Preamble

It is apparent to anyone with an open mind that this system is flawed and inequality is the result of the design. How deliberate and how correctable that is, is the subject of many hundreds of years of revolutionary thought. The oppression that exists in the world today is not only systemic but the direct result of the cultural mentality of apathy and consumerism that it has created. For those of us that have become aware, the stark realities of American imperialism clearly demand action. So, our movement is based upon necessity. We have all been witness to the systemic poverty, injustice and inequality. We have seen the shackles that bind us, and we will break free of them.

Seeing and knowing this, many have chosen to do nothing. So we have taken it upon ourselves to create a better society today, and send a message—a message that such injustice will not be tolerated. A call for change amidst the deafening silence of apathy. We are told we are free. Free to consume and free to question as long as our questions do not become dangerous to those who hold power. Our mission is to create a body capable of providing a versatile solution to American oppression; a group of revolutionaries ready to unite across ethnicity, class, and ideology to bring about a new kind of society.

The Organization was founded in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2001. A group without a name was formed to launch a movement without a color. The original objective was the resolution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It was believed that through the creation of a united front among the peoples of the region, a solution could be achieved that might serve as a springboard for a worldwide revolution against American hegemony, and the cultural mentality it perpetuates.

That September forever changed the nature of our struggle. Our enemy was not the Euro-American itself, but instead the quickly spreading gospel of the American mentality; and so an emigration was made, and soon the second division of the Organization was opened in New York City.

The principle on which this group was founded was that we are in fact not an organization, but rather individuals becoming organized. The Organization serves as a network through which different people can unite under common revolutionary goals.

We work to spark a consciousness among the people conducive to upholding the natural rights of each individual, regardless of background or belief. The oppression we all perceive must be fought on numerous fronts, and in numerous ways. We must embrace all potential solutions, and all methods of achieving them, in order to ensure that the solution produced is an effective one for all people, not just those charged with creating it.

Even if there is one perfect revolutionary solution, we do not claim to have it. Rather, we came together to find it. As such, the Grey Book has been structured as a constantly evolving document. It is the cumulative product of an ongoing dialogue between our members, the culmination of many different viewpoints. Today, the Organization is composed of autonomous chapters across the Northeast, and we are expanding rapidly. As we fight, build, study and educate, our struggle continues. It is part of a constantly interwoven tapestry of resistance to an aggressive and pervasively destructive world system called Neoliberalism specifically and capitalism more generally.

Introduction

Beginning in the year 2000 a diffuse, evolving and highly decentralized movement emerged in the Cities of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and New York City. The central thesis of the young Palestinian, Israeli, Kurdish and American leaderships that formed and sustained this clandestine movement was firstly; that the American Empire was a dangerous and expansive force in the world predatory to its own citizens and made rich off the backs of the rest of the world’s exploited subjects. Pursuing a sanitized version of the imperialism utilized to dominate the world’s non-white populations over 500 years. Second, that armed struggle had largely failed expansively in the past 200 years to liberate humanity from exploitation if anything triggering generations of intercommunal bloodshed and atrocity. Thirdly, that any revolution limiting itself to the nation state unit was destined to become isolated, easily quarantined and ultimately fail reduced in economic attrition and siege. This movement that began, as many do, with young students has blossomed into a global network of seasoned organizers, embedded on six continents within the leading unions, NGOs, political parties and social movements that we refer to today as “the Resistance.”

That is not assume that this faction was alone in arriving at these ideas or that far before and long after others would not come to them on their own. This is simply a book, subject to amendment and evolutions, that will attempt to identify the principles of one small band of partisans and activists. Unique in that they emerged from the Empire’s richest principle city and its outmost military colony base; occupied Israel and Palestine.

On 3 July 2001 the First Congress was held in Tel Aviv. By 2003 there were several hundred cadre and sympathizers organized around New York City, White Plains, Boston, DC, Baltimore, Saratoga, Burlington, Elizabeth and Madison in the USA; and a network of cells throughout Israel and Palestine centered around a leadership in Tel Aviv and Nablus as well as a youth movement in Haifa and Beer Sheva. Initially the movement in the States focused almost wholly on secret fund raising for the Resistance in Israel, opposition to the Afghan and Iraq wars, and an ambitions popular education effort to radicalize and indoctrinate young Americans to anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian liberation thinking through popular education. The movement inside of Israel and Palestine, more focused on survival, carefully expanded cells into leftist progressive formations and infiltrating the IDF thanks to conscription.

The First Congress on 9 July 2001 in Florentine Tel Aviv issued the first draft of the “Ten Point Program for the Resistance in Israel and Palestine”. The ideological tendencies of the nineteen founders, all of which were younger than 25 ranged from Marxist-Leninism and Anarcho Syndicalism on the left, to religious nationalism, Christian Liberation Theology, Shiism and Baha’i Universalism, as well as Revisionist Zionism and Universal Zionism at the center and right. The political platform called for an armed uprising inside the Jewish Military colony to inspire a broader encircling campaign throughout the developing world to cut the Northwest (OECD States) off from cheap labor and commodities while developing a framework for sustainable non-state governance and provision of social services.

Articulating the program of the subsequent seven congresses as well as compiling the communiques, pamphlets and speeches of its young leadership was the “little grey book” retitled in 2004 “The Grey Book”, a collective manuscript based around the movement’s emerging theories and tactics toward achieving universal human rights, participatory democratic governance and emancipatory development.

You are reading the 8th Edition; circulated immediately before an upcoming 8th Congress.

The first edition of the Grey Book was released in 2001. Its principal authors, and architects of the movement that would follow were Avinadav DeBuitléirs (Black Israelite, Israeli citizen), Emma Solomon (Sephardic Israeli citizen), Zachariah Artstien (American-Israeli dual citizen), Nicholai Trickovitch (American citizen), Malka Dror (Russian Israeli dual Citizen) and Gene Dissentious (American). Most of the American movement and its supporters were unaware throughout most of the entire period of organizing inside the United States that the leadership of their group was for the most part being formulated inside of Israel-Palestine.

Some 40,000 copies of ever expanding and revising editions were put in circulation between 2002 and 2005.

At the fourth Congress held in New Jersey, USA in 2005 the organization was split into several defacto front groups; a media and television company, a student front based in the State and City University System, a unit to infiltrate the Democratic Party prior to the Barak Obama election campaign, a unit to develop community survival programs, a unit for continued popular education and clandestine military arm called the People’s Defense Forces (PDF).

