play a dagger merchant danger game.

And I have a six shot and it’s a Mexican standoff at point blank range, no holds barred!
I know to shoot from my hip, but it’s you who have mastered the aim so you claim.
Now nothing, not nothing, not-one-single-speck of thing, will ever turn out the same.

Cupid’s gold pistol unloaded a whole clip: My vest was only stab-resistant, smitten, bombarded, rendered-retarded,
I drank from your chalice more than a sip_
_If I was flying before I’m the Hindenburg now! If I was sailing the Titanic is the name of my ship.
Bang! Bang!
Big things are brought down. Using katushas, or using atomics, or using whatever is lying around:
Whatever vulnerabilities show.
Your defenses are airtight to the rats of this town.
Appearing on radar not even one blip? Mountains of trouble to steal you, I know.
Torn by the yaw, bystanders made victim! Viewers at home traumatized by the flurry of things that they on the telescreen saw!

If you ever feel emotions that aren’t on demand or command, please dorogaia do let me know.
What missiles must we be asking the tax payer to lately equip?
Warfare with words, above and below!
And I am a slave not a captain it’s never my calling to sink into oblivion, hellish abyss_
_ Going down on another man’s ship.

And red buttons were pushed, on both sides of the Black Sea_ unleashing a cascade of hell fire_ a passionate dire fight melee.
I’m dangling above the floor of my flat, an American Romeo swinging tied gently.

Bound up in Cupid’s cuffs, two feet from floor suspended, I am her captive, this is a bad war_ and I am a prisoner now, a lost cause vow is at first-cluster-fuck-frantic_
But after expending all ammunition, this is my tragic position, made vaguely pedantic, a hung man hanging helpless: your poet paramedic, a hopeless romantic.

There were spent cartridges_ littered about the hard-wood-floor of the single bedroom flat,
I find that_ I, in my_ devil rages of self-loathing_ clawing outward_ I apply propensity for carnal carnage! the shedding of my clothing, not withstanding,
The use of a body is only a landing, for tactile obsession,
_Erzuli Danto’s possession_
to extract a typed, albeit useless post-mortem confession:
“My organs and flesh are but parts of a whole_ as I, cry out in bestial throws, she takes me, she levels resistance, she binds my hands without further insistence;

She tells me to “trade_ the lush of her lips for the thick of my soul.”

That’s what she said,

Then acted in battle with vigor, my belt as a collar some cuffs and a mind game playing out in her post-Soviet head.

“Missile defenses are Reagan. Cowboys cannot last long in Molotov’s cold,
I use dragon-fly-eyes, I use attrition, I’ll hang you cuffed from the chandelier post; swing you and stab you and beat you”_

_It’s just that fucking good, says all who have bought what she’s sold.

Lust is just lust, flesh is just flesh, and the crux-of-a-fuck-in-this country is only based on endurance and rubber band showers!
But love takes more work, work makes one bold, it consumes a soul whole_ it devours!
I have been shooting at her for at least as many lives as we could fit in our fate of the late Brooklyn hours_ as the days do allow or caution recommended, defended her fortress so no vulnerability shows,

Suppose as a fire grows,
A good man who knows prose_
Can discover_ just how deep or how wanton the ravish-a-rabbit hole goes.

The Cold War is over, but the weapons are warm_ bed breaking frights from our rooftop fist fights_ she said “just one night” but it certainly turned into more!

Her curiosity bought a conundrum she wrought a soul for a heart with a tumultuous mind, with not even the keep of a score.

Five months and no yields: Camped out in the double blue moon bright; in Elysian fields_ partisan Jews amuse, for former soviet bragging rights.

All agree;

We are like something not ever meant ever to be;
_guarded by 300 black Spartans with shields!

And she turns her back now on our war of Peony ambush.

And the smoke never clears: capsized carriers catapulted in vanquish of quite valid fears, an underground army of quiet devotion that will likely go on for the rest of my years.

Sirs and my dears, I must yield;
How-now companions, I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier,
And this was a love battle field.

#038

Moscow Hostage Crisis

Part One

Life of the slave show!
I will remove you from your castle and make you watch the way we live in the wilderness below.

And she slips off her high heels into a star-crossed stare down,
She always calls the shots,
Gun shots to blood soaked makeshift cots.
The shots she calls are complicated.
She must find me highly dedicated.
She mostly deals with the haves, and I am the have nots.

The rules are anything goes, but no know one “knows”.
If she’s been known to steal the weapon from my over coat,
I’ve been quick to remove my clothes.

