An independent Jewish body has condemned the move by Australia’s 39 universities to endorse a “dangerous and politicised” definition of antisemitism which threatens academic freedom.
The Jewish Council of Australia, a diverse coalition of Jewish academics, lawyers, writers and teachers, said in a statement that the move would have a “chilling effect” on legitimate criticism of Israel, and risked institutionalising anti-Palestinian racism.
The council also criticised the fact that the universities had done so “without meaningful consultation” with Palestinian groups or diverse Jewish groups which were critical of Israel.
The definition was developed by the Group of Eight (Go8) universities and adopted by Universities Australia.
“By categorising Palestinian political expression as inherently antisemitic, it will be unworkable and unenforceable, and stifle critical political debate, which is at the heart of any democratic society,” the Jewish Council of Australia said.
“The definition dangerously conflates Jewish identities with support for the state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.”
The council statement said that it highlighted two key concerns:
Mischaracterisation of criticism of Israel The definition states: “Criticism of Israel can be antisemitic when it is grounded in harmful tropes, stereotypes or assumptions and when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel or all Jews or when it holds Jewish individuals or communities responsible for Israel’s actions.”
The definition’s inclusion of “calls for the elimination of the State of Israel” would mean, for instance, that calls for a single binational democratic state, where Palestinians and Israelis had equal rights, could be labelled antisemitic.
Moreover, the wording around “harmful tropes” was dangerously vague, failing to distinguish between tropes about Jewish people, which were antisemitic, and criticism of the state of Israel, which was not, the statement said.
Misrepresentation of Zionism as core to Jewish identity The definition states that for most Jewish people “Zionism is a core part of their Jewish identity”.
The council said it was deeply concerned that by adopting this definition, universities would be taking and promoting a view that a national political ideology was a core part of Judaism.
“This is not only inaccurate, but is also dangerous,” said the statement.
“Zionism is a political ideology of Jewish nationalism, not an intrinsic part of Jewish identity.
“There is a long history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, from the beginning of its emergence in the late-19th century, to the present day. Many, if not the majority, of people who hold Zionist views today are not Jewish.”
In contrast to Zionism and the state of Israel, said the council, Jewish identities traced back more than 3000 years and spanned different cultures and traditions.
Jewish identities were a rightly protected category under all racial discrimination laws, whereas political ideologies such as Zionism and support for Israel were not, the council said.
Growing numbers of dissenting Jews
“While many Jewish people identify as Zionist, many do not. There are a growing number of Jewish people worldwide, including in Australia, who disagree with the actions of the state of Israel and do not support Zionism.
“Australian polling in this area is not definitive, but some polls suggest that 30 percent of Australian Jews do not identify as Zionists.
“A recent Canadian poll found half of Canadian Jews do not identify as Zionist. In the United States, more and more Jewish people are turning away from Zionist beliefs and support for the state of Israel.”
Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer and the Jewish Council of Australia’s executive officer, said: “It degrades the very real fight against antisemitism for it to be weaponised to silence legitimate criticism of the Israeli state and Palestinian political expressions.
“It also risks fomenting division between communities and institutionalising anti-Palestinian racism.”
From the unflinching investigative team behind Reveal comes a new weekly podcast that delivers More To The Story. Every Wednesday, Peabody Award-winning journalist Al Letson sits down with the people at the heart of our changing world for candid—sometimes uncomfortable—conversations that make you rethink your entire newsfeed. Whether he’s sounding the alarm about the future of democracy, grappling with the shifting dynamics of political power, or debating big cultural moments, Al always brings his unfiltered curiosity to topics and perspectives that go too often ignored. Because, as Al reminds us every week on Reveal, when you take the time to listen, there’s always More To The Story. Find it in your Reveal feed beginning March 5, 2025.
Seamus Fitzgerald hears a lot of opinions about solar power. As the associate director of real estate at OneEnergy Renewables, a solar energy developer, he approaches farmers and other landowners across the Midwest with proposals to lease their properties for solar projects. Some landowners are excited about being part of the shift to clean energy. Others are hostile to the idea of putting rows of gleaming panels on their land.
Fitzgerald manages to convince many farmers by explaining the simple economics of leasing their land for solar power. “At the end of the day, the financial payments from these types of projects are generally higher than what folks can pull off of their ground through other types of crops,” he said. To sell solar power to people who might have hesitations, he often talks about how the technology was invented in America. “When you install a solar project, you’re collecting an American resource here in America,” Fitzgerald said.
It echoes the way that President Donald Trump talks about energy, though he’s usually heaping praise on American oil and gas, not renewables. Still, the Solar Energy Industries Association, the industry’s primary lobbying group, has found plenty of ways to align its work with the administration’s talking points. Now splayed across its site, next to an image of an American flag hovering over solar panels, is a new slogan: “American Energy DOMINANCE.” Earlier this month, the association participated in a lobbying blitz in Washington, D.C., urging lawmakers to keep tax credits for clean energy projects in place.
Solar provided almost 6 percent of total U.S. electricity generation last year, but it’s been growing fast, expected to supply “almost all growth” in electricity generation this year, according to the pre-Trump Energy Information Administration. Many are hoping that the technology — which is broadly popular among Americans, with 78 percent supporting developing more solar farms — can manage to stay out of Trump’s culture wars over climate change. More so than wind power with its towering turbines, solar energy has an ability to bridge ideological divides, appealing to environmentalists and “don’t-tread-on-me” libertarians alike.
“President Trump has specifically said that he loves solar — and as energy demand soars, we know that solar is the most efficient and affordable way to add a lot of energy to the grid, fast,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, the Solar Energy Industries Association’s president and CEO, in a statement to Grist.
In December, her trade group released a policy roadmap that reflects Trump’s agenda, with priorities such as “eliminate dependence on China” and “cut red tape in the energy sector.” It’s a change from the vision the association laid out in 2020 after the election of former President Joe Biden, when Hopper promised to “meet the moment of the climate era with equity and justice at the forefront.”
The new language reflects a change in the federal government’s priorities, but also a recognition among solar advocates that they don’t need to talk about climate change to advance clean technologies. “Energy independence — I think that they should scream that from the rooftops,” Fitzgerald said. “Every single politician in the world, in America, should be saying, ‘We’re trying to make these things here to collect energy here.’”
Last year, solar represented more than 80 percent of new electrical generating capacity added to the U.S. grid. But some predict a slowdown. Solar industry stocks plummeted after Trump’s election in November as investors speculated that Republicans might repeal tax credits for solar in the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate law Biden signed in 2022. In January, a report from the data analytics company Wood Mackenzie projected that solar installations would stagnate in many countries because of “post-election uncertainty, waning incentives, power sector reforms, and a shift towards less ambitious climate agendas.”
“The bottom line is all that adds up to market uncertainty for one of the fastest growing sectors of our economy, and nothing is more important to businesses and investors than market clarity,” said Bob Keefe, the executive director of E2, a nonpartisan organization promoting policies that are good for the economy and environment. “And right now, what Washington is doing in regard to the future of clean energy in America is about as clear as a snowstorm in D.C. at midnight.”
Trump has complained about wind power ever since an offshore wind farm threatened the pristine view from his golf course in Scotland soon after he bought it in 2006. On his first day in office this year, he halted new permits for wind projects on federal lands and waters. But his administration’s position on solar is unclear: He has ranted about how solar farms take over deserts while at the same time saying he’s a “big fan” of the technology. “I think they’re more favorable to solar,” Keefe said, “but who knows? And for who knows how long?”
The Trump administration’s assault on federal bureaucracy has already jeopardized solar projects. The administration has withheld federal grants for climate programs, including Solar for All, a $7 billion program to bring residential solar to low-income neighborhoods, despite court orders to release funding. “We’re seeing real delays in getting that money out the door to the projects that need it,” said Sachu Constantine, executive director of Vote Solar, a nonprofit working to make solar power accessible.
Despite the continued uncertainty, most Solar for All projects “are still attempting to move forward,” said Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a group of alumni from the Environmental Protection Agency.
An offshore wind project is seen from Trump International Golf Links in Scotland. Andy Buchanan / AFP via Getty Images
By some measures, the culture wars are starting to encroach on Americans’ opinions about solar. Republican support for new solar farms slumped from 84 to 64 percent between 2020 and 2024, according to polling last year from the Pew Research Center. Misinformation campaigns have increasingly targeted clean energy, pushing the idea that solar and wind are unreliable — a line taken up by Citizens for Responsible Solar, a group led by a conservative operative who works to stop solar projects on farmland and timberland.
There are some valid reasons why people have hesitations about the technology, according to Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San José State University who researches conflicts over solar developments. People might be concerned about projects that take over prime farmland, cut through animal habitat, or affect Indigenous cultural sites. Careful planning can help avoid these conflicts, Mulvaney said. Solar farms can coexist with sheep, for instance. They can be built in a way that leaves space between panels for migrating pronghorn antelope, and in general, avoids prized areas in favor of developing projects on “low-impact sites,” such as degraded lands.
Mulvaney pushes back against the narrative that these concerns are slowing down solar power, arguing that most projects don’t face any resistance at all. Utilities in the U.S. are on track to meet their goals to shift to 100 percent renewable energy by 2060, he pointed out. “To me, the fastest way to get more solar is to require the utilities to buy more of it sooner.”
No matter what Trump does, clean energy advocates are hopeful that solar projects can continue to move forward at the state level. “We feel good about the future for clean energy in our states in the Southeast,” said Mark Fleming, president and CEO of Conservatives for Clean Energy, an organization that works in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana. “You know, we don’t talk about it in terms of the environment — we talk about it in terms of choice and competition in the market and in terms of good economics, because the price of solar is rapidly declining.” Over the last decade, the cost of installing solar has fallen by nearly 40 percent, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
Constantine says that talking about solar’s benefits — whether that’s through creating jobs, reducing blackouts, or pushing electricity prices down — is the key to overcoming hostility. “It is a way to reduce costs, and in this era of rising energy costs and real pinching in people’s pocketbooks, I think that’s a message that resonates,” Constantine said. “When you talk about affordability, resilience, reliability, people get that.”
Naveena Sadasivam contributed reporting to this story.
Maata Wharehoka has been described as the Parihaka Matriarch, Parihaka leader and arts advocate, “champion of Kahu Whakatere Tupapaku, the tikanga Māori practices, expert in marae arts, raranga (weaving) and karanga”, renowned weaver who revived traditional Māori methods of death and burial, “driving force behind Parihaka’s focus to be a self-sufficient community”, Kaitiaki (or guardian) of Te Niho marae for nearly 30 years.
And I want to add Peace Advocate and Activist. She died aged 74.
At Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa, the National Centre of Peace and Conflict Studies (NCPCS) at Otago University, Ōtepoti Dunedin, we were fortunate that Maata brought her knowledge and her exceptional presence to help us learn some of the lessons from Parihaka about peaceful resistance, non-violent communication, conflict resolution, consultation, hospitality, humility and mana.
One of her first talks was entitled “Why do I wear feathers in my hair and scribbles on my face?” and she explained to us the significance of the raukura or albatross feathers that signify peace to the people of Parihaka.
She used the moko (tattoos) on her mouth, chin and from her ears to her cheeks to teach us the importance of listening first, before you speak.
Maata taught us the use of the beat of the poi to signify the sound of the horses hooves when the pacifist settlement at Parihaka was invaded by the British militia in 1881.
The poi and waiata have served as a “hidden-in-plain-sight” performative image by the people of Parihaka that represents consistent resistance to the oppression.
Maata had been shocked when she first came to the peace centre that we were only able to sing (badly) what she called a “nursery school” waiata. So she gifted a unique waiata to NCPACS to help with our transition to being a more bicultural centre, now named Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa.
Maukaroko ki te whenua, Whakaaro pai ki te tangata katoa Arohanui ki te aoraki Koa, koa, koa ki te aoraki, Pono, whakapono Ki te ao nei Ko rongo, no rongo, na rongo Me rongo, me rongo, me rongo
Translation: Peace to the land Be thoughtful to all Great love to the universe Joy, joy, joy to the universe Truth, truth to the world It is Rongo, from Rongo, by Rongo Peace, peace, peace.
Maata also hosted a number of students from TAOR/NCPACS at Parihaka for both PhD fieldwork and practicum experience, building a link between them and Parihaka that extends to the next generation.
She named her expertise “deathing and birthing” as she taught Māori traditions of preparation for dying and for welcoming the new born. One of the students learnt from Maata about the process where the person who is dying is closely involved in the preparations, including the weaving of the waka kahutere (coffin) from harakeke (flax) for a natural burial.
Maata herself was very much part of the preparations for her own death and would have advised and assisted those who wove her waka kahutere with much love and expertise.
For me, Maata became one of my very best friends. Her generosity, sense of humour, high energy and kindness quite overwhelmed me. We also became close through working and writing together, with Kelli Te Maihāroa (from Waitaha — the South Island iwi with a long peace history) and Maui Solomon (who upholds the Moriori peace tradition).
We collaborated on a series of articles and chapters, and our joint work was presented both locally and at international conferences.
On my many visits to Parihaka I was also warmly welcomed by the Wharehoka family and was able to meet Maata’s mokopuna, all growing up with Māori as their first language and steeped in Māori knowledge and tikanga.
Maata is an irreplaceable person, a true wahine toa, exuberant, outgoing, funny, clever, fiece, talented, indomitable. Maata, we will miss you terribly, but will continue to be guided by your wisdom and ongoing presence in our hearts and our lives.
In the words of Kelli Te Maihāroa “She was an amazing wahine toa, who loved sharing her gifts with the world. Moe Mai Rā e te māreikura o Te Niho Parihaka.’
Dr Heather Devere is chair of Asia Pacific Media Network and former director of research of Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa.
Publications:
Kelli Te Maihāroa, Heather Devere, Maui Solomon and Maata Wharehoka (2022). Exploring Indigenous Peace Traditions Collaboratively. In Te Maihāroa, Ligaliga and Devere (Eds). Decolonising Peace and Conflict Studies through Indigenous Research. Palgrave Macmillan.
Heather Devere, Kelli Te Maihāroa, Maui Solomon and Maata Wharehoka (2020). Concepts of Friendship and Decolonising Cross-Cultural Peace Research in Aotearoa New Zealand. AMITY: The Journal of Friendship Studies, 6(1), 53-87 doi:10.5518/AMITY/31.
Heather Devere, Kelli Te Maihāroa, Maui Solomon and Maata Wharehoka (2019). Tides of Endurance: Indigenous Peace Traditions of Aotearoa New Zealand. Ab-Original: Journal of Indigenous Studies and First National and First Peoples, 3(1), 24-47.
