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readings and podcasts plus thoughts on Luigi Mangione and Syria

Hey everyone! Chris Browne from the Pluto Press podcast hosted a conversation between me and Vicky Osterweil, “Beyond the Ballot Box,” talking about what we can learn from the past few years to better face the dangers of the next years. Could you help share it?

And I had another great conversation on The Final Straw discussing themes that show up in my two latest books, They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us and Organization, Continuity, Community. Why do we have a hard time creating continuity between one generation and the next in our revolutionary movements? Why do we have to start over or commit the same mistakes so often? What keeps us from learning from our shared past, or even remembering it?

By the way, this newsletter? It’s entirely free!

Everything here is free, and that includes the newsletter itself. A few months ago I made the definitive decision not to put anything I release here behind a paywall. I write because I need to, being able to share these thoughts is reward enough, and I hope you find them useful or inspiring. The option to make a donation is still there (Substack uses the language of “becoming a paid subscriber”) but there will be no difference in privileges or access for any kind of subscriber. And the only difference between a subscriber and a non-subscriber is that the former will automatically get each newsletter in their email. Everything will be accessible and free on the website.

If you want to give me a gift, I’m happy to receive it, and you can do that through the subscription form, though as noted you won’t actually be buying or paying for anything: everyone gets free access. I’ll also occasionally share fundraisers with other projects that could use support, for anyone who wants to make a donation.

In general, I’m going to try to publish at least one in-depth essay a month, one or two recommended readings and listenings (like this one), and if I’m able, maybe a rant, maybe a list or a poll, maybe a second essay, maybe an analysis of current events.

But, this isn’t a job, and often life will get in the way, so I’m not making any promises. I’m still a precarious writer and manual laborer with cancer, chronic illness, and medical bills, dealing with rising rent and plenty of other problems – realities that most of you are too familiar with. I want everything and everyone in the whole world to be free, but we’re not there yet. If you want to help spread this newsletter or any of my other writings, or if you’ve got a little bit extra and want to send me a donation, I’m really grateful. But I’m also grateful we’re here and in conversation.

In the last couple weeks, a lot of people have been talking about Luigi Mangione and the assassination of the insurance company CEO. At the moment I’m not interested in dissecting his politics, I just want to name two things. The assassination, for one brief week, showed people how the real social fault lines ran between above and below. Real people overwhelmingly applauded the action, or at least sympathized with it. The elite—Republicans and Democrats, Right and Left—were united in moralizing, distortion, and hand-wringing.

The other thing: it took 5 days for Luigi to be caught, despite NYPD, FBI, and many other highly resourced, professional police agencies looking for him. Five days is a long time, and it could have been longer. He made good use of a mask: here we have another reason to take the pandemic and the realities of chronic illness and air pollution seriously. A culture in which mask-wearing is normal is good for everybody. Well, everybody except for cops and CEOs, but their existence is a threat to our survival, so…

He was proficient in fire arms, but he could have benefited greatly from proficiency in aesthetics: makeup and realistic masks can completely change someone’s facial structure, making them unidentifiable, and even just effective contouring and shading can throw off AI as well as human facial recognition.

Wearing generic clothes and completely changing the outer layer in a video surveillance blindspot with more than two egresses will make a person much harder to track. (With a small blindspot that just has one or two entry paths, even the cops will put two and two together if someone wearing red enters the blindspot and a minute later someone with the same build but wearing blue leaves the blindspot.)

Dumping trash like food wrappers anywhere close to the site gives the cops your fingerprints. Touching and rubbing against surfaces, or hanging out in one spot for a while, unless it’s a place with really high traffic, gives the cops your DNA.

Staying in most hotels or motels often requires you to give ID and puts you on surveillance cameras. Not having a week long stock of food requires you to buy more, which means interacting with bored and often alienated workers who might snitch you out, during the time period when the public is most focused on the case.

Of course, these thoughts are just reflections on the current state of law enforcement technology in practice. Don’t break the law, kids: it’s illegal.

This is a 1910 photo of actual newsies. All the other images in this newsletter are from the musical Newsies.

