Sir Fazle Hasan AbedKCMG (27 April 1936 – 20 December 2019) was the founder and Chair Emeritus of BRAC, one of the world’s largest non-governmental organizations.
Sir Fazle was honored with numerous national and international awards for his contributions in social development, including the LEGO Prize (2018), Laudato Si’ Award (2017), Thomas Francis, Jr Medal in Global Public Health (2016), World Food Prize (2015), Spanish Order of Civil Merit (2014), Leo Tolstoy International Gold Medal (2014), WISE Prize for Education (2011) among others.
In both 2014 and 2017, he was named in Fortune Magazine’s List of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders. He was also recognized by Ashoka as one of the ‘global greats’ and was a founding member of its prestigious Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship. He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) in the 2010 New Year Honours for services in tackling poverty and empowering the poor in Bangladesh and globally.[2]
In an interview for the Creating Emerging Markets project at the Harvard Business School, Abed revealed his strong belief that businesses can positively impact society, that “you can do good also by doing business.”[5][6]
In August 2019, Abed retired as the chairperson of BRAC Bangladesh and BRAC International, and took on the position of the Chair Emeritus. [7]
After passing intermediate from Dhaka College in 1954, Abed left home at the age of 18 to attend University of Glasgow, where, in an effort to break away from tradition and do something radically different, he studied naval architecture. He realized there was little work in ship building in East Pakistan and a career in Naval Architecture would make returning home difficult. With that in mind, Abed joined the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in London, completing his professional education in 1962.
Abed returned to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to join Shell Oil Company and quickly rose to head its finance division. His time at Shell exposed Abed to the inner workings of a large conglomerate and provided him with insight into corporate management, which would become invaluable to him later in life.
It was during his time at Shell that the devastating cyclone of 1970 hit the south and south-eastern coastal regions of the country, killing 300,000 people. The cyclone had a profound effect on Abed. In the face of such devastation, he said the comforts and perks of a corporate executive’s life ceased to have any attraction for him. Together with friends, Abed created HELP, an organisation that provided relief and rehabilitation to the worst affected in the island of Manpura, which had lost three-quarters of its population in the disaster.
Soon after, Bangladesh’s own struggle for independence from Pakistan began and circumstances forced Abed to leave the country. He found refuge in the United Kingdom, where he set up Action Bangladesh to lobby the governments of Europe for his country’s independence.
When the war ended in December 1971, Abed sold his flat in London and returned to the newly independent Bangladesh to find his country in ruins. In addition, hundreds of refugees who had sought shelter in India during the war had started to return home. Their relief and rehabilitation called for urgent efforts, and Abed decided to use the funds he had generated from selling his flat to initiate his own such organisation to deal with the long-term task of improving the living conditions of the rural poor. He selected the remote region of Sulla in northeastern Bangladesh to start his work, and this work led to the non-governmental organisation known as BRAC in 1972.[3]
Although the name ‘BRAC’ does not represent an acronym, the organisation was formerly known as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee and then as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee.
In a span of only three decades, BRAC has grown to become one of the largest development organisations in the world in terms of the scale and diversity of its interventions. As BRAC grew, Abed ensured that it continued to target the landless poor, particularly women, a large percentage of whom live below the poverty line with little or no access to resources or conventional development efforts.
BRAC now operates in all 64 districts of Bangladesh through development interventions that range from education, healthcare, microfinance, skills, human rights, agriculture and enterprise development. It is now considered the largest non-profit in the world – both by employees and people served.
In 2002, BRAC went international by taking its range of development interventions to Afghanistan. Since then, BRAC has expanded to a total of 10 countries across Asia and Africa, successfully adapting its unique integrated development model across varying geographic and socioeconomic contexts.
He was admitted to the hospital in late November on account of breathing problems and physical weakness. He died at the Apollo Hospital in the capital on Friday, December 20, at 08:28 pm. He was undergoing treatment for a malignant brain tumor. [14] At the time of his death, he was 83 years old. He is survived by a wife, a daughter, a son and three grandchildren.[15][16]
His influence on Israeli politics is profound: through his closest protégé Menachem Begin‘s administration (1977–1983), consolidating the domination of Israeli politics by the right-wing Likud party; and through the administrations (1996–1999, 2009–) of Likud‘s leader (1993–1999, 2005–) Benjamin Netanyahu, the son of his former personal secretary and historian, Benzion Netanyahu.
Jabotinsky with his parentsEditorial staff of Razsvet in Saint Petersburg, 1912. Sitting (R–L): 1) Max (Mordecai) Soloveichik (Solieli), 2) Avraham Ben David Idelson, 3) Zeev Jabotinsky; Standing: 1) Arnold Zeidman, 2) Alexander Goldstein, 3) Shlomo Gefstein
Vladimir Yevgenyevich (Yevnovich) Zhabotinsky[8] was born in Odessa,[2]Kherson Governorate (modern Ukraine) into an assimilated Jewish family.[9] His father, Yevno (Yevgeniy Grigoryevich) Zhabotinsky, hailed from Nikopol, Yekaterinoslav Governorate. He was a member of the Russian Society of Sailing and Trade and was primarily involved in wheat trading. His mother, Chava (Eva Markovna) Zach (1835–1926), came from Berdychiv, Kiev Governorate. Jabotinsky’s older brother Myron died when Vladimir was six months old, and his father died when he was six years old. His sister, Tereza (Tamara Yevgenyevna) Zhabotinskaya-Kopp, founded a private school for girls in Odessa. In 1885, the family moved to Germany due to his father’s illness, returning a year later after his father’s death.
Raised in a middle-class Jewish home, Jabotinsky was educated in Russian schools. Although he studied Hebrew as a child, he wrote in his autobiography that his upbringing was divorced from Jewish faith and tradition. His mother ran a stationary store in Odessa. Jabotinsky dropped out of school at the age of 17 with a guarantee of a job as a correspondent for a local Odessan newspaper,[10] the Odesskiy Listok, and was sent to Bern and Rome as a correspondent. He also worked for the Odesskie Novosti after his return from Italy.[11] Jabotinsky was a childhood friend of Russian journalist and poet Korney Chukovsky.[12]
In April 1902 he was arrested for writing feuilletons in an anti-establishment tone, as well as contributing to a radical Italian journal. He was held isolated in a prison cell in Odessa for two months, where he communicated with other inmates through shouting and passing written notes.[14]
He married Joanna (or Ania) Galperina in October 1907.[15] They had one child, Eri Jabotinsky, who later became a member of the Irgun-inspired Bergson Group. Eri Jabotinsky briefly served in the 1st Knesset of Israel; he died on 6 June 1969.
Prior to the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, Jabotinsky joined the Zionist movement, where he soon became known as a powerful speaker and an influential leader.[16] With more pogroms looming on the horizon, he established the Jewish Self-Defense Organization, a Jewish militant group, to safeguard Jewish communities throughout Russia. He became the source of great controversy in the Russian Jewish community as a result of these actions.
Around this time, he began learning modern Hebrew, and took a Hebrew name: Vladimir became Ze’ev (“wolf”). During the pogroms, he organized self-defense units in Jewish communities across Russia and fought for the civil rights of the Jewish population as a whole. His slogan was, “Better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it!” Another slogan was, “Jewish youth, learn to shoot!”
In 1903, he was elected as a Russian delegate to the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. After Theodore Herzl‘s death in 1904, he became the leader of the right-wing Zionists. That year he moved to Saint Petersburg and became one of the co-editors for the Russophone magazine Yevreiskaya Zhyzn (Jewish Life), which after 1907 became the official publishing body of the Zionist movement in Russia. In the pages of the newspaper, Jabotinsky wrote fierce polemics against supporters of assimilation and the Bund.
In 1905, he was one of the co-founders of the “Union for Rights Equality of Jewish People in Russia”. The following year, he was one of the chief speakers at the 3rd All-Russian Conference of Zionists in Helsinki (Helsingfors), which called upon the Jews of Europe to engage in Gegenwartsarbeit (work in the present) and to join together to demand autonomy for ethnic minorities in Russia.[17] This liberal approach was later apparent in his position concerning the Arab citizens of the future Jewish State: Jabotinsky asserted that “Each one of the ethnic communities will be recognized as autonomous and equal in the eyes of the law.”[17]
In 1909, he fiercely criticized leading members of the Russian Jewish community for participating in ceremonies marking the centennial of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. In the light of Gogol’s anti-Semitic views, Jabotinsky claimed it was unseemly for Russian Jews to take part in these ceremonies, as it showed they had no Jewish self-respect.[18]
In 1908, the Berlin Executive office of the World Zionist Organisation (WZO), sent Jabotinsky to the Ottoman capital Constantinople. Jabotinsky became editor-in-chief of a new pro-Young-Turkish daily newspaper Jeune Turc, which was founded and financed by Zionist officials like WZO president David Wolffsohn and his representative in Constantinople Victor Jacobson. The journalists writing for that paper included the famous German Social democrat and Russian-Jewish revolutionary Parvus, who lived in Constantinople from 1910 until 1914. The Jeune Turc was prohibited in 1915 by the pro-German Turkish military junta. Richard Lichtheim, who was to become Jabotinsky’s representative in Germany in 1925, stayed in Constantinople as WZO representative and managed to keep the “Yishuv” out of trouble during the war years by constant diplomatic interventions with Germans, Turks, and also US authorities, whose humanitarian support was crucial for the survival of the Jewish settlement project in Palestine during the war years.[19]
Ze’ev Jabotinsky served in platoon 16 of the 20th Battalion of the London Regiment between 1916 and 1917Lt Jabotinsky in the uniform of the Royal FusiliersMiniatures of the MBE, British War Medal and Victory Medal awarded to JabotinskyTestimonial to Jabotinsky from the 38th Battalion Royal Fusiliers
During World War I, he had the idea of establishing a Jewish Legion to fight alongside the British against the Ottomans who then controlled Palestine. In 1915, together with Joseph Trumpeldor, a one-armed veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, he created the Zion Mule Corps, which consisted of several hundred Jewish men, mainly Russians who had been exiled from Palestine by the Ottoman Empire and had settled in Egypt. The unit served with distinction in the Battle of Gallipoli. When the Zion Mule Corps was disbanded, Jabotinsky traveled to London, where he continued his efforts to establish Jewish units to fight in Palestine as part of the British Army. Although Jabotinsky did not serve with the Zion Mule Corps, Trumpeldor, Jabotinsky and 120 Zion Mule Corps members did serve in Platoon 16 of the 20th Battalion of the London Regiment. In 1917, the government agreed to establish three Jewish battalions, initiating the Jewish Legion.
As an honorary lieutenant in the 38th Royal Fusiliers, Jabotinsky saw action in Palestine in 1918.[20] His battalion was one of the first to enter Transjordan.[20]
He was demobilised in September 1919,[21] soon after he complained to Field Marshal Allenby about the British Army’s attitude towards Zionism and the Jewish Legion.[22] His appeals to the British government failed to reverse the decision, but in December 1919[23] he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his service.[24]
After Ze’ev Jabotinsky was discharged from the British Army in September 1919, he openly trained Jews in warfare and the use of small arms. On 6 April 1920, during the 1920 Palestine riots the British searched the offices and apartments of the Zionist leadership for arms, including the home of Chaim Weizmann, and in a building used by Jabotinsky’s defense forces they found three rifles, two pistols, and 250 rounds of ammunition.
Nineteen men were arrested. The next day Jabotinsky protested to the police that he was their commander and therefore solely responsible, so they, should be released. Instead, he was arrested and joined them in jail, the nineteen were sentenced to three years in prison and Jabotinsky was given a 15-year prison term for possession of weapons, until the month of July when a general pardon was granted to Jews and Arabs convicted in the rioting.[25]
A committee of inquiry placed responsibility for the riots on the Zionist Commission, alleging that they provoked the Arabs. The court blamed “Bolshevism” claiming that it “flowed in Zionism’s inner heart”, and ironically identified the fiercely anti-socialist Jabotinsky with the socialist-aligned Poalei Zion (‘Zionist Workers’) party, which it called ‘a definite Bolshevist institution.’[26]
Ze’ev Jabotinsky at a Hatzohar Conference (likely in Paris, in the second half of the 1920s)
In 1920, Jabotinsky was elected to the first Assembly of Representatives in Palestine. The following year he was elected to the executive council of the Zionist Organization. He was also a founder of the newly registered Keren haYesod and served as its director of propaganda.[27] Jabotinsky left the mainstream Zionist movement in 1923 due to differences of opinion between him and its chairman, Chaim Weizmann, establishing a new revisionist party called Alliance of Revisionists-Zionists and its youth movement, Betar (a Hebrew acronym for the “League of Joseph Trumpeldor”).
His new party demanded that the mainstream Zionist movement recognize as its stated objective the establishment of a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan River. His main goal was to establish a modern Jewish state with the help of the British Empire. His philosophy contrasted with that of the socialist oriented Labor Zionists, in that it focused its economic and social policy on the ideals of the Jewish middle class in Europe. His ideal for a Jewish state was a form of nation state based loosely on the British imperial model.[28] His support base was mostly located in Poland, and his activities focused on attaining British support to help with the development of the Yishuv. Another area of major support for Jabotinsky was Latvia, where his speeches in Russian made an impression on the largely Russian-speaking Latvian Jewish community.
Jabotinsky was both a nationalist and a liberal democrat. Despite his attachment to nationalism, he did not embrace authoritarian notions of state authority and its imposition on individual liberty; he said that “Every man is a king.” He championed the notion of a free press and believed the new Jewish state would protect the rights and interests of minorities. As an economic liberal, he supported a free market with minimal government intervention, but also believed that the “‘elementary necessities’ of the average person…: food, shelter, clothing, the opportunity to educate his children, and medical aid in case of illness” should be supplied by the state.[29]
In 1898, Jabotinsky was sent to Rome as a correspondent for Odessky Listok, writing columns under the pen name “V. Egal, “Vl. Egal” “V.E.” for more than a year. His first application for a job at Odesskiya Novosti was turned down, but after the editor, J.M. Heifetz, saw his writing for Odessky Listok, he hired him. At that point, Jabotinsky changed his pen name to Altalena, which he confesses was a mistake. He thought the Italian word meant “elevator,” but explained to the editor that the real meaning, “swing,” suited him well, since he was “‘by no means stable or constant’, but rather rocking and balancing.”[30]
From 1923, Jabotinsky was editor of the revived Jewish weekly Rassvet (Dawn), published first in Berlin, then in Paris. Besides his journalistic work, he published novels under his previous pseudonym Altalena; his historical novel Samson Nazorei (Samson the Nazirite, 1927), set in Biblical times, describes Jabotinsky’s ideal of an active, daring, warrior form of Jewish life. His novel Pyatero (The Five, written 1935, published 1936) has been described as “a work that probably has the truest claim to being the great Odessa novel. … It contains poetic descriptions of early-twentieth-century Odessa, with nostalgia-tinged portraits of its streets and smells, its characters and passions.”[32] Although it was little noticed at the time, it has received renewed appreciation for its literary qualities at the start of the twenty-first century, being reprinted in Russia and Ukraine and in 2005 translated into English (the first translation into a Western language).[33]
Evacuation plan for the Jews of Poland, Hungary and Romania[edit]
Ze’ev Jabotinsky (bottom right) meeting with Betar leaders in Warsaw. Bottom left Menachem Begin (probably 1939).
During the 1930s, Jabotinsky was deeply concerned with the situation of the Jewish community in Eastern Europe. In 1936, Jabotinsky prepared the so-called “evacuation plan”, which called for the evacuation of the entire Jewish population of Poland, Hungary and Romania to Palestine.
The same year he toured Eastern Europe, meeting with the Polish Foreign Minister, Colonel Józef Beck; the Regent of Hungary, Admiral Miklós Horthy; and Prime Minister Gheorghe Tătărescu of Romania to discuss the evacuation plan. The plan gained the approval of all three governments, but caused considerable controversy within the Jewish community of Poland, on the grounds that it played into the hands of anti-Semites. In particular, the fact that the ‘evacuation plan’ had the approval of the Polish government was taken by many Polish Jews as indicating Jabotinsky had gained the endorsement of what they considered to be the wrong people.
The evacuation of Jewish communities in Poland, Hungary and Romania was to take place over a ten-year period. However, the British government vetoed it, and the World Zionist Organization‘s chairman, Chaim Weizmann, dismissed it. Two years later, in 1938, Jabotinsky stated in a speech that Polish Jews were “living on the edge of the volcano”, and warned that a wave of pogroms would happen in Poland sometime in the near future. “Catastrophe is approaching. … I see a terrible picture … the volcano that will soon spew out its flames of extermination,” he said.[35] Jabotinsky went on to warn Jews in Europe that they should leave for Palestine as soon as possible.[36] There is much discussion about whether or not Jabotinsky actually predicted the Holocaust. In his writings and public appearances he warned against the dangers of an outbreak of violence against the Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe. However, as late as August 1939, he was certain that war would be averted.[37]
In 1939, Britain enacted the MacDonald White Paper, in which Jewish immigration to Palestine under the British Mandate was to be restricted to 75,000 for the next five years, after which further Jewish immigration would depend on Arab consent. In addition, land sales to Jews were to be restricted, and Palestine would be cultivated for independence as a binational state.
Jabotinsky reacted by proposing a plan for an armed Jewish revolt in Palestine. He sent the plan to the Irgun High Command in six coded letters. Jabotinsky proposed that he and other “illegals” would arrive by boat in the heart of Palestine – preferably Tel Aviv – in October 1939. The Irgun would ensure that they successfully landed and escaped, by whatever means necessary. They would then occupy key centers of British power in Palestine, chief among them Government House in Jerusalem, raise the Jewish national flag, and fend off the British for at least 24 hours whatever the cost. Zionist leaders in Western Europe and the United States would then declare an independent Jewish state, and would function as a provisional government-in-exile. Although Irgun commanders were impressed by the plan, they were concerned over the heavy losses they would doubtless incur in carrying it out. Avraham Stern proposed simultaneously landing 40,000 armed young immigrants in Palestine to help launch the uprising. The Polish government supported his plan, and it began training Irgun members and supplying them arms. Irgun submitted the plan for the approval of its commander David Raziel, who was imprisoned by the British. However, the beginning of World War II in September 1939 quickly put an end to these plans.[38][39]
According to the historian Benny Morris, documents show that Jabotinsky favored the idea of the transfer of Arab populations if required for establishing a (still-proposed) Jewish state.[40] Jabotinsky’s other writings state, “We do not want to eject even one Arab from either the left or the right bank of the Jordan River. We want them to prosper both economically and culturally. We envision the regime of Jewish Palestine [Eretz Israel ha-Ivri] as follows: most of the population will be Jewish, but equal rights for all Arab citizens will not only be guaranteed, they will also be fulfilled.”[29] Jabotinsky was convinced that there was no way for the Jews to regain any part of Palestine without opposition from the Arabs. In 1934, he wrote a draft constitution for the Jewish state which declared that Arabs would be on an equal footing with their Jewish counterparts “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The two communities would share the state’s duties, both military and civil service, and enjoy its prerogatives. Jabotinsky proposed that Hebrew and Arabic should enjoy equal status, and that “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice versa.”[41]
On May 12, 1940, Jabotinsky offered Winston Churchill the support of a Jewish Army; he also proposed Weizman and Ben-Gurion the creation of a United Front for policy and relief.[42] In his visit to New York in order to build support within the United States for a Jewish Army to fight the Nazis,[43] Jabotinsky died of a heart attack on 3 August 1940, 22:45,[44][45] Saturday night,[46][47][48][49][50] while he was visiting a Jewish self-defense camp in Hunter, New York that was run by Betar.[51] Most of the books say that Jabotinsky died on 4 August, because a wrong conversion from the Hebrew day (that starts after sunset and not after midnignt). The correct date is 3 August, the telegram of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from 4 August says he died “shortly before midnight last night”.[52] He was buried in New Montefiore Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York,[53] in accordance with a clause of his will. A monument to Jabotinsky was erected at his original burial site in New York.[54] In 1964 the remains of Jabotinsky and his wife, in accordance with a second clause of his will, were reburied in Mount Herzl Cemetery in Jerusalem by order of Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.[55]
Jabotinsky House at King George V St. in Tel Aviv. The building is also known as “Ze’ev’s Stronghold“, and is named after Ze’ev Jabotinsky. It used to be the center of the Herut Party, and is now the central institute of the Likud Party.Jabotinsky’s grandson Ze’ev with his daughter Tal beside Jabotinsky’s uniforms and military decorations at the Jabotinsky Institute and Museum
Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s legacy was carried on by Israel’s Herut party, which merged with other right wing parties to form the Likud Party in 1973. Likud has since acted as Israel’s main right-wing party, and has been part of most Israeli governments since 1977. His legacy has also been honored to a smaller extent by Herut – The National Movement (a breakaway from Likud), Magshimey Herut (young adult activist movement) and Betar (youth movement). In the United States, his call for Jewish self-defense has led to the formation of Americans for a Safe Israel and the Jewish Defense Organization. The JDO’s training camp is named Camp Jabotinsky.
In Israel, 57 streets, parks and squares are named after Jabotinsky, more than for any other person in Jewish or Israeli history. making him the most-commemorated historical figure in Israel.[56]
The Jabotinsky Medal is awarded for outstanding achievements in the sphere of literature and research.
The Jabotinsky Institute, in Tel Aviv, is a repository of documents and research relating to the history of Betar, the Revisionist movement, the Irgun, and Herut.[57] It is identified with Likud.[58]
A bronze bust of Jabotinsky by Johan Oldert was presented to the Metzudat Ze’ev in Tel Aviv in 2008 and remains on display.[59]
Jabotinsky Day (Hebrew: יום ז’בוטינסקי) is an Israeli national holiday celebrated annually on the twenty ninth of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, to commemorate the life and vision of Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky.[60]
In the 1990s, the Sweden-based church Livets ord set up an organisation called Operation Jabotinsky with the purpose of assisting diaspora Jews, mainly from the former Soviet Union, in emigrating to Israel.
The Story of the Jewish Legion, New York, B. Ackerman, Inc. [c1945]
The Battle for Jerusalem. Vladimir Jabotinsky, John Henry Patterson, Josiah Wedgwood, Pierre van Paassen explains why a Jewish army is indispensable for the survival of a Jewish nation and preservation of world civilization, American Friends of a Jewish Palestine, New York, The Friends, [1941]
A Pocket Edition of Several Stories, Mostly Reactionary, Tel-Aviv: Reproduced by Jabotinsky Institute in Israel, [1984]. Reprint. Originally published: Paris, [1925]
The Five, A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn-of-the-Century Odessa, Paris, [1936]
“The East Bank of the Jordan” (also known as “Two Banks has the Jordan”), a poem by Jabotinsky that became the slogan and one of the most famous songs of Betar
Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Story of My Life, Brian Horowitz & Leonid Katsis, eds., Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015.