I spill_ for the thrill of those invited, I can kill on compunction, I still have the will;
To activate the full facilities,
Of word play, and use of allegory_
To execute deliverance of a blue-blood-bleeding testimony_
A Former Soviet love story.
Involving a Chechen peasant and a woman once of Penza now mostly of night.
It will be of little glory, the way I tell the story.
It’s based upon real people. Real blood_ and real bleeding_
Of taking-of wanting-of feeding the need.
Of fucking and fighting and the will to survive in a City of glass, steel, and greed.
Real emotional explosions_ her eyes are always so bright,
She has long since urged me to put down the weapon and give up the fight.
But I have a last name that is easy to place,
I could buy some new papers, but not a new face.
They can spot us on site!
It’s the ongoing struggle of those who lead:
A tragic_ unyielding life of night.
We’ll sell a sordid tale.
I wish I had found her back when she was nineteen or twenty_
Before she had to do what she did,
And does what she still do,
To keep from starving in the shadow of plenty.
My objective and travail_ is to recruit the members of this audience into a clandestine apparatus_ And harness our collective clandestino_
To force a mighty train to prematurely jump the rail.
I wear suspenders with buttons, a Mayakovsky cap, and iron plated under shirts.
I dreamed up a plan to get revenge on a man, or a series of men, hit them in their pockets,
Hit them where it hurts.

I called her late at night_ bleeding all over the place,
She said don’t get your bleeding heart on my red carpet,
And her mother fixed me midnight supper.
Herring, beets, Palemni.
And she wiped the cake of crimson off my bloody Chechen face.

(Small talk)
“And the snow fall is phenomenal this year”_
She retorts”
“Don’t get French with me my dear.”
_They really punched yer ticket_ did a number on you in the district, this time.
(She loves the way I make the Ameikanski noire lingo mix out elequently with a touch of old Fenian rhyme.)
The pay phone call cannot be traced_
The weapons hidden in the drywall_
In the space your men replaced_
The ice cold taste of 9 proof Baltika is refreshing, albeit haram_
Those good patriot informers_ those zombies_ those follow-follow men.
They beat me for a fortnight,
Demand I sign a grim confession,
Attesting to the building and/or placement of some near but unexploded bomb.

“Why can’t you be like normal men?”

I told her: “I’m hungry for my freedom and I’m never going hungry again!” (Sung)

And she says;

“I cannot love you if you’re dead.”

Please put the house in order,
Use the lithium,
Use Russian Standard Vodka; use my lips if necessary,
To rectify the madness as it expands inside your head.
I’m not saying that I love you now or later,
Simply I refuse to cater_
To all the “incidents generated lately” when you do not behave_
Explain how you plan to court me_
From a black-bag-disappearance.
In frosty, shallow, unmarked open grave.
If you’re going to dedicate, in your exacerbation,
Resistance efforts to a woman (me) who can only love you out of pity,
In this bleak and foreign city_
Even if the words sound epic, also pretty_
Fuck it man! You’re doing it again!

I sigh and then reply:

“Did I tell you lately you’re my dorogaia and if not for loving you_I’d surely be dead a thousand times at the hands of ten thousand lesser men?”

Oh, when last we wrote I spoke of devouring her, for hours.
To tease her- to please her_to want her to need her- amid a bed of hand-picked, Peonies; or provincial-wild-flowers.
She isn’t one for single serving dancehall roses, she moves too fast for poses.
Her bright eyes beckon as they dart about the room filled with bluff and imitating glee_
“Accelerate your tempo of evacuation_
The checkpoints separate the have everything’s_
From the people who are dressed like you_
And carry paper work like me.”

I suppose you and only you_ the woman that I trust and choose_
Can entrap these men of business with their whoring,
With their thirst for further treasure_
With long lines of china white running from the mouse trap to their nose.
How many slaves does it take to keep this neon play ground running?_
I know via your profession you can undertake a series of transactions_
Blonde dynamite distractions_
Before any know exactly what’s in store.
Reduce the need for automatic weapons,
Acquire us the proper routes and channels_
And guide us through a tunnel to the vile trading floor.