Moving on…

Sometimes, the threat of our rebellions or simply the need of capitalists and militaries for a reasonably competent, healthy, and docile workforce means governments create programs to give us resources, like healthcare or education. All of these come with their own forms of humiliation and control that have been written and spoken about extensively. It’s also important to remember that they are created with resources stolen from us, from our labor, and from the land. Additionally, public resources don’t give us security, because they don’t belong to us, they belong to the State, and they State can restrict our access at any moment.

Here’s an article from The Baffler on the difficulties, humiliations, and privations that go along with getting Medicaid, and trying to keep it.

In “Well, then, it’s time to burn something else,” Cameron Steele revisits her reporting on the US government burning a chemical weapons stockpile, and how many people, herself included, got lethal forms of cancer. From there, she looks deeper to shine a light on “the age of exhaustion, the age of the bent, the age of the howl.”

As we approach the winter solstice (in the northern hemisphere) and for so many reasons, so many of us are thinking about death… as death becomes—if it isn’t already—a member of our family and not just a guest at our table… in the worst of circumstances I think it becomes again what it always used to be: a presence we need to care for, I want to share this article again, “For Black Archaeologists, the Atlantic Ocean Is an Ancestral Graveyard.” The transatlantic slave trade is incomparable to other historical experiences, but the bravery, the duty of remembering, and the sense of care of the protagonists of this article offer so much I think anyone can learn from, whether it’s members of other diasporic peoples or even people who are pressured to forget about these atrocities, who are taught to think of themselves as the descendants of conquerors and to be proud of this.

Here’s a mainstream but interesting article on weather magic on the Pacific island of Vanuatu.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/07/weather-magic-and-wind-lore-the-push-to-preserve-ancient-knowledge-in-vanuatu What I like about it is how it pushes back (though meekly) against centuries of racist assumptions about magical practices across the world being empty superstition, and it also mentions the connection between the loss of so many human languages with the loss of Indigenous knowledge and ecological practices. In fact, the destruction of most languages and the destruction of territorially specific and ecological Indigenous knowledge systems is an intentional product of colonialism and the modern State itself, continuing to this day.

In the last decades, as (some) scientists gradually play catch up, acknowledging how many Indigenous practices and beliefs far surpass their own knowledge or practices about health, food, or the environment, they tend to avoid any real reckoning or transformation. They do this by eliding or minimizing the violence with which colonialism historically and presently attacks and destroys non-alienated relationships and knowledge systems, and they also do it by continuing to steal Indigenous knowledge and place it within a colonial paradigm, in a familiar pattern of extractivism. This often shows up as the claim that Indigenous knowledge systems are scientific, when in fact they represent an entirely different paradigm of knowledge: intuitive rather than rationalist; complex and localized rather than universalized and reproducible; passed on through intimate personal relationships of apprenticeship and rootedness rather than through modular and impersonal institutionalized education. These are knowledge systems that flow from a mutual relationship with the rest of the world, from conversation with beings that scientists don’t even consider to be people; whereas the scientific knowledge system is amassed by treating everything—including other humans—as dead material to be experimented on, to take apart and put back together like Frankenstein.

I’m going to write more soon(ish) about who and what are considered to be people. In the meantime, here’s one last recommendation that I share sometimes, a critique of (colonial/Western/rationalist) Science.

Science, by Alex Gorrion

then Science Revisited , a follow up.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s important book on the colonialism imbued in actual scientific methodologies throughout history, Decolonizing Methodologies.

And many of these same criticisms are a major part of one of my late faves, Inflamed.

New developments in Syria

Following up on what I last wrote about the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria, I want to underscore some salient points.

• In suddenly losing their major ally in the region, Russia has accidentally revealed how weak its position is globally. They’ll need to reduce their scope and ambitions, or face further losses. Russia was already losing ground in the Sahel. If Moscow can’t preserve its naval base on Syria’s coast, it will entirely lose its access to the Mediterranean and northern Africa (as long as Turkey continues to deny the Russian navy passage through the Bosporus and out of the Black Sea). Incidentally, dictatorships often do worse than democracies when it comes to effective imperialism, since it’s dangerous to give critical feedback to a dictator, and without critical feedback, the leaders of such states develop an inflated sense of their own strength.