^ Jump up to:ab Владимир Евгеньевич Жаботинский. Russian Writers, 1800-1917. Biographical Dictionary, vol. 2, p. 250 // Русские писатели. 1800—1917. Биографический словарь. Т. 2: Г — К. — М.: Большая российская энциклопедия, 1992 (in Russian)
^ Жаботинский З. Повесть моих дней. — Библиотека-Алия, 1985
^Kishinev 1903: The Birth of a Century, quoting from the memoirs of Simon Dubnow: “It was the night of April 7, 1903. Because of Russian Easter, the newspapers had not been issued for the previous two days so that we remained without any news from the rest of the world. That night the Jewish audience assembled in the Beseda Club, to listen to the talk of a young Zionist, the Odessa ‘wunderkind’ V. Jabotinsky [….] The young agitator had great success with his audience. In a particularly moving manner, he drew on Pinsker’s parable of the Jew as a shadow wandering through space and developed it further. As for my own impression, this one-sided treatment of our historical problem depressed me: Did he not scarcely stop short of inducing fear in our unstable Jewish youth of their own national shadow?… During the break, while pacing up and down in the neighboring room, I noticed sudden unrest in the audience: the news spread that fugitives had arrived in Odessa from nearby Kishinev and had reported of a bloody pogrom in progress there.”
^Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete, Metropolitan Books, 1999. p.141
^“Keren Hayesod”. Archived from the original on 28 September 2007. Retrieved 10 December 2009.
^ ‘England is becoming continental! Not long ago the prestige of the English ruler of the “colored” colonies stood very high. Hindus, Arabs, Malays were conscious of his superiority and obeyed, not unprotestingly, yet completely. The whole scheme of training of the future rulers was built on the principle “carry yourself so that the inferior will feel your unobtainable superiority in every motion”.’ Jabotinsky, cited by Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall London, ch.7, 1984
Murray Bookchin (January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006)[1] was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement,[4] Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning, within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment (1962), Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), The Ecology of Freedom (1982) and Urbanization Without Cities (1987). In the late 1990s he became disenchanted with what he saw as an increasingly apolitical “lifestylism” of the contemporary anarchist movement, stopped referring to himself as an anarchist, and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism, which seeks to reconcile Marxist and anarchist thought.[5][6]
Bookchin was born in New York City to RussianJewish immigrants[7][8] Nathan Bookchin and Rose (Kaluskaya) Bookchin. He grew up in the Bronx, where his grandmother, Zeitel, a Socialist Revolutionary, imbued him with Russian populist ideas. After her death in 1930, he joined the Young Pioneers, the Communist youth organization (for children 9 to 14)[9] and the Young Communist League (for older children) in 1935. He attended the Workers School near Union Square, where he studied Marxism. In the late 1930s he broke with Stalinism and gravitated toward Trotskyism, joining the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In the early 1940s he worked in a foundry in Bayonne, New Jersey where he was an organizer and shop steward for the United Electrical Workers as well as a recruiter for the SWP. Within the SWP he adhered to the Goldman-Morrow faction, which broke away after the war ended. He was an auto worker and UAW member at the time of the great General Motors strike of 1945-46. In 1949, while speaking to a Zionist youth organization at City College, Bookchin met a mathematics student, Beatrice Appelstein, whom he married in 1951.[10] They were married for 12 years and lived together for 35, remaining close friends and political allies for the rest of his life. They had two children, Debbie and Joseph.[11]
From 1947, he collaborated with a fellow lapsed Trotskyist, the German expatriate Josef Weber, in New York in the Movement for a Democracy of Content, a group of 20 or so post-Trotskyists who collectively edited the periodical Contemporary Issues – A Magazine for a Democracy of Content. Contemporary Issues embraced utopianism. The periodical provided a forum for the belief that previous attempts to create utopia had foundered on the necessity of toil and drudgery; but now modern technology had obviated the need for human toil, a liberatory development. To achieve this “post-scarcity” society, Bookchin developed a theory of ecological decentralism. The magazine published Bookchin’s first articles, including the pathbreaking “The Problem of Chemicals in Food” (1952). In 1958, Bookchin defined himself as an anarchist,[9] seeing parallels between anarchism and ecology. His first book, Our Synthetic Environment, was published under the pseudonym Lewis Herber in 1962, a few months before Rachel Carson‘s Silent Spring.[12][13] The book described a broad range of environmental ills but received little attention because of its political radicalism.
In 1964, Bookchin joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and protested racism at the 1964 World’s Fair. During 1964-67, while living on Manhattan‘s Lower East Side, he cofounded and was the principal figure in the New York Federation of Anarchists. His groundbreaking essay “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” introduced ecology as a concept in radical politics.[14] In 1968, he founded another group that published the influential Anarchos magazine, which published that and other innovative essays on post-scarcity and on ecological technologies such as solar and wind energy, and on decentralization and miniaturization. Lecturing throughout the United States, he helped popularize the concept of ecology to the counterculture. His widely republished 1969 essay “Listen, Marxist!”[15] warned Students for a Democratic Society (in vain) against an impending takeover by a Marxist group. “Once again the dead are walking in our midst,” he wrote, “ironically, draped in the name of Marx, the man who tried to bury the dead of the nineteenth century. So the revolution of our own day can do nothing better than parody, in turn, the October Revolution of 1917 and the civil war of 1918-1920, with its ‘class line,’ its Bolshevik Party, its ‘proletarian dictatorship,’ its puritanical morality, and even its slogan, ‘Soviet power'”.[16] These and other influential 1960s essays are anthologized in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971).
In 1969-1970, he taught at Alternate U, a counter-cultural radical school based on 14th Street in Manhattan. In 1971, he moved to Burlington, Vermont, with a group of friends, to put into practice his ideas of decentralization. In the fall of 1973, he was hired by Goddard College to lecture on technology; his lectures led to a teaching position and to the creation of the Social Ecology Studies program in 1974 and the Institute for Social Ecology soon thereafter, of which he became the director. In 1974, he was hired by Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey, where he quickly became a full professor. The ISE was a hub for experimentation and study of appropriate technology in the 1970s. In 1977-78 he was a member of the Spruce Mountain Affinity Group of the Clamshell Alliance. Also in 1977, he published The Spanish Anarchists, a history of the Spanish anarchist movement up to the revolution of 1936. During this period, Bookchin forged some ties with the nascent libertarian movement. “He spoke at a Libertarian Party convention and contributed to a newsletter edited by Karl Hess. In 1976, he told a Libertarian activist that ‘If I were a voting man, I’d vote for MacBride’ — LP nominee Roger MacBride, that is.”[16] Bookchin’s affiliations to libertarianism during this period reflect his disillusionment with the authoritarianism of Marxist-Leninists, resulting in him stating in a 1979 interview with Jeff Riggenbach that he felt closer to free-market libertarians who defend the rights of the individual than he did to “the totalitarian liberals and Marxist-Leninists of today.”[17] Nevertheless, Bookchin rejected the types of libertarianism that advocated unconstrained individualism.[18]
In From Urbanization to Cities (published in 1987 as The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship), Bookchin traced the democratic traditions that influenced his political philosophy and defined the implementation of the libertarian municipalism concept. A few years later, The Politics of Social Ecology, written by his partner of 19 years, Janet Biehl, briefly summarized these ideas.
In 1988, Murray Bookchin and Howie Hawkins founded the Left Green Network “as a radical alternative to U.S. Green liberals”, based around the principles of social ecology and libertarian municipalism.[19]
In 1995, Bookchin lamented the decline of American anarchism into primitivism, anti-technologism, neo-situationism, individual self-expression, and “ad hoc adventurism,” at the expense of forming a social movement. Arthur Verslius said, “Bookchin … describes himself as a ‘social anarchist‘ because he looks forward to a (gentle) societal revolution. … Bookchin has lit out after those whom he terms ‘lifestyle anarchists.'”[20] The publication of Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism in 1995, criticizing this tendency, was startling to anarchists. Thereafter Bookchin concluded that American anarchism was essentially individualistic and broke with anarchism publicly in 1999. He placed his ideas into a new political ideology: Communalism (spelled with a capital “C” to differentiate it from other forms of communalism), a form of libertarian socialism that retains his ideas about assembly democracy and the necessity of decentralization of settlement, power/money/influence, agriculture, manufacturing, etc.
In addition to his political writings, Bookchin wrote extensively on philosophy, calling his ideas dialectical naturalism.[2]:31 The dialectical writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, which articulate a developmental philosophy of change and growth, seemed to him to lend themselves to an organic, even ecological approach.[2]:96-97 Although Hegel “exercised a considerable influence” on Bookchin, he was not, in any sense, a Hegelian.[21] His philosophical writings emphasize humanism, rationality, and the ideals of the Enlightenment.[22][23] His last major published work was The Third Revolution, a four-volume history of the libertarian movements in European and American revolutions.
He continued to teach at the ISE until 2004. Bookchin died of congestive heart failure on July 30, 2006, at his home in Burlington at the age of 85.[24]
General sociological and psychological views[edit]
Bookchin was critical of class-centered analysis of Marxism and simplistic anti-state forms of libertarianism and liberalism and wished to present what he saw as a more complex view of societies. In The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, he says that:
My use of the word hierarchy in the subtitle of this work is meant to be provocative. There is a strong theoretical need to contrast hierarchy with the more widespread use of the words class and State; careless use of these terms can produce a dangerous simplification of social reality. To use the words hierarchy, class, and State interchangeably, as many social theorists do, is insidious and obscurantist. This practice, in the name of a “classless” or “libertarian” society, could easily conceal the existence of hierarchical relationships and a hierarchical sensibility, both of which-even in the absence of economic exploitation or political coercion-would serve to perpetuate unfreedom.[25]
Bookchin also points to an accumulation of hierarchical systems throughout history that has occurred up to contemporary societies which tends to determine the human collective and individual psyche:
The objective history of the social structure becomes internalized as a subjective history of the psychic structure. Heinous as my view may be to modern Freudians, it is not the discipline of work but the discipline of rule that demands the repression of internal nature. This repression then extends outward to external nature as a mere object of rule and later of exploitation. This mentality permeates our individual psyches in a cumulative form up to the present day-not merely as capitalism but as the vast history of hierarchical society from its inception.[26]
Bookchin rejected Barry Commoner‘s belief that the environmental crisis could be traced to technological choices, Paul Ehrlich‘s views that it could be traced to overpopulation, or the even more pessimistic view that traces this crisis to human nature. Rather, Bookchin felt that our environmental predicament is the result of the cancerous logic of capitalism, a system aimed at maximizing profit instead of enriching human lives: “By the very logic of its grow-or-die imperative, capitalism may well be producing ecological crises that gravely imperil the integrity of life on this planet.”
The solution to this crisis, he said, is not a return to hunter-gatherer societies, which Bookchin characterized as xenophobic and war-like. Bookchin likewise opposed “a politics of mere protest, lacking programmatic content, a proposed alternative, and a movement to give people direction and continuity.”[27] We need
“a constant awareness that a given society’s irrationality is deep seated, that its serious pathologies are not isolated problems that can be cured piecemeal but must be solved by sweeping changes in the often hidden sources of crisis and suffering—that awareness alone is what can hold a movement together, give it continuity, preserve its message and organization beyond a given generation, and expand its ability to deal with new issues and developments.”[27]
The answer then lies in Communalism, a system encompassing a directly democratic political organization anchored in loosely confederated popular assemblies, decentralization of power, absence of domination of any kind, and replacing capitalism with human-centered forms of production.[27]
In the history of political ecology, social ecology is not a movement but a theory primarily associated with Bookchin and elaborated over his body of work.[28] He presents a utopian philosophy of human evolution that combines the nature of biology and society into a third “thinking nature” beyond biochemistry and physiology, which he argues is a more complete, conscious, ethical, and rational nature. Humanity, by this line of thought, is the latest development from the long history of organic development on Earth. Bookchin’s social ecology proposes ethical principles for replacing a society’s propensity for hierarchy and domination with that of democracy and freedom.[29]
Bookchin wrote about the effects of urbanization on human life in the early 1960s during his participation in the civil rights and related social movements. Bookchin then began to pursue the connection between ecological and social issues, culminating with his best-known book, The Ecology of Freedom, which he had developed over a decade.[30] His argument, that human domination and destruction of nature follows from social domination between humans, was a breakthrough position in the growing field of ecology. Life develops from self-organization and evolutionary cooperation (symbiosis).[31] Bookchin writes of preliterate societies organized around mutual need but ultimately overrun by institutions of hierarchy and domination, such as city-states and capitalist economies, which he attributes uniquely to societies of humans and not communities of animals.[32] He proposes confederation between communities of humans run through democracy rather than through administrative logistics.[33]
Starting in the 1970s, Bookchin argued that the arena for libertarian social change should be the municipal level. In “The Next Revolution”, Bookchin stresses the link that libertarian municipalism has with his earlier philosophy of social ecology. He writes:
“Libertarian Municipalism constitutes the politics of social ecology, a revolutionary effort in which freedom is given institutional form in public assemblies that become decision-making bodies.”[34]
Bookchin proposes that these institutional forms must take place within differently scaled local areas. In a 2001 interview he summarized his views this way: “The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality—the city, town, and village—where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy.”[35] In 1980 Bookchin used the term “libertarian municipalism”, to describe a system in which libertarian institutions of directly democratic assemblies would oppose and replace the state with a confederation of free municipalities.[36] Libertarian municipalism intends to create a situation in which the two powers—the municipal confederations and the nation-state—cannot coexist.[35] Its supporters—Communalists—believe it to be the means to achieve a rational society, and its structure becomes the organization of society.
Though Bookchin, by his own recognition, failed to win over a substantial body of supporters during his own lifetime, his ideas have nonetheless influenced movements and thinkers across the globe.
Among these are the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and closely aligned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, which have fought the Turkish state since the 1980s to try to secure greater political and cultural rights for the country’s Kurds. The PKK is designated as a terrorist organization by the Turkish and United States governments, while the YPG has been considered an ally of the US against ISIS.[37][38] Though founded on a rigid Marxist–Leninist ideology, the PKK has seen a shift in its thought and aims since the capture and imprisonment of its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, in 1999. Öcalan began reading a variety of post-Marxist political theory while in prison, and found particular interest in Bookchin’s works.[39][40]
Öcalan attempted in early 2004 to arrange a meeting with Bookchin through his lawyers, describing himself as Bookchin’s “student” eager to adapt his thought to Middle Eastern society. Bookchin was too ill to accept the request. In May 2004 Bookchin conveyed this message “My hope is that the Kurdish people will one day be able to establish a free, rational society that will allow their brilliance once again to flourish. They are fortunate indeed to have a leader of Mr. Öcalan’s talents to guide them”. When Bookchin died in 2006, the PKK hailed the American thinker as “one of the greatest social scientists of the 20th century”, and vowed to put his theory into practice.[39]
“Democratic Confederalism”, the variation on Communalism developed by Öcalan in his writings and adopted by the PKK, does not outwardly seek Kurdish rights within the context of the formation of an independent state separate from Turkey. The PKK claims that this project is not envisioned as being only for Kurds, but rather for all peoples of the region, regardless of their ethnic, national, or religious background. Rather, it promulgates the formation of assemblies and organisations beginning at the grassroots level to enact its ideals in a non-state framework beginning at the local level. It also places a particular emphasis on securing and promoting women’s rights.[39] The PKK has had some success in implementing its programme, through organisations such as the Democratic Society Congress (DTK), which coordinates political and social activities within Turkey, and the Koma Civakên Kurdistan (KCK), which does so across all countries where Kurds live.[41]
^ Bookchin, Murray. “The Future of the Left,” The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy. New York: Verso Books, 2015. pp. 157-8.
^ Murray Bookchin. The Ecology of Freedom: the emergence and dissolution of Hierarchy. CHESHIRE BOOKS. Palo Alto. 1982. Pg. 3
^ Murray Bookchin. The Ecology of Freedom: the emergence and dissolution of Hierarchy. CHESHIRE BOOKS. Palo Alto. 1982. Pg. 8
^ Jump up to:abcd Bookchin, Murray (2015). Bookchin, Debbie; Taylor, Blair (eds.). The next revolution: Popular assemblies and the promise of direct democracy (with a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin). London: Verso. ISBN978-1-78168-581-5.
^ Murray Bookchin (2015), The Next Revolution, London, Verso Press, p. 96
^ Jump up to:ab Murray Bookchin, interview by David Vanek (October 1, 2001) Harbinger, a Journal of Social Ecology, Vol. 2 No. 1. Institute for Social Ecology.
Selva Varengo, La rivoluzione ecologica. Il pensiero libertario di Murray Bookchin (2007) Milano: Zero in condotta. ISBN978-88-95950-00-6.
E. Castano, Ecologia e potere. Un saggio su Murray Bookchin, Mimesis, Milano 2011 ISBN978-88-575-0501-5.
Damian F. White ‘Bookchin – A Critical Appraisal’. Pluto Press (UK/Europe), University of Michigan Press. ISBN978-0-7453-1965-0 (HBK); 9780745319643 (pbk).
Andrew Light, ed., Social Ecology after Bookchin (Guilfor, 1998) ISBN1-57230-379-4.
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (/ˈwɔːlərstiːn/;[4] September 28, 1930 – August 31, 2019) was an Americansociologist and economic historian. He is perhaps best known for his development of the general approach in sociology which led to the emergence of his world-systems approach.[5] He was a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University from 2000 until his death in 2019, and published bimonthly syndicated commentaries through Agence Global on world affairs from October 1998 to July 2019.[6][7]
His parents, Sara Günsberg (born in 1895) and Menachem Lazar Wallerstein (born in 1890), were Polish Jews and both came from Galicia. Because of World War I they moved to Berlin, where they married in 1919. Two years later, Sara gave birth to their first son, Solomon. In 1923, the Wallerstein family emigrated to New York, where Immanuel was born.[9] On the “list of alien passengers for the United States” at the time of his family’s emigration, the nationality of his mother and brother was described as Polish.[9]
From 1951 to 1953 Wallerstein served in the U.S. Army.[3] After his discharge from military service, he wrote his master’s thesis on McCarthyism as a phenomenon of American political culture; the widely cited work, as Wallerstein himself later stated, “confirmed my sense that I should consider myself, in the language of the 1950s, a ‘political sociologist'”.[3] Eleven years later, on May 25, 1964, he married Beatrice Friedman; the couple had three children and 5 grandchildren.[10]
Wallerstein’s academic and professional career began at Columbia University, where he started as an instructor and later became an associate professor of sociology from 1958 to 1971.[10] During his time there he became a prominent supporter of the students during the Columbia University protests of 1968.[11] In 1971 he moved from New York to Montreal, where he taught at McGill University for five years.[10]
Originally, Wallerstein’s prime area of intellectual concern was not American politics, but politics of the non-European world, most especially in India and Africa.[3] For two decades Wallerstein researched Africa, publishing numerous books and articles,[3] and in 1973 he became president of the African Studies Association.[12]
In 1976 Wallerstein was offered the unique opportunity to pursue a new avenue of research, and so became head of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilization at Binghamton University in New York,[13] which has a mission “to engage in the analysis of large-scale social change over long periods of historical time”.[14] The Center opened with the publishing support of a new journal, Review,[10] (of which Wallerstein was the founding editor), and would go on to produce a body of work that “went a long way toward invigorating sociology and its sister disciplines, especially history and political-economy“.[10] Wallerstein would serve as a distinguished professor of sociology at Binghamton until his retirement in 1999.[15]
Wallerstein began as an expert of post-colonial African affairs, which he selected as the focus of his studies after attending international youth conferences in 1951 and 1952.[22] His publications were almost exclusively devoted to this until the early 1970s, when he began to distinguish himself as a historian and theorist of the global capitalisteconomy on a macroscopic level. His early criticism of global capitalism and championship of “anti-systemic movements” made him an éminence grise with the anti-globalization movement within and outside of the academic community, along with Noam Chomsky and Pierre Bourdieu.
His most important work, The Modern World-System, appeared in four volumes between 1974 and 2011.[23] In it, Wallerstein drew on several intellectual influences:
Karl Marx, whom he followed in emphasizing underlying economic factors and their dominance over ideological factors in global politics, and whose economic thinking he adopted with such ideas as the dichotomy between capital and labor. He also criticized the traditional Marxian view of world economic development through stages such as feudalism and capitalism, and its belief in the accumulation of capital, dialectics, and more;
Dependency theory, most obviously its concepts of “core” and “periphery”.
However, Wallerstein categorized Frantz Fanon, Fernand Braudel, and Ilya Prigogine as the three individuals that had the greatest impact “in modifying my line of argument (as opposed to deepening a parallel line of argument).”[3] In The Essential Wallerstein, he chronologically lists the three individuals and described their influence on his views:
Frantz Fanon: “Fanon represented for me the expression of the insistence by those disenfranchised by the modern world‑system that they have a voice, a vision, and a claim not merely to justice but to intellectual valuation.”[3]
Fernand Braudel: who had described the development and political implications of extensive networks of economic exchange in the European world between 1400 and 1800, “more than anyone else made me conscious of the central importance of the social construction of time and space and its impact on our analyses.”[3]
Ilya Prigogine: “Prigogine forced me to face the implications of a world in which certainties did not exist – but knowledge still did.”[3]
Wallerstein also stated that another major influence on his work was the “world revolution” of 1968. He was on the faculty of Columbia University at the time of the student uprising there, and participated in a faculty committee that attempted to resolve the dispute. He argued in several works that this revolution marked the end of “liberalism” as a viable ideology in the modern world system. He also argued that the end of the Cold War, rather than marking a triumph for liberalism, indicates that the current system has entered its ‘end’ phase; a period of crisis that will end only when it is replaced by another system.[24] Wallerstein anticipated the growing importance of the North–South divide at a time when the main world conflict was the Cold War..[citation needed]
He argued since 1980 that the United States is a “hegemon in decline”. He was often mocked for making this claim during the 1990s,[citation needed] but since the Iraq War this argument has become more widespread. Overall, Wallerstein saw the development of the capitalist world economy as detrimental to a large proportion of the world’s population.[25] Like Marx, Wallerstein predicted that capitalism will be replaced by a socialist economy.[26]
Wallerstein both participated in and wrote about the World Social Forum.
Wallerstein’s first volume on world-systems theory (The Modern World System, 1974) was predominantly written during a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (now affiliated with Stanford University).[5] In it, he argues that the modern world system is distinguished from empires by its reliance on economic control of the world order by a dominating capitalist center (core) in systemic economic and political relation to peripheral and semi-peripheral world areas.[27]
Wallerstein rejected the notion of a “Third World“, claiming that there is only one world connected by a complex network of economic exchange relationships — i.e., a “world-economy” or “world-system” in which the “dichotomy of capital and labor” and the endless “accumulation of capital” by competing agents (historically including, but not limited, to nation-states) account for frictions.[28] This approach is known as the world-system theory.
Wallerstein located the origin of the modern world-system in 16th-century Western Europe and the Americas. An initially slight advance in capital accumulation in Britain, the Dutch Republic, and France, due to specific political circumstances at the end of the period of feudalism, set in motion a process of gradual expansion. As a result, only one global network or system of economic exchange exists in modern society. By the 19th century, virtually every area on earth was incorporated into the capitalist world-economy.
The capitalist world-system is far from homogeneous in cultural, political, and economic terms; instead, it is characterized by fundamental differences in social development, accumulation of political power, and capital. Contrary to affirmative theories of modernization and capitalism, Wallerstein did not conceive of these differences as mere residues or irregularities that can and will be overcome as the system evolves.