Virtually anywhere on Earth, disaster is just a random collision of weather patterns away from your doorstep. A hurricane could tear off your roof, a wildfire might burn through your neighborhood, or a storm could flood your town, sweeping away cars, buildings, and utility poles alike. When the worst happens, how will you respond?
The animated feature Flow asks its viewers to reflect on such distressing questions in the subtle way that narrative films are so well suited for. The movie follows a black cat and the small menagerie of animals it meets as they sail over a drowned landscape, encountering survivors amid abandoned cities. And while each animal relies on instinct to pull through, the story follows a few that are able to overcome their me-first instinct to stick together.
The film pairs the charm of authentically animal-like characters with a simplistic 3D animation style — an unusual combo for feature-length films. It’s no wonder the Latvian film, made by the director Gints Zilbalodis on a modest $3.7 million budget, managed to shift a Hollywood paradigm: In January, Flow nabbed a Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature, beating out movies from Disney/Pixar, DreamWorks, and the Wallace and Gromit franchise. Now the film is nominated for two Academy Awards on March 2: Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature. No Latvian film has ever been nominated for either award before — let alone won.
It’s rare for independent animation to break into the mainstream. Even films by award-nominated artists, such as It’s Such a Beautiful Day(2011) by Don Hertzfeldt andAnomalisa(2015) by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, languish in festival circuits and are often too short on manpower, budget, and time. Laika, a small stop-motion animation house responsible for better-known features like Coraline (2009) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), each made on a $60 million budget, didn’t manage to win a Golden Globe in the animation category until 2019, with Missing Link. Foreign films face even more barriers: Studio Ghibli, the acclaimed Japanese animation studio behind Totoro (1988), has won an Academy Award for best animated feature only once, for Spirited Away in 2003. Two decades later, the studio’s most recent film, The Boy and the Heron (2023), received its only Golden Globe nomination and award for best animated feature.
In spite of all this, Flow takes up the space of a feature film with confidence and introduces the cat’s daily routine in an indulgent 15-minute sequence before floodwaters begin driving the action, allowing the viewer to delight in the cat’s charming, realistic mannerisms, and get a sense of what will soon be lost. (Be warned: spoilers ahead.)
The stars of Flow include a cat, dog, secretary bird, and capybara.
Janus Films
While humans are no longer found in the world of Flow, the setting of familiar-yet-fantastic ruins suggests that a flood has happened before, that there was a calamity before the one that’s about to swallow what remains. The cat lives in a house that was seemingly once the home of a human who either worshiped or obsessed over cats, replete with charcoal drawings and sculptures of them. The rising water soon submerges the house, its artifacts, and eventually everything. It’s a mirror to the equalizing power of natural disasters: Nothing is safe, not even our idols.
The nature of the flood seems to straddle the line between biblical fable and real-world climate disaster. Within a day or so after the first powerful wave, the cat is forced to climb to the tallest point in the landscape, which happens to be a giant cat statue. Just as our protagonist’s paws start to get wet, a boat passes by with a capybara onboard. Eventually, the pair pick up a self-sacrificing secretary bird, a trinket-obsessed lemur, and an eager-to-please labrador.
Flow isn’t necessarily compelling because of its depiction of disaster, but because of its portrayal of how these animals respond to it. In interviews, Zilbalodis has said the inspiration came from a short film he made while in high school about cats’ fear of water. “I really wanted to focus on the relationship between the animals, about the fear of others,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “The water is basically a way to communicate those other fears.”
As the water rises, the animals’ interactions change — but not how you might expect. Flow’s cast of characters don’t adopt the usual human habits and personalities, exaggerated features, and over-the-top movements that come with the animation territory — from the dancing cabaret in The Lion King (1994) to the career bunny-cop star of Zootopia (2016). It’s been the go-to move as long as animated films have been around, starting in the early 20th century with Mickey Mouse’s debut in Steamboat Willy (1928) and the noodly “rubberhose” style of the time. Ladislas Starevich, a naturalist (and arguably the first stop-motion animator) who puppeted exoskeletons of beetles for his films, depicted his subjects dining at restaurants, writing letters, and carrying briefcases in a story about a martial dispute in 1912.
Flow takes a different approach. The animals communicate with each other through meows, chitters, woofs, and grunts as animals really do. Each moves with striking realism and personalities largely true to their expected biological nature. (Cat owners are likely to think, “Oh, that’s exactly how my Miss Mittens acts!”) By keeping the animals so endearingly like their real-life counterparts, Zilbalodis is able to highlight the differences in their instincts.
And it’s the moments when these dispositions clash that drive the story forward. When the cat eventually overcomes its fear of water to provide fish for its companions, the good faith is quickly shattered when a self-interested dog devours most of the supply. Worse, the dog was only on board because of the other animals’ kindness: Minutes before, they had saved the dog and its unruly pack from rising waters.
“I didn’t want to have this didactic message of: Working together is good and being independent is bad,” Zilbalodis told the Hollywood Reporter. “I wanted to show the good and the bad of both of these extremes.”
The cat catches a fish in the floodwaters.
Janus Films
Even in an industry where 3D animation has become the norm, Flow visually stands out. Most animation studios, like Pixar and Dreamworks, use proprietary, cutting-edge software designed for feature film animation. Flow, however, was animated in Blender, a free 3D modeling engine popular with video game developers. The low-budget option doesn’t detract from the experience. Rather, its resemblance to a video game cut scene keeps you in anticipation, as if a moment of decision-making might be around the corner. It’s an impulse that clashes with the helplessness that disaster brings: Each time the cat nearly drowns, you just want to reach out and pluck it from the water.
The flood miraculously retreats and reveals a lush landscape for the animals to return to. It’s a comfort afforded to a fantasy world: When Earth’s seas reclaim the shorelines, the land won’t return in a matter of days, or even lifetimes. At the end of the film, the animals are met with another test of their comradery. They all survive, but the atmosphere becomes quickly subdued. The boat that has kept them safe plunges into the bottom of a ravine, while the receding waters leave a whale-like creature that protected the crew throughout the film beached and struggling to breathe. It’s a reminder that even in the best possible climate outcome, there will be plenty to mourn.
From George Orwell to Hannah Arendt and John le Carré, thousands of blacklisted books flooded into Poland during the cold war, as publishers and printers risked their lives for literature
The volume’s glossy dust jacket shows a 1970s computer room, where high priests of the information age, dressed in kipper ties and flares, tap instructions into the terminals of some ancient mainframe. The only words on the front read “Master Operating Station”, “Subsidiary Operating Station” and “Free Standing Display”. Is any publication less appetising than an out-of-date technical manual?
Turn inside, however, and the book reveals a secret. It isn’t a computer manual at all, but a Polish language edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s famous anti-totalitarian novel, which was banned for decades by communist censors in the eastern bloc.
The BBC has removed its documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone from iPlayer after it was revealed that its teenage narrator is the son of a Hamas official.
The broadcaster stated that it was conducting “further due diligence” following mounting scrutiny.
The film, which aired on BBC Two last Monday, follows 13-year-old Abdullah Al-Yazouri as he describes life in Gaza.
However, it later emerged that his father, Ayman Al-Yazouri, serves as the Hamas Deputy Minister of Agriculture in Gaza.
In a statement yesterday, the BBC defended the documentary’s value but acknowledged concerns.
“There have been continuing questions raised about the programme, and in light of these, we are conducting further due diligence with the production company,” the statement said.
The revelation sparked a backlash from figures including Friday Night Dinner actress Tracy-Ann Oberman, literary agent Neil Blair, and former BBC One boss Danny Cohen, who called it “a shocking failure by the BBC and a major crisis for its reputation”.
On Thursday, the BBC admitted that it had not disclosed the family connection but insisted it followed compliance procedures. It has since added a disclaimer acknowledging Abdullah’s ties to Hamas.
UK’s Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said that she would discuss the issue with the BBC, particularly regarding its vetting process.
However, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians urged the broadcaster to “stand firm against attempts to prevent firsthand accounts of life in Gaza from reaching audiences”.
Others also defended the importance of the documentary made last year before the sheer scale of devastation by the Israeli military forces was exposed — and many months before the ceasefire came into force on January 19.
‘This documentary humanised Palestinian children’ Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), criticised the BBC’s decision.
“It’s very regrettable that this documentary has been pulled following pressure from anti-Palestinian activists who have largely shown no sympathy for persons in Gaza suffering from massive bombardment, starvation, and disease,” Middle East Eye quoted him as saying.
Doyle also praised the film’s impact, saying, “This documentary humanised Palestinian children in Gaza and gave valuable insights into life in this horrific war zone.”
Journalist Richard Sanders, who has produced multiple documentaries on Gaza, called the controversy a “huge test” for the BBC and condemned its response as a “cowardly decision”.
Earlier this week, 45 Jewish journalists and media figures, including former BBC governor Ruth Deech, urged the broadcaster to pull the film, calling Ayman Al-Yazouri a “terrorist leader”.
The controversy underscores wider tensions over media coverage of the Israel-Gaza war, with critics accusing the BBC of a vetting failure, while others argue the documentary sheds crucial light on Palestinian children’s suffering.
Another teenager who appears in the Gaza documentary . . . she has o global online following for her social media videos on cooking and life amid the genocide. Image: BBC screenshot APR
The legendary founder of Bread and Puppet Theater is 90 years old and rising. In December I went to interview Peter Schumann in his home in Glover Vermont, together with his carpenter and comrade Henry Harris. We asked him about the wars of our times, about education, about ideology, and about the past and future of Bread and Puppet. Then in January, we decided to go back, and ask the same questions again. We talked for hours – trying to keep up with Peter who, in conversation just as in cirque, dances gracefully on visionary stilts through centuries and subjects. I made a transcript of all this, which billowed out like one of his painted bedsheets, with voluminous vistas of joy and woe… but it was easy to get lost in all the wrinkles and ruffles. So, I chopped it up, and slowly pieced it together again. This is an edited composite of both interviews, cut and pasted and kneaded and baked… hopefully the result will be, at least a little bit, like the world-famous bread and puppets. Heinrich von Kleist wrote that “where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet.” And so if what follows is more like a puppet of Peter than the man himself, so much the better. Without further ado, the papier-mâché revolutionary.
What’s happening in Gaza and what does it mean for this whole civilization?
That’s it – it’s finished, this civilization. It’s a pretend civilization that prides itself on a humanity that it doesn’t have. It has the opposite: it has inhumanity – thoroughly. Very thorough inhumanity – and nothing left over other than in little bits and pieces in individuals and in little clubs, that’s it… I mean how can they survive? … The last circus this last summer we called The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus. And that’s pretty much what it is. This is no more humanity. This pretense of a humanity with certain moral codes and etiquette of how to behave… that’s violated day in and day out. Right at the announcement of their peace deal they killed at least 100 people – in a school, just a hundred people, you know, mostly women and children, so what, just another hundred. And there’s no protest against that, are you kidding me? The bourgeoisie doesn’t see what it does? Phew. This is the bourgeoisie… And we are dealing with the kids of the bourgeoisie, you know. They come in flocks to us, because they want to learn otherwise. And when the puppeteers travel with their shows, people come even when academia cancels them – cancels their contracts for a few thousand bucks, on the eve of the performance… and there is immediate community support for another place. On tour, during the tour, on the same day, they can find another place. People are hungry for it. People know this is all shit…
There’s a mass media… we call them the truth industry. Yeah, what’s the truth industry? Upside down truths, half truths, quarter truths, all the versions of the truth that are not applicable to the truth. Unbelievable…. I’m trying to find news… Right now the big jargon of the various people who observe it, say OK, so the Axis of Resistance is now kaput, it’s finished, because of what happened in Syria. And others contradict that and say no, take the real latest news: Hamas is fighting as heavy as ever, and the same thing is true with Hezbollah. They are very successfully actually defeating the Israeli army in all kinds of details… the Israelis make no publications of their casualties; they are enormous, and they lose a lot of people and a lot of very valuable billion dollar equipment that the Americans gave them…
[Did you see the] Palestinian journalist [Sam Husseini] in a press conference with this Blinken guy? … As he was talking, the cops came and manhandled him, and he said ‘no it hurts’ – and he’s an older man in his 70s – and they manhandled him and took him out… and the rest of these hundreds of journalists they all sat there! They didn’t jump up and fight the cops? What kind of journalism is that? Why didn’t they jump up? All of them, staying seated?! Their own colleague, simply for asking a question, gets carried out of the room brutally… unbelievable! And the rest of them take that as if it’s part of the game. Yeah it’s a good job probably. Good little New York Times or Washington Post jobs, and they can’t risk them, no… These bastards. Bunch of fascists. That’s all they are. The press in America is disgusting. Just as academia is totally disgusting. What do they do? I mean, imagine: they call it education and they call the cops to beat up their own kids. Isn’t that the end of the definition of your academia, if you call in the cops to beat people up? By definition that should be the end … that’s not academia… that’s not research of the mind or investigation of the mind… it’s unbelievable, this farce of democracy, this total farce … And all of the world looks on and sees it… they can’t help but being dependent on this empire here, economically or otherwise, but the empire is also going downhill very fast, just like Israel… people are leaving them, running away from them… you see the Hasidim in Washington Square, and they all support Palestine, they don’t agree with the state of Israel. They say ‘that’s a wrong state, that’s not in our religion at all.’ They are the courageous people. The others are all cowards, idiots, stupid, uneducated…
I mean, imagine, that these fighters for freedom of press, they are immediately made criminals, and this is called the free press… it’s the opposite of what they pretend, all the time. It’s unbelievably false, what they say. They lie from morning to night. For what? For profit, for securities, for good salaries at the New York Times or Washington Post or whatever, or the stupid NPR shit…
I mean when Hamas broke out to do these hostage takings, you know, the big thing they make about that as if it was a war, did they ever look into how many Nazis were killed in the Warsaw uprising? Did they ever research that? It’s the same thing… But the biggest part was done by Israelis anyway; it’s pretty well researched. They had already, what’s it called, the Hannibal Directive – it was already in place at that time, and they decided no, no more deals, just kill our own citizens, why not, that’s better. Just as it is with the exchange of these hostages, again and again, there were so many chances to do it and they didn’t do it… Whatever they say turns out to be just lies. Convenient for making a speech in the New York Times or some bullshit like that…
I mean they gave Netanyahu standing ovations, for the mass murder of the day – the biggest mass murder in a long time, unbelievable…. so in other words, they steal the people’s money, hard earned money, usually, and give it to the mass murderer, and then he gets cheered for that? Are they so stupid, didn’t they go to school? I mean there’s an amendment to the constitution, the Leahy amendments, which forbid them to transport things without investigation of what it’s used for and how it’s misused… and they totally disregard what they themselves swear for. When they take their seat in congress they have to first swear with a hand on the bible to the constitution. Bullshit. They are totally liars. And cowards, cowards to the bone!