By the fifth Congress in 2009 it was decided to launch a trade union and printed newspaper for EMS and civil servants called the Banshee News Service/ Banshee Association and develop capability for overseas deployment. In 2010 the organization’s New York based cadre and sympathizers began a 5 year effort to smuggle trainers and supplies to Haiti after the earthquake to drill and train EMT medical workers. This continued successfully until 2014 when it became self-sustaining.

In 2013 two leaders of the clandestine movement received scholarships to Brandeis University and began the process of organizing the approximately 400 foreign nationals at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management into a student union a new branch of the movement to be called the Development Union (D/U).

In the foothills West of Boston, U.S.A. in the year 2013 we found ourselves interred in a special kind of research camp where with some 400 mostly foreign nationals we devised over two years and in numerous conversations many means to alter and affect the state of human development, which was dire and quite bleak. As we had all the maps, photos and data in front of us some of us sought jobs in big NGOS, others in their home governments and some of us imagined our future as revolutionary. This was not any academic exercise to most of us, most of us were from the places we studied and had seen the war first hand. It radicalized some of us maybe, sharing all these biting first-hand accounts from around the world on the horrid state of affairs.

Confirming that we were neither crazy nor alone. This manuscript is a collection of the speeches, essays, white papers and pamphlets issued by the various wings of the clandestine movement.

In May of 2015 at the 7th Congress the Banshee Association (the New York based cadre), the Haitian Emergency Group (GAI, the Port Au Prince based cadre) and a new international group from the Heller School codified a program based on Cuban medical internationalism, principles of solidarity and selected a political platform based on the Kurdish ideology of Democratic Confederalism.

On July 4th, 2016 a General Coordinating Committee was incorporated in New York to proliferate the training of medical workers.

By 2017 the movement still largely concentrated in New York and Israel had spread via Union Shops, cells, front groups and a dispersion of elected leadership to every inhabited continent on earth. After successful consensus was reached by the leadership around the tactics of remote training for social services via the concept of mass capacity; the movement began smuggling personnel and equipment to the world’s only Democratic Confederalist zone on 26 May 2017; Rojava, Syria.

The year is now, in the distant unknown future. A grim winter is upon us all. Mankind and womankind are cold by the fruits of their generational indifference to affairs of working people. The setting, a miserable gulag hidden from normal sight on the Eastern coast of the United American States outside the City State of Greater Boston. The snow falls so hard you can’t see the roads anymore, can’t see but ten meters in front of you. They are caught in a thick and deadly, white deluge.

Adelina Blazhennaya is lovely and petite, but very striking is her sense of presence. When you are with her, you have her largely undivided attention. She is completely disarming, you let your guard slip. Which is dangerous as she is lovely, and you are surely mad. She finds and collects a type of man, ‘a mystic’ would be the polite way to call them. Men with some abilities that are useful to the generals and the oligarchs. As well as the champions of the serfs and wage slaves. The very way she looks at you lingers long after she is gone. It’s not seductive, it is a type of white magic. They say, she caused the comet shower in Chelyabinsk, but really that is only a speculation.
There is a vast spiritual war going on for the hearts and minds of toiling serfs, but the greater wars are still fought with guns and bullets. The world is far past the brink of irreversible tragedy. Invisible and visible warfare is to be carried out now against ordinary people and she has a great soul and is after a very particular soldier in this storm.
It has taken her half a day traveling from Camp Brighton-Allston to bribe sentries, to take three trains and an omnibus, to flirt most professionally, ensnare the camp guards in false paper works and transfer documents and thus make her way to Shrakasa Waltham, sub-camp Brandeis; the largest Special Engineering Camp built by the Ivories in the Americas, but really one of many thousands of “special population camps” built for citizens of suspect loyalty after “the Great Revolt”, a very incomplete revolution that happened four years prior to the events of this act.

This place that holds the mentally imprisoned and prisoners of this war, mainly Chornay, some Fenian surfs and deranged, crossbred Jeufs with their Christ killing ways and mental deceits. It’s also a place where dead men call aggregate, which is to say no one really governs these camps. You surround them and sometimes the authorities drop bombs on them but the camps are for all the people cleared out of the cities pacifying the insurgency going on still.

Waiting for her is another dead man Sebastian Adon. And he has a feeling of nervousness in his chest. Steel butterflies. The kind of nervous anticipation that does not come from being more than intimidated by a very, very beautiful young woman. It comes also from secretly loving her. Or something about her.
Handsome for a dead man, she thinks. And nothing but fucking trouble, she curses sometimes inside but hardly ever outside. Sebastian gets a lot of work done, no one can dispute that, but his ease to fall for women is amateur at best.
The State-run national television company ‘True News Corporation’ has been running his face and face of his so-called “terror wife” Emma Solomon for many weeks along with sound bites on the “dead terrorist ring-leaders of the Millennium Theater Hostage Crisis.”
A bloody three-day standoff which precipitated the functional end of a past union called the “United States of America” definitively breaking an estimated sixty-four small city-states and territories, Soviets, from the rest of the country including the black parts of neighboring Boston. Which the Commies call ‘Soviets’ and the Democratic Confederalists call ‘Cantons’. And the Federal government calls ‘Bandit Zones.’
She looks him and down and he is not exactly the same man she had met years before and had corresponded with since periodically. Along with the dreaming they did.
He is handsome but he has dark shadows below his eyes, which though hidden under hazel contacts are grey on grey associated with never properly sleeping.
The eyes of the Old Souls.
He looks recently broken, as though he was lost or been lost by someone. As though smiling comes with great difficulty. As if the words and beliefs he hides behind are in actuality no true armor.
She wonders what the proper body language to assume is; to cordially shake his hand as a comrade; or to kiss his cheeks has an old friend, or, well they were not lovers or even old friends. And this was their second time meeting. In the world of the real, they had met just one single time, on one single evening. But in dreams, they had something else altogether.
She was never nervous, but she did regard this man as a certain threat. A threat not to her life or her mind, certainly not to her heart because her heart was numb to all words and deeds done by men. Having kissed his very souls, having spent night, after night in his mind; she worried that he might know her souls a little too. And this was a very difficult thing to accept as a candidate.
Firstly, that this murderer was from the blood of the chosen. He was more than half Israelite by any record as well as his own admission. Secondly, that he seemed unable to die. Thirdly, that in the real world he might actually desire her. Lastly, that it was her duty to accept him as a courier from here to newly liberated New York City, when his driving, according to all accounts was much worse than her own.
It would be one thing to be killed or tortured by the enemy. This was the constant risk of aiding the resistance, but to die because an American never learned to properly drive; unthinkable.
The way that she moves is not like human women, she has elegance and force in equal parts, and there then emerges a disarming smile and she quite nearly thinks to embrace him. To hold him with a tightness that in dreams is so familiar, but in the world they have but shaken hands only once. She has done it in dreams a hundred times. And so many other things with him. She has raced dragons with him and explored the surface of the moon.
He stands there leaning against his vehicle a white Charger 2009. Which, for all its lack of fuel efficiency will be worth nothing unless her paperwork permits his release for if he leaves the boundary of Waltham Third Perimeter Shrakasa; his aorta will explode. Oh quite literally.