A lasting division of the world into core, semi-periphery, and periphery is an inherent feature of world-system theory. Other theories, partially drawn on by Wallerstein, leave out the semi-periphery and do not allow for a grayscale of development.[28] Areas which have so far remained outside the reach of the world-system enter it at the stage of “periphery”. There is a fundamental and institutionally stabilized “division of labor” between core and periphery: while the core has a high level of technological development and manufactures complex products, the role of the periphery is to supply raw materials, agricultural products, and cheap labor for the expanding agents of the core. Economic exchange between core and periphery takes place on unequal terms: the periphery is forced to sell its products at low prices, but has to buy the core’s products at comparatively high prices. Once established, this unequal state tends to stabilize itself due to inherent, quasi-deterministic constraints. The statuses of core and periphery are not exclusive and fixed geographically, but are relative to each other. A zone defined as “semi-periphery” acts as a periphery to the core and as a core to the periphery. At the end of the 20th century, this zone would comprise Eastern Europe, China, Brazil, and Mexico. It is important to note that core and peripheral zones can co-exist in the same location.
One effect of the expansion of the world-system is the commodification of things, including human labor. Natural resources, land, labor, and human relationships are gradually being stripped of their “intrinsic” value and turned into commodities in a market which dictates their exchange value.
In the last two decades of his life, Wallerstein increasingly focused on the intellectual foundations of the modern world-system and the pursuit of universal theories of human behavior. In addition, he showed interest in the “structures of knowledge” defined by the disciplinary division between sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and the humanities, which he himself regarded as Eurocentric. In analyzing them, he was highly influenced by the “new sciences” of theorists like Ilya Prigogine.
Wallerstein’s theory provoked harsh criticism, not only from neo-liberal or conservative circles, but even from some historians who say that some of his assertions may be historically incorrect. Some critics suggest that Wallerstein tended to neglect the cultural dimension of the modern world-system, arguing that there is a world system of global culture which is independent from the economic processes of capitalism;[29] this reduces it to what some call “official” ideologies of states which can then easily be revealed as mere agencies of economic interest. Nevertheless, his analytical approach, along with that of associated theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank, Terence Hopkins, Samir Amin, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Thomas D. Hall and Giovanni Arrighi, has made a significant impact on the field and has established an institutional base devoted to the general approach of intellectual inquiry. Their ideology has also attracted strong interest from the anti-globalization movement.
Capitalist world-system Wallerstein’s definition follows dependency theory, which intended to combine the developments of the different societies since the 16th century in different regions into one collective development. The main characteristic of his definition is the development of a global division of labour, including the existence of independent political units (in this case, states) at the same time. There is no political center, compared to global empires like the Roman Empire; instead, the capitalist world-system is identified by the global market economy. It is divided into core, semi-periphery, and periphery regions, and is ruled by the capitalist mode of production.
Core/periphery Defines the difference between developed and developing countries, characterized e.g. by power or wealth. The core refers to developed countries, the periphery to the dependent developing countries. The main reason for the position of the developed countries is economic power.
Semi-periphery Defines states that are located between core and periphery, and who benefit from the periphery through unequal exchange relations. At the same time, the core benefits from the semi-periphery through unequal exchange relations.
Quasi-monopolies Defines a kind of monopoly where there is more than one service provider for a particular good/service. Wallerstein claims that quasi-monopolies are self-liquidating because new sellers go into the market by exerting political pressure to open markets to competition.[30]
Kondratiev waves A Kondratiev wave is defined as a cyclical tendency in the world’s economy. It is also known as a supercycle. Wallerstein argues that global wars are tied to Kondratiev waves. According to him, global conflicts occur as the summer phase of a wave begins, which is when production of goods and services around the world are on an upswing.[31]
^ Jump up to:ab Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice (1959). The Emergence of Two West African Nations: Ghana and the Ivory Coast (Dissertation). ProQuest LLC. ProQuest301893682.
^ Jump up to:ab “Wallerstein, Immanuel (1930- ).” The AZ Guide to Modern Social and Political Theorists. Ed. Noel Parker and Stuart Sim. Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997. 372-76. Print.
^ Jump up to:abcdef Sica, Alan. 2005. “Immanuel Wallerstein”. Pp. 734-739 in Social Thought: from the Enlightenment to the present. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
^ Ed. Lemert, Charles. 2010. “Immanuel Wallerstein.” Pp. 398-405 in Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classical Readings. Westview Press.
^ Lemert, edited with commentaries by Charles (2010). Social theory : the multicultural and classic readings (4th ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ISBN9780813343921.
^ Ed. Parker, Noel and Stuart Sim. 1997. “Wallerstein, Immanuel (1930- ).” Pp. 372-76 in The AZ Guide to Modern Social and Political Theorists. Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf.
^ Wallerstein, I. 2000. The Essential Wallerstein. New York, NY: The New Press.
^ Williams, Gregory. P. 2013. Special Contribution: Interview with Immanuel Wallerstein Retrospective on the Origins of World-Systems Analysis. Journal of World-Systems Research 19(2): 202-210.
^ Baylis, John (2011). The Globalization of World Politics. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-956909-0.
^ Ed. Lemert, Charles. 2010. “Immanuel Wallerstein.” Pp. 398-405 in Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classical Readings. Westview Press.
^ Jump up to:ab So, Alvin Y. (1990). Social Change and Development: Modernization, Dependency, and World-Systems Theory. Newbury Park, London: Sage Publications. pp. 169–199.
^ Abercrombie, Nicholas, Hill, Stephen, and Bryan Turner. 2006. Dictionary of Sociology. 6th ed. London, England: Penguin Books Ltd.
Kenneth, A. “Contemporary social and sociological theory: visualizing social worlds”. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2006.
Brewer, A., Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical survey, London: Macmillan, 1990.
Frank, A.G. and B. Gills (eds), The World System: 500 years or 5000?, London: Routledge, 1993.
Hout, W., Capitalism and the Third World: Development, dependence and the world system, Hants: Edward Elgar, 1993.
Sanderson, S., Civilizations and World Systems, London: Sage, 1955.
Shannon, T., An Introduction to the World-System Perspective, Oxford: Westview Press, 1989.
Wallerstein, I., The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press, 1974.
“Global Africa: Liberation Movements Since 1945” – Sept. 24, 2008, dialogue between Immanuel Wallerstein, Walter Turner, and Will Grant at CounterPULSE, part of the ongoing Shaping San Francisco Talks series
KPFA Radio Interview – Nov. 12, 2008, Immanuel Wallerstein comments on the structural constraints faced by Obama and the current economic crisis
Öcalan was arrested in 1999 by the Turkish National Intelligence Agency (MIT) with the support of the CIA in Nairobi and taken to Turkey, where he was sentenced to death under Article 125 of the Turkish Penal Code, which concerns the formation of armed organisations.[15][16][17][18]
The sentence was commuted to aggravated life imprisonment when Turkey abolished the death penalty in support of its bid to be admitted to membership in the European Union. From 1999 until 2009, he was the sole prisoner[19] on İmralı island, in the Sea of Marmara.[20][21] Öcalan now argues that the period of armed warfare is past and a political solution to the Kurdish question should be developed.[22] The conflict between Turkey and the PKK has resulted in over 40,000 deaths, including PKK members, the Turkish military, and civilians, both Kurdish and Turkish.[23]
From prison, Öcalan has published several books, the most recent in 2015. Jineology, also known as the science of women, is a form of feminism advocated by Öcalan[24] and subsequently a fundamental tenet of the Apoist movement.[25]
Öcalan was born in Ömerli,[26] a village in Halfeti, Şanlıurfa Province in eastern Turkey.[27] While some sources report his birthday as being 4 April 1948, no official birth records for him exist, and he himself claims not to know exactly when he was born, estimating the year to be 1946 or 1947.[28] He is the oldest of seven children.[29] According to some sources, Öcalan’s grandmother was an ethnic Turk and (he once claimed that) his mother was also an ethnic Turk.[30][31] According to Amikam Nachmani, lecturer at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel, Öcalan did not know Kurdish when he met him in 1991. Nachmani: “He [Öcalan] told me that he speaks Turkish, gives orders in Turkish, and thinks in Turkish.”[32]
Öcalan’s brother Osman became a PKK commander, serving until defecting with several others to establish the Patriotic and Democratic Party of Kurdistan.[33] His other brother, Mehmet Öcalan, is a member of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP).[34] Dilek Öcalan, a former parliamentarian of the HDP is his niece.[35] Ömer Öcalan, current member of parliament for the HDP is his nephew.[36][37]
Education and early political and revolutionary activity[edit]
After graduating from a vocational high school in Ankara (Turkish: Ankara Tapu-Kadastro Meslek Lisesi), Öcalan started working at the Diyarbakir Title Deeds Office. He was relocated one month later to Bakırköy, Istanbul. Later, he entered the Istanbul Law Faculty but transferred after the first year to Ankara University to study political science.[38] His return to Ankara (normally impossible given his situation[notes 1]) was facilitated by the state in order to divide a militant group, Dev-Genç (Revolutionary Youth Federation of Turkey), of which Öcalan at the time was a member. President Süleyman Demirel later regretted this decision, since the PKK was to become a much greater threat to the state than Dev-Genç.[39] In 1972 he was detained due to a participation in a protest held against the killing of Mahir Çayan. For 7 months he was held at Mamak Prison.[40] In November 1973 the Ankara Democratic Association of Higher Education, (Ankara Demokratik Yüksek Öğrenim Demeği,ADYÖD) was founded and shortly after he was elected to join its board.[41] In December 1974 ADYÖD was closed down.[42]
In 1978, in the midst of the right- and left-wing conflicts which culminated in the 1980 Turkish coup d’état, Öcalan founded the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which launched a war against the Turkish government in order to set up an independent Kurdish state.[26][43] In July 1979 he fled to Syria, where he remained until October 1998, when the Syrian government expelled him.[44]
PKK leader Öcalan allegedly used this Cypriot passport to enter Kenya where he was taken in and protected by the Greek embassy.Öcalan on trial in 1999
Until 1998, Öcalan was based in Syria. On at least one occasion, in 1993, he was detained and held by Syria’s General Intelligence Directorate but later released.[55] As the situation deteriorated in Turkey, the Turkish government openly threatened Syria over its support for the PKK.[56] As a result, the Syrian government forced Öcalan to leave the country but did not turn him over to the Turkish authorities. Öcalan went to Russia first and from there moved to various countries, including Italy and Greece. In 1998 the Turkish government requested the extradition of Öcalan from Italy.[57][dead link] He was at that time defended by Britta Böhler, a high-profile German attorney who argued that he fought a legitimate struggle against the oppression of ethnic Kurds.
Speaking to Can Dündar on NTV Turkey, the Deputy Undersecretary of the Turkish National Intelligence Organization, Cevat Öneş, said that Öcalan impeded American aspirations of establishing a separate Kurdish state. The Americans transferred him to the Turkish authorities, who flew him back to Turkey for trial.[60] His capture led thousands of Kurds to protest at Greek and Israeli embassies around the world. Kurds living in Germany were threatened with deportation if they continued to hold demonstrations in support of Öcalan. The warning came after three Kurds were killed and 16 injured during the 1999 attack on the Israeli consulate in Berlin.[61][62]
After his capture, Öcalan was held in solitary confinement as the only prisoner on İmralı island in the Sea of Marmara. Although former prisoners at İmralı were transferred to other prisons, more than 1,000 Turkish military personnel were stationed on the island to guard him. A state security court consisting of three military judges was convened on the island to try him. Öcalan was charged with treason and separatism and sentenced to death on 29 June 1999.[63] He was also banned from holding public office for life.[64] In January 2000 the Turkish government declared the death sentence was delayed until European Court of Human Rights EU reviewed the verdict.[65] Upon the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey in August 2002,[66] in October of that year, the security court commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.[67] The Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP) may have aided this case’s decision.[68]
Following the commutation, Öcalan remained imprisoned on İmralı, and was the sole inmate there. In November 2009, Turkish authorities announced that Öcalan would be relocated to a new prison on the island and that they were ending his solitary confinement by transferring several other PKK prisoners to İmralı. They said that Öcalan would be allowed to see them for ten hours a week. The new prison was built after the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture visited the island and objected to the conditions in which he was being held.[69][70]
In 2005, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Turkey had violated articles 3, 5, and 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights by refusing to allow Öcalan to appeal his arrest and by sentencing him to death without a fair trial.[71] Öcalan’s request for a retrial was refused by Turkish courts.[72]
From 27 July 2011 until the 2 May 2019 his lawyers have not been allowed to see Abdullah Öcalan.[73] From July 2011 until December 2017 his lawyers filed more than 700 appeals for visits, but all were rejected.[74] There are regular demonstrations held by the Kurdish community to raise awareness of the isolation of Öcalan.[75] In October 2012 several hundred Kurdish political prisoners went on hunger strike for better detention conditions for Öcalan and the right to use the Kurdish language in education and jurisprudence. The hunger strike lasted 68 days until Öcalan demanded its end.[76] Öcalan was banned from receiving visits almost two years from 6 October 2014 until 11 September 2016, when his brother Mehmet Öcalan visited him for Eid al-Adha.[77] On 6 September 2018 visits from lawyers were banned for six months due to former punishments he received in the years 2005-2009, the fact that the lawyers made their conversations with Ocalan public, and the impression that Öcalan was leading the PKK through communications with his lawyers.[73] He was again banned from receiving visits until 12 January 2019 when his brother was permitted to visit him a second time. His brother said his health was good.[78] The ban on the visitation of his lawyers was lifted in April 2019, and Öcalan saw his lawyers on 2 May 2019.[73]
Legal prosecution of sympathizers of Abdullah Öcalan[edit]
In 2008, the Justice Minister of Turkey, Mehmet Ali Sahin, said that between 2006 and 2007, 949 people were convicted and more than 7,000 people prosecuted for calling Öcalan “esteemed” (Sayın).[79]
In 1993, upon request of Turkish president Turgut Özal, Öcalan Jalal Talabani for negotiations following which Öcalan declared a unilateral cease fire which had a duration from 20 March to the 15 April.[80][81] Later he prolonged it in order to enable negotiations. Soon after Özal died on 17 April 1993,[82] the initiative was halted by Turkey on the grounds that Turkey did not negotiate with terrorists.[80] After his capture, Öcalan called for a halt in PKK attacks, and he has advocated a peaceful solution to the Kurdish conflict inside the borders of Turkey.[83][84][85][86][87] Öcalan called for the foundation of a “Truth and Justice Commission” by Kurdish institutions in order to investigate war crimes committed by both the PKK and Turkish security forces. A similar structure began functioning in May 2006.[88] In March 2005, Öcalan issued the Declaration of Democratic confederalism in Kurdistan[89] calling for a border-free confederation between the Kurdish regions of Southeastern Turkey (called “Northern Kurdistan” by Kurds[90]), Northeast Syria (“Western Kurdistan“), Northern Iraq (“South Kurdistan“), and Northwestern Iran (“East Kurdistan“). In this zone, three bodies of law would be implemented: EU law, Turkish/Syrian/Iraqi/Iranian law and Kurdish law. This proposal was adopted by the PKK programme following the “Refoundation Congress” in April 2005.[91]
Öcalan had his lawyer, Ibrahim Bilmez,[92] release a statement on 28 September 2006 calling on the PKK to declare a ceasefire and seek peace with Turkey. Öcalan’s statement said, “The PKK should not use weapons unless it is attacked with the aim of annihilation,” and “it is very important to build a democratic union between Turks and Kurds. With this process, the way to democratic dialogue will be also opened”.[93]
On 31 May 2010, however, Öcalan said he was abandoning the ongoing dialogue with Turkey, as “this process is no longer meaningful or useful”. Öcalan stated that Turkey had ignored his three protocols for negotiation: (a) his terms of health and security, (b) his release, and (c) a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish issue in Turkey. Though the Turkish government had received Öcalan’s protocols, they were never released to the public. Öcalan said he would leave the top PKK commanders in charge of the conflict, but that this should not be misinterpreted as a call for the PKK to intensify its armed conflict with Turkey.[94][95]
In 2013, Öcalan initiated new peace negotiations. On 21 March of that year, Öcalan declared a ceasefire between the PKK and the Turkish state. Öcalan’s statement was read to hundreds of thousands of Kurds in Diyarbakir who had gathered to celebrate the Kurdish New Year. The statement said in part, “Let guns be silenced and politics dominate… a new door is being opened from the process of armed conflict to democratization and democratic politics. It’s not the end. It’s the start of a new era.”[96] Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomed the statement, and hope for a peaceful settlement was raised on both sides.
Soon after Öcalan’s declaration, the functional head of the PKK, Murat Karayılan responded by promising to implement a ceasefire, stating, “Everyone should know the PKK is as ready for peace as it is for war”.
Democratic confederalism is a “system of popularly elected administrative councils, allowing local communities to exercise autonomous control over their assets, while linking to other communities via a network of confederal councils.”[100] Decisions are made by communes in each neighborhood, village, or city. All are welcome to partake in the communal councils, but political participation is not mandated. There is no private property, but rather “ownership by use, which grants individuals usage rights to the buildings, land, and infrastructure, but not the right to sell and buy on the market or convert them to private enterprises.”[100] The economy is in the hands of the communal councils, and is thus (in the words of Bookchin) ‘neither collectivised nor privatised – it is common.’[100]Feminism, ecology, and direct democracy are essential in democratic confederalism.[101]
With his 2005 “Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in Kurdistan”, Öcalan advocated for a Kurdish implementation of Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom via municipal assemblies as a democratic confederation of Kurdish communities beyond the state borders of Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Öcalan promoted a platform of shared values: environmentalism, self-defense, gender equality, and a pluralistic tolerance for religion, politics, and culture. While some of his followers questioned Öcalan’s conversion from Marxism-Leninism, the PKK adopted Öcalan’s proposal and began to form assemblies.[102]
In early 2004, Öcalan attempted to arrange a meeting with Murray Bookchin through Öcalan’s lawyers, describing himself as Bookchin’s “student” eager to adapt Bookchin’s thought to Middle Eastern society. Bookchin was too ill to meet with Öcalan. In May 2004 Bookchin conveyed this message “My hope is that the Kurdish people will one day be able to establish a free, rational society that will allow their brilliance once again to flourish. They are fortunate indeed to have a leader of Mr. Öcalan’s talents to guide them”. When Bookchin died in 2006, the PKK hailed the American thinker as “one of the greatest social scientists of the 20th century” and vowed to put his theories into practice.[99]
Followers of Öcalan and members of the PKK are known by his diminutive name as Apocu (Apo-ites), and his movement is known as Apoculuk (Apoism).[103]
Öcalan is the author of more than 40 books, four of which were written in prison. Many of the notes taken from his weekly meetings with his lawyers have been edited and published.
Interviews and Speeches. London: Kurdistan Solidarity Committee; Kurdistan Information Centre, 1991. 46 p.
^ Normally, students can only transfer between like departments, otherwise the student must retake the university entrance exam. Moreover, Öcalan was awarded a scholarship by the Ministry of Finance, despite being ineligible due to his age, and the fact that he had participated in political demonstrations. He had also been tried and acquitted by a martial law court. The public prosecutor had asked for the harshest possible sentence.
^ Mango, Andrew (2005). Turkey and the War on Terror: ‘For Forty Years We Fought Alone’. Routledge: London. p. 32. ISBN978-0-203-68718-5. The most ruthless among them was Abdullah Öcalan, known as Apo (a diminutive for Abdullah; the word also means ‘uncle’ in Kurdish).
^ Jongerden, Joost (2007). The Settlement Issue in Turkey and the Kurds: An Analysis of Spatical Policies, Modernity and War. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. p. 57. ISBN9789004155572. In 1975 the group settled on a name, the Kurdistan Revolutionaries (Kurdistan Devrimcileri), but others knew them as Apocu, followers of Apo, the nickname of Abdullah Öcalan (apo is also Kurdish for uncle).
^ Powell, Colin (5 October 2001). “2001 Report on Foreign Terrorist Organizations”. Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Washington, DC: Bureau of Public Affairs, U.S. State Department. Retrieved 24 June2017.
^ Marlies Casier, Joost Jongerden, Nationalisms and Politics in Turkey: Political Islam, Kemalism and the Kurdish Issue, Taylor & Francis, 2010, p. 146.
^ Council of Europe, Parliamentary Assembly Documents 1999 Ordinary Session (fourth part, September 1999), Volume VII, Council of Europe, 1999, p. 18
^ Mag. Katharina Kirchmayer, The Case of the Isolation Regime of Abdullah Öcalan: A Violation of European Human Rights Law and Standards?, GRIN Verlag, 2010, p. 37
^“A Short Biography”. Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan / Kurdistan Workers Party. Archived from the original on 24 September 2015. Retrieved 2 February 2015.
^ Nevzat Cicek (31 July 2008). “‘Pilot Necati’ sivil istihbaratçıymış”. Taraf (in Turkish). Archived from the originalon 9 August 2008. Retrieved 4 January 2009. Abdullah Öcalan’ın İstanbul’dan Ankara’ya gelmesine keşke izin verilmeseydi. O zamanlar Dev-Genç’i bölmek için böyle bir yol izlendi… Kürt gençlerini Marksistler’in elinden kurtarmak ve Dev-Genç’in bölünmesi hedeflendi. Bunda başarılı olundu olunmasına ama Abdullah Öcalan yağdan kıl çeker gibi kaydı gitti. Keşke Tuzluçayır’da öldürülseydi!
^“Öcalan bağımsız devlete engeldi”. Vatan (in Turkish). 15 October 2008. Archived from the original on 18 October 2008. Retrieved 15 October 2008. Öcalan yakalandığında ABD, bağımsız bir devlet kurma isteğindeydi. Öcalan, konumu itibariyle, araç olma işlevi bakımından buna engel bir isimdi. ABD bölgede yeni bir Kürt devleti kurabilmek için Öcalan’ı Türkiye’ye teslim etti.
^ Jump up to:abNahost Jahrbuch 1993: Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in Nordafrika und dem Nahen und Mittleren Osten (in German). Springer-Verlag. 9 March 2013. p. 21. ISBN9783322959683.
^ Jump up to:abc Paul White, “Democratic Confederalism and the PKK’s Feminist Transformation,” in The PKK: Coming Down from the Mountains (London: Zed Books, 2015), pp. 126–149.
^ Öcalan, Abdullah (2011). Democratic Confederalism. London: Transmedia Publishing Ltd. p. 21. ISBN978-3-941012-47-9.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to navigationJump to searchNot to be confused with Paradise Papers.Countries with politicians, public officials or close associates implicated in the leak on April 15, 2016 (as of May 19, 2016)
The Panama Papers (Spanish: Papeles de Panamá) are 11.5 million leaked documents that detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities.[1][2] The documents, some dating back to the 1970s,[3] were created by, and taken from, Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca.[4]
The documents contain personal financial information about wealthy individuals and public officials that had previously been kept private.[5] While offshore business entities are legal (see Offshore Magic Circle), reporters found that some of the Mossack Fonseca shell corporations were used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions.[6]
“John Doe“, the whistleblower who leaked the documents to German journalist Bastian Obermayer[7][8] from the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), remains anonymous, even to the journalists who worked on the investigation. “My life is in danger”, he told them.[9] In a May 6, 2016, statement, John Doe cited income inequality as the reason for his action, and said he leaked the documents “simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described”. He added that he had never worked for any government or intelligence agency and expressed willingness to help prosecutors if granted immunity from prosecution. After SZ verified that the statement did in fact come from the source for the Panama Papers, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) posted the full document on its website.[10][11]
SZ asked the ICIJ for help because of the amount of data involved. Journalists from 107 media organizations in 80 countries analyzed documents detailing the operations of the law firm.[3] After more than a year of analysis, the first news stories were published on April 3, 2016, along with 150 of the documents themselves.[12] The project represents an important milestone in the use of data journalism software tools and mobile collaboration.