… All these Americans including Obama, they’re all war mongers – by education. They were all brought up to be war mongers, and that’s the only venue they have. The weapons manufacturers are so happy that it is like that; it’s the biggest production in America, it’s way bigger than any Coca Cola or anything… You can’t be an innocent bystander, there’s no such thing. This is our fate, to be artificially made into innocent bystanders, which we are not. We are guilty bystanders. The inability, the impotence of not knowing what is available to us, the great liberties that we have… The languages that are available to you are tremendous – they are huge, they are available; some of them are not available and have to be invented, or translated from older languages, all of that, but they are. But this is our lifetime, what do you do with our lifetime? That’s what we have to do! We have to do! No other way.
But you don’t support the war in Ukraine?
(Uproarious laughter) They don’t even take a look, they don’t even remember how Biden smiled on the TV screen when he said, oh I’ll take care of that gas line that goes from Russia to Germany… And he killed it, bombed it, and he told it to the American public with a smile; he said yeah we’re going to take care of that, and that’s what they did. And then they even gave aggressive weaponry to penetrate Russia, inside Russia. Are you kidding me? Russia is huge, fantastic, even way bigger than America. Siberia is bigger than America. Russia has no comparison to America. It’s a way bigger thing, and economically probably better off than America I would think. After they told them not an inch further with NATO: that was during the time when there was still the Warsaw Pact, when the Communists had their own thing, and Gorbachev canceled it, he said, no we will stop, in return for not an inch further of NATO, we will stop the Warsaw pact… Classic American trick… trick people into believing them… It’s not real, the reporting on it…. what the old Ukraine was, how the Nazis divided it, how it survived the empire afterwards… the American empire, and the Russian empire, and how it lived through this and still was the main agricultural background for wheat, and super precious goodies… It’s unbelievable, the stupidity of the reporting of what’s happening there…. it’s pretty horrendously the opposite of what is being told to the population.
The most common reasonable assumption from this moment is that we are going to die in nuclear holocaust. This is the logical conclusion of this type of warfare, because… Americans have a concept of ‘winnable nuclear war’… this is so typical for capital, there’s no conscience in it, no heart in it, no mind in it, it’s all just calculation, and the shameless, ridiculousness of this moneymaking… how many more objects does it take to make a person happy, it doesn’t make any sense, it’s ridiculous… All colonies live that way, whether it was Spanish or French or German, all these bastards establish these little aristocracies of superiority, little clubs of people… the beneficiaries of this, the exceptional ones… who wants to be part of that club. Disgusting.
Another theme in almost all the Bread and Puppet shows is migration. Alongside world war, mass deportation is in the news again. How can we understand migration and deportation?
After all, these wars necessitate migrations. Whatever you do there in those South American countries, with drug wars and other horrible inflictions on them, necessitates migration. There’s no other way; you can’t live. And to pretend otherwise, it’s ridiculous, for this continent of America which consists almost entirely of migrants, in the first second or third generation… How is that understandable, that a nation of migrants is against migrants?! What a ridiculous thing to do! Doesn’t make any sense. And these borders, as if they’re all evil over there – they eat dogs or cats, naturally, that’s what they do…
I’m Silesian. We were bombed out at the end of the war, just a few minutes later when the war was finished, the big bosses signed papers, they made Silesia into Poland and Czech Republic and phew, it was gone, so 95% of Silesians were deported…
Academia is in free-fall. What’s the beginning after the end of education? How should we work with young people? Can you recommend some good books?
There are so many good guidelines. Me, I’m at an advantage because we grew up as kids learning poetry by heart. So we are full of incredibly wonderful things that are just coming by themselves. We don’t have to research it, it’s in our vocabulary, you know. And these kids never learn poetry by heart. Their schools abandoned that habit a long time ago, and they don’t have that vocabulary. They have a shallow vocabulary educated by mediocre terms that are fashionable… it’s ridiculous to me… What happens to them when they are deprived of their computers and how much time they spend with this stupid information business all over the place instead of weeding the garden and planting the potatoes?
… And they go to schools… what used to be called radical schooling, and they come running here totally disappointed… it’s all over the place, we used to have sort of the semblance of opposition… That’s how it was in postwar Germany, all these radical schools – Rilke ran a school. There were beautiful radical schools; schools where kids had to learn carpentry in addition to academia – languages and skills, plumbing and poetry – the real stuff. Great ideas. My father, he was deep into that… The best advice we can give to kids who come here is to make as little money as possible. Try to live with as little money as possible. Don’t waste for that shit, it’s only good for beer-buying otherwise. Even beer you can make yourself. Don’t bother about that shit thing with money… I’m a proletarian and I realize that…. We work with the bourgeoisie; with their kids. In the kids’ education, art is a privileged enterprise of entertainment, of surplus, it has nothing to do with life, it’s bullshit. And we are teaching them no, it’s not bullshit, it’s the real thing. It’s the address, it’s the language. And that’s what you do when you do art, you do the language. What is your language going to be, how are you going to address the masses, how do you get it out? … Instead of shopping for beautiful paints and all that, no, you pick them up from the garbage, you take old sheets and cardboards and cut them out, and make big figures of them – it’s all available in the garbage of this civilization, this civilization is so rich in that…
…Use real good books. For example Kropotkin… So amazing, the biggest anarchist sensation in European literature, and Americans don’t even know about Kropotkin.… you know, the prince who at a teenage age told his parents ‘no more prince for me, I’m just Pyotr’… and then they sent him to a military academy and he traveled thousands of miles through Siberia, and he collected information that was the opposite of what Darwin said, which capitalism uses as its philosophy of competition. And Kropotkin found… in meadows, in birds, in deer, in coyotes – it’s the total opposite of that. It was the exact example of the opposite of the competitive philosophy that used to be the inspiration for capitalist enterprises, and he points it out so clearly. It’s called Mutual Aid… It’s a huge book, fantastic, American students don’t even read it in the university, it’s ridiculous, how can they avoid it? And so he’s put down in the category of an “anarchist,” an anarchist philosopher, and he is, yeah. Another [by him] is The Conquest of Bread – a few very good readable books, excellent examples… and there’s another companion book written by a German forester, The Hidden Life of Trees … fantastic, pointing out the secret languages of a much huger life … what’s underneath the tree – every form of life from mushrooms to insects – it’s unbelievably bigger… and how communication travels in there, how diseases get fought, how trees talk to each other in families, how they communicate between the fungi and the leaves; unbelievable, so beautiful. But it’s huge…. Same with Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope: people don’t even know about it… he started writing it during Nazi Germany and then continued it after he went back to Europe, an American emigre like all the others… Instead of going to Frankfurt – Adorno and Horkheimer and all the people went there – and Bloch no. Bloch and Brecht went to East Germany, to the communists. Yeah. Very big difference… you know, corrupt system, difficult communism and all that, you know. But so what, way better than capitalism. Rents are cheap, health care is cheap, school is free. You know, a totally different system. People in America don’t even know that. In China people don’t pay for school. Why, what? How come Americans don’t even get informed on that? … Or Cuba… they could learn it from anybody. And they think of that as not relevant? Are you kidding me? Relevant to people’s life? How you make your money; naturally it’s the most relevant thing – how much rent, how much food costs… Americans grow up so incredibly stupid, uninformed on the world, uninformed… people have no idea how much bigger the world is. How there is more puppetry in Siberia than the whole of the United States. There is more versatility and ancient information from old theater forms… in old communication forms of theater. Definitely in Tehran; unbelievable, the richness of Iranian society, it’s so rich, so huge, much bigger than Europe… and when Khomeini was elected he threw out the Hollywood movies and all of a sudden puppetry was a major faculty in the Tehran university… I went to India, to Kerala, to one of the communist states of south India. Same thing; what they have to offer in way of ancient cultures, it’s vastly bigger than what Europe has, and definitely America. It’s so much bigger, in quantity and variety. And people here when they talk about Iran, they say oh but women get stoned for adultery. Really? Take a look at America. Who has the biggest prison system? Who tortures people with solitary confinement? And then to point fingers…
What’s your ideology? One time after a pageant, you stood next to a door frame in the middle of the pasture, and everybody walked through it, and you said “Now you’re a socialist!” But do you have to subscribe to the little red book?
No you don’t have to. Naturally I’m a communist, why wouldn’t I be… The overriding, call it the ideology of the day – it’s not the necessary outcome of this kind of thinking. Still you understand the ultimate simplistic difference of free education and healthcare, that’s a huge difference… What’s art good for? What do you do with a bunch of youngsters who don’t know what to do with themselves? What do you do with a beautiful landscape that’s not utilized agriculturally, but you could use for walking and revolutionizing and learning how to march together? …These are the realities; these little details of it, way more than the overriding ideology title, whether communism or socialism – it’s secondary to the reality of it. The reality of it is this big thing – they call it life I think. It’s a big thing: itches and twitches and grandma dying and auntie dilapidating and kid growing up – all of them together, same time. Yeah, my god, look at family life, look at what happens around here… it’s all over us, all around us…
Possibilitarians are proletarians… they are the masses, they are the 99 percent and they are available to everybody. We call them possibilitarians, because that’s it – but the possibilities are not opened up. Possibilities are just asleep, you know, and both Bloch and Kropotkin talk about that: the asleep-ness, the Not-Yet of things. The Not-Yet is so much bigger than the thing that’s here! And that’s the real expectancy of life… the Not-Yet in the sense of our living is the most important part of what Bloch calls Hope: it’s this vague thing that doesn’t have to be as vague as all that. It can be analyzed, it can be gotten, especially if you think of the difference of the 99 percent life and the 1 percent life and the controversy and the little politically pre-arranged battle between them… What could be clearer at this moment in American history, with three billionaires sitting right next to this new president – isn’t that as clear as it can be for the rest of the world? … Other people realize it in the rest of the world; this is a declining empire, it won’t be as Trump thinks at all. It’s an empire in decline…
…The Not-Yet is in the landscape also. You walk into our pine forest which is full of memorials, and people’s ashes, all of that, even grave sites, and what’s coming out of it… for example, the fact that people do have the hunger for memorializations, that people want that in their life. They don’t realize it, it doesn’t exist in this culture. When you go to Asian cultures it’s all over the place – meaningful memorializations – and here it doesn’t exist. And when you do it and the youngsters come and they sit there and talk about their aunts and their suiciding brother and all this stuff, it’s amazing what comes out. It’s a whole life in itself, just as part of realizing that life is so much bigger than the cliches about what life is… every week we do it. Once a week we go there and people let loose and do their talks. Part of life! Joel [Kovel] is in there, with his big book…..
Bread and Puppet Theater has been called political art, medieval art and religious art. You have been compared to Brecht, Genet, O’Neill… but what gets left out of all the analysis? Break it down for us; what are puppets? What is bread? What’s happening on this land? Who are you?
You think a puppet is a thing, a factual thing, a thing that you pick up and you can learn how to manipulate it, or somewhat. It’s not. It’s an opposite to your body and it emphasizes elements in your body that you didn’t even realize were there; that can do things that the body can’t do. For example a puppet has a little neck – no dancer can ever do what that neck can do; that neck can go all the way back, can go over here, there; can pick up the rest of the body and drape it around itself… It’s a divinity, it’s something that isn’t even comprehensible to people… no learning of effectiveness and what you want to say; that would be commandeering it — no way. It’s so secretly something, a whole thing, you can’t even imagine it. Only people who work with it – they realize it, slowly… and they start kneeling down in front of them before picking them up, carefully. Yeah…
The normal American diet is not only wonder bread but noodles, which go straight through the body to the shithouse…. Chewing is severe and real. And it massages your brain. So whoever eats pumpernickel becomes a revolutionary and whoever eats noodles becomes a capitalist. It’s a real thing, the simple recognition that food is something that you have to gain. Not just by tooth and saliva mixing, but also how you gather it, how do you get it… gleaning… a lot of tedium of all these little things coming together and nourishing families… When Elka’s parents bought his farm do you know why they bought it? Elkas’ mom was a peasant woman – poor family with nine kids – they took it because of this hillside here which is the watershed. This is the best water you can get anywhere in a landscape, to be so close to a watershed… it’s incredibly good, I keep telling the kids who come here, please drink the water, you won’t get it anywhere… And if you continue the stupid noodle eating, ok you’ll stay stupid, and if you chew pumpernickel you’ll be intelligent.
…Naturally in order to get land you have to team up with other people and make communities. Even Bread and Puppet, it couldn’t have worked with just a family; it needs more people, kids, gardens… there isn’t any other way of doing it. And then you have inherited an anarchy that is in total chaos, very hard to live with, but it’s worth it, because it produces something that the system can’t produce… outside the ambitions… nothing to do with the entertainment issues, and the desire to tickle people’s beautiful muscles for desire… that’s it, and the confusion makes it very attractive… It just does itself, and it will do it in conjunction with the latest news and horrors, and also the imbecility of not being told about it; having to live with the realization that it’s not in people’s conversation…
…Well I’m a papier-mâché revolutionary. I build giant papier-mâché swords to defeat the empires. Or divinities that are way more superior than capitalism; therefore come down on them when they don’t expect it and crush them with papier-mâché! Hahaha.
There are a lot of books and movies about Bread and Puppet. And there’s a big archive next door… but give it to us straight; how did this get started and what’s it all about?