And what’s an exploding aorta to a man who has never been able to die?

A painful waste of a third-dimensional opportunity to transform the human condition, that’s what. He is wearing the grey multiform, permitted to his faction. The State calls him a Communist, but after his time in Kurdistan, Democratic Confederalist is what he did business under. Her white skirt with blue linear patterns blows in the subtle but refreshing winter winds.
Has he ever torn her clothes off in a dream? Has she ever let him reduce her to another conquest, another bedded woman making an excuse of her own lusts and her own physical wants? No not ever once! He has asked to be held and so she held him tight; he has held her delicate and painterly hands. They have danced under the stars in over a thousand and one sequences of brightly colored controlled dreaming.
And those dreams were rather beautiful.
She strides ever closer and she sees his half smile, the left side of his face mostly. There were so many reasons why a whole smile was impossible to the gun slinging, rebel hooligan Sebastian Adon; but she immediately feels the entirety of his gaze, his full attention brought to bear just to take in her. And that half smile, she knows is the closest thing to showing happiness he can in this life bear to muster.
I will just extend my hand and then step back for the right-hand salute given by otriad fighters to their commanding officers, he thinks.
‘I will marshal all my best parts, knowing that she is a sacred woman and that my place in the chain of command is now different since culmination of the uprising, since the eradication of my otriad, since, since the debacle of my relations with the woman named Daria Andreavna Moonskaya, the tragedy of which I have not fully reconciled. And she is all but too familiar with the moving parts thereof. An embarrassment of my judgment.’
My goodness, he thinks; ‘I’m must suppress my longing for this woman before me.’
She walks with grace and power, she is in control of all her moving parts and in control of the fields of energy which are in perfect coordination top to bottom.
I will never let this man seduce me, she thinks. He is a rough and primitive creature, despite the fullness of his soul’s ambitions. Despite his mother being of the priestly class. What is more, she thinks, how did this warrior get reduced to slavery over a wild woman? In certain circles, he is still called the ‘American Shamel Basayev’. And most official circles think he is finally dead. But, the reason he was stashed away into the enemy gulag archipelago was not simply because this was a good place to hide him in plain sight. It was because he was being punished by the leadership. He had been on trial awaiting sentencing for 38 counts of guerrilla infraction including ‘lack of moral and spiritual discipline’; ‘conduct unbecoming a rebel Calvary officer’; four counts of “massacre”; three counts of ‘incorrect use of the word love’ and one very serious count of ‘complete self-compromise accompanying jeopardization of mission via liaison with a woman possibly aiding the enemy.’
Enguarte.
The tribunal had not concluded, yet the full findings were complicated. And, of course, his “wife” and long-running partner is a woman with considerable influence with the rebel leadership and the Godhead.
Something tingles in the base of his spine. Like Tiger Balm.
Something glows in the gold-brown depths of her eyes.
I will not allow my emotions to cloud my perception of the facts, he tells himself from the “Code of the Haitian Gentleman”.
I will not fall for this man and his tragic albeit heroic existence, she swears to the code of her own integrity.
Shake her hand, this is the second time meeting; salute and take her to supper while the transfer papers deactivate the Nanobots in my skull, he checklists.
She will take his hand, this is our second time meeting; accept his salute which acknowledges her leadership over him, let him take me dinner, while the paper works clears and bribes are wired, she thinks. Let him take me what was once four hours, but now is four days drive down the coastal highway from the United American States toward the mile-high wall, what’s left of New York City, and “the Breuklyn Soviet”. Where most likely the judges will order two shots to his head. His head cut off. And his soul bottled up forever in limbo as he pays for his roundabout decisions that cost everyone so damn much.
I’m thankful it’s her that I will be working with, he thinks. If they’re going to crucify me in New York, at least I get to spend the last four days with her.
Shake and salute, he affirms.
Shake and begin the road to sentencing she affirms.
She’s less than four feet beautiful from him.
And best the best of preparations yield to passion.
They throw their arms around each other and embrace like two long lost lovers separated by battle and sea and fate and the cruelty, the duality of some very, very bad decisions made during the war. They are locked so tight cheek to cheek.
This is the second time they’ve ever met in the world of the real.
He can feel her heart beating, she can feel his breath. Their souls make love right there on the roof of his car, they don’t let go of what is in real time a hot minute. But time stopped for them both the minute they held each other again.
They step back. He then salutes. And he passes her a note without saying overtly what she knows may be in his heart. Inscribed on his very ventricles.
She takes a glance at the note. It is quite obvious that the man likes to write his mind out. There are a thousand tiny characters in Cyrillic, she knows what they will tell her even if the grammar is a mess and the spelling is poorly.
They immediately embrace again. Tighter still. She looks into the note over his shoulder.
It is very poor form to love a man who in four days will be sentenced to a final death.
“Don’t say it,” she whispers. Nearly pleads.
“I won’t. I’ll just show it,” he replies.
“You have less than four days,” she whispers.
“I know,” he says.
“Why did you do all of those things,” she says right into his ear and grips him even tighter.
“My passion overwhelmed me,” replies Sebastian Adon.
She steps away from him, still so close though that that the angels inside of them may still be holding to their ecstasy.
“I find it nearly impossible to be charged with your fate,” she admits.
“The past is a useless story, Ms. Adelina.”
“I have read reports of your future too you know,” she retorts.
“The highway to New York is perilous. If my driving makes you nervous we can switch positions ok?”
She now looks him into his eyes.
“That sounds ok. Both sides of your face are smiling at me,” she says.
“That’s because I’m standing before the woman of my dreams.”
“Watch your words, little Prince,” she warns him.
“Don’t call me that please,” he replies.
“Sebastian, the road to New York is perilous and I want you to promise me that you ’re going to remain in control of your emotions. That you’re not going to break your word to me on any level. And, that no matter what they do to you in New York I’m going to be at your side and you need to be by mine, in the way that is appropriate.”
“I promise Ms. Adelina. Appropriately.”
“Ok, start the car. If you don’t make me completely comfortable with your driving I’m taking over and you’re going to have to ride shotgun all the way down. Which isn’t very manly in my cultural context.”
“It’s good to see you again,” says Sebastian Adon.
She nods in quiet agreement.
She never knew him in another life. And that was a little exciting. He’d never dreamed with a woman before. That was thrilling, that kind of investment in him. Even if she’d mostly been in his head tinkering with the wiring.
“Give me your gun,” she declares.
He takes out a small revolver and hands it to her. She checks the chamber and notes that there are no bullets in the gun. She puts it into her satchel.
“Do you remember why we used to take pictures of the sky and text them to each other,” she asks him.
“No. I always assumed you were just artistic,” he replies.
“There’s nothing like a beautiful sky to substitute for love when love is gone, or hope when hope hopeless,” she tells him.
“You’re Russian, you’re not supposed to believe in hope,” he says.
She takes his hand.
“Your American, you’re not supposed to know what the word love means at all but I’m giving you a shadow of a doubt. You have one chance left to make a man of yourself. Otherwise, they’re gonna hang you for happened during the rising. You and Daria were a little excessive at the Millennium Theatre job.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” he says.
“It’s nice to be appreciated,” she replies, “now let’s get ready for the road.”