The documents were dubbed the Panama Papers because of the country they were leaked from, but the Panamanian government expressed strong objections to the name over concerns that it would tarnish the government’s and country’s image worldwide, as did other entities in Panama and elsewhere.[13] Some media outlets covering the story have used the name “Mossack Fonseca papers”.[14]
In addition to the much-covered business dealings of British prime minister David Cameron and Icelandic prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, the leaked documents also contain identity information about the shareholders and directors of 214,000 shell companies set up by Mossack Fonseca, as well as some of their financial transactions. It is generally not against the law (in and of itself) to own an offshore shell company, although offshore shell companies may sometimes be used for illegal purposes.
The journalists on the investigative team found business transactions by many important figures in world politics, sports and art. While many of the transactions were legal, since the data is incomplete, questions remain in many other cases; still others seem to clearly indicate ethical if not legal impropriety. Some disclosures – tax avoidance in very poor countries by very wealthy entities and individuals for example – lead to questions on moral grounds. According to The Namibian for instance, a shell company registered to Beny Steinmetz, Octea, owes more than $700,000 US in property taxes to the city of Koidu in Sierra Leone, and is $150 million in the red, even though its exports were more than twice that in an average month in the 2012–2015 period. Steinmetz himself has personal worth of $6 billion.[16]
Other offshore shell company transactions described in the documents do seem to have broken exchange laws, violated trade sanctions or stemmed from political corruption, according to ICIJ reporters. For example:
Ouestaf, an ICIJ partner in the investigation, reported that it had discovered new evidence that Karim Wade received payments from DP World (DP). He and a long-time friend were convicted of this in a trial that the United Nations and Amnesty International said was unfair and violated the defendants’ rights. The Ouestaf article does not address the conduct of the trial, but does say that Ouestaf journalists found Mossack Fonseca documents showing payments to Wade via a DP subsidiary and a shell company registered to the friend.[18]
Swiss lawyer Dieter Neupert has been accused of mishandling client funds and helping both oligarchs and the Qatari royal family to hide money.[19]
Named in the leak were 12 current or former world leaders; 128 other public officials and politicians; and hundreds of celebrities, businessmen, and other wealthy individuals of over 200 countries.[20]
Individuals and entities may open offshore accounts for any number of reasons, some of which are legal[21] but ethically questionable. A Canadian lawyer based in Dubai noted, for example, that businesses might wish to avoid falling under Islamic inheritance jurisprudence if an owner dies.[22] Businesses in some countries may wish to hold some of their funds in dollars also, said a Brazilian lawyer.[23]Estate planning is another example of legal tax avoidance.
American film-maker Stanley Kubrick had an estimated personal worth of $20 million when he died in 1999, much of it invested in an 18th-century English manor he bought in 1978. He lived in that manor for the rest of his life, filming scenes from The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut there as well. Three holding companies set up by Mossack Fonseca now own the property, and are in turn held by trusts set up for his children and grandchildren.[24] Since Kubrick was an American living in Britain, without the trust his estate would have had to pay transfer taxes to both governments and possibly have been forced to sell the property to obtain the liquid assets to pay them.[25] Kubrick is buried on the grounds along with one of his daughters, and the rest of his family still lives there.[24][25]Poster issued by the British tax authorities to counter offshore tax evasion
Other uses are more ambiguous. Chinese companies may incorporate offshore in order to raise foreign capital, normally against the law in China.[26] In some of the world’s hereditary dictatorships, the law may be on the side of the elite who use offshore companies to award oil contracts to themselves,[27] or gold concessions to their children,[28] however such dealings are sometimes prosecuted under international law.[29]
While no standard official definition exists, The Economist and the International Monetary Fund describe an offshore financial center, or tax haven, as a jurisdiction whose banking infrastructure primarily provides services to people or businesses who do not live there, requires little or no disclosure of information when doing business, and offers low taxes.[30][31]
“The most obvious use of offshore financial centers is to avoid taxes”, The Economist added.[30]Oxfam blamed tax havens in its 2016 annual report on income inequality for much of the widening gap between rich and poor. “Tax havens are at the core of a global system that allows large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share,” said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, “depriving governments, rich and poor, of the resources they need to provide vital public services and tackle rising inequality.”[32]
International Monetary Fund (IMF) researchers estimated in July 2015 that profit shifting by multinational companies costs developing countries around US$213 billion a year, almost two percent of their national income.[33] Igor Angelini, head of Europol‘s Financial Intelligence Group, said that shell companies “play an important role in large-scale money laundering activities” and that they are often a means to “transfer bribe money”.[34]Tax Justice Network concluded in a 2012 report that “designing commercial tax abuse schemes and turning a blind eye upon suspicious transactions have become an inherent part of the work of bankers and accountants”.[35]
Money-laundering affects the first world as well, since a favored shell company investment is real estate in Europe and North America. London, Miami, New York, Paris, Vancouver and San Francisco have all been affected. The practice of parking assets in luxury real estate has been frequently cited as fueling skyrocketing housing prices in Miami,[36][37][38] where the Miami Association of Realtors said that cash sales accounted for 90% of new home sales in 2015.[39] “There is a huge amount of dirty money flowing into Miami that’s disguised as investment,” according to former congressional investigator Jack Blum.[40] In Miami, 76% of condo owners pay cash, a practice considered a red flag for money-laundering.[40]
Real estate in London, where housing prices increased 50% from 2007 to 2016, also is frequently purchased by overseas investors.[41][42][43] Donald Toon, head of Britain’s National Crime Agency, said in 2015 that “the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK”.[43] Three quarters of Londoners under 35 cannot afford to buy a home.[43]
Andy Yan, an urban planning researcher and adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, studied real estate sales in Vancouver—also thought to be affected by foreign purchasers—found that 18% of the transactions in Vancouver’s most expensive neighborhoods were cash purchases, and 66% of the owners appeared to be Chinese nationals or recent arrivals from China.[44] Calls for more data on foreign investors have been rejected by the provincial government.[45] Chinese nationals accounted for 70% of 2014 Vancouver home sales for more than CA$3 million.[46] On June 24, 2016 China CITIC Bank Corp filed suit in Canada against a Chinese citizen who borrowed CN¥50 million for his lumber business in China, but then withdrew roughly CA$7.5 million from the line of credit and left the country. He bought three houses in Vancouver and Surrey, British Columbia together valued at CA$7.3 million during a three-month period in June 2014.[47]
“This issue will surely be raised at the G20 summit,” predicted Tomasz Kozlowski, Ambassador of the European Union (EU) to India. “We need to strengthen international cooperation for exchange of tax information between tax authorities”.[48]
Panama, Vanuatu and Lebanon may find themselves on a list of uncooperative tax havens that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) re-activated in July 2016 at the request of G20 nations, warned Le Monde, a French newspaper that participated in the investigation. Those three countries followed none of the OECD’s three broad guidelines for international banking cooperation:[49]
information exchange on request
a signed multilateral agreement on information standards
a commitment to implement automated information exchange in 2017 or 2018[49]
The OECD, the G20, or the European Union could also institute another list for countries that are inadequate in more than one area. Countries meeting none of these criteria, such as Panama, Vanuatu and Lebanon, would go on the blacklist. Countries that meet only one criterion would go on the greylist.[49] In April 2016, if this greylist had been in place it would have included nine countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahrain, Brunei, Dominica, Liberia, Nauru, Samoa, Tobago and the United Arab Emirates.[49]
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists helped organize the research and document review once Süddeutsche Zeitung realized the scale of the work required to validate the authenticity of 2.6 terabytes[50] of leaked data. They enlisted reporters and resources from The Guardian, the BBC, Le Monde, SonntagsZeitung, Falter, La Nación, German broadcasters NDR and WDR, and Austrian broadcaster ORF, and eventually many others.[51] Ultimately, “reporters at 100 news media outlets working in 25 languages had used the documents” to investigate individuals and organizations associated with Mossack Fonseca.[2]
Security factored into a number of project management considerations. Saying his life was in danger,[52] John Doe insisted that reporters communicate over encrypted channels only and agree that they would never meet face-to-face.[53][54][55]
SZ also had concerns about security, not only for their source, the leaked documents, and their data, but also for the safety of some of their partners in the investigation living under corrupt regimes who might not want their money-handling practices made public. They stored the data in a room with limited physical access on air gapped computers that were never connected to the Internet. The Guardian also limited access to its journalists’ project work area. To make it even harder to sabotage the computers or steal their drives, SZ journalists made them more tamper-evident by painting the screws holding the drives in place with glitter nail polish.[56]
Reporters sorted the documents into a huge file structure containing a folder for each shell company, which held the associated emails, contracts, transcripts, and scanned documents Mossack Fonseca had generated while doing business with the company or administering it on a client’s behalf.[50] Some 4.8 million leaked files were emails, 3 million were database entries, 2.2 million PDFs, 1.2 million images, 320,000 text files, and 2242 files in other formats.[50][57]
Journalists indexed the documents using open software packages Apache Solr and Apache Tika,[58] and accessed them by means of a custom interface built on top of Blacklight.[58][59]Süddeutsche Zeitung reporters also used Nuix for this, which is proprietary software donated by an Australian company also named Nuix.[60]
Using Nuix, Süddeutsche Zeitung reporters performed optical character recognition (OCR) processing on the millions of scanned documents, making the data they contained become both searchable and machine-readable. Most project reporters then used Neo4J and Linkurious[58] to extract individual and corporate names from the documents for analysis, but some who had access to Nuix used it for this as well.[60] Reporters then cross-referenced the compiled lists of people against the processed documents,[50] then analyzed the information, trying to connect people, roles, monetary flow, and structure legality.[50]
US banking and SEC expert David P. Weber assisted journalists in reviewing information from the Panama Papers.[61]
Additional stories were released based on this data, and the full list of companies was released in early May 2016.[62] The ICIJ later announced the release on May 9, 2016 of a searchable database containing information on over 200,000 offshore entities implicated in the Panama Papers investigation and more than 100,000 additional companies implicated in the 2013 Offshore Leaks investigation.[63] Mossack Fonseca asked the ICIJ not to publish the leaked documents from its database. “We have sent a cease and desist letter,” the company said in a statement.[64]
The sheer quantity of leaked data greatly exceeds the WikiLeaks Cablegate leak in 2010[50] (1.7 GB),[65]Offshore Leaks in 2013 (260 GB), the 2014 Lux Leaks (4 GB), and the 3.3 GB Swiss Leaks of 2015. For comparison, the 2.6 TB of the Panama Papers equals approximately 2,660 GB.
Mossack Fonseca notified its clients on April 1, 2016 that it had sustained an email hack. Mossack Fonseca also told news sources that the company had been hacked and always operated within the law.[66]
Data security experts noted, however, that the company had not been encrypting its emails[58] and furthermore seemed to have been running a three-year-old version of Drupal with several known vulnerabilities.[58] According to James Sanders of TechRepublic, Drupal ran on the Apache 2.2.15 version from March 6, 2010, and worse, the Oracle fork of Apache, which by default allows users to view directory structure.[67]
The network architecture was also inherently insecure; the email and web servers were not segmented from the client database in any way.[68]
Some reports[69] also suggest that some parts of the site may have been running WordPress with an out-of-date version of Revolution Slider, a plugin whose previously-announced vulnerabilities[70] are well-documented.
A grey hat hacker named 1×0123 announced April 12 that Mossack Fonseca’s content management system had not been secured from SQL injection, a well-known database attack vector, and that he had been able to access the customer database because of this.[71]
Computer security expert Chris Kubecka announced May 24, 2016 that the Mossack Fonseca client login portal was running four different government grade remote access trojans (RATs). Kubecka confirmed there were still numerous critical vulnerabilities, too many open ports into their infrastructure and internet access to their archive server due to weak security.[72] Kubecka explained how each data security issue was discovered in detail in a full-length book titled Down the Rabbit Hole: An OSINT Journey.[73]Shodan scan results of Mossack Fonseca’s client login portal breached by RATs
Gerard Ryle, director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, called the leak “probably the biggest blow the offshore world has ever taken because of the extent of the documents”.[74]Edward Snowden described the release in a Twitter message as the “biggest leak in the history of data journalism“.[75] The ICIJ also said that the leak was “likely to be one of the most explosive [leaks of inside information in history] in the nature of its revelations”.[76]
“This is a unique opportunity to test the effectiveness of leaktivism“, said Micah White, co-founder of Occupy, “… the Panama Papers are being dissected via an unprecedented collaboration between hundreds of highly credible international journalists who have been working secretly for a year. This is the global professionalization of leaktivism. The days of WikiLeaks amateurism are over.”[77]
WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic investigative journalist who worked on Cablegate in 2010, said withholding some documents for a time does maximise the leak’s impact, but called for full online publication of the Panama Papers eventually.[78] A tweet from WikiLeaks criticized the decision of the ICIJ to not release everything for ethical reasons: “If you censor more than 99% of the documents you are engaged in 1% journalism by definition.”[79]
While offshore business entities are not illegal in the jurisdictions where they are registered, and often not illegal at all, reporters found that some Mossack Fonseca shell corporations seem to have been used for illegal purposes including fraud, kleptocracy, tax evasion and evading international sanctions.
Reports from April 3 note the law firm’s many connections to high-ranking political figures and their relatives, as well as celebrities and business figures.[3][80][81] Among other things, the leaked documents illustrate how wealthy individuals, including public officials, can keep personal financial information private.
Initial reports identified five then-heads of state or government leaders from Argentina, Iceland, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates as well as government officials, close relatives, and close associates of various heads of government of more than forty other countries. Names of then-current national leaders in the documents include President Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, and the Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.[80]
Former heads of state mentioned in the papers include:
Argentinian president Mauricio Macri who was president from december 2015 – december 2019. Moreover the moral problem, the oppositers reclaimed illegality because he never put this in his patrimonial declarations. For one of the official source of panama papers: “Macri’s official spokesman Ivan Pavlovsky said that the Argentine president didn’t list Fleg Trading Ltd. as an asset because he had no capital participation in the company. The company, used to participate in interests in Brazil, was related to the family business group. “This is why Maricio Macri was occasionally its director,” he said, reiterating that Macri was not a shareholder.” Mauricio Macri aparece como director una segunda empresa offshoreMacri offshore: aparece una segunda empresa del presidente en Panamá | Perfil.com
Former Emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani owned Afrodille S.A., which had a bank account in Luxembourg and shares in two South African companies. Al Thani also held a majority of the shares in Rienne S.A. and Yalis S.A., holding a term deposit with the Bank of China in Luxembourg. A relative owned 25 percent of these: Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, Qatar’s former prime minister and foreign minister.[83]
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a former vice president of Iraq, owned property through Mossack Fonseca shell companies registered in Panama and the British Virgin Islands, for security reasons following an assassination attempt, according to his spokesperson, who added that any income from the properties was reported and taxes paid “promptly and on time.”[85]
Other clients included less-senior government officials and their close relatives and associates, from over forty countries.[80]
Over £10 million of cash from the sale of the gold stolen in the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery was laundered, first unwittingly and later with the complicity of Mossack Fonseca, through a Panamanian company, Feberion Inc. The company was set up on behalf of an unnamed client twelve months after the robbery. The Brinks money was put through Feberion and other front companies, through banks in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Jersey, and the Isle of Man. It issued bearer shares only. Two nominee directors from Sark were appointed to Feberion by Jersey-based offshore specialist Centre Services.[91] The offshore firms recycled the funds through land and property transactions in the United Kingdom.[91] Although the Metropolitan Police Service raided the offices of Centre Services in late 1986 in cooperation with Jersey authorities, and seized papers and two Feberion bearer shares, it wasn’t until 1995 that Brink’s-Mat’s solicitors were finally able to take control of Feberion and the assets.[91]
Law firms play a central role in offshore financial operations.[35] Mossack Fonseca is one of the biggest in its field and the biggest financial institutions refer customers to it.[3] Its services to clients include incorporating and operating shell companies in friendly jurisdictions on their behalf.[93] They can include creating “complex shell company structures” that, while legal, also allow the firm’s clients “to operate behind an often impenetrable wall of secrecy”.[21] The leaked papers detail some of their intricate, multilevel, and multinational corporate structures.[94] Mossack Fonseca has acted with global consultancy partners like Emirates Asset Management Ltd, Ryan Mohanlal Ltd, Sun Hedge Invest and Blue Capital Ltd on behalf of more than 300,000 companies, most of them registered in the British Overseas Territories.
Leaked documents also indicate that the firm would also backdate documents on request and, based on a 2007 exchange of emails in the leaked documents, it did so routinely enough to establish a price structure: $8.75 per month in the past.[95] In 2008, Mossack Fonseca hired a 90-year-old British man to pretend to be the owner of the offshore company of Marianna Olszewski, a US businesswoman, “a blatant breach of anti-money laundering rules” according to the BBC.[96]
The anonymity of offshore shell companies can also be used to circumvent international sanctions, and more than 30 Mossack Fonseca clients were at one time or another blacklisted by the US Treasury Department, including businesses linked to senior figures in Russia, Syria and North Korea.[97]
Three Mossack Fonseca companies started for clients of Helene Mathieu Legal Consultants were later sanctioned by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Pangates International Corporation was accused in July 2014 of supplying the government of Syria with “a large amount of specialty petroleum products” with “limited civilian application in Syria”. The other two, Maxima Middle East Trading and Morgan Additives Manufacturing Co, and their owners Wael Abdulkarim and Ahmad Barqawi, were said to have “engaged in deceptive measures” to supply oil products to Syria.[98]
Mossack Fonseca also ran six businesses for Rami Makhlouf, cousin of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, despite US sanctions against him.[99] Internal Mossack Fonseca documents show that in 2011 Mossack Fonseca rejected a recommendation by their own compliance team to sever ties to Mr. Makhlouf. They agreed to do so only months later. The firm has said it never knowingly allowed anyone connected with rogue regimes to use its companies.[97]
Frederik Obermaier, co-author of the Panama Papers story and an investigative reporter at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, told Democracy Now: “Mossack Fonseca realised that Makhlouf was the cousin, and they realised that he was sanctioned, and they realised that he’s allegedly one of the financiers of the Syrian regime. And they said, ‘Oh, there is this bank who still does business with him, so we should still keep with him, as well’.”[100]
HSBC also appeared to reassure Mossack Fonseca not only that it was “comfortable” with Makhlouf as a client but suggested there could be a rapprochement with the Assad family by the US. Makhlouf is already known to be a long-standing client of HSBC’s Swiss private bank, holding at least $15 million with it in multiple accounts in 2006.[101] The Panamanian files also show HSBC provided financial services to a Makhlouf company called Drex Technologies, which HSBC said was a company of “good standing”.[101]
DCB Finance, a Virgin Islands-based shell company founded by North Korean banker Kim Chol-sam[102] and British banker Nigel Cowie,[103] also ignored international sanctions and continued to do business with North Korea with the help of the Panamanian firm. The US Treasury Department in 2013 called DCB Finance a front company for Daedong Credit Bank and announced sanctions against both companies for providing banking services to North Korean arms dealer Korea Mining and Development Trading Corporation,[102] attempting to evade sanctions against that country, and helping to sell arms and expand North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme. Cowie said the holding company was used for legitimate business and he was not aware of illicit transactions.[103]
Mossack Fonseca, required by international banking standards to avoid money-laundering or fraudster clients, is, like all banks, supposed to be particularly alert for signs of corruption with politically exposed persons (PEP), in other words, clients who either are or have close ties to government officials. However they somehow failed to turn up any red flags concerning Tareq Abbas even though he shares a family name with the president of Palestine, and sat on the board of directors of a company with four fellow directors the firm did deem PEP because of their ties to Palestinian politics. Yet Mossack Fonseca actually did and documented due diligence research, including a Google search.[104]
Mossack Fonseca has managed more than 300,000 companies over the years.[93] The number of active companies peaked at more than 80,000 in 2009. Over 210,000 companies in twenty-one jurisdictions figure in the leaks. More than half were incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, others in Panama, the Bahamas, the Seychelles, Niue, and Samoa. Mossack Fonseca’s clients have come from more than 100 countries. Most of the corporate clients were from Hong Kong, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Panama, and Cyprus. Mossack Fonseca worked with more than 14,000 banks, law firms, incorporators, and others to set up companies, foundations, and trusts for their clients.[105] Some 3,100 companies listed in the database appear to have ties to US offshore specialists, and 3,500 shareholders of offshore companies list US addresses.[106] Mossack Fonseca has offices in Nevada and Wyoming.[107]
The leaked documents indicate that about US$2 trillion has passed through the firm’s hands.[108] Several of the holding companies that appear in the documents did business with sanctioned entities, such as arms merchants and relatives of dictators, while the sanctions were in place. The firm provided services to a Seychelles company named Pangates International, which the US government believes supplied aviation fuel to the Syrian government during the current civil war, and continued to handle its paperwork and certify it as a company in good standing, despite sanctions, until August 2015.[99]
More than 500 banks registered nearly 15,600 shell companies with Mossack Fonseca, with HSBC and its affiliates accounting for more than 2,300 of the total. Dexia and J. Safra Sarasin of Luxembourg, Credit Suisse from the Channel Islands and the Swiss UBS each requested at least 500 offshore companies for their clients.[105] An HSBC spokesman said, “The allegations are historical, in some cases dating back 20 years, predating our significant, well-publicized reforms implemented over the last few years.”[109]
In response to queries from the Miami Herald and ICIJ, Mossack Fonseca issued a 2,900-word statement listing legal requirements that prevent using offshore companies for tax avoidance and total anonymity, such as FATF protocols which require identifying ultimate beneficial owners of all companies (including offshore companies) before opening any account or transacting any business.
The Miami Herald printed the statement with an editor’s note that said the statement “did not address any of the specific due diligence failings uncovered by reporters”.[110]
On Monday, April 4, Mossack Fonseca released another statement:
The facts are these: while we may have been the victim of a data breach, nothing we’ve seen in this illegally obtained cache of documents suggests we’ve done anything illegal, and that’s very much in keeping with the global reputation we’ve built over the past 40 years of doing business the right way.