She looks at me and rolls her eyes and says in Russian “Lord have mercy.”
I said “I don’t have imaginary friends; there ain’t no need to curse me._

Where we met is unimportant.
Did I mean to enlist her?
I couldn’t resist her.
I had causes and struggle and vengeance and plan.
I shouldn’t have kissed her
And longed for her touch,
For surely she lays nightly in the arms of some husband, some man.
We have become a most curious spectacle_lately.
You hate me? Push further,
Took you home from the bar stool,
Bite me_
Kick me_
Bait me.
She could have killed me that first night, just with things that she said:
I looked at her once.
And the wheel was turning quickly but the hamster was dead.
The wheel was her cold rationale,
The hamster was the morals that once governed the wheel.
And there were bright lights, that up lit her eyes_ and whatever that implies.
Separating what she does_
From that which she’s still willing feel.

“You take up so much clock!
Blood from a rock!
I must return to District work which begins at moon rise.
And the steel trap will slam shut_
And bind me behind those District walls.
And the men of that vile district,
Will use their credit cards_
To try and pay for my flesh and access to between my thighs.”

She said “root for me.”
I’m going voodoo out tonight_
To earn my money the City.
If you truly are my friend,
Understand that I’ve been hungry and I’m never going hungry again.” _(Sung)

I am looking down the barrel at my pin striped enemy.
And the columns we’ve been shaking
And lives we’re always taking,
I was seeking sweet surrender and I sought it at her feet.
You think you’re not a target? You pay your taxes don’t you?
Are you blind to their transgressions?
A cavalcade of charging bulls rampaging down the street.

Everything from here out, it’s true,
My bones rust, from your star dust, your fairy eyes_
I loose myself to you.

She says, “Oh the things you might do,”
Our harsh and untenable positions have emboldened us_ as we know no one cares or pays attention, or even has a clue.

If we want it bad enough we can get it:
“For the rest of our lives_
_we do.”

Even if that life, she says, will last no longer than another a day or two.

Kiss me _fight beside me Dorogaia,
Even if to you my name and words are sometimes strange,
For what they do to your body and mind,
And what they did to my family,
Help us create a major crisis at the Moscow Stock Exchange.

You’re crazy she said,
You’re crazy won’t get me dead.
Well talk about your ridiculous plan in the morning.
It’s all a slave show, and if you didn’t know.
Russians who help rebels aren’t even given a funeral, much less a warning.

 

#33

_And who can really know, how far a man must go_

To take her away from Brooklyn.

Listen, my dorogaia!

My so-called tovarish in a yellow cock tail dress!

The-dame-was-so dear to me, somehow-so-quickly;

That just one night turned into a four month chase across the fall.

When I told her later that I loved her.

She shot back from the hip, at the Steeplechase pier,

“Do you think yourself a jealous man?”

If I now get accused of poor decision making,

The moon blindsided me, the vodka made me pliable, and for a former Soviet she gave more than she asked for.

But our balance sheet is not bilingual.

She hates it most when I try and keep score.

When it comes to this shapely dovotckka,

She thinks mostly in enthralling ultimatums.

I know her as a golden eyed terrorist.

A goddess with a temperamental nature,

Once the ethanol hits her engine.

When in the morning, up until recently, if she’d broken my heart the night before, she often took the high road back to mercy.

Her motives were everyone’s guess.

Over and over we go!

After hours when the tavern closes out its books:

One step to the train,

Two steps to the long kiss good night.

Three steps on my misplaced feelings.

Held tight together we often ride the night train to nowhere,

Both perfumed in tobacco smoke but her still like the fragrances of smashed up rose petals I’d used on the dance floor to try and tease her smile into submission to passion.

She swears no simplifications, could possibly stand in the way of her creature comfort ambitions,

But she is not completely immune from daring, talk of lusty great escapes and love that comes with everything.

Because nothing on earth of value comes without much cost in sleep and sacrifice. Not even love and its associated gestures.

Poems pressed, hand holding to teach a man to dance.

Forbidden but repeated tongue dueling.

“Get out! Come back!

It’s hopeless and you just can’t win.”

She pities me it seems as a mad man of good character.

But she has no sympathy for poorly laid plans.

She says keep to the contract, but I cannot.

My promises are subsumed in passion time and again.

At times it seems she knows not what she wants,

Suffice to say that her current wants are un-met by all she has so far encountered.

 

That’s not true entirely.

Her wants are sky high.

And why not want the moon itself when one is so wanton.

Or so wanted

The moon was our loves maker.

Its double barrels down my throat the reminder of this explosive calamity that has so upset my life of night.

The Gods of War are sometimes known to play the fiddle and pass a tip jar.

Those notes once fed my soul shards of hope and propelled a corpse to grandstand.

And up a mountain road toward heaven up upon the Brooklyn coast.