Well, when you go into, you know, the details… it’s starting in the early years when we did Vietnam in the street… And we did things that we needed hundreds of people for, in the street: bombardments of prisoners, resurrections, pulling them up, cops, all that, death masques, all that – it was totally easy to get the couple hundred people that we needed to do it… People were sick and tired of the slogans… they didn’t want to do that. They wanted to be a shark in an airplane, they wanted to be a Vietnamese woman being bombarded – it was easy to get people to realize that, the big spectacle of it. It was a carnival you know. Like throwing shit at the cardinal. And you can do that during the carnival: a limited revolution, a very time-limited revolution, which is not quite a revolution because of its limitation, just a jubilee for the sake of relief. That’s what carnival was… it was time-limited and then it went back to normal… Wonderfully liberating for populations, but not meaningful until you take a look at what happened in the 14th century, which is when peasant revolutions – Engels wrote about them – became serious. And peasants – rye bread eating peasants – crowded together, and beat the shit out of the latest state of the art weaponry: knights on their horsebacks. And the peasants came… people with hayforks – ripping the brightest beautiful knights with their fancy attack methods of killing – they ripped them off their horses and beat the shit out of them. You know, there are big records of this. It happened again and again, starting in the 14th, century, into the 15th century, and into the 16th century… peasant revolution would have been the likely thing if Luther and Zwingli and the other reformers would have coordinated their moves with the peasantry. And they didn’t. They sided with the aristocracy… Thomas Müntzer, one of the biggest successes of peasant revolution – way more successful than Luther as a speaker – he was the big thing, not Luther. And then Luther has him hanged, publicly tortured to death, by the aristocracy… the 14th and 15th century would have been the ideal time to create real political revolutions. It didn’t happen. It totally could have happened… the bourgeoisie took over, and from the beginning, they imitated the aristocracy… and that became the goal, to become as nice as the aristocracy…
It has a hell of a lot to do with history…. [For example] what happened with Matthias Grünewald. He was Germany’s major late-medieval, early-renaissance northern artist… he was on horseback in 1502 going over the Alps… and during that travel was the 1502 total solar eclipse, which was the most serious thing… this one was really like the end of the world. Everybody thought this was the apocalypse; this was it, in the middle of the day – and he experienced that riding on horseback through the Alps… and whatever he painted after that is obviously influenced by the blackness. No question about it, everything comes out of the deepest possible darkness, even the most polychrome events that he invented like nobody else, come out of a darkness that is so severe; all his things, his crucifix and nativity and all of it. And that happened at a time when one of the major diseases in the middle ages was ergot, caused by rye, a fungus in rye. Rye was the food of the peasants, it’s much easier to grow than wheat; it grows in the Alps, in the deserts, even in Mongolia it grows fine. When I bought rye I went to the highway department in New York because they keep rye – it’s the toughest of grasses – when they need to fix highway entrances they grow rye… and that’s what the peasants ate, and the effect of ergot is craziness, total craziness, and skin diseases and so on; weird, serious stuff. So there was a whole sect of healers called the St. Anthonites, who dealt with the ergot effect, mostly in the peasantry. And they hired Grünewald to paint… and then people flocked to it, like to a healing altar. And people threw their crutches – they have records of all that, unbelievable! And that was the reality of painting. He painted all the healing arts available to him, underneath crucifixes, and painted all the most graphic horror of ergot… no comparison to any other picture in the renaissance… nothing compares to Grünewald… The peasant struggles are so important. The situation will come up again. For example with migrants being deported. This will happen again. People have to realize – what we eat is food. Food has to be made by people. Saying it comes out of tin cans is not good enough. So there could be a shift of attention when people realize what a serious thing food is. It’s huge…
In 1968 you lit a fire in hearts and minds; first it burned in New York City, then it moved to Vermont… and at some point you’re going to graduate; shuffle off the mortal coil; join the extraterrestrials… and we’re going to be left here running around wondering what to do. Any advice for the future of Bread and Puppet, post-Peter Schumann?
Oh yeah, totally ready for it… Death is little, death is big, or death, don’t believe it. Haha…. You’re right, it’s a good point, because puppeteers talk all the time about my funeral, and what kind of whiskey we’ll have served, and I agree a lot of good whiskey is needed for that funeral. But it’s so apparent what has to happen. The organization of Bread and Puppet is so changing according to etiquette, according to bourgeois habits, according to the latest result of the job market, which you know is so unfair to people’s talents… people are forced into these straitjackets of being slaves, just as Marx called them, slaves to the system… of – what? What is it? It’s slavery, whatever you call it – a form of slavery that you have to pay rent and all this. It’s ridiculous! Why? Totally unnecessary, stupid! Why? The 99 percent, let’s take a little close up look at what they are. OK, Bernie [Sanders] tried to do a little bit of awareness for the working class and so on. Not enough. Needs more. Yeah, mama mia…. our bourgeois little company needs it all the time, they need to be re-radicalized all the time.
Ernst Bloch says that “the true Genesis is not at the beginning but at the end.” What comes after the end of humanity? What do we do next?
My best examples come from Gaza and Lebanon, where people from under the rubble are declaring that: ‘no we are not giving up.’ No, my family is dead, my grandpa died, my cousins are no more – we are not giving up. They built a horse from trash, from ambulances destroyed by Israel; a German sculptor with teenagers built a big horse, a big statue, and then the Israelis destroyed it, immediately, and the message was yeah, out of this crap, we’re going to make a horse, galloping. It’s amazing what’s happening there…
…We will never totally explore a summary of what we need to do, but we should keep doing it. And you know that, I mean you have to do it, it’s never a solo enterprise, anyway. It won’t be done by a solo singer… it can only be done where not even conversation happens, something less than that… it’s trying something, doing something, pronouncing something – into the public, unexpectedly, you know – and see what happens to it, what’s the response to it, how do you get it? Yeah!
Immediacy. Do it immediately. To not do planning revolutions, to not do lengthy developments of a new type of engineering of this and that. But to step right into the street, step right into whatever is available, to speak right out in front of whatever you have out here… whatever size the group is doesn’t matter. You know the tour just went all across the country… the universities canceled them, quite a few of them, where they had contracts, and on the same night they found a community center, on the same night… In other worlds there’s a real hunger in this truth-deprived nation for other versions of truth, for looking at what the real thing is…
(December 16, 2024) Any thoughts you want to share with us before Christmas?
Santa and Walmart and whatever. Santa… at least in southern French culture, is a witch! Santa is a child molester and is a demon – nothing to do with goody goody. The house that he hits is seriously hit; he’s equipped with torturing equipment, and he is sincere. And so that fake little man is the sugary version of reality, which is a very bitter horror thing in culture. How was it transformed, it would be interesting to find out, how did they manage to turn it so upside-down? …The excuses for the great god of love religion don’t exist anymore. Because now people can read this world enough to realize that the god of love was a gigantic murderer, of genocidal proportions, all over the place … they discovered all the kids’ grave sites in Catholic schools here in America, remember that, shit like that? Yeah, is that the god of love or not? Yeah, it is.
(January 21, 2025) Do you have any New Years’ resolutions?
Good idea. I had a dream last night, about revitalizing the Domestic Resurrection Circus, and meeting crowds and crowds of people like we used to have, in the thousands, and walking with them… and as we walked, we called it, Revolution… Just walking around these circus fields, in my dream… doesn’t matter where do we go right? … I mean you have a job to do, with your teammates, it’s obvious, whether the town gives you permits or not is secondary. It will happen – you will get whatever you need, and otherwise you find other ways of doing it. But this is the important thing: you get those kids going.
Staffelsee in Autumn, Gabriele Münter, 1923, National Museum of Women in the Arts.
I enter the Thyssen Museum in Madrid to see the exhibition about Gabriele Münter. She is one of the great painters of German Expressionism, who has finally been placed on an equal level with her male colleagues. Lately, several museums have organized major exhibitions of her work. Last year it was the Leopold Museum in Vienna, this year, in addition to the Thyssen in Madrid, the Guggenheim in New York will open a major retrospective of the painter in November, which will be called Into Deep Waters.
From the very first paintings I look at, such as Breakfast of the Birds, I am reminded of the house where Gabriele lived with Wassily Kandinsky, in the small town of Murnau that I visited in the winter of last year. Kandinsky was her painting teacher and became her partner.
After traveling together through Europe and North Africa, the couple decided they needed a house where they could paint and lead a stable life. They fell in love with Murnau, a village on the shores of Lake Staffelsee at the foot of the Bavarian Alps. Gabriele bought the yellow house, built in the style of the local chalets, and they lived there from 1908 onwards. They became inseparable friends of Russian painters Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky (also a couple) possessed as they all were by the excitement of portraying landscapes and human figures in a way that had never been done before.
I look at the many paintings of snowy landscapes on display at the Münter exhibition in Madrid and I remember the whiteness of the snow-covered fields and frozen lakes of Murnau with their faint winter light. On entering the snowy garden of the house-museum, I was struck by the paintings on the furniture and the wooden stairs. In the explanations offered by the house-museum, I read that, on acquiring the house, the couple set to work painting the walls and decorating the furniture. Indeed, the interior of the house, which that day contrasted so much with the quiet, white landscapes, is in itself a work of art: the walls of the rooms are a riot of bright colors – reds, blues, greens – and the wooden stairs, like the rustic furniture, are adorned with paintings of horsemen, trees and flowers.
I move on to another room in the exhibition and stop in front of the painting Boat Trip, with Gabriele rowing with her back to me, Kandinsky standing in the boat and two other people: Marianne Werefkin and Jawlensky’s son. Then I think of all the artists who came to the yellow house; the composer Arnold Schönberg was a regular visitor, as were the painters Macke and Franz Marc, who together with their hosts founded the group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) a key group in modern expressionism. All those creators who visited Gabriele and Kandinsky, and whose portraits hang on the walls of the yellow house, gave a new direction to 20th-century art. Some, like Kandinsky and Jawlensky, took their spiritual quest in a new direction: abstract art.
In 1914 the war put an end to the joy and vitality of the group. From one day to the next, Kandinsky, as a Russian citizen, had become an enemy of Germany and after a few months with Gabriele in neutral Switzerland, he returned alone to Russia where he married. Gabriele spent the war years in Stockholm.
During Nazism and the Second World War, the painter had managed to save her paintings, those of Kandinsky and those of other expressionists, labeled by the Nazis as degenerate art, by hiding them in the basement of her house, with the help of her husband, the art historian Johannes Eichner. The Gestapo, which carried out several raids on the house, did not discover the treasure. When Gabriele turned 80 in 1957, she bequeathed her collection to the Städtliche Galerie in Munich. The painter spent the rest of her life in Murnau, where she died in 1962.
Cicero regards Kendrick, with the ashes of the Republic in the ritual urn behind. Photo: David Yearsley.
It is the year LIX, BCE. The Roman LIX translates into 59 in Arabic, soon to proclaimed “American Numerals” by Trumpius Maximus, newly returned to the Consulship.
BCE stands for Big, Crazy Entertainment, and it is fitting that this edition of the games are being staged in Caesars Superdome in New Orleans. During his conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar besieged and then obliterated old Orleans, then called Cenabum. Later Roman overlords of the province would bestow the name Aurelanium on the city. The first 59 BCE (Before the Common Era) was the year that Caesar was first elected Consul.
I watched Sunday’s American gladiatorial spectacle with a Dane—soon-to-be an enemy combatant in the looming Bellum Americanum—and the famed Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero. We were in an unheated safe house in the midst of the Arctic temperatures of Upstate New York (actually colder than those now prevailing in the Arctic). As historical happenstance would have it, we were not far from two towns named in his honor: Tully and Cicero, both in Onondaga County.
Cicero hated Caesar, though he was not part of the conspiracy that assassinated the usurper in the Roman Senate in 44 BCE. Nonetheless, Cicero wrote that he “wished he had been invited to that superb banquet.”
In the aftermath of the bloodbath in the Curia, Cicero lambasted Ceasar’s henchman and would-be successor, Marc Antony, in a series of fourteen speeches known as the Philippics. Antony’s thugs then tracked down Cicero as he fled the Italian peninsula and cut off his head and hands.
When Antony’s wife Fulvia saw Cicero’s severed head displayed in the Roman forum, she grabbed hold of the legendary orator’s tongue and began jabbing it with a hairpin pulled from her lavish coif.
Luckly, Cicero’s allies included Rome’s leading physician, Asclepiades, who had not only developed an atomic theory of the human body, but was also the inventor of cryogenics. Just in time, the good doctor had this beautiful mind spirited to a subzero cave in the bowels of an Alpine glacier north of Milan (Mediolanum), where Cicero has been cooling his head—though not his heels (these were never found)—for the last two millennia-and-change.
That glacier has been melting quickly in recent decades, so, thanks to a Living Latin kick-starter campaign, Cicero has recently been moved secretly to a luxury frost-o-leum at an unspecified location in North American. As befits his exalted status, Cicero’s current berth is between the noggins of baseball immortal Ted Williams and Walt Disney, who, since his temporary demise in 1966, has been anything but animated.
Soon after it was announced that Kendrick Lamar would do this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, a secret meeting of the Ciceronian Cryonic Society (CCS) deemed it worthwhile, nay essential, that, for the first time since his beheading, the celebrated orator be warmed up a few degrees in a slow oven.
Cicero would want to know what’s going down in the American Republic during the current stampede towards Dictatorship. Cicero had seen it all before. He hadn’t fared too well in Ancient Rome under such circumstances, making any advice from him suspect at best. But at least he could offer rhetorically elegant commentary.
Cicero is on record—papyrus and occasionally parchment—as enjoying the theatrical preludes to the gladiatorial games staged in the Colosseum. But he found the human combat distasteful and felt particular compassion for the elephants forced to participate. In the Philippics, Cicero savaged Antony for his “gladiator’s body,” one that housed a mind of the same brute qualities.
On Super Bowl Sunday, Cicero scoffed as the dandified champions paraded through the tunnel to the arena, not in their armor, but in purple-suited finery, their hair slicked and styled, their necks draped with gold chains, their mangled fingers ornamented with bejeweled rings, their cauliflower ears coddled by music muffs. Later, when games had at last begun after all the pomp and circumstance, Cicero wondered why the American legionnaires’ curious flying chariots hadn’t descended from above and disgorged their own gladiator to battle with those already in formation on the green, gridded floor of Caesar’s Superdome? I drew the Roman’s attention to the fact that this amphitheater had a roof. “Have these machines not catapults that could launch incendiary missiles to blast a hole in the battlements?” I didn’t dislike the idea.
Just before kick-off, the CCS technicians had hooked up DeepSeek’s recently unveiled Large Latin Language Model and Nero-Neuro-translator to the cooling Kelvin-Pole on which they had mounted Cicero’s head.
Given the Ancient hack-job on his tongue, Cicero wasn’t in top elocutionary form, and during the half-time show he wondered if a kindred lingual fate had befallen the Pulitzer-prize-winning performer. Had some modern-day Fulvia recently mutilated the rapper’s silver tongue?
Even through this marvel of the latest AI technology, Cicero only caught a few words that passed Lamar’s lips as he babbled into what the Roman thought was some kind of magic scroll, not of parchment but of exotic metal gripped tightly and held close to his mouth. Cicero couldn’t make heads or tails of the patter, though he had dropped mega dinari (having gotten into digital currency a good ten years ago) on the coin toss, in spite of his long-ago fulminations against gambling on the games.
Luckily, Cicero had also taken the over on the national anthem, set by oddsmakers at 120.5 seconds. In his heyday Cicero had been a master of rhetorical emphasis and well-timed repetitio, and a warm grin broke through his icy lips grin when Jon Batiste circled back not once, but twice through “the land of the free,” vaulting the New Orleans native’s bluesy rendition of the British-white-man’s-drinking-society-song-equipped-with-an-American-racist’s-ridiculous-lyrics a few seconds past the over/under line. “Tasty tag, my man!” exclaimed Cicero, dollar signs flashing in his frozen eyes.