Co-founder Ramón Fonseca Mora told CNN that the reports were false, full of inaccuracies and that parties “in many of the circumstances” cited by the ICIJ “are not and have never been clients of Mossack Fonseca”. The firm provided longer statements to ICIJ.[111]
In its official statement April 6,[112] Mossack Fonseca suggested that responsibility for any legal violations might lie with other institutions:
approximately 90% of our clientele is comprised of professional clients … who act as intermediaries and are regulated in the jurisdiction of their business. These clients are obliged to perform due diligence on their clients in accordance with the KYC and AML regulations to which they are subject.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Jürgen Mossack said: “The cat’s out of the bag, so now we have to deal with the aftermath.”[113]
He said the leak was not an “inside job”—the company had been hacked by servers based abroad. It filed a complaint with the Panamanian attorney general’s office.[114]
On April 7, 2016 Mossack resigned from Panama’s Council on Foreign Relations (Conarex),[115][116] even though he was not officially serving at the time.[117] His brother Peter Mossack still serves as honorary Consul of Panama, as he has since 2010.[118][119][120][121]
On May 5, 2016, Mossack Fonseca sent a cease and desist letter to the ICIJ in an attempt to stop the ICIJ from releasing the leaked documents from the Panama Papers scandal.[122] Despite this, the ICIJ released the leaked documents on May 9, 2016.[123][124]
In March 2018, Mossack Fonseca announced it would close down.[125]
In October 2019, The Laundromat, a movie based on the events of the Panama Papers was released on the streaming service Netflix. Prior to this, Mossack and Fonseca issued a lawsuit[126] in aim of preventing the release, citing defamation and potential damage to their rights of a fair trial by jury, should one begin.[127] On July 17, 2019, the judge, based in Connecticut, refused the injunction citing lack of jurisdiction, and ordered the case be transferred to Los AngelesCalifornia.[128][126]
At 5:00 am on April 3, as the news first broke, Ramón Fonseca Mora told television channel TVN he “was not responsible nor he had been accused in any tribunal”.[129]
He said the firm was the victim of a hack and that he had no responsibility for what clients did with the offshore companies that they purchased from Mossack Fonseca, which were legal under Panamanian law.[129] Later that day, the Independent Movement (MOVIN)[note 1] called for calm, and expressed hope that the Panamanian justice system would not allow the culprits to go with impunity.[129]
By April 8, the government understood that media reports were addressing tax evasion and that they were not attacking Panama. The president met on Wednesday April 7, with CANDIF, a committee of representatives from different sectors of the economy which includes the Chamber of Commerce, Chamber of Industry and Agriculture, the National Lawyers Association, the International Lawyers Association, the Banking Association and the Stock Exchange, and entered full crisis management mode.[131] On the same day he announced the creation of a new judiciary tribunal and a high-level commission led by Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. There were accusations that foreign forces were attacking Panama because of Panama’s “stable and robust economy”.[132]
Isabel Saint Malo de Alvarado, Vice President of Panama, said in an op-ed piece published April 21 in The Guardian that President Juan Carlos Varela and his administration have strengthened Panama’s controls over money-laundering in the twenty months they have been in power, and that “Panama is setting up an independent commission, co-chaired by the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, to evaluate our financial system, determine best practices, and recommend measures to strengthen global financial and legal transparency. We expect its findings within the next six months, and will share the results with the international community.”[133]
However, in early August 2016, Stiglitz resigned from the committee because he learned that the Panamanian government would not commit to making their final report public. He said that he had always “assumed” that the final report would be transparent.[134]
On April 8, President Varela denounced France’s proposal to return Panama to a list of countries that did not cooperate with information exchange.[135] Minister of the Presidency Alvaro Alemán categorically denied that Panama is a tax haven, and said the country would not be a scapegoat.[136] Alemán said that talks with the French ambassador to Panama had begun.[136]
On April 25, a meeting of the Panamanian and French finance ministers resulted in an agreement under which Panama will provide information to France about French nationals with taxable assets in the country.[137][138]
The Minister of Economy and Finance of Panama, Dulcidio de la Guardia, formerly an offshore specialist at Mossack Fonseca competitor Morgan & Morgan, said the legal but often “murky” niche of establishing offshore accounts, firms and trusts make up “less than half a percentage point” of Panama’s GDP. He appeared to suggest that the publication of the papers was an attack on Panama because of the high level of economic growth that the country had shown.[139]
Eduardo Morgan of the Panamanian firm Morgan & Morgan accused the OECD of starting the scandal to avoid competition from Panama with the interests of other countries.[140] The Panama Papers affect the image of Panama in an unfair manner and have come to light not as the result of an investigation, but of a hack, said Adolfo Linares, president of the Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture of Panama (Cciap).[141]
The Colegio Nacional de Abogados de Panama (CNA) urged the government to sue.[142] Political analyst Mario Rognoni said that the world perceives Panama as a tax haven. The government of President Juan Carlos Varela might become implicated if he tries to cover up for those involved, Rognoni said.[143]
Economist Rolando Gordon said the affair hurts Panama, which has just emerged from the greylist of the FATF, and added that each country, especially Panama, must conduct investigations and determine whether illegal or improper acts were committed.[144]
Panama’s Lawyers Movement called the Panama Papers leak “cyber bullying” and in a press conference condemned it as an attack on the ‘Panama’ brand. Fraguela Alfonso, its president, called it a direct attack on the country’s financial system.
I invite all organized forces of the country to create a great crusade for the rescue of the country’s image.
The law firm Rubio, Álvarez, Solís & Abrego also reacted and in a press release said that “In recent decades Panama has been in the most important financial and service centers of Latin America and the entire world. As a result, all kinds of attacks on our service system have been attempted.”[145]
Offshore companies are legal, said Panamanian lawyer and former controller of the republic Alvin Weeden; illegality arises when they are used for money laundering, arms smuggling, terrorism, or tax evasion.[146]
On October 19, 2016, it became known that a government executive had spent 370 million U.S. dollars in order to “clean” the country’s image.[147]
On October 22, 2016, during a state visit to Germany, Varela told journalist Jenny Pérez, of Deutsche Welle that there had been “progress” in transparency and many agreements to exchange tax information, and that tax evasion was a global problem. Asked about his ties with Ramón Fonseca Mora, managing partner of the firm Mossack Fonseca, he acknowledged that he is a friend.[148]
The Procuraduría de la Nación announced that it would investigate Mossack Fonseca and the Panama papers.[149] On April 12, the newly formed Second Specialized Prosecutor against Organized Crime raided Mossack Fonseca and searched their Bella Vista office as part of the investigation initiated by the Panama Papers. The Attorney General’s office issued a press release following the raid, which lasted 27 hours,[150] stating that the purpose was “to obtain documents relevant to the information published in news articles that establishes the possible use of the law firm in illegal activities”.[151] The search ended without measures against the law firm, confirmed prosecutor Javier Caraballo of the Second Prosecutor Against Organized Crime.[152]
On April 22 the same unit raided another Panama location and “secured a large amount of evidence”.[150]
The Municipality of Regulation and Supervision of Financial Subjects [not the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF)] initiated a special review of the law firm Mossack Fonseca to determine whether it had followed tax law. Carlamara Sanchez, in charge of this proceeding, said at a press conference that the quartermaster had come to verify whether the firm had complied since April 8 with due diligence, customer knowledge, the final beneficiary and reporting of suspicious transactions to Financial Analysis Unit (UAF) operations. She said that Law 23 of 2015 empowers regulation and supervision and said some firms had been monitored since late last year with special attention after the Panama Papers, and noted that the law carries fines $5,000 to $1 million or even suspension of the firm.[153]
The ICIJ investigation of Mossack Fonseca was reported to the Public Ministry. Samid Dan Sandoval, former candidate for mayor of Santiago de Veraguas (2014), filed the legal action against the journalists and all those who had participated. He said the project name damaged the integrity, dignity and sovereignty of the country and that the consortium would have to assume legal responsibility for all damage caused to the Panamanian nation.[154]
A Change.org petition requested the ICIJ stop using the name of Panama as in the Panama Papers. The request said the generally- accepted name for the investigation “damage(d) the image” of Panama.[155]
Attorney General of Panama Kenia Isolda Porcell Diaz announced on January 24, 2017 that he was suspending the investigations against Mossack Fonseca because it filed an appeal for protection of constitutional rights before the First Superior Court of Justice of Panama and requested that he deliver all the original documents to issue a judgment.[156][157][158][clarification needed]
In March 2018, Mossack Fonseca announced that it would cease operations at the end of March due to “irreversible damage” to their image as a direct result of the Panama Papers.[160]
Former South African president Thabo Mbeki, head of the African Union‘s panel on illicit financial flows, on April 9 called the leak “most welcome” and called on African nations to investigate the citizens of their nations who appear in the papers. His panel’s 2015 report[161] found that Africa loses $50 billion a year due to tax evasion and other illicit practices and its 50-year losses top a trillion dollars. Furthermore, he said, the Seychelles, an African nation, is the fourth most mentioned tax haven in the documents.[162]
On April 22, 2016, Australia said it would create a public register showing the beneficial, or actual, owners of shell companies, as part of an effort to stamp out tax avoidance by multinational corporations.[163]
The Australian Taxation Office has announced that it is investigating 800 individual Australian taxpayers on the Mossack Fonseca list of clients and that some of the cases may be referred to the country’s Serious Financial Crime Task Force.[164] Eighty names match to an organized crime intelligence database.[165]
Leaked documents examined by the ABC “pierced the veil of anonymous shell companies” and linked a Sydney businessman and a Brisbane geologist to mining deals in North Korea.[166] “Rather than applying sanctions, the Australian Government and the ASX seem to have allowed a coach and horses to be ridden through them by the people involved in forming this relationship, corporate relationship with one of the primary arms manufacturers in North Korea,” said Thomas Clark of the University of Technology Sydney.[166]
David Sutton was director of AAT Corporation and EHG Corporation when they held mineral licenses in North Korea and did business with Korean Natural Resources Development and Investment Corporation, which is under United Nations sanctions, and North Korea’s “primary arms dealer and main exporter of goods and equipment related to ballistic missiles and conventional weapons, responsible for approximately half of the arms exported by North Korea.”[166] The geologist, Louis Schurmann, said British billionaire Kevin Leech was key to putting the deal together.[166] Leaked documents also reveal the involvement of another Briton, Gibraltar-based John Lister.[166] According to ABC, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was aware of these mining deals, which had also been brought up in the Australian Senate, but nobody ever referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police.[166]
On May 12, 2016, the names of former Prime Minister of AustraliaMalcolm Turnbull, and former Premier of New South WalesNeville Wran, were both found in the Panama Papers, due to the pair’s former directorship of the Mossack Fonseca-incorporated company Star Technology Systems Limited. Turnbull and Wran resigned from these positions in 1995, and the Prime Minister has denied any impropriety, stating “had [Star Technology] made any profits—which it did not regrettably—it certainly would have paid tax in Australia.”[167]
Media initially reported that the Panama Papers lists 500 entities created under the jurisdiction of the Cook Islands, population 10,000, almost as many as Singapore, whose population is 5.7 million.[168] After the Winebox affair, the Cook Islands gave New Zealand jurisdiction over tax matters.[169]
New Zealand’s Inland Revenue Department said that they were working to obtain details of people who have tax residence in the country who may have been involved in arrangements facilitated by Mossack Fonseca.[170]Gerard Ryle, director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, told Radio New Zealand on April 8, 2016 that New Zealand is a well-known tax haven and a “nice front for criminals”.[171] New Zealand provides overseas investors with foreign trusts and look-through companies. New Zealand government policy is to not request disclosure of the identity of either the settlor or the beneficiaries of the trust, and thus the ownership remains secret, and as a consequence, thus hiding the assets from the trust-holder’s home jurisdictions. These trusts are not taxed in New Zealand. These trusts can then be used to acquire and own New Zealand registered companies, which become a vehicle by which the trust owners can exercise day to day control over their assets. These New Zealand-registered companies can be designed not to make a profit using loans from tax havens and other profit shifting techniques: the result being tax free income with the general respectability that has typically been associated with companies registered in New Zealand.
Prime Minister John Key responded May 7 to John Doe‘s remark that he had been “curiously quiet” about tax evasion in the Cook Islands by saying that the whistleblower was confused and probably European. While the Cook Islands use New Zealand currency, “I have as much responsibility for tax in the Cook Islands as I do for taxing Russia.” New Zealand does represent the Cook Islands on defence and foreign policy, but not taxation, he said.[172]
In distancing New Zealand from the Cook Islands, Key ignored the close ties between the two countries and the crucial role New Zealand had in setting up the Cook Island taxation system.[173]
Mossack Fonseca approached Niue in 1996 and offered to help set up a tax haven on the tiny South Sea island. The law firm drafted the necessary legislation, permitting offshore companies to operate in total secrecy. They took care of all the paperwork, the island got a modest fee for each filing, and it seemed like quite a deal, even if they were required by law now to provide all banking paperwork in Russian and Chinese as well as English.[174]
Soon the filings almost covered the island’s year budget. The US government however made official noises in 2001 about laundering criminal proceeds and Chase Bank blacklisted the island and Bank of New York followed suit. This caused inconvenience to the population so they let their contract with Mossack Fonseca expire and many of the privacy-seekers on the banking world moved on.[174] Some did stay however, apparently; the Panama Papers database lists nearly 10,000 companies and trusts set up on Niue, population 1200.[168]
Many recently created shell companies were set up in Samoa, perhaps after Niue revised its tax laws. The Panama Papers database lists more than 13,000 companies and trusts set up there. Samoa has a population of roughly 200,000.[168]
On May 27, 2015, the US Department of Justice indicted a number of companies and individuals for conspiracy, corruption and racketeering in connection with bribes and kickbacks paid to obtain media and marketing rights for FIFA tournaments. Some immediately entered guilty pleas.[175]
Among those indicted were Jeffrey Webb and Jack Warner, the current and former presidents of CONCACAF, the continental confederation under FIFA headquartered in the United States. They were charged with racketeering and bribery offenses. Others were US and South American sports marketing executives who paid and agreed to pay well over $150 million in bribes and kickbacks.[175]
On December 12, 2014, José Hawilla, the owner and founder of the Traffic Group, the Brazilian sports marketing conglomerate, waived indictment and pleaded guilty to a four-count information charging him with racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Hawilla also agreed to forfeit over $151 million, $25 million of which was paid at the time of his plea.[175]
Torneos & Traffic (T&T) is a subsidiary of Fox International Channels since 2005[176] (with investments since 2002) and is the same company involved in corrupt practices in the acquisition of rights to major South American soccer tournaments.[177][178]‘
The leak also revealed an extensive conflict of interest between a member of the FIFA Ethics Committee and former FIFA vice president Eugenio Figueredo.[179] Swiss police searched the offices of UEFA, European football’s governing body, after the naming of former secretary-general Gianni Infantino as president of FIFA. He had signed a television deal while he was at UEFA with a company called Cross Trading, which the FBI has since accused of bribery. The contract emerged among the leaked documents. Infantino has denied wrongdoing.[181]
Recovered sums from litigations, fines and back taxes[edit]
In April 2019, the ICIJ and European newspapers reported that the global tally of such payments exceeded one billion USD, and is now at 1.2 billion. In comparison, Great Britain recovered the largest position (253 million), followed by Denmark (237 million), Germany (183 million), Spain (164 million), France (136 million) and Australia (93 million). Colombia with 89 million recuperated the highest amount for South and Central American countries, which were heavily involved in the financial scandal. While investigations are ongoing in Austria, Canada and Switzerland, and more payments are to be expected, many countries are conducting continued inspections of companies and private individuals revealed in the report.[182][183]
The Tavern is open for business officially only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Though typically and unofficially there are underground lap dancing parties happening late Wednesday night in the basement. The lights are kept dim no matter what happens. You need that to hide subtle stains from fluids. You can dance all night if you have to, but eventually someone has to herd the cats out the door and hide the bodies on the floor. The Mehanata Social Club is tucked away discreetly on113 Ludlow Streeton the lower east side of Manhattan. This is their second location. Numerous police raids and finally a raid which transformed into a brawling melee succeeded in burning to the ground the original location on Canal and Broadway. In an ugly incident that took place in 2005 the lights of the “Bulgarian Bar and Cultural Society” briefly went out. The new location is about six times the size over three levels. Surely it will not be the final location, given the tumultuous nature of the existing times. Sasho the owner has already begun planning an even larger Breuklyn location, a whore house in Kiev with the same name and a ‘School for Alcoholism’ in upstate New York.
At an infamous establishment such as this you ought to always know the names of the men standing watch or the women pouring your drinks. Or the people holding down of your bags and coats. Most importantly you ought to be cautious of the seductive forces marshaled via awkwardly inexpensive liquor and the black magic to lead you to things you ought not to be playing around with. Such as foreign persons in needs of papers. Or creatures that drink blood.
There might was well be signs on the wall telling you anything not tied down will be carried away into the night, your bags, your souls, and virginities of nearly every kind. Come to think of it, there are such overt signs hanging everywhere! Literal not figurative signs. One claims three teeth are needed for entry. One says anything not checked will be stolen. One says “get naked get a shot, get fucked on the bar win a bottle”. That is hardly a bluff, but the bottle is never top shelf stuff.
It’s a ‘Gypsy Bar’, they claim to the public which sometimes romanticizes Gypsies, but often does not. But Gypsy’s all steal. Gypsy’s will trick you with music and some dance, lure you for tarot cards and then steal you internal organs and you will wake up in an ice bath in Bratislava missing some elements internally, then die of blood loss. The name of this place literally means ‘the Tavern’ in Bulgarian. And it lives up to that designation splendidly.
You wouldn’t find it unless you were looking for it. The entrance isn’t loud and the clamor inside is well insulated by its system of layers. The Lower East Side area is a drinking dancing seven day a week shit show anyway for university students and the children of the upper middle classes. Mehanata is the club of choice for New York’s newly arrived undocumented immigrants from South America, Central America and the former Soviet Union. You’d only be looking for it if someone told you about it. Perhaps you’d hate them for it later, but very few people are not amused the very first time. There never is just a first time. But, in the New York wilderness a tavern of eclectic wilding foreigners and untamed domestic people dancing to the tunes of South America, the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and the Roma can draw to it both angels and demons by word of mouth. Since 2000 it has been surviving pogroms, police raids and venue changes via fire. The police department is doing everything in their human power from keeping the Breuklyn location from obtaining a liquor license. Sasho has been trying to open it for three of four years it seems.Who is Sasho? He’s of course the boss.
There are three floors to the Tavern. The website extols patrons to “meet their future green card holding spouse.” There is live Mestizo music. Live fire juggling. Bulgarian contortionists on Thursday alongside with Bordel Dali.Rafael and his business comrade Georgie who is from Bucharest, Romania. Or maybe he just says that knowing no Americans know any other cities there.
“But I’m not freaking Gypsy!” he declares. He’s getting a PhD in Computer science. His specialization, the tracking of petrol futures purchasing and predicting in relation to major airlines. The cast of characters around here boggles the mind.
The club has the look of a vast lawless pirate ship or a wilderness brothel. It is sometimes dim red and under the cloth tarps of the upper galley level which looks down with little tables in the dance floor. The main floor has a dance floor, a bar and a kitchen. The downstairs has stripper poles, blue light, a bar and an Ice Cage.
The Ice Cage has bottles of wall to wall Vodka, which is all the same Vodka, but when people pay $40 to enter the cage and slam that wall to wall Vodka orgy in Soviet officer uniforms; they don’t notice. Vodka drinkers of repute, do not go in the Ice Cage, which also sits above a hatch to the abandoned railways under lower Manhattan. So one can walk or take a private train to Breuklyn or New Jersey. That is also why the place is only officially open Thursday through Saturday, to facilitate that traffic.
The waitresses and bar tenders are skinny or shapely, all Post-Soviet Bucharest or Sophia girls just arrived recently though generally well educated and for now, un-indentured. Some claim they are ‘from Moscow’. But they are not from Moscow at all. They are from shitty little Eastern European towns no one has ever heard of. They mostly don’t stay long and the reason for that is partly because of the mental and physical demands of the work and because their boss is the devil himself. The club is only open Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Things that go on during the week here are private and mostly didn’t even ever happen. There are private parties in the basement you’d do well not to crash unexpected or uninvited. Like the one on Wednesdays which is sort of high stakes a gang bang contest. There have been cock fights, dog fights and also bear fights. There are a lot of meetings happening upstairs right before the place fills up in Eastern European languages that you’d do well not to hear. The musical talent is highly various. Normally three or four live acts a night on Friday and Saturday. A lot of live horns. There’s a rather Pall Mall esthetic of transcontinental bacchanalia.
The booking agent for Music is petite and elegant Viktoria Lynch often wearing the hat of a Soviet officer the shoulder length locks of her hair falling over well fashioned skirts or flowing dresses. She was born in the Catskills, but has recently gotten her New Yorker residency card much to her delight; eight years later. The primary live acts are Gypsy Jazz, Spanish Ska and Balkan mostly. Roma meets Latin American for the most part. You get dance hall and reggae tone periodically from the Selectors, but for the most part ‘the brothers’ stay out of the place. The doughty wine happens, but as international as everything remains, there are almost never black people at Mehanata. Which no one has a problem with except maybe Kawa Zivistan who keeps bringing them there? But, they have one drink and politely leave after meetings. For some reason the charms of the venue are lost on the brothers.
Since 2001 the Z.O.B. has made Mehanata its unofficial office and also its social club. It’s meeting spot and its drinking spot. Sasho allows all kinds of people to meet under his roof and being there has connected the movement to darker things. There is a power the club has to draw in the very worst and best of people. Mehanata is thus a fitting place for the Z.O.B. leaders to draw towards since many of the group are hardly saints. Its members are generally able to lumped into the categories of ambulance workers, criminals, sex workers and also some leftist radicals. Sometimes a cadre is two or more of those things.
The Balsa, the Wango, Rumbia, sometimes even a little Zoukare played by the various selectors, but ‘the brothers’ always immediately depart when the meetings are over. No one can say exactly why they don’t like the place, but they really don’t. But as it is a central location for all five boroughs, it’s remained an unchallenged haunt.
Sasho and Kawa allegedly go all the way back to 2001, but they don’t always remember or talk about all the events in between. The most popular disk jockeys are Raphael Rafael Contreras Lynch also called Selector Rafflex and Georgie from Bucharest also called ‘Selector Mishto’. As stated Romanian but “not a fucking Gypsy”. Recently booked is the bearded, crazy eyed Serb Adrian Jankovitch. The most famous of the current bartenders is moxy Martina Hella Dubreskaya. She has been here a good deal longer than the others. A black haired Bulgarian journalist, music blogger and BDSM enthusiast. She has the special constitution that a bartender needs to work the shit show around here longer than a month. Though many suspect she will quit soon. Perhaps go into Real Estate. Martina smiles at everyone in hate. She is technically speaking the first person to publish the work of Kawa Zivistan by putting his sad poems on her website. She regrets that she encourages him, but secretly likes some of his work.
Outside and inside is James Burns the feisty retired Fenian cop on ¾’s pension. They call him James White, because he’s white. After his ACL was torn chasing down a perp he retired to bouncer work. His partner is James Behemoth Brown Pererez a smart talking, burly Mestizo from the Bronx. They call him James Brown, because he’s Mestizo. Always outside is Slavi the stone faced brother of Sasho, but no one trusts they’re actually brothers. Until sneaking a sly grin the Bulgarian strong man collects people’s papers, cans their IDs and directs them to be retina scanned via this Illubadori device at the door which biometrixes all the guests. He collects the cash or the directs drunk patrons to use the external ATM which charges an extortionist ten dollar service fee, the highest almost in New York actually. The irregular admission charge never gets a smile, because Slavi doesn’t charge people he knows in money. Then he sneaks a sly happy grin, has a quick smoke and sometimes, only sometimes asks people for money to come inside wearing a black Soviet wolf fur ushanka hat except during the summer.