• I don’t think Iran was overextended in its support of Hizbollah and the Houthis. The Iranian leadership itself stated that it would support Assad’s government but it was not interested in occupying the country for him if his own military wouldn’t fight. Nonetheless, their loss of a foothold here significantly weakens their position against both Israel and Gulf Arab states like Saudi Arabia. What’s more, Syria was the route for Iran to supply Hizbollah in Lebanon, by air and by land. Tehran faces an uphill battle cultivating an alliance with the new government strong enough to preserve those logistical privileges, though it is certainly trying.

• In case Israel has any supporters left who can be swayed by reason (unlikely), Israel reacted quickly to this development by flooding tanks into southern Syria to steal more land and force more people out of their homes. This is the most quintessential strategy of the Israeli state: the entire state is founded on theft, displacement, and ethnic cleansing.

• However, I haven’t seen strong evidence that Israel orchestrated the offensive or is effectively trying to determine who comes to power next in Syria. If you know of such evidence, please send it my way, but they seem to be acting opportunistically. Other than land theft, they are carrying out hundreds of bombings of weapons stockpiles, ensuring that whoever comes to power next will be militarily weaker.

• The way in which Syrian state power and Assad’s military collapsed so quickly is a great illustration of the disadvantage of repression. Repression erodes a government’s legitimacy. The soldiers who massacre their own fellow citizens have to go home sometimes to their families, their neighborhoods. Unless the repression can be effectively targeted against some minority, an “internal enemy,” this has consequences. The moment they have to imagine the fall of the regime, the moment they have to imagine that their survival and livelihood might depend on what their neighbors think about them, they are likely to abandon the State, or at least decrease their enthusiasm and the effectiveness with which they carry out their actions. All states are oppressive, but democratic states have an advantage in this department. They can carry out oppressive policies more effectively, because democracies come with more opportunities to renew their legitimacy and convince their subjects to participate in their own oppression. If the only tool for control a State has in its toolbox is repression, its days are numbered.

• The US is also showing its weakened power and influence in the region. It wasn’t ready for this sudden collapse, and unlike Israel its response has been timid, limited to bombings against sites linked with ISIL. In other words, it doesn’t want a resurgence of the Islamic State in the region, but the US government doesn’t really know what it does want. Other players will carry the day.

• Turkey, on the contrary, has improved its position by eliminating a neighboring rival and probably gaining an ally. Prior to the surprise offensive Turkey had the strongest relationship with the HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), the dominant faction in the military offensive that overthrew Assad. Turkey, as a nominally democratic, conservative Sunni Islamic state, might also present the nearest model for how HTS plans to rule. Nonetheless, it has become clear that Turkey does not lead the HTS the way it leads the SNA, the Syrian National Army. Following Turkey’s most immediate strategic needs, the SNA has responded opportunistically to the situation by attacking the Syrian Democratic Forces, which are connected to the Kurdish liberation movement.

• The SDF, both its Kurdish units and Arab and other units, have gained ground throughout this collapse, but not nearly as much as they would have without the Turkish-backed offensive.

• The new government in Damascus, led by the HTS, has promised it has broken all ties with al-Qaida and ISIL-affiliated groups, that it will respect all ethnic and religious groups, and (maybe) that it will govern democratically. Nonetheless, it is also demonstrating its effective independence from Turkey, whatever their relationship was before the offensive. High-ranking diplomats from eight Arab League countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, the UAE, Jordan, Qatar, and Bahrain) as well as the US, the EU, and Turkey, recently met in Jordan to discuss their support for the new regime. All of these countries are in contact with Damascus. Given the lack of unity and all the political differences between these various countries, it means the new Syrian government under al-Bashir has a lot of latitude and plenty of potential allies.

If the HTS want to install a Sunni fundamentalist autocracy, they will probably be able to, though any mistreatment of other groups risks a renewed civil war. They might have better luck following the Turkish model, with a nominally democratic but reactionary religious state, though given Syria’s greater diversity and lack of resources for a strong centralizing force, the actual result might be a more segmented state like the one in Iraq.

As we should know by now, the fall of one oppressive regime does not automatically mean a free society will flourish. Internationally, we need to strengthen our contacts and build support for the different groups that survived the brutal repression (by Assad, Hizbollah, Turkey, and ISIL) of the Syrian Revolution of ten years ago. That’s probably the only path that leads in a significantly better direction.

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Until next time, take care of one another.