He almost says it. But she gives him a look.
“Be a real man and check your passion until the proper time,” says the look.

The sky above Shrakasa Waltham is pink, blue vanilla and the weather is beautiful because the Ivories have developed cloud-seeding weather apparatuses. There are no more open Ivories in the United American States except here in this camp of perhaps 70,000 serfs in the Massachusetts foothills outside rebel Boston which, like New York is no longer part of America.
If you’re just tuning in to our frequency; if you want to know what kind of story this is. Well, it’s definitely some kind of passion play; a Post-Soviet epic love story.
In the previous Act, we learned of a man who didn’t know how to die and his tortured love affair with an agent of the enemy. In Act One we learned something of his passion.
How there came to be a full-blown human rights revolution in the United States of America had very little to do with those two protagonist-antagonists. And the uprising itself was not the work of men and women alone, but also gods and spirits, monsters and suffering old souls.
We began with loyalty because it is the basis for all good human acts. And now we jump seven years before the event of the first part of our serial; to account for the things which were unleashed by woman and men enraptured by their passions.
This interlude has taken place before Act One and after what you are about to embark on reading.
Adelina was ordered to accompany Sebastian Adon to newly liberated New York City; to a besieged place called the Breuklyn Soviet. It was not purely to keep him calm before his execution. It was also to directly ascertain the very specific particulars of what he had compromised to the enemy.
“I don’t judge you for anything you have done, but I am quite curious as to why you did it,” declares as he puts the Dodge Charger in drive mode.
“We were all in a most uncomfortable situation,” Adon begins as they take to the road, “there were past lives to account for, there was hope and investment in the future, there were debts to pay.”
“You need to tell me everything that happened in the six months before the uprising,” Adelina flatly tells him.
“Must I?”
“I cannot save you and I cannot fix you or tame you, but if you will tell me the truth and stick to your promises I will make sure that you get what you deserve one way or another.”
There is a dinner at a weigh station on the lip of the black tarmac highway. To get to New York they will have to take a more circuitous route. They will eat there and wait until the sun goes down. They will have to switch vehicles, they will have to evade bandits and other various gentlemen of the road. They will need to grease many hands at checkpoints staffed by rebel and federal and gangster armies. And eventually, they will have to fly over or find a tunnel under the mile-high wall.
“There’s going to be plenty of time,” she tells him, “You need to go slow and get deep with me on this.”
“Must I?”
“Yes, you must. You are accountable only for this life, but it is unclear to me and other interested parties not only what you did in your past lives, but whose side you’re on now.”
He thinks about it.
“I’m only on your side now,” he whispers.
“Well, that is because your old friends now want you dead and your enemies think you’ve been buried already. You have only two allies left and Oleg the Bear is still temporally missing in the Urals.”
Or perhaps at the weigh station just up federal Highway 95.
“My wife sent you?” asks Sebastian Adon.
“Yes. Emma Solomon sent me.”
“She’s not really my wife.”
“I know she’s not really your wife.”
“Does Emma think I betrayed the resistance?”
“No. Emma just thinks you mostly betrayed yourself.”
“And what do you think Ms. Adelina?”
“I think you have a brief window to prove your place in history. As a great working class hero or a despicable traitor who sold out his closest friends to make a deal with the devil over a two-bit whore that he got tricked into thinking was his old soul lost companion.”
“Those are strong words,” says Adon watching the road unfold.
“I’m a very strong woman.”
“That’s why I might…” but he shuts off. You can’t put a timeline on a dream or series of dreams.
“When I met you on my birthday I thought you were a charming scoundrel. But I have come to realize that I believe you innately to be good. I am unclear still on what happened leading up to and during the rising and if I am to be your true friend I must know that in totality before we arrive in New York.”
“When I met you I knew immediately that I must see you again and that you were not like anyone I’d known before.”
“Honey, pick your words well.”
“Ms. Adelina, I’m worried I let my passions get the best of me.”
“Well we shall see and we shall hear,” is all she replies.
The car accelerates, the road unfolds faster. She tells herself he is a most precarious man. There are both merit and dangers to that. He tells himself to review what he knows about this world and world to come.
The highway has many, many perils.
“There were so many nights that I could no longer trust myself and you were there to teach me.”
“Start with the relevant beginning,” she says.
“I am sure that one cannot love another when one hates themselves.”
“Do you hate yourself Sebastian Adon?”
“In another life, because of beliefs I held and reckless actions I took in the name of our freedom the enemy took from me. A woman and a child. I have never slept well, nor lived happily since.”
“Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé,” she says in French, “you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
Again with the Little Prince, he thinks sardonically.
“If my inherited memories are true then I have caused some great amounts of carnage for cause and country.”
“I do not know if they are all true,” replies Adelina.
“I am quite happy you’re here. There is no more preferable a witness I could ask to vouch for me,” he says.
They’re gonna end you in New York, she thinks and he hears.
“I vouch for nothing honey, I know you only as a magical dream. But, the road is long enough for you to reconcile that. Don’t let me down ok.”
“I did many things in the name of our cause. I do many things still as acts of passion.”
She takes his hand right hand which he has extended to her, she squeezes it.
“Both hands on the wheel,” she then says.
It is sad to meet a good man four days before he will die. For no matter what he chooses to tell her she knows what he has ultimately done! And nothing can absolve him, nothing he says or does can save his souls. Oleg the Bear said be very careful with him. She has his gun, but she is not aware yet that she also completely has his heart.
If the mind is a limitless tablet, and his animal soul belonged now to devilish promises made, if his godly soul and hers are still quite playfully holding hands in spirit worlds and dreamscapes; what is left is a mechanical heart. A pounding, pulsing drum fueling his warpath and guiding his way in the darkness.
The road unfolds empty as they speed to the diner at the junction.
“You don’t have to tell me everything, but please tell me what matters,” she says.
“Only you own and you rattle my bones, you turn me over and over until I can’t control myself,” comes over the Fire Station on the radio. The dancehall version.
She gives him a small look.
He changes the station to Tchaikovsky set with house music.
There are many people that want this man dead or alive. There are swarms of angry vultures circling above the car, metaphorically.
“I’m not in the business of saving souls or fixing people,” she tells him.
“Well how now, what business are you in then,” he smiles.
“I traffic in language and also dreams,” she softly replies.
“And also evidently me,” he says.
For eight months she has been in his mind and there was little she had seen there that would not make normal people nervous. But, Adelina is not like normal people and very little makes her nervous except the possibility that when she stops being numb for lucid intervals she realizes that this rebel bandit has quite possibly fallen for her.
And were it not for circumstances!
Might she let herself fall too?
Impossibilities of fate.
The world of now was unfolding right before them and the world of dreams was inconsequential. She has been charged with a messy assignment and she has no backup, nothing to rely on but her will.
“Will you stay in control of your emotions for me honey?” she asks him looking now at the little note he gave her.
“I have made you promises.”
Seven of them she observes in his micro-Cyrillic scrawl.
“Then in good faith I take you as a man of your word.”
“After dinner, before the road I’ll try and explain myself to you darling.”
“Take your time, go slow. Nobody knows you’re alive in this part of the world and when we get to your city I’ll walk through the job.”
“There’s a job still for me then?” he exclaims.
“What you thought this was just going to be a dark Russian American love story?”
“Well I don’t know what the genre is.”
“What’s a rose to a fox,” she asks him eliciting for the third time the phrases she’s programmed him with to access his dreams.
“What’s a jackknife to a swan,” he replies in the code that they have used for eight months on the satellite phone before bed.
“Don’t hurt me,” he says.
“I don’t have it in me,” she replies, “just show me your soul and I’ll show you mine. Try not to kill anybody on the road to New York.”
He wonders if she’s talking about his driving.
“In your culture what is more important; loyalty or passion?” she asks.
“What are you getting at?”
She pulls out the silver steel hand of the hamsa around her hung neck and flashes it for him out the corner of his right eye. Except he had given it to her in a dream.
“Don’t tell me you love me again until you can love yourself as well. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe in your potential for good. But if you break your promises to me you’ll prove your enemies right.”
“Adelina, I…”
He wants to pull over and taste her again like it was in the dreams.
“Don’t say it,” she warns, “keep driving. I’m hungry and as a Haitian gentleman you must of course never allow a woman to be hungry.”
She knows his code, she knows most of his story, but there is still a four-day window for the highly unusual things to occur.