You should pay cash up front for everything. Unless you’re a card carrying regular. Giving them your credit card is simply a horrible idea. It means you’ll just keep drinking and very often, leave without your card. James White and James Brown are sometimes easy going on admission for just about anyone not over weight and female. The regulars never pay. The various mob tough guys never pay. The Z.O.B. members never ever pay. Sexy young girls never ever pay. The endless Korean bachelorette parties never pay except to ride the Gypsy Bus. The guests of regulars, mobsters, musicians, D.J.s, rebels and girlfriends of friends never pay. It’s between 15-35 dollars though if you’re just sort of showing up. Except on Thursday when everyone is in for free.
James White, James Brown and Slavi sometimes have to get fierce quick to squash the brawls which happen, generally around 2 AM, generally instigated by the Albanians, but often before and after. They can’t seem to keep the Albanians from breaking people’s faces over stupid things. But that’s part of their cultural charm some say.
Justin Toomey O’Azzello is ‘the General Manager’. He is full blood Fenian and has ‘wandering hands’ people say. He is quite jovial and likes to tell elaborate stories about his days in the Air Force flying bombing missions over former Yugoslavia. He blames his flirtations with alcoholism over the years on bombing runs he inflicted over Bosnia. But Justin was never in the air force or ever in Bosnia. His hands do wander though. Recently he has taken up painting. Some say he’s Sasho’s top Capo.
The owner of this place is a fearsome Bulgarian half Ukrainian Ivory named Sasho, but is real name is Alexander Dmitrievich Perchevney. He was born in Kiev, lived in Belaya Tserkov, Ukraine and moved to Sophia, Bulgaria before arriving here in 1992. He used to be a dentist. He used to be a person of importance in the now defunct U.S.S.R., in the Inner Party. He thus has something of soft spot for revolutionists. The debaucheries of fallen men too. As well as a hard spot for undocumented woman of theatre. Misha Kishbivalli, the long haired millionaire playboy from Georgia also is his silent partner. No one ever knows of asks what Misha does for a living. But the answer is blood diamonds. The Mehanata “cooks” are all from the tropic of Capricorn but nothing is ever very good eat except the beet soup or the Bulgarian salad; cucumbers, tomatoes, onions and pepper and white cheese. The feta cheese over fries is pretty safe too. Some type of Borschtwhich is rumored to sometimes contain menstrual blood. The pork dishes are outright made of people.
Sasho’s wife Tanya isn’t the cook anymore. It’s always undocumented Mexicans Sasho brings on over the years through the under tunnels. They say the Breuklyn venue, when it opens, will have ‘traditional Bulgarian food’, but no one knows what that means exactly. Tanya is not a vindictive person, but she cannot stand this ‘so-called Kawa Zivistan’. There is very valid reason for that contempt, beyond him being something of a trouble maker. They have history in other lives.
“Stop cooking people and more people would eat here,” Kawa once suggested.
“Stop being a fucking Democratic Confederalist, Blatand Daria will perhaps date you, yet again,” was Tanya’s response.
It is rumored, also that there is vast tunnel system running from under the Tavern to multiple places unknown. Some nights, Misha Kishbivalli has pontificated outside of the club with clearly manic eyes that an ‘American engineered mega tunnel system runs under the entire country in case of insurgency, general emergency or nuclear winter.’ The traffic around here is always hard to predict. ‘Of course I’ve been to camps’ Misha exclaims, ‘let me tell you, one time I followed the tunnels all the way back to Bulgaria!’
There are tall glass pitchers of apple cider ginger vodka that sit atop the bar, sitting there for haShem only knows how long. There is a sign informing people that “get naked get a shot, get fucked win a bottle” and people seem to win all the time. Also the rule that patrons ‘must have at least three teeth to enter the establishment’, that is untrue. You just need to have cash money. Preferably American type. Or be vouched for by a regular. But, things are always pretty fucking negotiable.
The music is playing loud at the Mehanata Social Club where Daria Andreavna makes eyes then orders a Vodka based energy drink confection. She then slides up to Kawa at the bar. He is wearing a black suit this time. A week since his death, no one acknowledges or recognizes them.
“I thought you were dead,” Kawa says.
“Martyrs never die,” Daria replies and she winks.
“It seems that we have found each other again,” she whispers.
“You completely misbehaved I dare tell you,” he says, “you got us both killed yet again. This time for true bullshit.”
“I was bad. Bored? Rude should I say? I am told, the other night, I insulted your hospitality, greatly.”
“That you certainly did.”
“What are you drinking,” she asks.
“Astika,” he replies. The Bulgarian beer that is never in stock, hasn’t been in stock since 2001, but he always asks for it. Knowing they one squirreled away.
She catches Martina’s attention, and get him his drink. Martina winks at her. One man’s hot commodity, still is the cheapest drink in the house.
“So,” she whispers again, “Cheers. I have no memory of anything last weekend. Forgive me for that. I don’t even know what I did. Or didn’t do, might have done.”
“You remember nothing?”
She just gives him a coy but devilish smirk. And she shakes her head.
“I drink a lot for fun. I don’t always remember my Friday or my Saturday nights. Outside work, where I also drink the week gets interrupted by school, and then I party hard on the days off. I was told I was really bad to you. So, I’m saying the sorry. For the being of bad. What are you really drinking? This is our custom. Astika is shit,” she says.
“Nothing? No recollection?”
“No nothing at all. Oh, okay,” she smiles at him, “you were wearing a suit that’s a different color from the suit you’re wearing now, this I remember.”
Kawa is now in a black suit. The night she almost killed them last it was white linen. It’s almost always a cheap suit or a blue uniform with him.
“You never acted all that drunkenly. You were calm and in control throughout, your, shall I say, outbursts. My friends have told me that it’s too late to stop your vodka calamities from unfolding sometimes. But, you nearly killed us. And you bit me,” he says showing her the red ring around his index left finger.
“Well we all have our demons in there, don’t we? I’m good at drinking. Until I sometimes fall down. I fell down those steps one night,” she says pointing to a long downstairs plummet into the downstairs floor where the Ice Cage is hidden.
The Ice Cage is a freezer box in the basement where people pay forty a head to slam wall to wall cheap vodka over a period of two minutes. It never ends well for those who get in that cage. There is perilous flight of stairs down to the basement where they keep the stripper poles and the blue lit fuck cage by a second bar and dance floor.
“That looks like if would hurt,” he replies, “if you remembered it”.
“I don’t remember it,” she smiles wide and seductively.
But that’s a silly thing to say. Seductively. Dasha is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. Her proclivity for homicide aside, she is fascinating. Describing just how beautiful she is almost doesn’t fit in a later play he could end up writing. Her golden locks are like a lioness. Her eyes are capable of quick swing between fierce, curious and loving. She loves to hear men say it, how beautiful she is, but beauty isn’t where a man falls from when he falls from the heart not the groin. Beauty is a thing of lust. It has no bearing on love when that love is real love and not lust with imagined feelings. Love is energy, a wave crashing over you. Kawa has drowned several times before. He’d be very careful to use the word again. In that regard he is reckless to no end. He feels an attraction and can’t comprehend it, must be love. Previous formula for the same emotion dictated that whatever woman resisted his affections the most adamantly and then let down her guard to an elegant seduction of deeds and art, must be love. There were loves at first sight, or interaction as well as friendships that became romances and he was unafraid to say the words again. The words often came out without his permission.
Overtime several women had accused him of bastardizing the loaded phrase via serial usage. There were over a dozen women he’d uttered it to over the course of his 28 years. Generally after the conquest of kisses, but to a couple stupidly even before.
They were all very different women of course and they all brought out very different rolls to his emotional dice. Sides to his coin being a limited idiom. Supposedly in popular fictions man or woman is supposed to have only one true love in a lifetime, to marry them or be parted from them tragically. So Kawa was working hard by that standard, which truly in real life it can never be that simple, that limited.
“You’re really something to write about,” he says.
“Absolutely I am. And I never say sorry to men, but Rafael said he would cancel his friendship with me if I didn’t say sorry to you. Apparently I underestimated that you are the favorite host. The dashing revolutionary saint. The darling also of the owner. The grandeismo! Wait, I’m not sure what that word means blat! You’re great. Also as the confidant of Rafael Rafael and Viktoria, you should become my confidant too.”
“I’m just Kawa on my good nights.”
“And on the bad nights? Tell me some of your other names,” she whispers.
“Zachariah, Valera or Vasyli Pveada, or, wait, wait, my memory is growing back, perhaps your papers really say: Sebastian Adonaev! Ha! A royal victory? Where did you concoct these strange and slightly atrocious monikers? Moniker, is that the right word?”
He nods slightly.
“I’m Kawa when the drinks flow and the desire to dance returns to my hard hips. All other times I’m at war. With myself and my nature, with a world of sheep and a den of wolves. In such circumstances I require a hard Russian name, and the luck of a royal victory.”
“Hmm. Well it sounds ridiculous the way you say it. I’ll call you Valera, highly sparingly, it’s an insult you know! Some girl insulted you and you made it your Russian name. We can get you a new on. But, Kawa is okay too. I’ll see what rolls better off tongue. All that other stuff, well I have no idea what you’re talking about.
“Martina, two shots, Russian Standard please,” Daria proclaims dropping another twenty on the bar. Martina the bartender comes over and gives Dasha a little wink again. She pours them out.
“This is sorry alright,” she smiles “I have said the words sorry! Now I again reserve the right to be rude to you and forget about it later. Fair game, yes? You got two drinks.”
He looks deep into her blue eyes and gives a half smile wondering how much she really remembers. In her eyes he sees someone looking out at him below the swagger of her posture, behind her beauty is a much older beauty.
“Well aren’t you impressed with my new manners?” she asks
I find you quite a bit stunning, he thinks and almost says.
“Of course I am.”
“What are you drinking next?” she asks.
They clink the shots and she proclaims, “Nazdrovia!”
She drinks like a fish, but really she just drinks like a Russian.
“Astika,” she orders for him.
She has years of recent training in anticipating the needs of men. By realizing those needs controlling them. And she thinks, what terrible piss but of course she orders him another one from Martina. The raven black haired Bulgarian bartender who knows exactly what she’s doing. Since Daria never buys men drinks. Because Russian apologies are based on acts not words.
“Are you coming to our little festival?” Daria asks him almost casually.
There will be a four day Bohemian Festival happening Labor Day Weekend where all manner of fuckery will take place in a park in Queens called the Onderdonk Public Historic Fields. Sasho the owner had let Victoria allow Kawa do a benefit concert for their Haiti efforts at Mehanata a month ago. So a week from now Kawa and his E.M.T., Paramedic in training comrade Jared Forgetter from Kalifornia will be freelance E.M.T.s covering the first two days of festival.
“Wait,” she pauses.
“You are working the festival as our paramedic,” she says as she presses her palm to his side burn and face side.
“Sharp as a dagger you are dorogaia,” he smirks.
She smiles with big bright eyes. Who the fuck taught you that word, she thinks.
“Don’t call me dear ever again, I’m not so old! I’ll alert you that I may well come to some of that festival and if I fall down, drunk, I will ask for very intimate and professional service.”
“Hand pressed ice,” he promises reaching for her waist then thinking again.
“Hand pressed everything,” she demands.
“It’s at the service of all attending,” he declares.
“You are a true servant of the people,” she mocks with a wink.
“Dasha, you’re a tough act to follow.”
“You’re gonna keep calling me that are you?”
“That a problem?”
“It’s rather intimate, I don’t know if we know each other like this or that.”
“Well I suppose we can work on that over festival.”
She smiles a lovely, practiced smile.
Kawa, or whatever stupid name you’re calling yourself tonight. Press me best you can. The risk is completely yours not mine.”
A song about the great and noble Commandant Che Guevaraby the Buena Vista Social Club comes on and she thrusts herself into his arms for a last dance. They take the floor to themselves.
“I knew you back in Cuba,” she whispers in his ear.
“I’ve never been to Cuba,” he replies with a stone face.
She Latin sashays with him across the dance floor muscling out the other couples with her buxom way. She’s part crass and part wonderful. She lets him lead and he does a fairly good job under pressure to keep up. It’s been over a year since he’s danced with a woman of any substance.
“You dance like you’re actually from the Caribbean,” she says to him.
“But I’ve never been to Cuba,” he repeats.
He dips her slightly. She’s a gorgeous powerful woman who will always get what she wants in the end so it seems. Except perhaps happiness which no power or money can so far buy.
“You’ve gotten much better at playing an Amerikansky radical,” she tells him in Ivory language. “You are even at better at playing a Russian courtesan,” he replies and they dance the rest of the night.
It is past 4 am now and efforts begin to clear the worst kind of rabble out the tavern have begun. Only card carrying regulars and lovers of staff can remain and light things up or pound things down. It’s now with the storm shudders sealed just over two dozen left lingering around the bar. Smoke them if you got them. They count out the cash on the bar. For some reason, with almost no music, drunk as hell, Kawa and Daria are still dancing. Slumped into each other.
“Right never on schedule,” says Justin Toomey O’Azzello to Sasho, the burly owner smoking a cigar at the end of the ground floor bar passage way, packed up with intoxicated core circle patrons, tight except around his circumference.
“Hasn’t changed his cap or tune much in ten years,” Justin notes.
“I know him of course,” Sasho says without looking up, “with or without the ridiculous peasant cap. He’s been the same good man for over a decade. Dependable killer. Knocked the fuck around in Ayiti, that is for sure.”
“He’s dancing with Daria Andreavna, good for him! She’s got great big ones for him.”
“He’s always dancing with Daria,” replies Martina, “or at least trying to dance with her anyway.”
“You’re thinking of…” notes Justin.
“No my O’Azzello. I’m thinking exactly what I mean to be thinking. He’s always dancing with my Dasha right before things get interesting around here. And it sure will get interesting fast.”
“They just met boss,” says Martina.
Sasho almost yells,“You’re thinking of things three dimensionally and I am thinking of things fifth dimensionally, even sixthly or seventhly and I know that when those two dance. Fucking trouble. Niggers with fire and arms in the streets. Illubadori mind games. Decapitations on camera and lynchings to boot. Lynchings I say! Gays being flung of roof tops! And lots of piles of burning bodies. Walking dead and fucking flying robots. It’s time to call up all our troops, every single man to the front.”
Justin sometimes suspected the boss was fucking insane, but the old man had a gift for utilizing that insanity. The lights come on and the remaining guests not vouched for are herded like drunk cats out the secondary exit on to Ludlow street until no one is left inside but the staff, a handful of regulars and of course Sasho with his cigar.
Daria and Kawa wander out into what’s left of the night on the Lower East Side.
Out of the corner of his eye Sasho notices the mini Mexican weight staff are carrying the body of a man out of the tiny room upstairs where people go to fuck whores, or their drunk lady girlfriends, or college students. Or, he supposed less frequently, but evidently in case tonight; kill a man, drain his blood and empty his pockets. A little room to the very back of the second floor mezzanine. You can fuck or even murder at the top of your lungs and no one would know. Of the four little Mexicans none are taller than four feet a piece and they must carry drag the body down the stairs. The corpse is pale from exsanguination, being bled totally dry.
“Into the soup or the soap?”asks little Enrique from Monterrey in Spanish.
Sasho nods. “Let the dead keep eating the dead, like they do out in the colonies.” James White and James Brown sit with their drinks in near silence. Tanya just counts money. Martina counts more money with a smoke in her mouth for some reason naked as they day she was born. Justin Toomey the General Manager sits on the bar next to Sasho wondering how many days the Tavern in its current incarnation has left above ground.
The Bulgarian Tavern called ‘Mehanata’ on 113 Ludlow Street has roughly four doors in and three tunnels out. Also a roof hatch. You could completely miss the whole place if you weren’t looking for it. For the nine to thirteen million rats in their various stages of the great race to make it here, this city never fucking sleeps. Its go, go, go, go, zoom, zoom, rush rush! Slaves and Serfs to the trains for wage service. It’s all an illusion its fun here. With no currency, with endless wage work the place is bleak urban hell. It’s a filthy place except at the very center. The Isle of Man. Getting in early with red eyes and leaving late. Back on the cattle cars. The masters dangling enough to cover the rising rent and some groceries if you’re lucky. You’re so lucky to here in this cage! The hope dies out. You whore yourself somehow. You have to! You drink more than you should. It feels worse if you’re not from here. Even the yellow cab driver have more education than most of the rest of the country. The black sports utility vehicles, with tinted windows and important people that don’t want to look at you. The constant sirens. Everyone running somewhere not making eye contact. Always a fucking siren going off for some emergency that isn’t probably real. The city itself was built on the very top of the mountain. Its highest towers hold more rich and powerful people than anywhere on earth. Except maybe Moscow and London. This apple is all poison and rotten. The high octane hyper diversity is just a sex circus. Plus a racial death trap. Plus an ugly over crowed sprawl more regularly breaking then making those who arrive from the interior or abroad.
Nikholai Trickovitch is bleary eyed. He stinks of cigarettes, some cheap men’s fragrance and also of raw smoked Rum. The climate here is repressive towards the end of summer. Rum Barbancourt Nine Staron the rocks isn’t served in this part of town. So he brought his own bottle to the tavern. For their troubles were about to mount exponentially. Their bravest battle was about to arrive. ‘Heroes will be separated from hooligans. The cowards from the brave. The sacred from the profane.’ Well anyway so said the voice of Emma Solomon on the Fire Switch Radio.
Nikholai also technically, mostly by very early association with an even more militant Kawa in the early days of the Resistance is part of the inner most core of the leadership of the Z.O.B. The clandestine network of insurgent cells and for a time the editor of its underground newspaper, ‘the Banshee News Service.’ He highly prefers conducting his revolutionary duties from the computer of his uptown Penthouse. Moving things about the internet, correcting pamphlets and public movement speeches Kawa and their comrades give in soap box parks and on the trains. Nikh was persuaded to manage the logistics for the very First Haiti Operation. He did pretty well. Only two had gotten killed. He was then later persuaded to manage ground logistics in Port-Au-Prince for the expeditionary forces. Still later, he joined the medical guerrillas in their ill-fated expedition into Colombia. Where most of the partisans were wiped out and he barely survived the long walk home. But, he has only so much will power to back up such walk and warfare.
‘I need yet another drink!’, thinks Trickovitch. He knows it will be a long meeting and the A/C won’t work well in the private upper club house. The night is really just getting started work wise even though it’s past 4am. They’re erring toward minimal street traffic, but even the rats and pigeons here work in shifts. Well that same night Nicholai Trickovitch put together a little squad to, “do another messy little big job.” There were big jobs and little jobs. There were protracted campaigns that took many years. Some jobs where social engineering was needed. Others where brute force was the best approach. A job that has a lot of force commitment is called ‘an Operation’. Several coordinated large scale operations are a ‘Campaign’.
This required some of both and right away. He had to get buy in. No one was ever really in charge. Now, outside New York the Resistance got very eclectic with who was involved. It would be inaccurate to say anyone could possibly ever lead it. It was bad in New York where well over 70% of the population wasn’t even born here. A lot of players. They all “Relied heavily on Neg, Blan and Gray magic to keep this whole thing together,” as Nicholai was fond of saying, “But in New York Fucking City, we still do things the old fashioned way. By having a real tight crew.”
For many, many years Newyorkgrad was not the old Newyorkgrad that so many who had never visited imagined it to be based on movies and television. In the dead of something, where night creeps toward dusk, around a table on the fourth floor of 113 Ludlow Street, they met. That is to say the restaurant immediately above the Mehanata Tavern. A little talk is underway, a briefing. Maybe also something of a sale pitch.
“There are thirteen elected leaders of the Z.O.B,” Trickovitch explains, “Two have disappeared. We don’t fill their seats, but we consider them probably, most likely dead. One is living in a submarine somewhere hidden. Two are sleeping. That’s a polite way of staying they were thrown in a camp and badly tortured. Most of them kill themselves sometime after. That means at any given period nine are left. Left in charge of all the cells in the division. Greater Newyorkgrad.”
The table is wooden and plates of tapas have all been cleared. Nobody got in from the street. They got in from the various tunnels. It’s time for tea.
“Let me tell you how this is gonna go down,” says Nikh to his fellow partisans which include the tall well-polished Jamaican Gangster Mickhi Dbrisk. He is wearing a black suit with no tie after coming from work at previous engagement. Where girls were still jiggling.
Mara Fitzduff is a half pint Fenian. Barely ever smiles. A dirty blonde rebel famous for her firebrand speeches on the Fire Switch Radio. Also present is Rafael Ernesto Contreras, the Peruvian disk jockey. A photographer too. Retired child soldier and lesser officer of a defunct guerrilla band in the Arequipa Province. The fifth member of this add-hock unit is Mr. Siegfried Sassoon. He speaks very well with great emotion in his face. He should be expected to as he is an actor classically trained in Moscow. He too is just getting off work as a bar tender at a flashy supper club up the street called the ‘Red Fox Box’. A dashing swaggerous man of Cuban descent. The sixth man in this last minute, late night call up was the light skinned Haitian smooth criminal Watson Entwissle. The seventh at the table wasn’t made yet. A smooth young bloodfrom East New York. Says his name is Joshua Hunter. Has okay references and they are going to test him out. Could be a plant.
Watson is pretty pissed. You can tell when he’s pissed, he doesn’t pay attention at all. It’s based anyway on the past midnight hour. He left his favorite ‘sexy chocolate’ in bed in Yonkers for this “very tedious bullshit.” He doesn’t get to see his old lady enough. She lives in Boston. Ms. Charlotte from Uganda.
In the confusing and albeit vaguely disjointed chain of command Mara, Watson, Mickhi and Nicholai are all title holding inner leadership. Only one is from the inner nine. Siegfried Sassoon, Hunter and Raphael were called in as ‘hevals’. Though technically Hunter was not even a ‘provisional member’. Hasn’t made rank or been sworn in. Not written in the book of life. But they were told he can do good work by Dbrisk.
“The Labor Day weekend begins in 72 hours and you all know what’s coming,” explains Mickhi, “The West Indian Day Parade ain’t heading south at the Grand Army Plaza. Oh no, they’re gonna head north right over the bridges and attack the mostly empty City.”
Everybody except young Joshua Hunter knew that already. They were gonna stick Hunter with Watson and Watson would keep him working this weekend until he was trust-able, or dead. They were all aware of the score.
“As most of us know this revolt is a three stage attack in Newyorkgrad was being coordinated mostly by the Pan-Africanists, the Garveyites, the N.L.M.M., some of the liberal and radical medical trade unions, the I.W.W. of course, the Shi’a Muslims, the Occupiers, the affiliated radical student movements in C.U.N.Y., the 1199 Trade Union, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and of course, Uhuru and greater we,” explains Mickhi.
“The dry runs were the messy occupations on Wall Street and around the country last year to assess the state defenses. Phase Two is Labor Day where we take Breuklyn, the Bronx and Queens. Phase three will be to hold and liberate ‘the City’ just before New Year’s Eve,” he continues, “The goal is to declare confederated cantons up and down the east coast. Hunker down and defend them from federal counter assault.”