By contrast, the only words from Lamar’s half-time show that Cicero did understand were: “The revolution will not be televised.” Cicero’s response to that fleeting moment of clarity was immediately seen in English on the DeepSeek tablet and uttered simultaneously by a virtual voice that sounded a lot like James Earl Jones’s: “It could have been televised this very moment in this very place, toppling the would-be emperor from his throne high up in the amphitheater, if you only you, Kendrick Lamar, weren’t so obsessed with the sound of your own indecipherable voice, and the attendant fame and lucre in which you bathe. Entertaining Trumpius and his masses is a form of venal submission, not courageous dissent.”
Two hours earlier, as Batiste had hymned the American Republic (its own over-under expiration-date dropping rapidly in Vegas), Trumpius had risen from his imperial seat in salute. From the crowd came a giant surge of jubilation as the plebes and patricians saw his flame-topped image spread across the giant screen.
It was time for Cicero to quote himself, his prodigious memory undiminished by the intervening centuries since he first gave the speech in the Senate:
“Behold, here you have a man [Caesar] who was ambitious to be king of the Roman People and master of the whole world; and he achieved it! The man who maintains that such an ambition is morally right is a madman; for he justifies the destruction of law and liberty and thinks their hideous and detestable suppression glorious.”
After the rituals opening patriotic displays, Cicero soon became bored by the on-field maneuvers and on-screen decadence, all of it familiar to him from the last days of the Roman Republic. After halftime, Cicero seemed downright depressed. Hyped as a great orator, Kendrick had proved a grave disappointment. Even Trumpius made for a dismal display: “I knew Caesar and Trumpius is no Caesar.”
As the epic “entertainment” ground on, Cicero began to cool further, then lost interest altogether. In the third quarter he glanced over as we finished off the Buffalo Wings. “Finger LIXing good,” he quipped, the great orator reduced to infantile wordplay. Such was the state of the Republic of Rhetoric.
These games were a bust and so was he, he punned again, forlornly.
The CCS technicians came early in the fourth quarter and took him. The Dane made an ardent plea that he be hidden somewhere Greenland, but even she knew that he would not be safe there.
The next morning, we got word that the van had been intercepted by ICE, Cicero kidnapped by one of the Osprey plane-helicopters from the Super Bowl fly-over. His head had been flown immediately south and from a great height pitched into the Gulf of America just off of Nova Aurelianum.
Bank robberies have been a means to gather funds for revolutionary organizations for more than a century. From the Russian narodniks to the Bolsheviks to the Black Liberation Army and countless others similarly inspired, the expropriations of funds from capitalism’s reservoirs of wealth have funded numerous acts of rebellion and ongoing revolutionary movements. Perhaps no single individual in contemporary times is better known in Europe for such actions than the Basque left anarchist Lucio Urtubia Jiménez. Familiar to many as Lucio, he was born in Navarro in 1931 and died in Paris in 2020. He is the focus of a 2007 biographical film simply titled Lucio and a 2022 film titled A Man of Action. Perhaps his most famous expropriation was the scam he pulled on Citibank involving counterfeit traveler’s checks that resulted in Citibank paying him off to the tune of millions. Although his politics were anarchist, he helped dozens of leftist groups with the funds he stole from the big capitalists through robberies and forgery; the Black Panthers and anti-fascist/anti-Franco groups in Spain were among the benefactors.
Recently, AK Press published a translation of his autobiography. Titled To Rob a Bank is an Honor, it’s a riveting tale of adventure and anarchism—a combination that goes together more often than not, at least among those anarchists who take their politics to heart. Whether one agrees with his politics or his actions, the reality is that Urtubia never committed any criminal action for his own financial gain. He identified as a bricklayer once he learned the trade as a young adult and rejected attempts by his supporters and cheerleaders to glorify him. This isn’t to say he was a saint, just an acknowledgment that there were (and perhaps still are) revolutionaries and leftist radicals who genuinely put politics in command.
Although his stories didn’t always stay the same regarding his past, it appears that when Lucio was in his late twenties is when he began his political activities in earnest. This was in the late 1950s. By 1968, he was living in Paris where he took part in the May 1968 insurrection that nearly overthrew the French government. He fell in love with another rebel named Anne with whom he had a daughter. The two set up a print shop and began forging documents for revolutionaries and criminals on the run. Urtubia continued to work as a bricklayer, not wanting to draw too much attention from law enforcement in the post May 1968 crackdowns. The two began working with the Groups of International Revolutionary Action (GARI) in France, which in turn worked with a Spanish group of revolutionary anti-fascists known in English as the Iberian Liberation Movement (MIL). Both groups were composed of anarchists and council communists (a form of communism where power rests with workers and other citizens’ councils and not with the party). In May 1974, days after the Carnation Revolution had overthrown the fascist government in Portugal, a joint action by GARI and MIL resulted in the kidnapping of the Paris representative of the Spanish Banco Bilbao. The representative was released after twenty days; arrests in Spain and Paris followed soon after. Urtubia and his wife were among those arrested.
This escapade is an example of the lives lived by revolutionaries in the latter third of the twentieth century, even in the countries of what we now call the global north. The political situation was quite different from the one we live in now in 2025. The same elites are in power, but their systems of control are not only much more sophisticated. Indeed, almost any movement of any individual can be tracked at almost any time the police state desires. Many, if not most residents of the planet readily volunteer their locations, their loves, their politics and their potentially criminal activities in endless streams of data they provide each and every time they use their so-called devices. Even those who do not exist in any voluntary form online discover the surveillance state—a combination of the corporate and governmental infrastructures—knows much more about them than they think.
Urtubia’s most famous exploit involved the forgery of traveler’s checks. For those who don’t know (or don’t remember) traveler’s checks are what many western travelers used as currency when traveling outside of their country of residence. It was a time when every country had its own currency; there was no Euro. One bought these checks from their bank. They paid for them with dollars if they were purchasing them in the United States. These checks were than either exchanged for local currencies overseas or, if a particular merchant accepted them, used to pay the merchant directly. Urtubia, together with some others, put together a scheme where he forged millions of dollars worth of these checks and distributed them through a variety of avenues. In 1980 he was approached by a man named Tony Sarro, who was working with the French police. His plan involved selling the forged checks at cut rates mostly in Latin America. When Urtubio met with Sarro, he was arrested. Prior to the arrest, the money he made was turned over to various armed revolutionary organizations. Ultimately, Urtubio and his lawyers worked out an agreement where he was freed, paid a large sum of money which he distributed to various direct action-oriented revolutionary organizations. In return, he handed over the plates he had used to forge the checks.
The exploit summarized above is a prime example of the illegal actions often required to fund revolution. A combination of the practical, the utopian, determination and fearlessness, the levels of trust and commitment involved in underground revolutionary activity are the foundation of the story told within this autobiography’s pages. Truth, even the matter of revolution, is usually at least as fantastic as fiction. Upon reading To Rob a Bank is an Honor, that becomes clear.
This is the twelvth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (This week newly installed President Elon Musk and his social media spokesman, Donald Trump, did their best to furlough most of the federal government, including everyone working for US AID, the FBI, CIA, and Department of Education.)
Mustafa Kemal (also known as Atatürk), second from the left in black tie, wanted Turkey (the 1923 successor of the Ottoman Empire) to be both a secular state and to remain a power in the muslim world—an inherent contradiction. Photo of a museum photo by Matthew Stevenson.
Close to the Ankara train station and my hotel was the Museum of the Republic. Just up the street was a second, similar museum dedicated to the War of Independence in 1923. Both were in buildings that housed the Turkish parliament in the early days of the republic, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire.
Under the terms of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres—complimentary to the Treaty of Versailles and others signed in Paris after World War I—the Ottoman Empire was divided into zones of Allied occupation: Britain (and an international contingent) got Çanakkale and the Straits; Italy controlled Antalya and southern Turkey; France occupied eastern Turkey north of Syria; and Turkey itself was reduced to an area around Ankara. (The United States refused to take up a mandate over Armenia.)
No sooner was the Ottoman Empire partitioned than Greece invaded east from its zone of occupation around Izmir (then Smyrna), which touched off the conflict that became known as the Turkish war of independence. (It could be argued that it is still being fought to this day, especially in Kurdistan and Syria, if not in Gaza.)
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Led by Mustafa Kemal (aka Atatürk, which means “Father of the Turks”), the Turkish army fought from just outside Ankara all the way to the Mediterranean coast, culminating in the 1922 battle of Smyrna, which saw thousands of Greeks massacred on the waterfront (the number of victims varies from about 10,000 to 100,000) and ended the “Ionian visions” that Greater Greece would include ancient Greek cities in Anatolia.
In The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923 (which I had with me on my Kindle), historian Sean McMeekin writes:
Whoever actually started the great fire of Smyrna, it seems clear that many Turks saw it as poetic justice for the dozens of cities and towns the Greeks had put to the flames farther inland. For the fact remains that, even if many Turks lost property and a few mosques in the old city were burned, it was the Christians of Smyrna, Ottoman and European alike, who lost everything. What perished alongside the old city of Smyrna in September 1922 was the very idea that Greeks and Turks, Christians and Muslims, could live together peacefully in Asia Minor—or in mainland Greece, for that matter.
After their defeat in Smyrna, hundreds of thousands of Greeks living in Asia Minor fled to the state we think of as Greece, and after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne re-drew the demarcation lines of the Treaty of Sèvres, Turkey declared its independence and republic, with Atatürk as its founding president. He had been the general in charge of defeating the Greeks in western Anatolia, just as, when he was a more junior officer, he had led the counterattacks at Gallipoli when the Allies tried to capture the Dardanelles in 1915.
Many museums in Ankara and Turkey are little more than exhibitions on the life and times of Mustafa Kemal; the Museum of the Republic has a display cabinet showing off his top hat and tails (he liked western formal wear).
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If the Museum of the Republic is devoted to early parliamentary procedures and Atatürk’s greatness as a politician, the Museum of the War of Independence (just up the road and on the corner of a busy intersection in old Ankara) is more concerned with his brilliance as a military commander.
In those displays cases, there are maps, flags, daggers, and pistols devoted to the cause of independence, which, in effect, was fought from 1914, when the Ottoman Empire (then on its last legs) decided to enter World War I on the side of the German allies.
In the two years previous to the Great War, in the two Balkan Wars (1912-13), the Ottoman Empire had largely been evicted from the European mainland. (It kept a rump presence near Edirne and the Bosphorus Straits.)
Then in World War I, the western Allies (France, Britain, and Russia) did their best to dismember the empire once referred to as the “sick man of Europe.” The British and French fought on sea and land at Gallipoli throughout much of 1915, eventually withdrawing in defeat at the end of the year. In Egypt and Palestine from 1916-18, largely British forces—including the camel corps in which T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) often rode—attacked toward Jerusalem, Damascus, and the Hejaz Railway, which all fell in 1918.
Britain also sent an army up the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia against Ottoman forces, although they were surrounded and annihilated at Kut. Finally, Russian forces in World War I attacked from the Caucasus into eastern Turkey, besieging Kars and capturing the strategic city of Erzurum (to which I was headed).
In the midst of all these campaigns, the Ottoman leadership vented its rage against Armenian citizens of the empire, which led to the deaths (on forced marches or through starvations and beatings) of more than a million Armenians (the survivors were scattered into the Caucasus and Asia Minor). And it was to make sense of this sweep of history—especially from Anatolia to Erzurum and Kars—that I was now biking around Ankara and buying a railway ticket on the Dogu Express to eastern Turkey.
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From the Museum of the War of Independence, I biked up a short, steep hill to the Ulus Victory Monument, a statue of Atatürk on horseback, symbolically leading the nation to victory and independence. Then I set out on a bike ride that could only be considered folly.
I had a map in my pocket that showed “key sights” around Ankara, and I had GPS on my phone, which was clamped to my bicycle handlebars. But nothing prepared me for the absurdity of an Ankara bike ride, in which I found myself riding on broken sidewalks or standing at busy intersections trying to push the bike across the street.
I had ridden the same bicycle in New York, Moscow, London, Rome, and Saigon, and despite some learning curves I had managed to master the navigation through serious traffic. But here in Ankara I was defeated.
Most roads I headed down were clogged with cars, buses, and trucks, and even side streets that felt like death alleys. I went this way and that, searching for something like a bus lane in which I could ride, but came up with nothing.
After about an hour of such futility (add in a few steep hills to match), I gave up and rode back to my hotel, considering whether I might not even take the bike the following day, when I had planned to ride to Atatürk’s presidential home, now a museum on the outskirts of the metropolis. To use an expression from the Tour de France, I was thinking of “putting my foot on the ground,” an unpleasant consideration for any cyclist.
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I never left the hotel that evening (Ankara isn’t much of a city for pedestrians, but it does have sidewalks), and I spent much of my time after dinner with various city maps unfolded on my bed, trying to make sense of my possible ride the next day. As best I could tell, Atatürk’s house museum was about five miles from my hotel, on the far side of the Turkish State Cemetery and more war memorials.
On my phone and computer, I calculated various routes, and in the end, after a good night’s sleep, I came to the decision that I would start out on the bike and only give up if the traffic was unbearable. A full hotel breakfast further fortified me, and encouragement from the hotel staff (which by this point had warmed to the folding bicycle as a symbol of American eccentricity) made me think I might be able to succeed.
Once I got away from the small, crowded streets around my hotel, I rode along a wide boulevard, which in a few sections even had what looked like bicycle paths. The ride was uphill, but not steep, and I settled into the rhythm of watching both GPS on my phone and my lane for errant cars.
Beyond the the city downtown, I even began to enjoy the ride, although in a few places I found myself confused about the GPS directions, which forced me to hand-carry the bike across broad boulevards with a concrete meridians.
Eventually, following GPS, I turned right off the main boulevard and started riding on a wide, but strangely empty boulevard that, I soon discovered, was laced with police roadblocks and checkpoints.
By this point I was on an official bike lane, so I decided to press on, as Atatürk’s house was only a mile or so from my tracked location. It would have been a shame, after all this riding, if I had start again or find some other path through Ankara’s concrete wilderness.
At the very worst, I figured, the police would stop me from carrying on, but at the first checkpoint an officer cheerfully waved me on. Surely, I said to myself, all this security wasn’t for the protection of the house where Atatürk lived when he was the Turkish president from 1923 – 1938.
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Only when I biked to the top of the long incline did it dawn on me that I was riding on the (blocked) boulevard that led directly to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “Presidential Complex,” his 300,000 square meter mansion that cost more than $600 million to build.
For years I had been reading about the building, but had no idea where in Ankara it was until I got to a second police barrier and checkpoint just opposite the main gates. Strangely, even at this checkpoint I was waved on, as if the Turkish president was expecting someone on a bike.
As much as I wanted to stop and take a picture of the building, I didn’t want to take out my phone, especially as at the top of the hill (opposite the main gates) there was a platoon of police soldiers keeping an eye on things. There was also a memorial to the failed 2015 coup in the plaza near the front gate, so I asked one of the policemen if he would take my picture in front of the monument.