He watches the road, both hands on the wheel. He doesn’t want to let her down.
“Adhi, I…”
“Honey don’t say it,” she says again firmly.
“Please one time aloud. So you hear it in person as you have it in writing.”
“No. Not yet. Not until you really mean it.”
“I’ve done such crazy things in the name of it, I’ve killed so many people, I’ve invaded three counties, I’ve lost my wife and child, and I’ve died. Over and over again,” he murmurs.
“I know. So don’t say it to me until you know the right words. And you’d better be willing to back them all up with actions.”
“Fair enough.”
“I read your first manuscript, I’m very concerned about your dead wife and child, and also your relations with a certain woman named Daria Andreavna. It is suspected that your claims to loving have often been subsumed and subverted. It is suspected that you were used. And that your passion over took your word and your loyalty. With most tragic results.”
“Do you believe that then? That I’m a traitor who knows nothing of love?”
“I know we women lead the resistance because we can truly love and you men do most of the killing because you cannot truly feel.”
“You read my first book, you’ve been in my head for eight months. Don’t you know what you’re looking at yet?”
“I’m not clear yet that you can separate your facts from your emotions. And I didn’t read all of your first book, just enough to get a taste of things to come.”
“Adhi, I…”
Sebastian wants to say it. He wants to make it into poems and novels and paintings and sketches and thousands of loyal deeds. He wants her to believe in him like he believes in her. He wants her to see that his past can be absolved by his present.
“Baby don’t say it.”
She uses sweet talk sparingly with men she hasn’t gone to bed with. But you go to bed with a man’s dreams, you spend months together in an imagined world you feel a certain intimacy that extends to the physical realm at times.
“We’re almost at the weigh station,” he says.
I will not judge him for anything he has done, she thinks but I will hold him to everything he says so the moment that he says that simple word aloud he will have wedded his cause to me, and that is a complicated and explosive thing indeed. And to repel his advances is a matter of time and orders, but were I to feel again, she thinks, well he is a bit my type.
From the moment that he saw her on her birthday he had known she was a very different creature. He wanted her as a partner by his side. But eight months ago he was blinded still by a distracting influence and reeling from the aftershocks of it. That was when she entered his dreams as the Great Revolt made the long-simmering spiritual war a quite bloody contact sport.
Story time again. This time though our parables will draw attention, not to violence done in the name of loyalty, but instead the acts done when we are overwhelmed with passion.
“Str’ast,” she says, passion in Russian.
“I’ll tell you how it came to be that I played my part in the uprising,” he says.
She doesn’t like politics, so she responds, “stick to the parts with passion and allow me some insight and judgment as to if you’re the man I’m looking for.”
“Darling don’t be numb,” he says feeling layers of loving that are impossible to verify the source of in the world of the real.
“Darling just be realistic.”
The sun is down. The stars are up. They park at the weigh station and get ready to fill their bellies with food in preparation for the long road to Breuklyn Soviet.
“One last sentimental thing,” he says locking up the car.
“Go on then,” says Adelina, “before I make you have a heart attack,” she smiles.
“If it comes out of my mouth in the next few days that I have done things that upset you I am sorry. Please understand that we all have complicated pasts, and some of us complicated past lives. I swear to you I did not betray the resistance. I swear I will make sense of all these actions; those in New York, those in Haiti, those in Israel and Africa. I swear to you that you will have my undivided loyalty.”
“Listen, if you must you can say it one time, as you have already written a song about it and started a war in its name.”
“Adelina, I…” but he does not say it for he knows how little in English the word means to her and what a mockery he has made of the concept too.
For a second she turns away. Impossible, she thinks. This is the second time he’s met me! What does he know about love at all?
What a ridiculous notion to love another so quickly!
Based on shared dreams?
“I know. I’ll try and not say it again,” he says a bit ashamed at her reaction.
“It’s not that,” she starts.
“What then?”
“Your words have to count that’s all. You need to not say things just to hear how they sound, you need to say things to declare things that will be.”
“Why do I know you so intimately and still know nothing,” he says.
“Because this is our second meeting,” she jokes, “the rest was just a dream.”
“I…” he stammers, but the word is unable to form.
“You have only just begun to know me. In my culture there is a ridiculous arrogance in saying words you don’t mean when you can’t back them up, said only because you’ve caught up in the heat of something,” she says.
“It’s a very traditional feeling and it is backed up by eight months of dreams.”
“I will wait and see if you feel that way this time next week, for there are many things done in the name of passion, but they are not the same things done in name of love.”
Why can’t I say the word he wonders? And the answer is she will not let him, so strong are her powers over him. For if that word was good fuel in act one for poems, and the basis of the Partizan Song; then we must now examine motives of our Postsoviet Protagonist-antagonists yet anew.
“There is incredible power in language,” she tells him, “but sometimes talk is cheap. You’ve loved early and loved often, and that makes me suspect you also love easily, but all these things are beside the point. We have a treacherous four-day journey to reach your city, and then you will be put on trial. It is my duty to inform you that whatever feelings you think you have developed for me in dreams, I am nothing to you now but friend and comrade.”
“I won’t use words I can’t back up with actions.”
“Well, I suspect that you may try.”
“I’ve ruined myself several times before over the idea of a perfect woman.”
“Well don’t do that again.”
“You’re not an idea.”
“You don’t know me yet. They say that I have what science has yet to prove in the blood.”
“Well, that I believe.”
“Your defenses are lowered, your dreams have been invaded by thoughts of me, and you write well and have pretty brown eyes like mine. But watch the things you say, I will make you put your money where your mouth is. I will make you ready for trial.”
“If things escape my mouth that proclaims some newly forming feelings…”
“We’ll be sure not to act on them,” she says.
And with that in mind, they went cautiously to eat supper before they took to the road under the cover of darkness.
And in real time not much longer.
The dinner at the crossroads is empty except for them two.
Though thoughts of her had pervaded his mind for the past eight months, now sitting across from her about to bite into his Ruben sandwich, the gun-slinging ambulance man, a wanted rebel hooligan new little of what to say.
“Why is it that you do not speak any Russian,” she asks him.
“I have no talent,” he replies.
“No talent for language?”
“No talent for listening. It’s my most dishonorable trait.”
“No, being a murderer is your most dishonorable trait. Not speaking Russian means you’re just lazy. Your file says you’ve had several Russian partners. I call it lazy, though I do not judge you for it.”
“Indeed, well then what is that you judge me for?”
“I have nothing to linger judgment upon at this juncture.”
“I am indeed then lazy and also a bit ashamed. For I do love the thought of knowing that which you think in.”
“I am merely surprised that living and working alongside three Russian speakers you acquired nothing.”
“I acquired some fucking and fighting words. Please believe I bring more to the table than my talent with English.”
“You bring a great deal from what I understand from your wife.”
“Not my…”
“I said before I know what you are to each to each other. It is clear to me that you are far more than a murderous American bandit who while trained to save lives spends most of his energies killing people. ”
“Can you make no small talk woman!”
“Eat then happily and be quieter,” she replies.
He returns to the Ruben feeling vaguely that for one who claims to never judge she has arrived at some rather serious prejudgments and will be deterred from them.
She wonders if Oleg the Bear will arrive on time or make them wait, or whether he will get there early. She wonders if he will come alone, or bring a woman. And she wonders if that woman will slow them all down.
Sebastian is unnerved by silence. It reminds him of sleep, and also of death and nothing about a silent moment makes him feel at ease. It makes him feel also like an inadequate conversationalist. And he begins to second guess his feelings, having realized that when not allowed to speak of politics or feelings, he has little to work with.
“I have a soft spot for writers,” she finally says, “I understand you wrote a book once.”
“I did. A Noire, it sold less than a hundred copies.”
“Well maybe if you’d written it in Russian it would have had a better reception.”
“Maybe it was just a bloody mess of a book.”
“If I recall it was about a paramedic and a whore on the eve of the revolution was it not?”
“It had a bit more to it than that.”
“Well of course. To you. I read some.”
“So not your style.”
“No. Not really. A little too violent. A little too sentimental about the wrong things. Your poems are much better.”
“I’m flattered you took the time to read them.”
“You began sending me them four days after meeting me do you recall. Under some pretext of soliciting my technical opinions on airplanes.”
“I was sincerely curious about airplane terminology. I was also sincerely interested in attracting your attention more general.”
“And here we are.”
“So the book was not to your tastes and the poems were all splendid?”
“Some more than others, but I will say that you have a good handle on the English language. Although your spelling is ad hock and your grammar most irregular.”