The-road-itself is littered with my bleeding hearts casualties. Secrets, shames and ghosts of glory scattered as a product of her shake down.

 

And an empty gun strapped to my rip cage is now a talisman of my shame.

And mad ideas of great escapes are but zealous demons which pander to an empty closet of promised deeds neglected in their doing!

Her eyes make foot prints on my spine.

She saw something in my second soul that spoke to her of goodness, which through my orbits reflected my awe for her back upon my works.

Enticing me to prove a role in her life was a valid exercise of time.

For-a-man cannot truly see himself without loves reflection dancing out upon the mirror of his desire.

SOUND THE ALARM!

If a hunted man can only be bound by the shackles of longing by a wanted woman than allow me to speak of something brazen.

I love another man’s woman,

And just when I delude my senses into thinking I will be the victor in this duel which pits-in-pistol-play rationality and Raspizdia against reckless abandon to passion:

A train wreck and crawl ‘til dawn,

I am forced by her ethics and her calculus of needs to return her to his company.

It’s an old and sordid tale.

Lusting causes reckless action, but once the heart is pierced by love’s dagger discontinuation makes a man bleed out.

She is everything.

I know her not fully to claim this, but I shall attempt it.

I know her moods manifestation’s thinly veil contempt for all things Russian. And America is just a playground for her not an ideal.

I like when she flies off the handle.

I like how she handles a den of wolves in cheap cologne.

That gawk at her vibrations.

An angel on a bar stool, a devil with a charming grin, a survivor with little need for protection. She lets me pretend.

She looks over at my scribbling creations from a rented room in purgatory.

Which on a cold night seems like hell.

She has cut me at my knees, from at which I can recover,

But ascension and the dreaming of forbidden things,

Like a jackknife to swan,

A gunslinger with no bullets.

Better to die in a last stand with one’s reflection,

Than an Icarus plummet when her wings are angel wings,

And yours are wax and feathers.

And who can really know, how far a man must go, to steal her away from Brooklyn.

American
Refugee

The First Play by
Adler S Walt

Manuscript completed on 12 August 2004.
Consolidated 10 December 2014.
Dedicated to Joanna Kocab,
As to relate the events that occurred immediately before we met.

PROLOGUE

8 November 2001

They are sitting quietly in a Haifa hills café that is small and dimly lit. The last light of day falls softly on the Carmel. A fleeting splendor ripples over the harbor bay.

The boy is too thin to look American. His eyes have a lean and hungry look and are bad eyed and deeply sunken. They are filled with hate. His clothing is worn and torn. He might even be mistaken for a Russian street kid. The dirty gray corduroy cap on his head is encrusted with sand and sweat. It conceals his natty brown hair and gives him the appearance of a child like Che Guevara, perhaps in his own mind alone. The loose, blue pin-stripe suit he wears had been kosher cut in Golder’s Green, but is now a patchwork of torn threads and desert dust. He removes a crumpled green pack of Noblisse cigarettes from the inner pocket, puts one in his mouth and lights it. He takes long drags.

Like he’s learned to smoke by imitating some noire movie detective.

It looks as though he might cry out at any moment, or lash out across the table throttling the chubby preacher with his bare hands. If he lets down his guard down long enough though, he might have to admit defeat.

Occasionally the boy looks up to stare across the table at the man who is so determined to save him. This true Christian soldier has a cherub-like face even though he is in his forties and sports a brown scraggly beard. The chubby man is a proselytizer disguised as a tour guide. The man is uncertain whether this meeting will lead to more violent outbursts. His last encounter with this boy in Jerusalem was a debacle. The man says a quick prayer and begins to talk in his soft Midwestern drawl.

“I’m sorry,” the preacher says.

The boy looks up. His response is steady and calculated despite his condition.

“They fucked her within an inch of her life before they killed her. They ripped her to shreds. The body was cut into pieces and they dumped her along the southern highway as if they knew there wasn’t even any use in covering the thing up. Where was the man Jesus then? What do you know of good hard pain?”

It is a sharp and biting response. There is a quick pause and the flash of yet another silent prayer as the fat man’s eyes dart up.

“I know plenty about plenty. Do you remember what I said that first evening we met Sebastian?”
The boy’s eyes focus intently. He is uncomfortable with anyone using his real name. No one has used his real name for a long time. Suddenly there is some frustration in his voice.
“Why do you insist on calling me that?”

“Because it is your name.”

“My name is Zachariah Artstien.”