If pictures were not allowed, he would say so, and if pictures were questionable I would rather say later that it was a police officer who had taken mine. Then I stood in front of the coup memorial in such a way that when the policeman took my picture, he would get the palace complex in the background, which is what happened.
Looking past the memorial at the front of the presidential mansion, I wondered whether this building was larger than Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Palace of Parliament. Both buildings seemed to have about 300,000 square meters and more than 1,000 rooms, and both seemed designed to house a government under siege, should things come to that (as they did for Ceaușescu, although when those bells tolled, his edifice complex was still evolving).
I later read that Erdoğan’s MacMansion has a library with 5 million books, fully functioning health clinic, nearby mosque, and full-service bomb shelter, which he needed in 2015, when insurrectionists attacked Erdoğan’s palace from the air. (He survived.)
The Ceaușescu manse, carved from stone, resembles an Orwellian ministry of fear, while Erdoğan’s residence looks more like the headquarters of a regional insurance company near Phoenix. Both speak to a government of pharaohs.
The Miss Pacific Islands Pageant (MPIP) Committee has finally issued a statement — 5 days after damaging social media attacks following the 2025 Pageant finals hosted by the Solomon Islands last Saturday.
The statement yesterday simply said the committee recognised and deeply regretted the distress caused by recent disputes concerning the result on the pageant night.
“Unfortunately, these allegations have escalated to the extent of subjecting contestants to degrading treatment and issuing threats against the lives of certain judges, thereby, detrimentally impacting the camaraderie and ethos of the pageant,” it said.
However, the statement did not address the judging controversy despite calls from around the Pacific for a proper investigation and to hold the person responsible for the false allegations of results rigging against the pageant’s head judge, Leiataualesa Jerry Brunt.
A former pageant organiser told Talamua that the statement had come “too late — too little, the damage has been done”.
The organiser said there were policies and regulations that must be followed to ensure the successful progress of the pageant and steps to be taken if such events like the allegations against a judge surfaced.
She told Talamua that the MPIP committee should have issued a statement within 24 hours of the allegations.
Opened the door to conflict
She believes that if MPIP had issued a statement earlier, it would have prevented the harsh attacks on the contestants and the head judge, but the delay had opened the door for the exchange between Samoans and Tongans on social media.
The statement did not offer an apology or reasons why a statement was not issued earlier.
It only gave an explanation on why such a pageant had been established and then acknowledged Miss Samoa Litara Ieremia Allan, the contestants, all involved in the pageant, and the host country.
According to the former pageant organiser, the MPIP seemed to take the stop notices issued on the pageant judges very lightly, which drew an unprecedented involvement of both the Solomon Islands and Samoan governments.
Although the detained judges have returned to their respectful countries, a statement from the Solomon Islands government issued yesterday said investigation was continuing based on the complaint and that formal charges would then be determined.
It should not have gone this far if the MPIP committee had done their part, said a former pageant organiser.
Your new book, The Artist’s Way Toolkit, is your fifty-eighth book. When you first started writing, did you ever have an intention to write so many books?
No. Never. I still don’t. It’s one book at a time.
Do you ever have ideas for the next book while you’re working on the current one?
I want to say no. It goes a book at a time. When I finish a book, then I say, “Oh. I wonder what to write next.”
How much time usually passes between books? Do you ever find yourself closing one and then starting right again on another, or do you have these periods between books?
Right now, I’m in a period between books, but ordinarily, I go pretty much book to book. I would say it takes me the better part of the year per book.
I’m 76. I’ve been writing full-time since I was 18.
Do you think that’s why you work in so many mediums, then?
Yes. I think I find myself getting an itch to write something which may not be in the same genre as what I have just finished writing.
I think part of what makes The Artist’s Way so attractive to people is the very clear and seemingly simple actions you prescribe: the morning pages and artist dates. How did you arrive at the system of daily actions that have become The Artist’s Way?
I would say through practice. I found myself just leading from one book to the next and from one tool to the next. I think they were exciting to me.
What excited you about this framework initially?
The fact that I could keep going.
I notice, when I talk with friends about the practice of writing morning pages, people love to talk about the size of the notebook. Have folks come to you with a lot of questions about that too?
Yes. The often-asked question is, “What size paper should I use?” And I say, “8 1/2 x 11.” If you use something smaller, you miniaturize your thoughts. If you use something larger, you’ll be daunted.
Did you have trial and error with the size of the notebook as you were thinking about how to synthesize this toolkit into what it is today?
I just used the paper that I had on hand, which happens to be 8 1/2 x 11.
I want to talk about the spirituality of The Artist’s Way. It’s a creative program, but it’s also a spiritual program, and I’ve known more artists than I can count who say they’ve picked up the book but almost immediately dropped it because they found that foundation of a higher power to be off-putting. I’ve noticed that many people say the same thing about 12-step programs. But you even address this issue in the book’s introduction, and I think you handle it so well: you say it can simply be an exercise in open mindedness. And yet many readers still find the higher power element to be off-putting. What do you say to those readers?
I don’t have anything to say to those readers.
Why is that?
Well, I just think if they find it off-putting, that is their business.
I think that feeds into something I’ve noticed in your new book, The Artist’s Way Toolkit: you have so much to say about protecting ourselves from the dangers of codependency by utilizing morning pages, artist dates, solo walks, and writing for guidance. Can you say more about that?
I think that the tools lead the way to autonomy. When you write morning pages, you’re saying particularly, “This is what I like. This is what I don’t like.” And it’s particular to the person who is writing. I think when you write out of that state, you are opening yourself up to a spiritual source. That, too, is an exercise in autonomy.
And the same would be true of walking. Walking opens you to a higher source and gives you a sense of benevolence. And guidance is something that we need to try in order to feel that it’s worthy. All four tools are exercises In independence.
Have you written for guidance today at all?
Yes, I did.
Would you be willing to tell me a little bit about what you asked for?
I said, “Dear God, please guide me. Give me faith and optimism. Give me everything I need to make me alert and make me lively. Give me grace and eloquence, give me humor, and let me like Hurley.”
[laughs] I really hope that God is giving you that last one. Do you find yourself repeating questions when you write for guidance?
Yes.
What are some things you repeat?
I ask, “What’s next?” And then I listen. I often find that what’s next is something very simple. And so sometimes I think, “Are you listening to me?”
Does it seem like it can take a while sometimes to be delivered the answers?
I think the answers come pretty quickly. But my belief in them comes more slowly.
In your writing, I love how you express how very gentle the voice of guidance is with you. Do you find that that’s consistent? Or has guidance ever been a little more firm than that?
I think guidance is habitually gentle. And habitually also firm. And so if you are asking for guidance and saying, “Please guide me,” then you are open to the way guidance comes to you. And I think the guidance is, frequently, I want to say, surprising.
In the same way that guidance is habitually gentle, how do you remain habitually open to it?
Well, I use guidance often. And when I do, I am asking to hear what path to take next. And I have found over time that the path, and the suggestion, is fruitful.
And so I think that what we’re doing is asking for openness. And when we are granted openness, we are given a desire to go forward.
You’re the creator of The Artist’s Way, but you’ve also written and directed films in addition to writing plays and musicals and fiction and children’s books and collections of poetry. But you clearly relish both sides of your work. In fact, in your book Living the Artist’s Way, you write, “I love it when I am a building block in someone’s dream.”
It doesn’t seem to bother you that the rest of your tremendous body of work may often be overlooked in favor of one book. Do you have advice for artists who help fellow artists and perhaps struggle to find that balance between pursuing their own work and helping others with theirs?
It’s important to pursue your own work first. When you pursue your own work, you are given what to teach. And I think that it’s an important facet of my work, that I keep moving in many different genres. I think that it’s important for anyone trying to help to teach from creative practice, not from theory.
What does your own writing practice look like these days?
I tend to write several times a day. First thing in the morning, I write morning pages. They sort of give me a trajectory for my day. And then later in the day, I turned my hand to whatever creative project I’m working on, and I write on that for a while. And then I wrap my day up with writing for guidance.
Has your writing routine changed at all through the years, or have you maintained this process of waking up, writing morning pages, working on the creative project later in the day, and writing for guidance to end the day?
It’s pretty steadfast.
How many of your ideas for your books arrive to you during your morning pages?
I think they arise more when I am setting out on them as a creative project. I don’t think that they come to me through morning pages very often.
What other parts of the day do you find yourself being struck with ideas for your work?
I think walking helps.
How long do each of your writing sessions typically last for you?
Morning pages can take quite a little while. And by that I mean, maybe an hour and a half. And when I’m working on a project, I go until I run out of gas.
How do you know when you’ve run out of gas?
When it becomes difficult to find what comes next.
Do you ever feel that you’re wrestling your writing to the ground, trying to get it right? Or do you have a strong sense of when to step away and let your subconscious do its work on it?
I hope to say I have the wisdom to walk away.
How do you know when to walk away from the writing?
Israeli police have confiscated hundreds of books with Palestinian titles or flags without understanding their contents in a draconian raid on a Palestinian educational bookshop in occupied East Jerusalem, say eyewitnesses.
More details have emerged on the Israeli police raid on a popular bookstore in occupied East Jerusalem.
The owners were arrested but police reportedly dropped charges of incitement while still detaining them for “disturbing the public order”.
The bookstore’s owners, Ahmed and Mahmoud Muna, were detained, and hundreds of titles related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict confiscated, before police ordered the store’s closure, according to May Muna, Mahmoud’s wife, reports Al Jazeera.
She said the soldiers picked out books with Palestinian titles or flags, “without knowing what any of them meant”.
She said they used Google Translate on some of the Arabic titles to see what they meant before carting them away in plastic bags.
Another police bookshop raid
Police raided another Palestinian-owned bookstore in the Old City in East Jerusalem last week. In a statement, the police said the two owners were arrested on suspicion of “selling books containing incitement and support for terrorism”.
As an example, the police referred to an English-language children’s colouring book titled From the River to the Sea — a reference to the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that today includes Israel, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The bookshop raids have been widely condemned as a “war on knowledge and literature”.
The Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem is full with shoppers in solidarity a day after the Israel Police raided the Palestinian store, arrested its owners and confiscated books. They dropped the charges of incitement but still detain them for ‘disturbing the public order’ pic.twitter.com/ZfnkBttfY3
It was the first June of the new millennium and we were in the northern Italian foothills of the Alps. The Italians call them the Prealpi, as if the rugged terrain makes for a collection of preludes to the snowcapped works of nature rising to the north.
We had been staying with one of our daughter’s godfathers in the northern industrial city of Brescia. Berretta, founded in the early 16th century and the oldest continuously operated firearms company in the world, still has its main factory there.
Brescians turned metal not only into guns and bullets but also into organs. The famed Antegnati family of organ builders lived and worked in the city from the 15th century into the 18th, during which time they supplied instruments across northern Italy, from the Piedmont to the Veneto. Amongst these masterpieces is that still in Brescia’s Old Cathedral, a circular Romanesque structure so ancient that you walk down from modern street level to enter. This monumental organ by Gian Giacomo Antegnati is from 1536, completed four hundred years after construction began on the cathedral. The organ is subterranean, perhaps a unique position for any King of Instruments.
We had our two daughters with us. The eldest was two-and-a-half. The younger had been born in the first days of January—a true millennial. In the cathedral and outside on the street and in shops and restaurants, old women would stop to marvel at the blonde bambine. There were many trendy shops with expensive baby clothes in the windows, yet we almost never saw any other babies. After decades of decline, the birth rate in Italy had stabilized just above one child per woman.
After a few days, we left Brescia and drove northeast up through the Prealpi to our friends’ summer house in a village called Binzago west of Lake Garda. The landscape was mostly wooded, the winding road popular with motorcyclists clad in colorful leathers and moving at dangerous speeds. Ducati screams rebounded off the hillsides. At the turn-off from the main road to the narrower by way snaking up towards the village, there was a dilapidated but still functioning iron factory.
We drove past farms and a few holiday houses and into Binzago with its terraced houses of light-brown stone. At the center of the village, the road made a slight jog around the church. At the fountain, a dark-skinned mother did her laundry with her five kids around her, the youngest in a collapsible stroller.
Our house was beyond and above the village on a steep hillside. The broad, tiled porch looked out over the narrow valley. In the early evening, a pair of cuckoos began calling to each other below.
We found haircutting scissors in the house and gave our five-month-old her first haircut on the porch. Her soft blond locks fell like hatchling’s feathers as the cuckoos continued their vesper antiphon.
The cuckoo population was—and still is—decreasing dramatically in northern Italy on account of, among other factors, the loss of habitat and the pesticides of industrial agriculture like that practiced in the vast Po Valley that spreads south and east from Brescia.
Cuckoos are brood parasites. They lay their eggs in the nests of other species, their young to be raised by their competitors. This biological outsourcing strategy has been imbued with allegorical resonance in many human cultures through tales told or sung of cuckolds, of foundlings of royal birth, of monarchical pretenders, and of deadly sibling rivalries.
The falling minor third of the cuckoo’s two-note call and the hollow timbre of their delivery of it have been drawn on for thematic content by many composers across centuries. This raw material evokes not only the rebirth in the springtime but also the origins of human music in nature. The birds sang first, on before people did.
The simplicity of the cuckoo’s call is both an inspiration and a challenge—assuming there’s a difference between the two—to human musicians. How to elaborate on the bird’s proto-melody while remaining true to it? Can a human musician prove to be as clever through art as the conniving cuckoo is in nature?
The next morning was Sunday and we walked to Santa Maria Annunciata, arriving as the mass was ending. The congregation was made up of a few old women singing a Lutheran hymn to Italian words. The old religious animosities over which European nations warred among themselves for centuries have mostly been forgotten or at least ignored. After the service was over, the young priest from El Salvador took us up to the small choir loft.
The organ was from 1726, not a sumptuous creation like those of the Antegnati, but a rough-and-ready model for a mountain village. The tarnished pipes sat in a simple wooden case with scrolled decorations painted in faded red.
The instrument was dirty and neglected, but, thanks to the maker’s craftsmanship, it still mostly worked and proved capable of singing out with characterful power and variety. Like most Italian organs of the baroque, it had just one manual and a scant octave of slanting pedals used for pastoral drones or to mark off cadences. There was no back panel on the case. Instead, the instrument had been set against the wall of the church. In the gap between the windchest with its pipes and the stone vaulting, pigeons had been nesting. Among the ranks of more forceful registers was a single flute stop that could be made to puff like a dove or a cuckoo.
The priest left us to stay and play for as long as we wanted.