Oleg Leonidovich Medved enters most gregariously.
He is well dressed in various black and gray tones and carries a close cut beard which does nothing to disguise the Ivoryish aspects of his Slavic complexion or the Slavic attributes of Eurasian manly disposition. He is a man twice the size or other men who prefers to break others with conversation not brawn but can resort to that if needed. Sebastian stands to greet him, they are old friends and they embrace before either man can or will acknowledge either woman, for he goes nowhere alone and with him is the young modal Yulia Romanova, a brown-haired slender beauty.
“The American Mayakovsky is much alive! I am glad you are not really as dead as the telescreens now claim. The Millennium, I am aghast at the recent carnage. I only hope with you and you wife officially “dead” the ceasefire holds. Tovarish poet paramedic, glad to see you again!”
“The same Comrade Oleg, the same!” responds Sebastian. And the two men embrace in a gruff but friendly, eastern European fashion.
“This is Yulia Romanova,” Oleg says and goes to embrace Adelina whom he has known for some number of years. In fact, it was he who introduced the two of them last April on her birthday.
They all are then seated at the dinner men facing men and women facing women.
“A perilous journey ahead,” toasts Oleg as soon as the drink has been put in his hand.
“Cheers,” says Adelina. What a silly British thing to say, to toast well; nothing.
“Is it true they aim to finally kill him in New York?” asks Oleg as if he despises all pretenses or suspense. Which he does.
“There is reason to believe that the revolution’s leadership has arrived at doubts as to Mr. Adon’s commitment to the values of the resistance. There are certain factions that want him put on trial and put to permanent death.”
“Well I say we skip New York, and all fly out directly to lovely Cataluña” interjects Yulia.
“Do you know this man so well you are vouching for his safety on public airlines,” asks Adelina to Yulia with vague scorn.
“No, I simply don’t like trials and don’t like New York now that it has gone communist,” replies Yulia Romanova, a self-proclaimed white Russian.
“I liked New York capitalist, I like it, communist. The issue to me is who knows Sebastian is alive and why do they suspect him of treason to the revolution?” asks Oleg.
“Because of circumstances,” states Adelina and as she even says the same she squirms a little inside.
“Fuck Circumstances. Quite literally. I will of course vouch for Sebastian Adon and testify that what he did for that woman was nothing of his own choosing. If anything it spoke well to his dedication to lost woman, or to saving, or to art. But I was there when they met and am privy to the entirety of the tryst, and I know this man did not betray a thing. Except is own heart perhaps.”
“Thank you for that friend,” Sebastian says.
“Ain Davar,” says Oleg in Hebrew having lived four years in Israel once, once when it was there.
“Let underlying facts be placed upon this table then,” states Adelina, “this man is most uncommon. Three years ago he became enamored with a Russian call girl. His relations with her led to the underlying causalities that triggered the mighty revolt. And then, to save her he signed a contract with the devil himself. And then souls left bodies, this man walked his way across time down a rabbit hole. And then became alive three years later. That in the revolt’s eleventh hour he and his wife could seize thousands of hostages and perish in a bloody sand off in Midtown Manhattan. And awake alive miraculously a third time in Shrakasa Waltham!
“His exile,” Adelina explains with a hint of banality.
“Ah, yes thank you both, and you too Ms. Yulia for delivering me out of this cold wretched place,” says Adon.
“It is nothing, droog as we are all fans of your work, and friends of the people and the wider goals of the glorious revolution underway,” smiles Alan Medvinsky, also called Oleg the Bear, who is paid in cash dollars, billing by the minute for his very tricky work.
He has worn many hats in other lives, over the years of cold war thaw, repeat.
And thus begins our very rocky road running towards Brooklyn Soviet to the satellite camps of outer Boston; to the City of Port-au-Prince, then to Santo Domingo and Havana; then Kingston and then Madeira, to the final invasion of Europe; then to Cataluña, then to Moscow burning our way across the great mountain fortress of pale Europe; to the remembering and also forgetting. And finally Burma. To all the places and possibilities beyond the narrow struggle to survive. But on that fateful cold winter day, we four never made it out of that dinner, telling stories to make it through the cold.