“Hectic shit,” mutters Raphael.
“Our role then is quite basic in phase two,” explains Nikholai Trickovitch, who knew indeed that the General Rising was close in coming, but not actually a mere five days away.
“We all know what was revealed about the h1n1 and Ebola. We’ve all seen the reports. The documentation has been widely circulated and now our people are ready. Enough outrages have occurred to spark something bigger than riots. The ‘Stop and Frisk’, the weekly shootings, the Iran war conscription and the new walking drones of course. This time almost everyone expects death camps and prolonged urban warfare, not Capoeira,” Mickhi explains.
“The Z.O.B. has called up eight hundred riflemen, combat medics and agitation propaganda officers to support the needs of the parade. Our convoy of marauders. They will be attached to each major island band truck. Flying columns are on the ready in all five boroughs. An additional three hundred and forty three women and men.
“Listen!”, declared Watson, “Watson knows all of this shit. So brother please come to conclusion so I can get Bronx bound with this new jack,” says Watson, “he can wash my care before we die in the coming melee.”
“Watson, we just need this young blood briefed. You can get out the door in fifty minutes,” Mickhi tells him. Used to his load way.
“Watson needs this to happen in less minutes,” he replies with a grin.
“As usual,” continues Mickhi, “The two Haitian Convoys will bring up the middle and the rear. Unknown to the City parade organizers, and hopefully the police intelligence forces, there are actually three Haitian bands this year of 10,000 masqueraders a piece. About ¾ up the route the Middle Convoy which is gonna be twice as big will initiate the raid across the Grand Army Plaza and then fight their way up Flatbush hope fully with the people behind us. And this is when the hectic bloody melee will begin.”
“What’s our precise role tonight,” asks Siegfried Sassoon. Siggy, never goes to that many meetings. He never votes in Otriad elections except with his feet for Kawa. When Kawa is leading he steps back and when Kawa is sleeping her steps up. He did however vote for keeping Kawa asleep after the last Haiti job, when the Hospitaliers took him very hard. Kawa is a serious knock around guy; best estimates think he’s been taken to the camps over 21 times. About three years’ worth of his life. Siggy, like Watson does jobs not meetings. Neither ever-ever tries to be at these meetings. Rarely even the candle light salons in Breuklyn. Which are sometimes cute.
“We’re gonna install Fire Station Transmitters on four very, very tall structures,” says Mara Fitzduff. She has over the years been the club’s ‘Chief of Staff’, worked in the propaganda bureau, in academy on the ‘Science of Women’ and done much of the fund raising for the past ten years. She’s not always officially even in the Z.O.B., but she is always very dependable. She has no salty broag. She’s got one kid with a soldier who ran off somewhere. And another with the Russian-Ivory loan shark Donny Gold who Kawa and Nikholai went to high school with ‘way back in the day’. So in that regard she’s double tied down.
“And then tomorrow we’re gonna blow up the Consolidated Edison building, putting most of Manhattan in the dark” says Mickhi Dbrisk, who has been the club’s Operation’s Chief since nearly the very beginning. He was in prison for a year as a teenager. When the cops accused him and four friends of all robbing a liquor store and no one talked. Some people say he’s a Crip, but he’s allegedly not a Crip anymore.
Nikholai holds the official position of Logistics Coordinator, but he’s more hands on than many before or after him as a good logistic fixer should be. He’s the one who arranges a lot of the raids and bombing targets. Now that Kawa lives in a dream, or a nightmare.
“The transmitters will override the police radio system and turn whatever frequencies we feel like into dancehall radio stations. We need them hidden and we need them high,” explains Mara, “so we can keep broadcasting when they shut the internet down again.”
“We’ve gotten the four choice spots picked out well enough,” Nicholai explains, “each transmitter is about the size of a football. There are blasters and flicker masks in the bags at the downstairs at coat check. But those are for getting out of the buildings later. Soon as this meeting is done, if you agree to this shit, you’re all getting in the town cars outside and getting dropped near bye all four targets. Fuck the girls if you feel like, if that works for you. We want you rested and loose. The town cars bring you to apartment brothels we work with and you sleep there. Whatever you decide to do,” Mara says.
She continues, “You wake up again when it’s dark. One person one location. In the bags with the guns and flicker masks are the addresses and names of four sympathetic venues, but really the car will just take you pretty near there. You’re going to get dropped at some of the tallest buildings on the island. Masks go on to obscure your faces, before you get out of the town cars. The girls will have you over for a drink, and whatever. Don’t really drink. Fuck if you wanna fuck and go to sleep. Then they will give you roof access when you get up. Those masks don’t come off in elevators, in lobbies, on streets anywhere near that building. The cameras are everywhere, as you know. You will get up the roof and turn on the transmitters.
“Try to hide them somewhere,” Nicholai mentions. Don’t just leave them lying around, they’re booby trapped anyway. Whoever tries to turn them off will is gonna lose their arms and face,” says Mara.
“Watson, you are assigned to the Heights. You’ll take Hunter with you. Siggy you’re in Midtown. Jon Denby and I will work in lower Manhattan. Raphael you’ll be setting up the Long Island City installation which is quite tricky because there’s nothing residential in the CITI Corp building so we’ll have to social engineer it. Nicholai and Dbrisk will go after the High tower on Atlantic Junction also with the same predicament.”
“And by assigned, we’re asking you to accept the job as a volunteer,” Mickhi explains.
“For the good of the service,” Mara says with a smile.
“How is Jon Denby doing?” Mickhi asks.
“His father is real sick again, it cuts into his out time,” Nicholai explained.
“So are you with this? You’re all Pararescuemen and or amateur Parapsychologists so I’m sure this will all just be fun. Once you get to the safe houses you’re staying at feel free to relax and take a long nap. You’ve all been up all week. Some of you all month. This doesn’t have to happen at once or tomorrow, it just has to happen before we blow up the power station on Monday morning. So enjoy, thank god it’s Tuesday. Some of these sympathizers are very attractive. I’m not saying any of you would take a whole a day to ravish the high end escorts at the brothels you’ll be staying at. Certainly not as either husbands, fathers, or Haitian gentlemen. But well it’s an option. Can’t have you stressed,” grins Mara knowing full well Raphael is married albeit a consummate adulterer. That Mickhi Dbrisk for all intents and purposes has three or four wives. That Siggy is secretly married to the daughter of a powerful Russian oligarch. That Nicholai is an incorrigible whore monger. And that Watson Entwissle is a very loyal family man. A true Haitian gentleman.
“We’re working out of the apartment brothels yet again?” asks Raphael. The joy in his voice is real for he so loves the Manhattan apartment brothels. You can’t afford them as an internationalist Disk Jockey.
“We need these devices set up real high,” says Mara, “If we can knock out their power and maintain alternative systems of communications we’re keeping to our end of the mutual aid agreement with Uhuru. Without blowing our arsenal and fighters prematurely,” she says, “as you all know this is phase two of three. We’re only fully mobilizing if they manage to take the City or if they hold Breuklyn longer than a week. Otherwise it’s 1st Nivôse.”
“I know I’m in,” asks Raphael.
“Shut the fuck up, Watson knows before he came here he was in.”
“Ha Chi will be a little pissed,” says Siggy, “But of course. It’s too late to get out now.”
“Joshua, you gonna ride with us on this?” Watson asks him.
“Yeah one hundred,” the kid replies.
Mickhi Dbrisk chuckles.
“Four transmitters. Then we blow the Consolidated Edison N.S.A. Data aggregation depot on Monday morning and EMP the district financial at noon thirty Monday with the anarchists, if they breech. Monday. All of you are in the trenches and I’m running dispatch with Anya out of a most secure location. Things are going to pop the hell off prematurely. We’ll do the best we can to keep up with impossible expectations, any questions?”
No one has any.
“I love centralized democracy. All of you please grab your gear at coat check and get in the cars outside via the alley door,” Mara tells them, “Good luck. Don’t get needlessly killed. Shahid Namaran!”
Things were about to go smash bang! Then fully explode. In flame and death in the night. To the sweet blaring tunes of the Wild West Indies.
What if a crime of enormous magnitude was being carried out in the most sanctimonious and white washed paradigm imaginable?
Perhaps in the name of social justice, gender equity, human rights and democracy. A great and unnatural pillage of humanity and planetary resources being carried out as a civilizing, modernizing mission. Preceding at such an alarming rate that 5 in 7 humans were as of 2015ce reduced to varying degrees of miserable serfdom and the climate itself was being altered, rendering the ecosystem hostile to life. What if an international web of small clustered elites were via their accumulation of wealth concentrated in several developed nations. And these elites we able to not only shape the dominant socio-political discourse; they were able to carry out their expropriation by calling it “development.”
The Development Enterprise as we understand it began after the Second World War with the 1948 implementation of the Marshal Plan. The intention of this far-reaching US Aid investment was to keep war-ravaged Western Europe from being absorbed into the Soviet sphere. Development subsequently evolved into a far more expansive international architecture. Its newly stated intention within the Cold War context was to modernize & industrialize the former colonial, third world and later the Post-Soviet nations. Packages of civilian and military aid were coupled with technical assistance. Non-governmental organizations proliferated generally around poverty alleviation and cause specific programs. The United Nations ratified a wide range of human rights instruments as rapidly escalating armed conflicts accelerated in almost every nation in the developing world. By 2014, there have been 15 confirmed acts of Genocide by International Law since 1945, 37 total if you include acts of democide (Rummel, 1998). Environmental degradation has resulted in expanding disastrous climate change (Nordhaus, 2013).
There are over three billion human beings living at or below $2.50 a family a day that are worth as much in their collective assets as the top 83 richest people on earth (Oxfam, 2014). It is believed that over 29.8 million people still live in chattel slavery (Global Slavery Index, 2013). That number might expand tenfold were we to incorporate low paid, race to the bottom type assembly plants and bonded labor. While the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals have supposedly ‘halved global extreme poverty’, ‘doubled human access to clean water’ and ‘halted new infection with HIV-AIDS’ divested of all the many political, economic and religious superstructures the results of the development enterprise are highly underwhelming. Largely unmeasured, unaccountable and top down in implementation; if not an outright architecture to maintain former colonial relationships between states referred to as dependencies (Rist, 2002); development lacks to a growing body of humanity whatever moral imperative it once enjoyed.
Development today is a highly subjective and amorphous field that lacks measurement or even an agreed to verifiable definition (Rist, 2007). Within the ranks of this vast and ambitious undertaking are bright eyed idealists; ego maniacs; missionaries, spies; colonialists, national patriots and aspiring revolutionaries. Economic opportunists are everywhere. As well as wolves in sheep’s clothing who in pursuit of bare national & self-interest leave not a scrap for the future. This global enterprise of unprecedented scale relies upon various competing theories of change and remedy, constantly in antagonism. That the needs of the present generation do not outstrip the prosperity or availability of future generation’s needs; juxtaposed to a Kuznets curve positing that rising inequality precedes equity. Concentration on Sen’s maximization of agency & capability; or breaking physical and mental dependency via Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. Does one glorify the United Nations and multilateral big-push theory and Sachs’ Millennium Villages or endorse Easterly’s social entrepreneurial searchers and the Monterrey Consensus. Does the future look to John Smith via ‘Free Market Fundamentalism’ or to the ghost of Karl Marx? Human Rights or human needs; the ‘ease of doing business’ or the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Capacity or capability? Do developing nations borrow from the World Bank or BRICS; is the worldview of the practitioners shaped by World Economic Forum or World Social Forum. Where do we ultimately place priority and resource mobilization; within the social, the economic or environmental sphere? Does work actually set people free? No one knows, or can know, the answer to any of those questions. Largely due to a total lack of objective and transparent data.
We must refuse to accept the validity of government statistics being produced by governments that cannot meet the most basic social services such as feeding, housing and providing healthcare and education for their people. We must also reject systems of Monitoring & Evaluating any data that are carried out by the same institutions that the data reflects performance upon. The World Bank in 2001 conducted a massive participatory study of poverty where tens of thousands of people living below $1.25 a day were asked what could be done. When the UNDP in 2014 asked similar questions to over 1 million people about the ‘world they wanted’ it was still obvious; the interests of the powerful few, the narrow interests of the oligarchic elites persist in smothering the voices of the poor, silencing all calls for change and imposing upon us all the vision of acceptable development, modernization and social progress (Piketty, 2014).
Underlying all this chaos and urgency is the objective reality that over 4 billion human beings are living in varying degrees of wretched deprivation, dying miserably before their time (World Bank Data/UNDP 2015). There is a very harmful dual untruth being perpetuated by majoritarian development actors in the United States and Europe. It is based on a dual illusion that has been furthered by big media apparatuses and financed by the corporate, business & banking sectors which also fund the various political parties in high office with direct bribes, indirect bribes and campaign financing.
Later we will introduce a cruel and insidious “Dual Illusion”; part and parcel is the dual un-truth contained implicitly.
The first part of this great un-truth is that human progress is a proven fact upon the ground; that the world is gradually getting freer, safer and more equitable; exemplified by indicators such as trade statistics, GDP and the Millennium Development Goals. This is the world view offered by TED Talks pundits, the neo-liberal theories of economist Jeffrey Sachs and revisionist academics such exemplified Steven Pinker. That poverty is ending and violence is ever decreasing.
The second part of the untruth is that capitalism and globalization are the drivers of this equitable progress and that market forces are ultimately good for the poor. The so-called ‘hard data’ that we have on hand does not well substantiate either highly muddy illusion. Both of which are paradigm hallmarks of a North Western development consensus which has for too long been operating unaccountable to all those it claims to serve, while attempting to maintain a monopoly on development and its discourse. We cannot reasonably prove in a scientific and objective way that Walt Rostow’s “Modernization Theory” is actually even occurring. We cannot prove that global violence, war and conflict is markedly decreased from unestablished, and largely un-kept statistical base lines from all the ages before 1848 (most of world history); and most importantly; we are being intellectually coerced (and coddled) by Western academics, politicians and economists to embrace a growth-obsessed, econometric free market fundamentalism simply on the basis of the competing ideologies battle field defeat.
The famines, gulags, atrocities and repressions used to chronicle the civil warfare transitions from backwards feudal and peasant societies to 20th century socialist incarnations are direct exacerbations of top down socio-economic transformations in a state of perpetual cold and hot proxy war with the Western capitalist system. Russia and China have without a doubt gone in the course of less than one hundred years from being defeated, long victimized semi-feudal peripheral powers to super power hegemons and serious core contenders (Wallerstein, 2004)(Amin, 2006).
There can be no clear and absolute measurement of the data being generated to verify progress in the Human condition despite what various experts attempt to claim. The numbers on hand at the United Nations and World Bank are supplied by statistical ministries in a variety of highly non-transparent [if not overtly corrupt and incompetent] national governments aggregated to produce results that do not tell full or even partial truths. Despite what is being claimed at global conferences; we do not actually have much valid comparative data on the human condition before 1848 (Foucault, 1988). At the 2013 Interaction Forum, the broadest confederation of American development NGOs and Humanitarian actors, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres admitted, “We are not entirely prepared”. More conflicts, deeply entrenched poverty, coupled with the targeting of aid workers will occur alongside decreases in funds and the impacts of global climate change. Yet, across the western development enterprise, almost all of the Western and white-washed academia and technocracy seem to agree that the very worst of human civilization is behind us (Pinker, 2013). Climate change and gender equity are to subsume talk of structural human rights achievement and class warfare as the acceptable development discourse.
There still is massive disagreement regarding the hierarchy of immediate needs for those 5 billion human souls that live on less than USD 10 a day; 4 billion at below $4 per family per day. 3 billion of which live on less than USD 2.50 a day; and 1.2 billion on less than USD 1.25 the number of which living in Sub-Saharan Africa which may in fact have in the last decade doubled (World Bank, 2015). The economist Thomas Piketty argues in his 2014 book Capital in the 21st Century that not only has there never been such wealth & income inequality ever in recorded history; but that at present rates oligarchic wealth accumulations are increasing and ultimately highly destabilizing to both markets and democracy.
The question remains one of enlisting actual participation and empowerment, not governance. Will listening to the ‘voices of the poor’ be a meaningless slogan or a set of specific instructions to those invested in actually achieving equality? Will development amount to economic enrichment of existing elites, corrupt governments and be the political aid carrot to the military stick; or will development mean emancipation from poverty and a tool kit to achieve freedom from long running structural violence (Goulet, 1971).
Development economist Amyarta Sen believes that development is a means to achieve freedom and freedom is achieved by enabling human capability. Jeffery Sachs believes poverty can be eliminated though coordinated action via a big push style global Marshal Plan. Banerjee & Duflo argue that not until randomized control trials drive interventions are we truly transparent and accountable. Many denounce development itself as a neo-colonialist scheme (Amir, 1973) and regardless of your political tendency one must admit the same actors of the North West dominate. OECD countries are theoretically bound to be giving 0.7% of GDP in direct foreign aid, to be matched by 0.3% via private sector charitable giving. However all rich, high HDI nations seem to prefer the 2002 Monterrey Consensus; to invest in trade related infrastructure. A regular buzzword in the enterprise is ‘Capacity building’, but this is often limited to technocracy and management training going directly to the government/public sector. Throughout the development and humanitarian sector coordination is irregular, local participation is largely dictated top down, and dependency is fostered beholden to national political directives, or just simple failure to meaningfully empower the so-called beneficiaries.
Development cannot easily be grouped by proponent origin geography, but a grouping of tendencies in methodology can be identified from their sources. It is important to remember that Development is not purely about donor and beneficiary nations; there is a clear linkage between internal national developments of a governments own population and external projection of its development paradigm. Development fosters dependency inherently; citizens dependent on government services and developing nations dependent on developed ones; their economies wide open their resources and cheap labor reserves ripe for picking.
There has emerged in the developing world a variety of effective means to break that dependency and unleash the human capability Amyarta Sen was referring to. Southern Development (Bangladesh, India, Cuba and Tanzania) is often categorized by utilization of micro-finance as credit base for social programs, encouraging self-reliance, directing investment internally and promoting massive capacity investment via vocational training in vital services. In the experience of Eastern Development (emanating from Russia, China, Israel and Iran); development focuses on construction of fixed infrastructure, long term investment in education & health, large scale/ long term cultivation of local leadership capacity and highly replicable localized mass training.
As opposed to Northern Development (Advanced Welfare States) largely concerned and successful with their own citizens development; and Western Development (emanating from the European Union and the United States via the OECD) that focuses predominantly on excess asset dumping, promoting market deregulation and free trade policy, augmenting perceived comparative advantage, supporting widespread privatization; and in the era of Gates philanthropy pushing disease surveillance, availability of inexpensive pharmaceuticals, women’s literacy [and inclusion in the work force] as well as advancing shallow policy changes in socio-political culture and asserting entrepreneurship when and where ever it can be advanced.
Within local Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), Social Movement Organizations (SMOs), trade unions, religious intuitions and Community Based Organizations (CBOs) of the so-called Global South, but in actuality economic dependent periphery; maximized human resources are often the primary asset they have to work with. Cut off from mega donors, domestically or abroad and often from services typically provided by government; innovation has been the key to community survival, which has superseded international external development strategies rarely aligned with political realities. A result of that innovation is the understanding that development is best implemented through indigenous knowledge, through local control of the means of development; and through investments in skills and training called Mass Capacity Development (MCD).
Our movement is being driven by development programs initiated in the Global South/Periphery, but the theoretical construct is Eastern in origin (Rist, 2011). The world is divided into 216 economic, quasi-national zones. While it would be largely accurate to state that the core of the world system lies in the global North and West; it would be wildly inaccurate to think this is a static reality. There are multipolar challenges coming from the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation and India. There are a myriad of shifting paradigms in development methodology.
Particularly those activities occurring in Cuba, Bangladesh, but also in New York, India, Israel and Iran. While this may seem a highly irregular data set the following findings are emerging that will revolutionize the system of Development Capacity Building. To transform the enterprise completely from one, which focuses on barely meeting human needs to one that generates human rights achievement via mass capacity.
From Cuba we have seen some of the largest medical deployments in human history; an estimated 50,000 medical workers and comparable number of teachers and construction workers (Feinsilver, 1993). A full 40-60% of Cuba’s GDP is generated providing healthcare, education and construction of infrastructure to the developing world. Its population is 99% literate and has better health indicators than the United States.
Bangladesh has facilitated the birth of the world’s largest NGO BRAC. Over 102,281 people (BRAC, 2012) employed in a massive hybrid system that cover 70-80% of its own operational needs though social industries. That runs major businesses, micro creditors, schools, health services and paraprofessional training.
The Acumen Fund in New York has set up over 82 major social enterprises in the global south through their implementation of patient capital.
Israel has developed sophisticated training systems in health and agriculture to generate functional cohorts. Its state formation itself was a demonstration of parallel state development. Introducing from abroad the piecemeal part of an unrecognized or supported state.
Iran has made incredible progress through an innovative system of community health workers called the Behvarzan; it has also demonstrated via Hezbollah in Lebanon its ability to rapidly introduce Para State functionality and security in a war zone.
Beginning in 2008 India via the Indian Skills Development Corporation has set out to provide vocational training to millions of it is citizens via a vast public-private partnership.
The true “economic miracles” of the last twenty years were not those countries which followed the advice of Washington Consensus; they were not the captive Asian Tigers; they were China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Ethiopia who generally ignored the basic elements of the Washington Consensus completely (Rodrik, 2002).
There should be no mistake that development is highly complex, perhaps the most ambitious undertaking of human civilization; an organized and sustained campaign to alleviate massive human suffering and injustice. However, whether we in the North West wish to admit it or not; most of the leading causes of underdevelopment were & are the direct result of social, military and economic polies initiated by developed nation governments (Blum, 2003).
We must operate in the realm of realpolitik, but we must also draw definitive lines between what is in the interests of the long suffering masses of humanity verses what is done in our own so-called national interests, to secure the lifestyles and wants of the developed world at the expense of the majority of the species. Mass Capacity Development is not adversarial. It does not pit nation against nation or posit a new utopian political order. Instead, modular vocational development is the great leveler that allows all who are willing to engage in productive social enterprises to have doors open to their advancement. It places development back in the hands of the community while engaging the recommendation that development and aid are best directed not at state systems but towards striving masses yearning to acquire a means to fish. Dependency is not broken with a ‘leaky begging bowl’ but with the skills and training to invest in ones future (Escobar, 1995).
The Development Enterprise has regularly circumvented the local populations of the developing world by focusing aid into the opportunistic private sector, often corrupt public sector or via foreign dominated and culturally hostile NGOs. Development too often ignores the capacity of local people and focuses on the capacity of increasingly failing states (Collier, 2007).
Throughout the history of development since 1948 the politics, economic needs and priorities of the North West have not only shaped the way we are taught to view human progress, but also tethered more than half the human race to the most wretched and deplorable living conditions imaginable.
The concept of multi-disciplinary vocational/ technical paraprofessional training coupled with the formation of civil service enterprises (CSE) is seemingly anathema to North-Western development, but remains at the fore front of South-Eastern/ South-South development exemplified by Russia, Cuba, Israel, Iran, Bangladesh and the People’s Republic of China. Responsible elements within the global development enterprise must become not only “accountable to those they serve” but work actively to break all forms of foreign dependency; especially in this a new era of unstable Multipolarity.