We started with Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Capriccio sopra il Cucho, published in 1624 in a collection of characteristically ingenious and flamboyant contrapuntal keyboard works. The capriccio is a genre that paradoxically evinces both erudition and willful liberty, command of and adherence to the rules of composition while also indulging a fantastical freedom. Frescobaldi had his collection printed in the open score, that is, with a separate staff for each of the four voices described by analogy to vocal music as soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. In this format, his command of counterpoint could more plainly be seen on the page, even if it was more difficult for lesser keyboardists to play from.
From the beginning to the end of the six-minute piece, the soprano voice has only two notes: a minor third descending from D to B-natural. Below this continual call, the composer weaves a fabulous tapestry of contrapuntal motives in an ever-changing combination. These are interspersed with occasional flashes of figuration and enlivened through rhythmic variation. Harmonic feints constantly reframe the unchanging melody above. Moments of poised reflection are interrupted, as if spontaneously, by flights of fancy, all as the cuckoo calls with obstinate simplicity from its perch atop the array of voices. Frescobaldi’s is a daring, self-conscious display of self-imposed limitations that paradoxically do not constrict his imagination but spur it.
What lessons are to be learned from this ingenious piece? Should limits be respected or ignored, embraced or rejected? Does art “improve” on nature or is art a cage? Or both? Should we be delighted or dismayed—or both—by Frescobaldi’s capricious cuckoo? Is the cuckoo doomed to disappear from the world, the capriccio to become the bird’s mournful echo?
After an hour of music, we left the church. Outside, another woman with her children was at the spring doing laundry. As we walked back to our house on the hillside track, the cuckoos began calling again.
A documentary like No Other Land defines everything that is vital about the power of film to be a chronicle. Devastating and full of justified anger, it places the viewer front and center in the reality of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Palestinian directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal worked with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and cinematographer Rachel Szor, also Israeli, to present in wrenching human detail what amounts clearly to an apartheid state and colonial project. Now the documentary arrives in a curious state that says much about our modern society. It is the most decorated documentary of 2024, now nominated for an Academy Award, and has struggled to find distribution. Now it is being independently released in several theaters and VOD. This is a document that must be seen. Make others watch it with you.
The focus is Basel Adra and his efforts from 2019 through 2023 to document via video Israel’s efforts to demolish his home village of Masafer Yatta. It is located in the West Bank, which along with East Jerusalem, constitutes the Palestinian territories Israel has been illegally occupying and settling since 1967. Adra’s footage presents the brutal cycle in all its clarity. Israeli forces move in, claim their land is needed for a “military training ground,” and proceed to demolish homes, destroy wells and expel the population. Many families resist and move into nearby caves, vowing to return at night to rebuild in secret. Yuval Abraham appears as that rare Israeli Jew who feels genuine compassion for his Arab neighbors, outraged at what is being done in his name. With Basel, Yuval confronts the Israeli soldiers who arrive with deadened stares to push out the Palestinians, and witness acts of terrible violence, both from troops and settlers who behave like leftovers from the Jim Crow South.
No Other Land arrives at a time when the Israel-Palestine conflict has dominated headlines like never before in the wake of Israel’s devastating war on that other Palestinian territory, the besieged enclave of Gaza, following the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas militants into Israel. For many Americans the details of the conflict are too archaic to understand or they see it through glasses tinted by our conditioned biases. What the filmmakers present leaves little room for ignorance. A day in the life of the film’s subjects can suddenly be broken by the arrival of troops ready to displace them, using excuses clearly meant to cover up the nature of what amounts to colonialism. It doesn’t matter that these are families who can trace their roots to the land for centuries, for the Israelis they are a mere nuisance. A cave suddenly becomes a refuge. What is astounding is the mixture of despair and strength on display from the Palestinians.
At the heart of the chronicle is the friendship between its filmmakers. It is vital that someone like Yuval can cross artificial barriers to be in solidarity with Basel, yet it is far from easy. Through them we see the apartheid system at work. The West Bank is essentially under a military regime. Palestinians have no civil rights here. Roads are reserved for Israeli settlers and Palestinians are not allowed to drive on them. Yuval is free to leave when he wishes back to Israel, while Basel, like the rest of his people, is not allowed to leave the West Bank without Israeli authorization. The “only democracy in the Middle East” functions like a dictatorship in this land. Eventually, Palestinians wonder how Yuval can even remain a friend when one of his friends or relatives could very well turn out to be a soldier coming to drive them out.
Yet, without solidarity there will be nothing but an abyss. The violence Basel’s community faces is pure fascist terror. A local man is paralyzed when Israeli troops shoot him for protesting the taking away of a power generator. Racist settlers, their faces masked, descend on the village to sow fear, fully backed by soldiers. One chilling thug mocks Yuval for writing his articles, another films him with his phone, warning that his face will be made public. It takes courage to face such monstrosities, especially when all you have is a moral will. Yuval has to be honest with his friend and say that few read his reporting, because nobody wants to face what is happening. The great Israeli journalist Gideon Levy also appears at one point, interviewing the residents of Masafer Yatta. He too has been condemned as a traitor by the right-wing of his country, no doubt because, like all truth tellers, he shakes their cowardice.
No Other Land is a powerful human chronicle in how it portrays the violence of power and those who have to resist or fade away. There is a tragic melancholy to Basel, who went to college and studied law, but has no options in an occupied home. One is reminded of the plight of the Native Americans or all Indigenous peoples who have faced this same kind of fate. There is immense bravery in this documentary as well, from the Palestinian boys willing to tell a soldier to leave their home or the mothers somehow making a home for their children in the interior of a cave. What viewers should keep in mind is that the Palestinian issue is not disconnected at all from the United States. We fund and arm the Israeli machine bulldozing these lives. The entire West is complicit. There is a moment where footage shows former British Prime Minister Tony Blair visiting a corner of the village that was then left alone by the occupation. Early on, Basel speaks with the heartbreaking naivety of believing that his footage could spark enough outrage in the U.S. to intervene.
The haunting, closing moments of No Other Land inform us that filming ended on the fateful month of October 2023. The war on Gaza would begin and the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, an internationally wanted war criminal, would take advantage to expand the colonial violence in the West Bank while carrying out its genocidal assault on Gaza. How will it end? History is unpredictable. Our returning emperor, drunk on hubris, now wants to claim Gaza for the U.S. imperium. Will the West Bank be handed to Israel as loot? What is clear and unnerving is how a documentary like this puts to shame our slogans of “Never Again” or how we insist on reckoning with the sins of the past, while ignoring the ones taking place right now. The people of Masafer Yatta were left to resist alone but at least their story is preserved in a documentary like this. It is a testament to the worst of humanity and also the glimmering flickers of genuine solidarity. Basel only has his camera while others will gravitate towards the armed struggle. What right do we have to criticize them? There is the fleeting comfort of knowing the filmmakers’ work is being acknowledged, which is testament to the power of what they are sharing. In the future someone will surely discover this work and wonder why the terror in its frames was allowed to go on.
In 2019 Professor of Chicano and Latino Studies Department at University of Minnesota, Town Cities Mary Karen Davalos posed the following question: “Under what context were Castillo’s images of the Rarámuris exhibited?” The primary reason for Tarahumaras/ Rarámuris: Life, Culture and Challenges as well as a second exhibition 1519: Una Respuesta (A Response) did not derive from an opportunity but from a moment; 2019 marked the beginning of an antagonistic 500 year relation between two diametrically different cultures/civilizations: Mexico and Spain/Europe. Spain’s main colonizer Hernan Cortez first set foot on Mexican soil in 1519. The 500 anniversary of this event surged a debate. Was Cortez a conqueror or a man of his times?
Mexico’s academia debated the significance of this so called encounter and the meaning of conquest. Although the Rarámuris are north (the high Sierra of Chihuahua) of Tenochtitlan nevertheless they would face the same colonial enemy. Since the formation of Mexico’s modern state 200 years ago Indigenous communities all across its territory continue to be a point of contention. Whether Cortez was a victim of his era or not is besides the point? Why shield Europe and Cortez’s colonizing crimes with doubt?
Two art exhibitions were curated on the 500 anniversary of pillage and death. With the support of Artfully Space Gallery, an African American owned and operated gallery located in South Los Angeles.1519: Una Respuesta’s opening was made possible in October 2019. Tarahumaras/ Rarámuris: Life, Culture and Challenges opened in September of 2019 at Casa 0101 Theater’s Jean Deleage Art Gallery in Boyle Heights, California. With 25 never exhibited images by Chicano photographer Oscar Castillo the exhibition magnified a contested beauty. The call for artists was well received by those who participated in these exhibits. Both collaborations allowed for an intercultural cross reference dialogue between the African American community, Latin@s, friends and the working class of our local neighborhoods.
Under this context and departing from a decolonial turn both exhibitions were a response/respuesta to the colloquial foggy quest taking place in 2019 of Cortez’s impact in Mexico’s Indigenous history by Mexican academic circles. This essay is a reply to that foggy conversation.
Rarámuris/ Tarahumaras: Life, Culture and Challenges acknowledges yet moves away from what is most associated with the Raramuris; as long distance runners. It differs from the visual culture of suffering and destitution often associated with Indigenous peoples. An exhibit of the Rarámuris community could not be without the presence of retos (challenges). The struggles and forms of resistance by Indigenous communities were not absent in the conversations that took place during the opening reception. The Rarámuris indigenous community face multiple obstacles: the Mexican state, cartels, racism, environmental poachers, land thieves, violence, displacement and death.
1519: Una Respuesta was political and social. It consisted of powerful linocuts and graphic artwork by Yaneli Delgado, Pedro Rios Martinez and Ernesto Vasquez. Yaneli Delgado found inspiration in the linocut artwork from Guadalupe Posada, Elizabeth Catlett and Leopoldo Martinez. The same could be said of Ernesto Vazquez and Pedro Rios Martinez.
Process:
Upon conversing with Castillo and the significance of the 500 year anniversary of contact in 1519 between Abya Yala and Europe, It would be no coincidence that Oscar Castillo would reveal his tucked away images of the Tarahumara Sierra in Chihuahua, Mexico and the Rarámuris people. As he opened up his portfolio with images of his visit to the Rarámuris village the aura of a narrative community took hold. I was dumbfounded! Castillo is known to be one the premiere Latino photographers in the United States with an extensive body of images of the Latino community archived at the UCLA Chicano Resource Center.
Rarámuris is one word composed of two meanings, rara means feet and muris translates to run. Together it signifies runners and Tarahumara means ‘the light footed’. Rarámuris is how the indigenous community identifies themselves and Tarahumara is how they are mostly known outside Mexico. The Rarámuris live in the western part of the Sierra Madre which crosses the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango. According to a United Nations article Protecting the Sierra Tarahumara, A Biodiversity hotspot, “The longest mountain range in Mexico, harbors some of the richest biodiversity in North America. Around two-thirds of the standing timber in the country are in the Sierra.”
Early in his career in 1972, Castillo was commissioned to photograph British runner Bruce Tulloh competing in the Rarámuris/Tarahumaras yearly running event. Running for the Rarámuris is spiritual and the competition amongst the villages is a collective and an entertaining ritual. This circumstance came to Castillo after Chicano professor Ricardo Romo from California State University, Northridge could not attend the documentation of Tulloh due to an illness. For Castillo this opportunity would become a fortunate stroke of serendipity.
Upon arriving in the small village of Sisoguichi, Chihuahua Castillo would no longer meet the Rarámuris/ Tarahumaras at the edge of town as he did as a child. He now found himself ‘being in the world‘ with and where the Rarámuris dwell.
In the process of viewing Castillo’s 35mm color slide film and his black and white contact sheets, what came forward were life, children, families, milpas, women, men, pristine landscapes and a way of life contested since the arrival of Europeans to Las Americas. This body of work contrasts Castillo’s images of the 1970s Chicano Movement and Moratorium. The Raramuri photographs by Castillo were taken a few years after the National Chicano Moratorium. Meaning as a young emerging photographer some 48 years ago since 2019. His subtle low key approach and emotional sensitivity would carry over when he first visited the Raramuris.
Images of the National Chicano Moratorium are political civil rights and anti-Vietnam war manifestations during the 1970s the majority were from the working class barrios of East Los Angeles. The Rarámuris series are not. It has a different glow. Castillo pivots his camera and enters history without words but with images. This series of unexamined images interrogates the present. The fragility of life as a quotation is caught in each of Castillo’s photographs. There’s a quiet and a stealthiness in his approach to photography. Castillo’s unconventional method, the family-like snapshot moment, becomes an extended admiration that allows Castillo to carry his childhood sentiment into each frame.
It is a childhood sentiment nurtured by his visits from El Paso, Texas with his mother and grandmother to the local market to buy goods and handmade corn tortillas from Rarámuris vendors across the bordertown in Juarez, Mexico. In Several interviews Castillo attributes his interest in photography early in his youth when he’d pick up the family photo albums and browse through the thick pages with wonder.
Decolonial and Dialectic Turn:
Art critic and writer John Berger once said “The task of an alternative photography is to incorporate photography into social and political memory, instead of using it as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of any such memory.” Tarahumaras/ Rarámuris: Life, Culture and Challenges, celebrates the life of the Rarámuris while at the same time unveils the invisible difficulties faced by the Rarámuris Indigenous community.
The second and most poignant reason for a decolonial turn is advocacy, visibility and awareness vs. like/don’t like dichotomy of documentation described by Roland Barthes as studium. If any documentary approach comes about, it was second to feelings, emotions and dignity that first led to the curating of Castillo’s tucked away 48 years old photography of the Rarámuris/ Tarahumaras. We could say that the technique and instrument used by Castillo’s are western while the gaze is not. It is a Chicano aesthetic inspired by the Chicano renaissance which emphasized community and collectivism. By Chicano aesthetics I refer to an elastic aesthetic conceived in the early 60s as Carnalismo ( brother/sisterhood). It is best described by scholar Colin Gunkel in The Oscar Castillo Papers and Photography 2011 catalog as one of “activism, community and participation.” Whether this aesthetic is still in practice today is a question which is up for debate.
For Roland Barthe the punctum is somewhat of a pinch or sting caused when viewing a photograph and the power of expansion. Upon experiencing Castillo’s Rarámuris images, the pinch/ punctum is the simplicity and tranquility in many of the portraits. There is a feeling of quietness. Especially for those living in a fast paced society, who are in a constant rush, constantly planning and constantly maximizing one’s output. This series seems to have an effect of serenity and reflects the power of silence in many indigenous communities as a form of rebellion.
Described from an aesthetics of liberation point of view, the visual conversation in this exhibition can become the potencia which can address the separation between sensibility and indifference when discussing diverse cultural practices. This approach carries the possibility of agency in the arena of representation to the unversed eye both in academia and for the general public. In other words the aesthetic of liberation leans towards a humanistic socially conscious approach rather than a scientific or darwinistic method of learning. This body of work could be described as images that question and interrogate us, the viewer, the non indigenous,the city person, the western gaze we’ve inherited. When engaging with the Rarámuris series we could ask ourselves, What are we thinking (feeling) and why?