For before you try to storm the mountain before you get to build upright human castles, battle white and black demons both and build your grand castell to victory; you must drill. For in the face of indomitable odds and opposition; zealous persistence and ineffable might are your truest weapons. You build your alliance, you ready your team. You prepare for the day it is your time to join the Great Revolt.

8

Reads Carla Santiestiban:
The U.S.S.R. was the sun and we were just a proud and tiny fortress; that when the sun went out, when we lost our greatest, sturdiest ally; we would be in the dark and there were many things in the dark that could ruin us.
There would be no more petrol for the cars and tractors, buses and power plants. There would not be fertilizer for growing food. There would be shortages of absolutely everything on every level of consumption. There would be long lines and no electricity. There would be no fans or air conditioners, there would be nada. And in this proverbial darkness of our times ahead, our enemy which had sought to ruin us from the very day of our independence would move in, emboldened by the so called end of history.
I have some understanding that were it not for decisions made during the revolution, if not for our Russian friends and of course the own solid base of our people in the historical context; we could be living in an illiterate and deeply unhealthy place; with a brothel and gambling embankment running from Miramar to Varadero; 500 kilometers long where foreigners could just cheaply, scenically fuck our women, drink our rum and smoke our cigars in the sun.
And I knew, I knew the minute I was called to the office that we would not surrender, our great leaders, well the two brothers still alive; would not for one human second consider that the fight was lost.
I was there the day they called us all together. The top nine, the big two; the Ministers and the deputies of industry, defense, finance, agriculture, espionage later. We had known it was coming the fall of our protector and benefactor. In embassy cables and diplomatic whispers; we also knew, it was our job to know that when the big bear fell down, died, and became reborn as god only knows what under American guidance! And its brightest, newest oldest and also highly questionable satellites began dropping from the sky; that nothing not one thing would stop the aggressors to the north from moving in upon us.
We knew this was the beginning of the end of the revolution as we understood it, but what could we do? We suspected the Syrians and the Libyans would not give in easily to them at all. And we watched one after another as communist regimes collapsed in Eastern Europe and Africa. It was really our estimation, that by the time the dust settled; it would be only us, the Vietnamese, the People’s Republic of China (both which had embraced capitalism in most regards five years ago, Laos, and whatever the backwards hell they were doing in North Korea, mi dios.
We assumed Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Namibia and Angola would remember what we did for them but be in no position to reciprocate. And between 1989 and 1994, it would all come down.
We sat together at a time when even the leaders were hungry and when anyone looked in a mirror they would not always recognize their own faces, for a look of despair had set in, inside oneself. All that we had willed as a people could be undone in just one year. We were all the same outside, for the siege had not begun yet, it would begin tomorrow and the next day and for the next ten years.
And the enemy in the North, the pale colder place just a few days out by raft or one hour by plane; it would either soon invade, or try and starve us out. The ten million that had refused to defect. And the accomplishments of the last fifty years could go up in smoke, or simply in a long whimper, as the dominos began to fall.
But I understood, it was my training from Moscow to understand and my own Cuban sense of putting it together and taking it apart and refashioning. I knew that there was only one thing that could hold the country together, and so did Fidel and Raul. We needed to buy the time it required us to shore up.
And I am not sure that we prepared adequately for this day, actually. I’m not sure really we believed this day would come.
And they drove us out to, well of course they didn’t tell us and we didn’t ask. And we were told in a meeting this was going to be a special period in times of peace, which was to say all the conditions of a siege and a war were to be upon us and really the only question was how long could we last until the U.S. gets bored, not tired for they have never been in a rush. More until the empire is bored with us, less obsessed with us. Long enough for the opposition to imperialism to recoup.
I remember in the car to the ranch which disguised the room for these situations. I remember wondering if this was the end of our experiment and life as we understood it.
“This comes right from the chief; you’re all going abroad in a week. Some of you will join embassy staff or medical missions, some as private people with foreign passports. You will be going to allied countries and Western countries, you will be going to make some hasty business.”
Well really the whole speech was so much longer. But this was the short of it. We were not told in any specific terms how long supplies and foreign currency reserves could hold out on the island. We were told in no uncertain terms that things were going to run out, and that our job was to generate hard currency through the operation of a variety of legal and illegal businesses to shore up the essential purchase; food, fuel and probably armaments.
“They’re rioting in Moscow and Warsaw and Budapest. It’s all coming down.”
I tell you it wasn’t all cigar smoke and mirrors and fake foreign names, Cubans look like everyone and we had trained long ago to act like anyone, and we’d been assimilating for years into the second world and there was a contingency planned for a cut off over time from USSR foreign aid, not overnight.
“What brought it all down?” someone named Carla Santiestiban asks.
“This wasn’t a polite or immediate question,” she was told. But the answer was several things. First, the West was economically more exploitative and comparatively more ruthless. Second, the Russian Communist Party lost its popular imperative, and third, the endless wars in proxy had sapped its will.
But there was something else no one said, which was being said in the West; that Capitalism was simply a better system, no-no no one would say that. But everyone was always hoping blue jeans and popular gringo music would fall of a favela cart or plane hatch back from Miami. And it often did. Luxury carrots for all or for none says the evil murderous and often sloppy CIA!