The preacher give him a ‘boy don’t talk crazy’ look.

“Your name is Sebastian.”

“Bu there is no such a person anymore. If you wish to carry on this conversation you will not refer to me by the name of a man who is rotting in the ground,” he responds sharply.

“You know I don’t like to humor your devils.”

“You know I do not like to humor your just about anything,” the boy retorts. “You cannot save me. I don’t believe in your religion. You are wasting your time on me, yet again.”

“Please calm down, Sebastian.”

The boy gets up to leave.

“Sit down!”

There is authority in the man’s voice for the first time.

“I told you the first time we met that I saw a well of pain in your eyes that was so deep that you might drown in your own sorrow. The night we met I laid awake praying for hours in the hope that you might find peace.”

“Redemption being some man called Jesus of Nazareth, of course. Shut the fuck up.”

“Could you please stop?”

He looks like the kind of person who says ‘darnit.’

“What do you really know about me? About this Sebastian you’re trying so hard to save? I grow very tired of people these days. Especially those with penchants for doing the Lord’s work through lost children. There is nothing you can say to me to make me forget everything that has happened.”

“You can forget the past, Sebastian. Even the immediate past.”

“Well thank you, you quintessential, self-helping faith healer!”

“I killed two people last night.”
The preacher stares into him and knows that cannot possibly be true.
It’s not in the prophesy.

“Not everything you saw actually happened to you. You are not a corpse, but you have allowed hateful demons to possess your body and speak on your behalf. It is time to go home!”

“My home is a place near two flaming towers where men of finance sacrificed three thousand of my former country men to their false god and those that rule this country collaborated with them!”

His words sear the man’s heart as he continues.

“Thank you for telling me what everyone always tells me, just in case I had forgotten the misery and grind of things since yesterday? Perhaps another brilliant cliché is in order like ‘be myself?’ Or forgive my enemies perhaps! I’ve been trying. I swear I have. In all honesty I think your coming here was a waste of both of our time. I have no home at all.”

The man’s tone changes.

“I figure you tell lots of tales. Throw around theology at people and radical rhetoric. You’d tell your secrets to any stranger who’d care to listen if you thought it would teach them something. But that doesn’t make your secrets true.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“How many people speak out of your mouth boy? Who’s that imaginary friend whispering in your ear? It’s gotten worse since you arrived here in the land hasn’t it? Can you tell anymore who is talking, you or the devils?”

“Don’t worry your neurons. So what’s the moral, Brent Avery? The take away?”

“What I want you to do is to tell me how you came to be the way you are without Zachariah doing the story-telling. Why are you so angry at your tribe and country of birth, the world in general and even God himself? ”

“You would never understand that story, Brent. It isn’t set in places where the wind blows lightly on the plain.”

“Try me then, boy. Believe it or not we’re not so different. God cries for all of us.”

“Oh really!? I don’t believe that for a second. He spits on us with his indifference! I doubt that there are two people who could be more different than you and I. You have your Lord, your God. You serve him blindly like a sheep. My only higher power is the coming revolt. I will get what I contribute.”
“They are one and the same these higher powers you speak of.”

“Really, Brent Avery? Do you think I believe that?”

“No. I don’t think you don’t know what you believe in anymore. Other than in the hate that never leaves you, other than the demons whispering inside you to pick up arms and kill without compunction for cause.”

The thin boy smiles with a shit eating, devilish grin.

“At least I can believe in my hate. But if faith is what governs us–you in your God, and me in the coming revolution–what makes you think we should see eye to eye on anything? You play the preacher pray boy and I’ll play the rebel with righteous cause.”

“You should confide in me because we all have nightmares about the things we can’t control. Your demons have taken their toll, Sebastian Adon. An ocean, a new name and some ten thousand miles later ain’t improved your sleep, boy. Is that truth?”

The coffee shop has all but emptied out, still the boy doesn’t answer. The Arab Christian is keeping it open for the sole prospect of what these Americans might buy. He will stay open all night as long as they keep drinking and eating things. The Carmel is sometimes slow on a Tuesday night. Especially since the uprising began.

“You want to hear a yarn?” the boy asks.

“I want to hear a true story.”

“There’s no such thing as a true, Brent. There’s only the mostly true, the heartfelt and remembered past. It’s a long story. It goes well with vodka and cigarettes.”

“We’ve got all night, but you’ll have to settle for coffee. I’m not much of a drinking man. I’ve come a very long way to get you home and I don’t have anywhere else I’d rather be.”