The future of development must assume a marked departure from the imperatives of the former colonial powers as well as those emerging hegemons that are effecting core shift from ‘West to Rest’ via the BRICS. The gross human rights violations and structural injustices that have been perpetrated via the world system have resulted in 3.5 billion humans living below $3 per day, 45 active low, medium and high intensity armed conflicts (Kaldor, 1999) (Uppsala, 2015), vast deterioration of our climate via CO2 emission and unprecedented wealth concentrating the worth of half the human race in the hands of just 83 individuals (Oxfam, 2015). The perversity of this reality bears it being repeated.
This thesis via its interpretation of several eastern theoretical frameworks; organizational case studies and direct RCT field implementation of the suggested approach recommends that the blue print to emancipatory development via human rights and justice lies no longer in hands of the North-Western powers that have for 500 years demonstrated both their tendencies toward proliferation of both conflict and exploitation (Wallerstein, 1974). Nor does it fall evenly into the three sectors (private, public and NGO) that so far have failed to meaningfully deliver development to more than half of the species.
The micro-problem is the wholesale refusal to admit ‘development as a political act’, the inverse of interstate warfare. A system of theory, technology and praxis carried out upon a targeted population group. The macro-problem is that those that designed the architecture of the development enterprise had no intention of relinquishing their power differentials or their own hyper-development.
This manuscript will build upon these Eastern and Southern case studies and demonstrated praxis to outline a bold new methodology of development called Mass Capacity Approach (MCA). I will then illustrate the applicability of this modal for proliferation in all four sectors of the enterprise. It will draw on historic as well as contemporary examples to demonstrate the validity of development efforts to achieve equitable societies and human rights security through Parallel State Theory (PST); the demonstrated development paradigm that allows communities to fully control the terms, planning and implementation of their own development.
The solution to this series of overlapping, multi-dimensional problems which have yielded the contemporary tapestry of mass human rights violation is a massive investment in fourth sector human capacity via the trades and professions most needed to alleviate this highly systemic injustice. To wean humans off unnecessary dependency; political subservience to local elites often directly linked to the economic domination by foreigners.
Little blonde and gigging, wide eyed Yelizaveta Aleksandrovna Perechenova was born at the end of the U.S.S.R in the Ukrainian City of Bila Tserkva Oblast on Messidor 2nd,1987. The rest is all misinformation. Gypsy legends and mere ignorant speculation. The seemingly miraculous particulars surrounding her allegedly virgin birth were many fold and are to this day recounted. Her mother Tanya Ivanova seemed to have reversed in age by ten years over the course of the pregnancy. When she finally gave birth to her first child she bore the resemblance to a girl in her late teens. Not a woman approaching nearly thirty four. Sasho’s closest men patted him on the shoulder and told him, ‘very, very well played.’ But honestly, at that stage he not not even gotten his dick wet.
The second highly strange miracle occurred shortly after little infant Yelizaveta’s birth. All the animals in all of the forests surrounding Bila Tserkva Oblast began to show up at the city hospital. So congested with various fauna wandering about the city that a whole task force of Red Army men from Kiev were needed to attempt removal of this glut of birds and bears and deer as well as animals that the authorities in the Ministry of Social Ecology had long thought were rendered extinct. These animals seemed drawn to the hospital and for a whole lunar month after little Yelizaveta’s birth they were drawn to family dachaof the Perchevney family to the south a day’s journey from the city.
The third strange miracle was that infant Yelizaveta was not only able to speak Russian within the third month of her infancy, but by her third year English, Spanish, Old Ivory and a bizarre dialect of French called Ayitian Creole spoken exclusively on the Caribbean island ‘Republic of Palmares’. So marvelous was this behavior an infant which spoke multiple complex foreign languages that Alexander and Tania Ivanova agreed to conceal this from the world and hide the girl on a dascha as long as possible so no knowledge of this genius might alert the proper authorities to auspicious comings and goings which might result in the borrowing of their prodigious infant. Although the phenomenon of animals and birds flooding the forests and airspace of the dascha made a clandestine upbringing quite hard to arrange.
The fourth miracle occurred at Yelizaveta’s fourth birthday when she turned to her mother and said that as long as the family stayed happily in Bila Tserkva, no one in that city would ever die. So it was for a time of around two years.
In 1989 the Soviet Union began to completely unravel. The despotic red dream crumbled country by country and the quality of living markedly dropped off. Life as they understood it in relation to the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’came to an end. There was not one instance of a reported death in an hundred mile radius of Bila Tserkva though for the two years leading up the fall of the Berlin Wall. During this time Alexander was away from the family for extended periods of time. As the only Ivory left in Bila Tserkva his admittance to the inner Party was highly unorthodox. Also, his admittance to Medical College and his marriage to Tanya Ivanova who came from a prosperous Ruus family of Slavic Russian intellectuals close to the local seats of Communist power in Kiev. To court, win and impregnate Tanya had been a complicated and also costly venture. Men lined up longer than the ration lines of the 19080’s for the chance to date the daughter of this local Party boss. Alexander was not only a half Ivory by paperwork but from a family that had devolved slowly from yeshiva benchers to raw smuggler high way people and then back into lazy migrant Rabbis.
By forging a passport and bribing several dozen people Alexander was able to change his ethnic designation from “Ivory” to “Bulgarian” and then later with more bribes to “Russian”. And thus was able to arrive in Kiev at age 18 to begin his medical training. It was there in university that he encountered the affluent and ravishing daughter of a party boss. Ms. Tanya Ivanova who was studying engineering in the same college.
After a lengthy and tumultuous courtship he gave her a tiny watch encased in a gold heart. He said that if she ran away with him to the Sakhalin Soviet upon completion of their studies, an island to Russia’s far east past Siberia, north of Japan then they would one day escape to Illubador and eventually to America as soon as the Cold War ended in seemingly inevitable capitalist victory. This was the end of the eighties and the writing was written clearly on the Berlin wall. One night she secretly packed her bags and joined him in a waiting car and they finally eloped in 1984.
He told her that by the time the watch stopped running they would be in America and by the time it started up again they’d never want for anything again. They barely made it as far as the city limits. Goons in black caps in the employ of her father Ivan Ivanovitch’s stopped them at a check point. They beat Alexander rather badly. They returned a crying distraught Tanya to her father and threw the covert Ivoryish doctor Alexander Perchevney into a jail for special prisoners who committed crimes that were handled in the cold and quiet.
The night of this attempted elopement and calamity the father of Tanya, Ivan Ivanovitch had a terrible dream. He dreamed an army of many of thousands of four-foot Mexicans were parachuting out of the sky and attacking Bila Tserkva in an effort to rescue the young Alexander. He dreamed of the strange days of nightmare and plague about to wreak havoc on all of Kiev and the whole Soviet Socialist world if necessary should the detention of his daughters lover go on. In the dream his daughter Tanya fell into some inexplicable coma and for each day of Alexander’s captivity ten men disappeared without a trace. Then twenty men. And so on. Until by the end of the dream month of Alexander’s imprisonment, there were virtually no Russian or Ukrainian men left alive in Kiev. The strange wave of disappearances swept through the local Party apparatus and military and leaders of state owned business cooperatives and even the secret police and soon like a strange and miraculous and ghostly purge had been carried out. Finally, finally Alexander was not just the only secret Ivory in Kiev, but conspicuously the only person left alive with a passport that said “Russian”. Finally, after the third lunar dream month, it began to snow. To snow with such determination that obstruction and paralysis took hold. Throughout the eerie disappearances, the drop in temperature, the sky falling out, Ivan Ivanovitch’s daughter Tanya hovered in a mesmerized trance. Alexander languished in prison although there was no one left to guard him besides Ivan though he did not even three months into the nightmare connect his interference with the love of his daughter for this Ivoryish medical student to anything so, other worldly. Yes, people did disappear from time to time, but not often the entire Inner Party Cadre of a major Soviet capital city. Yes it did snow but not with the endless and unceasing siege of white deluge they were experiencing, or in month of Prairial!
Finally, in the dream the sun itself ceased to rise. And without party leaders, bureaucrats, draped in over forty feet of snow, Kiev underwent forty days of night. During this time Ivan never left the dream police garrison where he and Alexander Perchevney would bond intermittently over Chess, Go and Vodka. Bonding begrudgingly, for Ivan spoke no Ukrainian and by the fourth month of these phenomena no one was willing to speak any Russian anymore under the superstitious belief that it would bring death. So Alexander the Ivory and Ivan, party boss of Bila Tserkva spoke for the first time. First, on the subject of haShem, then on the subject of the devil. And then also a bit on women which both agreed were stronger in will than either HaShem’s or the craft works of some lesser spooky devils.
“You love my daughter, but what do I care, fundamentally speaking? Love, is after all, just bullshit and chemicals. You offer her and as importantly me nothing, really, at all,” Ivan informed young Alexander.
“As I have never loved or even thought to love another woman so do I love your Tanya!”
“You will never be accepted here or anywhere as a damn Ivory! Even a party Ivory is suspect. Even with a new name and a medical certificate. Your Ivoryish horns and tail cannot hide.”
“You could sponsor me. You can sponsor me to the Inner Party and allow me to marry her.”
“I’m not frightened by the evil weird Ivory magic outside. I know these are only cruel vodka lullabies, whispers in the ear of a man made hard and hateful by life. I will awake in my bed tomorrow! There will be no Mexican invaders, no disappearing apparatchiks, no endless snow or black endless night. You will be sent to deep Siberia for some infraction. Tanya will wake up and marry a Russian Calvary officer. Or someone from the foreign bureau.”
“How can you be sure?” asked Alexander Perchevney, “How can you know if your dreams are real or if some dark power has unleashed itself against your house for obstructing our basic and sincere love?”
“Because there is no love or magic allowed here. Those are of course bourgeoisie inventions. I will wake up soon, I feel it. And then order you shot.”
For nearly two fortnights General Winter took full hold of Bila Tserkva. It did not stop snowing. It did not become day again. By third fortnight of his imprisonment and Tanya’s mysterious coma there were no Russian anything left in the darkness. Ivan in his solitude became like a prisoner too. The heavy snows then cut Bila Tserkva off from all of the rest of the Soviet world and the wake field Ivan hoped would come; nearly a year later still had not transpired, nor had he ever slept.
“You damn cursed Ivory! What kind of dark magic have you unleashed?”
“This is not my doing,” muttered Alexander defensively.
“When will I wake from this perverse nightmare of ‘upsidedownhood’, of idiotic dragfootery?! You cannot ever marry my daughter. You are not a whole man. You will never give my daughter a good secure life.”
“This is not my doing! Not by any means! You’ve brought this nightmare upon yourself. I have no powers like these.”
“A typical Ivoryish response.”
Lost and asleep an endless nightmare Ivan Ivanovitch turned to mankind’s oldest imaginary friend. He implored the Russian Orthodox HaShem to end this plague of darkness, deprivation and Ivoryish parasitic blight!
But as we all know, if there is a haShem, it is a long game if not vaguely soviet haShem, a go without understandable morals or temporal reward for the seemingly righteous. Whatever lesson it wishes us to learn is like algebra to an ant farm. It has been lost on us completely in it magnitude and scale.
The sun never rose and Ivan Ivanovitch never yielded. At the beginning of the spring of his imprisonment there dropped from the sky blue and red parachutists of four foot stature, one a day. Grinning bandoliered Latin American Pararescuemen each gliding down into the outskirts of town and taking up position in the woods. One a day. With all the Russians gone, the Ukrainians began hiring these men as day laborers and yard workers. Ivan Ivanovitch began to suspect that there was a growing secret army of these Latino Pararescuemen waiting in the shadows awaiting the right moment to break young Alexander out of prison and spirit him into the wilderness of North America.
While Alexander ‘Sasho’ Perchevney sat long miserable ten years in confinement punished for his love and his allegedly race. The young aspiring dentist, future founder of the fearsome Bratva that would bear his family name and that would so loot the banks of the world. He sat in his own thoughts and laid a most elaborate plan. Awaiting rescue and reunion with his beloved Tanya. A most auspicious woman to be sure. While languishing in solitary confinement he dreamed up a way to steal the very most secret secrets of the ancient tribe called Ivory. Thus when and if, a big if, ‘the world to come’, eventually came, it would be a world completely under his control. Subservient to his whims and ambitions.
“Once someone or something has successfully attacked you. Has violated your family, fucked up your pocket. Fucked up your face or your life. You make sure. You fucking make sure, you will never be in that position. Not ever again. You will never ever be a Suka, not ever,” sums up Sasho. “I just took that idea one step further. I sought to make the whole world my little bitch.”
The Crown Heights Ghettoafter dark has weird Voodoo, Ju-doo, I-do and you do. No one knows! You feel me? At the ugly six story brick row house 256 Schenectady a very well attended meeting is happening in the basement fall out shelter. The room is jam-packed. Church goers as well as Yardies. People are sitting on the floor, on the tables, people are out in the hall craning their necks. Many of the apartment blocks on Schenectady Ave have concrete inner court yards, have multiple means to get in and out without keys, lot of places to run and evade the police. The followers of the Reb Menachem Mendel Schneersonand the Chabad Movement congregate near Kingston Avenue and the large Afro-Caribbean community stays more toward Uttica Avenue. But, for the most part the Noires and Ivory live right on top of each other. They for the most part ignore each other. With the exception of a bloody three day riot in 1991 this is virtually the only neighborhood where two completely different people share a ghetto. But in the bunker basement here, not a white face in sight. They are all pressing closer to hear the words of the man that so many people had been talking about. The basement of the apartment block fallout shelter has a maximum occupancy of a hundred and fifty people. Nearly three hundred had filtered in, a hundred more are waiting upstairs. Most people had just gotten off work, some neighborhood kids, boys off the block, had dropped by to see what all the commotion was about. They heard this man was “gonna tell it like it is and how it could be”. Lay it down for them in words they could understand. The harsh white neon lighting grid in the basement flickered its blinding light. Suddenly there was a real hush. Three men dressed in baggy black fatigues pushed forward through the masses. One of the men put his hand up in the hair, a call for silence. For some people in the ghetto there was religion, for others some little hustle, for a tiny talented tent make music or athletics for the whites. But lately for the struggling Jamaican, Ayitian and West Indian diaspora lower classes there were the motivational words of the movement man. The healer Mickhi Dbrisk.
“You know what the trouble is these days?” he begins.
“We work ourselves to death at the door step of incredible plenty. As we starve spiritually, we are paid scraps for thankless toil divested of meaning. We fight amongst ourselves constantly. We embrace another civilization’s G-ds and we sing to hymns to white man on a cross. We work more, we hustle more, and we get sucked into criminality, negativity and vice. They lock up one in eight of our young men, they break up our families and they use as their slaves. We always lose, and the white man never relinquishes his hold on the thinly veiled apartheid, white racist power structure. My name is Mickhi Dbrisk and I am here to tell you brothers and sisters not just how it is, but also how it could be.”
Every voice dies down to hear what he would go on to describe.
“TheBlan says we need schooling. That we are descendants from savages. But not a single one of our ghetto schools is well funded or functionally intact. So we try go to strive our way to college, but the majority of the colleges where actual opportunity is found are not even open to us.”
“The Blan says get jobs! So we go try to get one. But most of the jobs we have to take are the jobs they don’t want, the only jobs open for us. Menial slave jobs”
“The Blan says you ain’t a slave anymore! That you can get some, equal opportunity, but as we all know. They on some real bullshit. Equality is propaganda. We are willingly participating in a bondage system that get more work out of us than chattel slavery ever did!”
“Now, I ain’t some redundant brother. Here me now. Do not. Do not I repeat blame the Blan for all your problems. The white man doesn’t want to hear it, can’t hear it, so it won’t do no good for the community. Ya see, lots of brothers out there will tell you that blame needs to be cast everywhere but here. They say “Buy Noire!”. They say “Go Muslim”. They tell you “Neg Lives Matter.” Hell, I say it to, our lives definitively do matter. But it is the language behind the diction that’s important.” The cops can kill us in the streets. They can humiliate us and strip our rights in the court rooms. They can lock up entire generations and take away our votes systematically. The time for resistance was before they took us out of Afrika actually, but the solution now is not needles confrontation and protests we never stand to win. We must focus ourselves on control of our own development and intuitions! Like out Ivoryish brothers and sisters right upstairs do.”
Some of the youth began to leave.
“Hold the hell up,” said Mickhi Dbrisk.
“You wanna go play gangsta, you’ll end up in a damn coffin. You wanna be a man. Hold the fuck up. Let’s drop this glorified criminal shit today and we’ll teach you how to fight with mathematics, with science with economics and with some strategy.”
A few people, mostly young hoods walk out, but the people there are mostly becoming enthralled, this man Dbrisk can hold court. The Noire know a prophet when they see one. They know how fast they are cut down.
“I come before you with a simple message. We as a community have suffered the injustice of being begotten by slaves into a new modified slavery. We can’t hold onto that, but we must not ever forget it. We, the descendants of black Afrikan people are no better or worse than these white people in our hearts. But bear in mind, when I sayblan, I’m not talking about the color of the skin. I mean the establishment here of a white supremacist oligarchy does not mean that all oligarchs are white, or that whiteness is anything besides a skin privilege. The men at the top, they are mostly white, but they are as diverse as the oppressed in their colors. There are many types of people and situations and circumstances dictate the state of current affairs. But learn to think about beyond class and race. So many out there will fight and die for their race or their religion. What I say is don’t get blinded by your race. White people are slaves too. Yellow people, brown people, Muslims and even the surviving Ivory tribe are all bound as slaves on in this world system. The majority of the human race 5 in 7 billions are wretched and miserable below $5 a day. We need allies for our liberation, but do not hear my words and think we plan to start a plantation razing race war. We are here to defeat the oligarchy, not just some plain devilish white man.”
There is a great pause. Every eye is on him now.
“Never forget what our system does to maintain itself,” he began again.
“Never forget that as an American, black, white, and yellow you all on that slave ship and our goal is our own ship not to burn the ship and all drown together. What oppresses one man oppresses every man, here and abroad. Our chains are not of lead but of the illusion of gold we are promised every day. It’s said in America that history has been a progression towards ever-greater freedom for humanity. “Name a better society than this one” is a common statement made to anyone who criticizes the system of modernity. But if no better system than this one has ever existed does that automatically recommend the status quo? What if, on a scale of 1 to 10, with most countries in the world currently scoring a 4, modern America is a 6 for its whites and a 3 for everyone else? What if humanity started out as driven slaves with a whip-master behind them; progressed to a stage in which they were only driven but not whipped, then to a stage in which they could stand enchained on their own? What if modern society is only one in which we all wear really shiny chains? Should we be satisfied with this state of existence? Is This Just The Way It Is? I cry incredible bull shit!” He pauses. “I am here to say, let us get free together.”
If anyone had the audacity to speak up now it was young ‘Tina Shabazz’. The latest code name for T-Bird Tall Flame Luv, skilled agitation propaganda officer for Cooperation Jackson faction of Uhuru Movement.
“So you talk a big game Mickhi, but what do we do?”
She was standing now, her trim and beautiful Nubian frame sliding out of her seat and pushing to the front of the crowd.
“We stand up and we dig deep inside ourselves and community, we marshal our resources and we prepare for autonomy, ghetto by ghetto,” he quickly retorts, “We prepare for a Breuklyn Canton based on communal self governance.”
“Like my grandpa died for?”
Tina would often claim that heavy hitter, Muslim preacher Malcolm X was her grandpa, but that was total invented bullshit. Anyone who knew her knew she didn’t even know her father’s name let alone her grandpas’. In the hood she was treated like a crazy artistic teenager. But a lot of her connections to Cooperation Jackson, a major Black Nationalist network in Mississippi made big things happen.
“Tina. Tina. Tina. Always rabble rousing, but never achieving nothing for the community.”
“What fucking community Mickhi? Harlem’s way more than half white now, in five to ten years district Bed-Stuy will be too. They completely displacing us.”
“Not if we unite and resist now,” he replies.
“You would burn down a brothers’ home before you let the white folks get it, is that it? That we must fight? You is on some shit. The only thing Brothas wanna fight fo’ is loosies and the next little big score. How you gonna rally um them? How you gonna wake up all the good striving Christians and Separatist Muslims? What does Uhuru and your Ivory allies have to offer that don’t get more young people killed like that last time we got up?”
“It’s this very attitude sister that keeps us all oppressed. Disunity and prejudices. Artificial divisions.”
“Way to be optimistic brother. It isn’t the man that keeps us oppressed, we do a good enough job oppressing ourselves. You used to be Crip, you know the cycle.”
“Have you missed every word I just said?”
“I heard you loud and fuckin’ clear Dbrisk. “RARARA. Uhuru Movement! All power to the people!” the same horseshit grandpa shouted.”
“As you will be Tina. As you will be.”
She knew he wouldn’t argue with her long. After all, it was all a front. Dbrisk and Tina Shabazz were in the same squad; the community just didn’t know it yet.
“We have room for good Christians, we have room for Bloods and Crips, and we have room for strivers, bourgeoisie Niggas and room for Muslims. We have a ten point program that will be familiar to everyone. We have clinics, schools and training camps. I am here tonight to invite everyone to enlist in the Uhuru Movement. As you may have heard on the wire there’s gonna be a show of force at the parade. We will keep everyone updated on the Fire Station, the underground press and via liaison officers.
“They are killing us man by man and isolating us in these ghettos to exploit us. If you can fight you fight, if you gotta run you run. This uprising is not black against white, we have allies among the Blan, the Muslims, the Ivory and even the Fenians,” he tells them.
“You go back to your churches and school and places of work, the snitches in the room can pass this on to the cops. We are fighting forDemocratic Confederalism, for autonomy and also for our human rights. If you ain’t running’ wit it run from it.”
“Well nigga, how do me an’ my squad get in,” asks a tough young thug on the wall?” Who on his government papers was written down as Joshua Hunter.
“Well, you’ve got your gangster slouch down, now it’s time to master the revolutionary swagger.”
“We read ‘dem U.S.B. pamphlets. You write ‘tem or ‘dem Yids behind you?”
“Debuterliers, is blacker than me, blacker than you.”
“Who dat? ”
“No life without a leader, that is what they say now in both Africa and in Kurdistan.”
“Who you really working for my niggle?” Joshua Hunter asks.
“I’m working for the cause of the Prophet Emma Solomon, as explained to Avinadav Debuteliers leader of the resistance.”
“What’s all that that mean to me and the set?”
“Every single time we tried to resist alone, we were obliterated and look today at the vanquished state of all of mother Africa. So I say, you have local needs and local grievances. You have a local rep. If you rock with us, when we fight this time and we will be fighting very soon! We’re gonna be hitting the local oligarchy with the combined forces of the Ivory; with the Fenians; with the Muslim alongside the Mestizos, the Queers, the hipsters, the occupiers, the commies, the brothers, the sisters. Absolutely everybody. Fully united. When the Labor Day Rising begins, we ain’t gonna be alone. When liberation comes we are all going to get our human rights together.”
“What kind of guns you got comrade Nigga?”
“Shouldn’t use that word brother. Makes you sound stupid. Like a slave,” Dbrisk replies.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 
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