Explains Maria Silverrtova;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maria:

Let’s pretend we’re back in interrogation.

Sebastian:

Is it true you got manhandled?

Maria:

Let’s pretend we’re back in interrogation.

Sebastian:

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

Maria:

Let’s pretend we’re back in interrogation.

Sebastian:

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

Maria:

But, let’s pretend we’re back in interrogation. It happened to Daria not to me. I never suffered for your idealism at best I’ll call it. What’s a midnight rape at the hands of the boss?

Sebastian:

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

Maria:

I won’t let you Russian up to roulette. I’m not heartless about you. You have a futuristic future being something great, probably. If you take salt pills and stop giving away yourself to a tragic world.

Sebastian:

These aren’t songs for people who build bombs.

Maria:

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

4

Sebastian has many women in his life, but not all are his advocates or lovers. Sometimes the friendships seem forced out of pity. However, Polina Mazaeva loved him very much for as long as she could.
“An artist, is just a colorful, self-destructive fool making muses left and right of women who he is too poor to build a life around, but so much of a distraction he can keep them for a bit amused. An artist is a social parasite, with no aim, especially a poet for god’s sakes. Death to the artists and cheers to the investment bankers, the engines of productive society, I’d like to be fucking one,” so says Maria of Moscow voting with her lips not her feet against American artists.
“He appears more infatuated with the idea of a real relationship, than the mechanics needed to keep on going,” said Daria to the secret police when the arrested her in January.
“Who is Polina Mazaeva? A coy Russia agit-prop? No, No, she actually has fallen in love with this radical. And they are preparing to meet, but have composed a number of Russian American, or Americano Soviet love songs and scribbles. Truly, I just wish he would disappear in Syria and we can close his file,” wrote Case Officer David Smith of Homeland Security, Station 4443.

Why and when Sebastian and Polina began to write each other is of no great mystery, both were in existential crisis. They wrote often and eloquently in the year leading up to his deployment in Kurdistan Syria and Iraq. These letters and poems all sounded similar, but not the same to previous love affairs across the Cold War, but they reinforced each other’s motivation.

Dear Polina Mazaeva,
[American Russia Love Song 116]
Sebastian:
We now sit down in different cities,
We are all dying, on our own, in a terrible way.
We went hunting, for the words in Russian or in English for, the clever, slash redeeming things, we might, even begin to try, and say.
Maria:
Raise your head and hands up rude boy!
That’s not how the Story Ends, this time!
“You found your son, you saved your wife you helped your people win the war.”
Ana Campbell isn’t dead this time, regular people, comprehend the revolutionary side of this long epic thing that sounds like lullabies and gory folk lore!
That’s not how the story ends this time;
Tragically as it might be, you get to start again. Tell us what you fought for!
Sebastian:
No, no, no, this isn’t right, I turned my gun on Newey before the fire fight that night.
Polina’s alone and in poverty, she’s trapped in Novgorod. What have I done!
Sebastian is sealed in a psychiatric ward! Making these fucking phrases rhythm rhyme for fun!
Anya’s losing her little mind in Baghdad.
Piling and Dan Newey are in French and British prison, so this happy tale is really quite black and rather fucking sad.
Maria:
That’s not how the story ends this time!
I’m a woman not a shot girl, I’m a journalist not someone’s whore!
What were these hands grasping for!?
Tell it better, give us something, give us hope give us something to believe in!
Don’t let your martyrs’ dies for nothing, hold out longer dear dead Afrin!
Sebastian:
That’s not how the story ends this time!
Sebastian finds his mind in chapter three.
And long live the Kurdish resistance, I wonder what Anya can see, when the lights go out and the rubbing oil turns her to Cleopatra.
But, this is sad long terrible black soliloquy. Resistance was our mantra.
About the things we did, to we. It was murder carried out like tantrum.
Maria:
That’s not how the story ends this time!
Afrin is defensible, Anya is a happy kid again. Yazan conquers his disease. Sebastian has the strength of lions, of over 45 men! But that’s all in your sad Americano mind game!
But now we begin, everyone lost something and it seems hard to think we could ever win. It’s over you all lost, things are still the same.
Give them something to believe in!

Sebastian:
“Give, me, back, my shattered life!”
Let my people find a way to win!
And she’s looking at me now like she’s ready to go!
Turn back the clock give us our lives!
And she’s looking at me now like she’s ready to go!
Turn back the clock give us our land!
And she’s looking at me now like she’s ready to go! (Ready to blow).
Turn back the clock give us our lives!
Maria:
That’s not how the Story Ends, this time!
This is not a ballad for people who build bombs!
This is not a ballad for, people who turn cars into battering rams! Man, your life is nearly gone!
That’s not how the Story Ends, this time!
This is not a ballad for two people who move on.

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.