“Well, let us all hope this Arab can tolerate the sound of English and take mental notes. It begins with the tale of a rude boy on the last days of summer. It ends with a hooker beaten half to death on a lonely desert high way. A black man hanging from a tree and an early deportation. And we know exactly who brought the towers down, and more importantly why.”

Tough talk from a seventeen year old.

But the boy is still just a walking corpse with a demon inside him and the if the lord works in mysterious ways maybe Avery can him back to Babylon before someone, something or even himself will cut the story short, or worse change the underlying narrative. Take a boy meets girl, meets some Negro revolutionaries and twist it until you don’t even care who lives and who dies.

PART ONE:
Concrete Jungle

1

My oh my.

Tickle me Tamerlane. I wish I were part of a religion important enough to have my God housed in that thing, thinks the pilgrim as he looks up at the sprawling temple complex on the mount in this little desert town.

This is the Pale City in the badlands.

The streets are dark. An eerie twilight dances upon the cobblestones and the happy laugh of children is missing. The pilgrim senses that this place is just no good. There is no moon and someone has turned off the stars. He has been here many times before. He has wandered these cobblestone streets lost while searching, drinking deeply from the puddles of his own soul. Time has no meaning here. There are only the ghosts and the growing darkness surrounded by an endless desert of the mind. Each time he returns to bow down and to venture towards the light glimmering in the darkness. He is no longer sure this light even exists. Behind every locked door is some route to the horror freak-show of his subconscious, some lurking subterranean display of rape or torture. The place is good at making a religion out of violence.

The pilgrim passes by a towering Ferris wheel at the town wall; a Bregna barrier, an apartheid separation wall made of pyramid bricks and barbwire. The wheel sits in a thorn garden. Its operator is a hideous harlequin whose face is painted white, red, and black and who laughs like a mad man carries himself like a pederast.

There is no way out.
Every night the pilgrim returns to this personal hell, this Pale City in the desert, this home of perpetual blackness. His pilgrimage begins anytime he goes to sleep causing him to return to pay homage over and over again, to bear witness to hell as he understands it.

Tonight there is a great commotion coupled with alarm. The town’s transient population waits on the central square called umslagplatz. Their faces are twisted in grimaces too close to death to be truly alive. Everything appears grainy, toned in black, white and gray scale unless it needs to bleed. Then it is the color of bright red arterial blood, like a 1970’s B movie grindhouse.
The temple looks like a cross between the Hagia Sophia and the Luna Park housing projects, or maybe the Alhambra mixed with Astroland in its heyday. Robed clerics on the balconies of the temple drone out prayers from behind their grey hooded robes. One can never see their faces, accuse them of their crimes. The holy men are never from the pilgrim’s tribe.

A tall and twisted tree stands in the center of the square, bulus and ghatly. It looks like the last standing cherry tree in the parking lot at Chernobyl. It has flowers, but not the kind you would give a loved one. The pilgrim knows what is to come for he has read about it in a banned book called the New Testament. You can’t get a good translation of it within ten thousand miles of Brooklyn.
But most versions agree on one detail at least. When the messiah came back, well the forces of evil got him, got him good.

An illiterate and rowdy mob has assembled around the main square. A large garrison of foreign troops forms ranks and bars all the entrances and exits. A big black man crowned in barbed wire, already beaten nearly to death, is being dragged through the streets as the people pelt him with rocks and garbage screaming for his blood. The crowd exists as a single entity, a twisted sweating creature of manipulated rage. The black man carries a long wooden board over his muscular African shoulders. Grisly avulsions run down his back. His blood and sweat only lubricates the mob’s resolve to hurt him further. It emboldens them. Many would have begged for mercy or made an indignant show of fortitude toward their captors but this man simply marches along with a sad look in his grey eyes. His humility makes them hate him even more.

The pilgrim is watching the spectacle from his hiding place in a bombed out café at the edge of the square. He is too scared to get much closer. Finally, the man is lifted by the mob onto the tree. The beam is fastened. They begin nailing his hands to the ends of the board. Then they nail his feet with one great big rail spike right into the tree. Two more pitiful figures, some alleged criminal that the pilgrim didn’t know and some revolutionist are fastened next to this dying rebel. Their bodies form a triangle above the base of this crucifixion tree. The mob is cheering with an orgiastic glee, dancing about the tree. Soon they begin fucking each other right there on the square.

The pilgrim shudders. He is only thirteen and can’t speak the language much less really protect himself from that mob. He uses a pair of binoculars to look up from behind the counter of the derelict cafe into the eyes of the man. There is no fear or agony on the man’s face, simply the grim realization that he has failed in his mission. The black rebel spasms and coughs up blood as life drains out of him.
A soldier stabs him with a bayonet to seal the deed.

A young girl in a dirty white dress is hiding in the bombed out café also. She is only sixteen or seventeen and pregnant. She could be Arab or Puerto Rican but passes for blan. She has red hair like Jessica Rabbit, bright died red hair. She is sobbing quietly. Her hair is tied in the light grey wrap that pilgrim women wear.

She whispers accusingly, “Collaborator.”

The alarm rings. It’s an air raid siren blaring the pilgrim out of slumber.

I wake up quickly in a pool of sweat. I nearly fall out of the bed that is a raised bunk bed with my desk underneath. It has been another in a string of nightmares. They all started sometime in 1997. I never remember most of the details, only the horror.

It is 6:15 am on a Monday morning of a new school year. I live at Waterside Plaza on the island fortress of Manhattan. My school is an hour north by subway in what some call the Boogie down, but what I call the fucking Bronx.

It is time to go to school.

My name is Sebastian Adon. Believe as much or as little as you hear about me. That goes for the things I tell you about myself as well.

The mind works in cycles and patterns, innate behavioral conditioning brought about through external governing factors that mold response and reaction. How strong or beautiful a person appears is genetic, but that the mind is a clean slate, a great evolving tapestry, a mostly unused muscle. With discipline, this muscle can be harnessed to radically affect a person’s surroundings, sense of time and ultimately, the character of an individual’s life. The mind is a beautiful piece of organic clockwork that we are largely unable to understand, regulate or control.

I’m sure that I’m not using more than 8% of my brain, but like all things that will change.

I get up quickly and shower. I jerk off in the shower thinking about my dick with two chicks–one Black-Irish, one Asian. I towel off. I dress in whatever is lying about. Some days I undress again when the socially conscious part of my brain realizes my threads look ridiculous. I run back to the bathroom. I throw Queen Helene, that thick mix of hardening green goop, into my hair, slick it back, spike it and sculpt the devil horns that swoop and curl. I use Scope instead of brushing my teeth because it is quicker. If I’m late the teacher will make me sit in the corner.

I run down the stairs and drop by the steel shutter coffee stand to wait in line for my morning fix of that nasty, bitter stimulant that will keep me awake long enough to do last night’s homework on the train.

It is “essential” that this work be completed, because it is essential that one finishes high school. That’s the place you memorize facts you do not need to know in pursuit of a so-called “body of knowledge” necessary to be considered a civilized member of Western society. This is nation-biased bullshit that paints our consumer-frenzied culture as truth and light to the brown barbarians. But learn it you shall, for college is only four years away. There you will be further tuned and refined into a cog, screw or girder in mainstream society. Eventually you will choose a career you hate, making enough money to one day join that promised upper middle class bracket of the American socio-economic stratosphere. You will marry, have 2.3 kids and move to the dream home in the suburbs. You will go on vacations to places with beaches or European cities you can’t quite pronounce and hopefully sip fancy drinks. Your children will grow up to be accountants, doctors and lawyers if you’re a Jew or athletes, musicians, or entrepreneurs if you’re black.
But the main goal is to get rich. This is the American Dream.

I board the uptown #6 train on 34th Street and transfer at 42nd to the #4 Bronx-bound uptown express. The train is packed like a fetid Polish cattle car, a sea of inter-tangled flesh, crammed into a metal can and shipped to its respective destination. People push and shove, fighting over every inch of cubic space. The heat is unbearable. The stale air is cross-pollinated with the odors of aftershave, raw armpits and cheap cologne.

Right now all I am thinking about is the history homework I didn’t do, the sleep I didn’t get and the utter monotony of the life I am currently leading. The roar of the train car through the underground tunnels is deafening. People peer through the glass divider giving me annoyed looks as I finish off my cigarette. I once read a story about a boy who was thrown to his death from the train while riding between cars as the train made a sharp turn. I am sure these rumors are propagated by the old to make the young less daring. Wouldn’t want to be fucking statistic!

I arrive at the Bedford Boulevard station at 8:30 am. It’s the second to the last northbound stop on the #4 train. I’m fifteen minutes late. It will take another five to ten minutes to cross Bedford Park Boulevard and Harris Field and smoke another stoag.

My school is the Bronx High School of Science. I have been going here for two weeks. I spent the nine years of elementary and middle school at the private United Nation’s International School. But it was pure luck that I tested into this school a month before UNIS suspended, then expelled me.

Bronx Science is a magnet school. The school draws its roughly 2,400 students from throughout New York City. Like many other New York City Public magnet schools, the classes are over-packed and the kids are largely middle class. Unlike almost all other New York City public schools, Bronx Science will, in theory, get you into a good college. I took the admissions test back in 8th grade. I got in by a single point.

I am walking through Harris Field, the dilapidated expanse of gnarled-down lawn that is a massive sports field where teenagers smoke pot. This morning students are clustered across the field indulging in the morning reefer madness amid patches of dying grass. There’s no cover, just gonna-see-the-law-coming-from-a mile-away cover. A part of me notices that it isn’t even 9, so what is there to celebrate? Maybe they have first period off because they commute from Staten Island, but they’re probably cutting. Maybe they just like the green.

The school is a T-shaped, red brick building that is three stories high. The object is not to learn, but to absorb it sometimes seems.

There are exceptions. My first period teacher, the one who is about to put me in the corner, is rather on point. His name is Dr. Maskin. He wears real tight pants and has crazy person eyes. I keep falling asleep in his class, even if it ain’t so boring.

I run up the down staircase as I rush toward Dr. Maskin’s first period global history class. I dash past a group of Asian schoolgirls sitting in the corridor talking. They are legion at this school. My homework is only half-finished. I will most definitely be placed in the corner. My only hope is that he will have checked the work already. There’s a slim chance. I have another worry as well. I push open the door.

“Good of you to join us, Mr. Adon,” he says sharply. “Your presence and your homework were greatly missed.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Quite alright, Mr. Adon. Your homework please.”

Dog ate it, I think to say but mostly give him a stupid look like it was news to me we had any. It was me or the dog.

The class is staring at me. I look for the sympathetic eyes of Case Yadger, another sometimes denizen of the corner. I see him smirking in the back of the classroom, his blue baseball cap pulled tightly over his brow. Also smirking is Tamar Dreyfus; the Greek-Jew girlfriend of my latest friend Donny Gold.

“Sit in the corner. You’re late and unprepared.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Stop calling me sir.”

“Yes, Dr. Maskin.”

The theme of today’s class has something to do with cavemen and fences. My eyes feel heavy. Sleep begins creeping into my mind. The room periodically blinks out of existence. The class drones on. Reality melts away. I slump over at my desk. The room fades to gray. I fight it but just can’t win.
All I see is the great desert expanse and the Pale City, dimly lit in the never-ending twilight of my mind. I’m on the tree. My hands are nailed to the branches. I look to my side at the Black man nailed next to me. He eyes pop open and his head swings in my direction. Although his mouth never opens I can hear his thoughts in my head.
“Collaborator, do you see it?” he questions me in rasps.

I awake with a sudden start. I have fallen asleep at the wheel once again, with too many witnesses.

“Mr. Adon, perhaps you could give us some insight into this subject,” says Dr. Maskin smugly. I have been caught sleeping in class yet again.

“I can tell that you are particularly enthralled by the discussion and won’t hesitate to add some of your own vast wisdom to our dialogue.”

The class bursts out in faggot chuckles.

“Well, I suppose I could repeat the question for you, Mr. Adon. I know a mind like yours requires periods of, thoughtful hibernation.”

“Yes sir, it certainly does,” I respond to the amusement of my peers.

“We were discussing early human socio-economic development, Mr. Adon. As you know from last night’s reading, which I am sure you read in depth, hunter-gatherer societies evolved into the classic city-states of antiquity. We are now debating how.”

“Well, um. I suppose when the rich folks started building fences around their homes and telling all the little brown people what to do, tricking um like to relinquish control over property that nobody really owned.”

Dr. Maskin looks vaguely intrigued.

“So, like, society evolved from a concept of ownership and property, a mass theft really. Hunter-gatherers did not understand the concept of property. But it was this concept that created the early foundations of the city-state. The moment the biggest, toughest caveman built a fence and declared that the land inside was his, modern society was born.”

“Once again, ladies and gentlemen, the young philosopher king redeems himself. He may pass this class, yet. You may return to half salute slumber, Mr. Adon.

I lean back in the chair with a smug grin.
Only seven more periods to go.
I hate school. If there weren’t girls here I wouldn’t probably even show up.

 

#108 Workers Life

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.