The Rarámuris/ Tarahumaras exhibition under a different context/gaze reinscribe a possible new way/dialogue of perceiving not only the emanating serenity in Castillo’s photography but a closer understanding of what it means to befall under a colonial/ western eye for Indigenous people. In curating this exhibit the direction is to move away from a one way perception of non euro peoples. Chicano Studies Professor Al Chavez from Los Angeles Mission College recalls the exhibition as “ an extraordinary exhibition in which Castillo’s not only captures the beauty of the Rarámuris culture and the world they live in. Castillo’s Images advocate for the wellbeing and protection of the Rarámuris.”
Unlike Edward Curtis’s beautiful Native American images posing for Curtis on site during the early 1900s, Castillo’s are not. He snaps at the camera like a family member photographing his relatives.The images are striking vignettes of communal culture settled away from urban life.
Challenges:
The resilient determination of the Rarámuris to defend their communal culture against an adversary as powerful as the modern Mexican state continues. Ten days after the opening, a Raramuri activist and leader Antonio Montes Enriquez from the local town of Creel, Chihuahua, who protested against the illegal cutting of forest trees and the construction of an airport four years earlier on Rarámuris territory was killed. The long historical discrimination against the Rarámuris is still prevalent today in 2025 as it was reported in the Mexican political journal Proceso back in 2018.
Two Women, Oscar Castillo, 1972.
Civilizing program:
Two Rarámuris women photographed walking along the train tracks are telling. For it is the invention and use of the train that accelerates industrial modernity and the expansion of colonization of Indigenous people and its territories. Western expansion for the most part excluded Indigenous people from modernity. It could not tolerate or make room for un-western ways and un-colonial practices that are not eurocentric. The only invitation by modern society/state is conditioned for the Rarámuris/Tarahumaras to join the fiesta no longer as Indigenous with their traditional cosmic view of the world.. They must give up their ancestral lands as subjects to colonial civilizing practices under the auspices of progress. The Rarámuris Indigenous First People have refused the invitation.
In another image we see a Rarámuris family wearing western clothing. Some are patterned with their own cultural motifs that transmit and transfer their subjective spiritual connection with earth to an un-fetishsized object; the textile. What could be considered hybrid from a non Indigenous perspective might not be for the Rarámuris. It represents their cultural autonomy. The exhibition does not address this point of view. Yet, it has the potential to be a topic for discussion. Assimilation for many Rarámuris equals erasure.
Ancestral Lands as Landscapes:
The landscapes images in this exhibit are of extraordinary beauty of ancestral territories from several indigenous communities. The topography of Tarahumara Sierra is four times larger than the Grand Canyon and twice as deep. With pristine waterfalls and biodiversity the Tarahumaras Sierras face legal and illegal deforestation by state authorization and criminal groups forcing displacement of many families and communities to seek refuge in local urban towns and cities. Almost five years later since the exhibition first took place the battle to preserve the ecological beauty and dignity by local protectors continues as reported in a recent 2024 article by La Jornada.
Was this series made from an anthropological view? I’d argue no. The making of these images is not framed with the need to document a presupposed vanishing ‘tribe’. The exhibition was initiated within the space of a local community center that serves its community. This series is from a young enthusiastic emerging Latino photographer early on in his career.
These images are personal to Castillo as is most of his photography. To a large extent Castillo’s Neltiliztli begins during his childhood examination of family portraits and the story telling that accompanied each photograph narrated by his elders and family to him.
The intentionality of any work of art is key in understanding the transparency of any artist. Castillo has dedicated his life to preserving memory and history with images. His protest and dialogue is done with images.
The exhibition did include images of the Rarámuris runners in action. The photos are stunning examples of dedication to a long ancestral relationship as runners on a coarse and rough terrain in the Tarahumaras Sierra. This terrain is understood by Rarámuris as the earth’s skin, one that breathes and feels. Indigenous memories sprout from the images of a land that belongs to them. Castillo’s emotional reading in this series of images is captivating and poetic.
In late December of 2024 Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum visited the Tarahumara Sierra to sign a presidential decree of land restoration. She met with several leaders of the Raramuri community. At the visit she states the government:
“recognizes the historical debt it owes to all of you; a debt that implies knowledge of your cultural wealth, your system of organization, beliefs, customs, your identity and the ownership of your territory.”
According to President Sheinbaum the first step to her Plan of Justice is to acknowledge the injustice experienced by the Raramuris as well as other indigenous communities throughout the state of Mexico. Sheinbaum’s visit brought forth many neglected issues to the forefront and hope as well.
The poetic sting or the punctum is best described by Emmy award winning photographer John Simmons on Oscar Castillo’s Rarámuris series:
“Oscar Castillo is a poet. His images are created with his heart and they touch the heart of the viewer. He has taken a chance and shared every bit of his love with us. We can only be grateful for what Oscar has given us. He is connected to his people in every way, their love, joy and suffering. His work speaks to the fabric of humanity.”
Castillo decides that seeing is worth recording. And his recording is filled with an aura of dignity, beauty and the reforesting of hope.
When President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring a “national energy emergency” hours after being sworn into office, something conspicuous was missing from his definition of energy. It consisted of a list of petroleum products, with nods to nuclear, biofuels, geothermal heat, and hydropower. There was no mention of wind or solar power, the fastest-growing sources of energy in the United States.
The omission begins to make sense when you consider Trump’s pitch to “Make America Great Again.” In his inaugural address on January 20, Trump was full of nostalgia for a bygone era, one in which solar panels and wind turbines didn’t yet exist. “America will be a manufacturing nation once again,” he said. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”
Trump’s speech tapped into a vein that runs as deep in American culture as the coal mines that fueled the country’s industrial rise. And it’s probably not a coincidence that the way he talks about energy, with another executive order on Inauguration Day aimed at “unleashing energy dominance,” sounds so macho. In fact, this kind of chest-beating reaction to industrial decline and climate change has a name: “petro-masculinity.”
“It’s part of this nostalgic vision of the past where America was awash in oil, and men were in charge, and patriarchy was less challenged than it is today,” said Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, a professor of English and gender studies at the University of California, Davis. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance have bristled at how America has changed — wind turbines, “childless cat ladies” in positions of power, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs — and have reacted with a call to return to an idealized version of how things used to be.
The phrase “energy dominance” has created a puzzle for people trying to understand it as a realistic policy goal. “There isn’t a clear definition, so that’s the problem right off the bat,” said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at Stimson Center, a foreign affairs think tank. The United States is already the largest oil producer in the world, with production reaching an all-time high last year under former President Joe Biden. There’s so much supply that hundreds of oil leases are sitting unused in the Gulf of Mexico.
“I strongly suspect that what the Trump folks are thinking when they say ‘energy dominance’ is that they want to be in a position where American energy lets them dictate to world markets or to other countries,” Ashford said. As examples, she pointed to Trump ending Biden’s pause on awarding permits to export liquefied natural gas and his recent threats to place tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
That emphasis on leverage aligns with a definition proposed by the energy security expert Joseph Majkut: “holding a strong economic and geopolitical hand by producing and strategically using high-value energy resources to secure domestic energy needs and drive influence in global markets.” Noah Kaufman, an economist at Columbia University, considered serious definitions like Majkut’s, but thought that the phrase “energy dominance” had so many cultural associations that no simple definition could capture it. “I have come back to believing this is really about vibes,” Kaufman said.
Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump wears a coal miner’s hard hat at a campaign rally in Charleston, West Virginia, in 2016.
Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Trump started talking about “energy dominance” during his presidential campaign in 2016, alongside wishful promises to bring back coal. “That language does have this bravado and machismo that is important to his movement,” said Cara Daggett, a professor of political science at Virginia Tech University. “This is very much about a performance of strength in a world that feels increasingly out of control.” Daggett first identified the connection between Trump’s anti-feminist and pro-oil rhetoric in 2018, when she proposed the theory of “petro-masculinity” to describe, in part, how rising authoritarian movements invoke fossil fuels to appeal to men who feel left behind.
If anything, those anxieties have only become more evident since then, Miller said, “with all of these billionaires like Elon Musk and Zuckerberg kind of falling over themselves to echo Trump on gender and on energy.” In January, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, lamented that corporate culture was moving away from “masculine energy” on Joe Rogan’s podcast, saying it would be good to have “a culture that, like, celebrates the aggression a bit more.”
Fossil fuels have been tied up with romantic ideas about sweaty, strenuous work since at least the Industrial Revolution. Many states had prohibitions against women working underground in mines, modeled after a British law from 1842, giving the profession a “very gendered quality” that was distinctive from other industrial jobs, Miller said. Upon observing coal miners at work in 1937, the author George Orwell wrote that it was impossible to watch them “without feeling a pang of envy for their toughness,” comparing the workers to “iron-hammered iron statues.”
Starting with the discovery of the gushing geyser that led to the Texas oil boom in 1901, fossil fuels gained another connotation — bringing “not just profit, but freedom and a kind of exuberant creativity to the world,” according to Stephanie LeMenager, an English professor at the University of Oregon who wrote a book about oil’s cultural resonance. But the sense of optimism that cheap petroleum inspired — associated with the freedom to drive around in automobiles — started to collapse in 1969, LeMenager said. That year, a huge oil spill in Santa Barbara left beaches littered with thousands of dead, crude-slicked birds, making the damages caused by oil extraction more apparent. Soon thereafter, the oil crisis of 1973 sent once-stable gasoline prices climbing.
LeMenager uses the word “petro-melancholia” to describe this grieving for the dream of what oil promised. “I think Trump is really good at tapping into the cultural unconscious, at least of some Americans,” she said. “And my sense is that ‘energy dominance’ is a deliberately vague term that’s meant to evoke a cluster of feelings.”
Volunteer crews clean up a beach near Santa Barbara, California, following the oil spill in 1969.
UPI/Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
There may also still be a lingering sense that the United States doesn’t have enough domestic fuel, imprinted during the 1973 crisis when OPEC countries banned oil exports to the United States because of its support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Gas prices quadrupled, and people waited to fill up their cars in lines that wrapped around the block.
“Everybody has been talking about ‘energy independence’ since probably the Jimmy Carter era,” said Travis Fisher, the director of energy and environmental policy studies at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute. That terminology is now out, along with the sense of isolationism it upheld, he said. To Fisher, ‘energy dominance’ communicates the message: “We shouldn’t only seek to supply ourselves. We should supply the world.”
Daggett argues that the way that right has responded to climate change — with defiance — reflects a more realistic grasp of what abandoning fossil fuels would entail than many on the left are willing to reckon with.
“If you actually understand the magnitude of the climate crisis, it is a threat to ways of life that characterize one version of the American dream — suburbia, dependence on cars, mass consumerism,” Daggett said. “To respond to it is to have to develop new ways of life, new ways of organizing ourselves. And the right, in some sense, has recognized the existential nature of the climate crisis, and therefore the reaction is really strong. And the reaction is to say, ‘No, I refuse that. I refuse that I have to change this way of life. I want this way of life, and I’m going to defend it.’”
Even if Americans aren’t anywhere close to giving up their cars, LeMenager has seen hints that people could embrace new possibilities instead of falling into the trap of petro-masculinity. Last year, she drove an electric vehicle across the country and met people at charging stations along the way, some of whom she suspected were Trump voters. One man said to her, “We’re living in such a remarkable time.” She waited to see what he meant, and he continued, “It’s like we’re at the dawn of the 20th century, and we’re seeing an energy transition.’”
To LeMenager, it was a sign that people could get excited about moving forward — even those who might not be excited about the idea of a Green New Deal.
After weeks of bitter subzero temperatures, the Polar Vortex loosens its grip on Upstate New York. Far more tenacious and deadly was the Little Ice Age that kept Europe in its grasp for the entire 17th century and beyond. This Saturday night, music of crackle and warmth from those colden years will heat Anabel Taylor Chapel at Cornell University in a live-streamed concert marking today’s release of an album from False Azure Records.
The concert given by Martin Davids (violin) and David Yearsley (organ) begins at 7:30 pm EST on Saturday, February 1st:
As an exclusive CounterPunch prelude to that event, we present the program notes here:
In size and power, the church organ dwarfs the violin, and the two instruments might therefore seem unlikely, even irreconcilable duet partners, the one infamous in the popular imagination for a bombast that could easily overwhelm the other. Yet, in Europe’s richest organ center, one of the most celebrated musical pairings of the seventeenth century was the collaboration between organist Heinrich Scheidemann and the violinist Johann Schop, playing together from the organ gallery of cavernous St. Catherine’s church to the delight of locals and tourists, musical colleagues and clerics, civic grandees and townspeople.
Scheidemann was renowned for his ability to express his lively humor on the four manuals and pedals of St. Catherine’s organ, a massive color-machine boasting impressive strength, but also equipped with a vibrant palette of registers imitating other instruments of the age: cornettos, viols, recorders, and dulcians. Flying over the stacked keyboards of the organ’s ornate console, Scheidemann’s famously “fast fists” launched bright figurations and witty echoes into the vast architectural space of the church. Scheidemann molded his buoyant musical temperament under his teacher Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck’s tutelage in Amsterdam from 1611 to 1614, but the great Hamburg organist also learned from his partnership with Schop, whose violin playing was praised for a liveliness rife with unexpected ideas and sparkling flourishes and for the occasional retreat into melancholic shadows.
The contemporary poet, hymn writer, and music-lover Georg Neumark was one of the duo’s most ardent admirers; in his Poetisch- Musikalisches Lustwäldchen (Poetical and Musical Pleasure Grove) published in Hamburg in 1652, he praised a performance by Schop and Scheidemann at a St. Catherine’s vespers service when both musicians were at the height of their individual and collective powers. For Neumark, these Hamburg compatriots outshone even mythic musicians of Antiquity.
How Am I thus enraptured? Who can so bend my
Heart with such beautiful pipework? Whose is the beautiful tone,
That permeates all my senses? Is it you Hipparchion,
And your companion Rufin, who with gentle violin
Makes the artful playing of the organ playing yet more pleasing?
No, you two are not up to the task. It is Schop and Scheidemann.
The widely traveled Philipp von Zesen lofted a similarly effusive paean to the pair in a volume of poetry published in 1651:
Whenever Schop und Scheidemann
Marry their art,
Melancholy flees as fast it can,
All my senses leave me.
Indeed, the entire air
Puffs, full of sound.
It was not only the beauty and ease of the Schop and Scheidemann duets that so captivated these listeners, but also their ability to raise the spirits, even during the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War that devastated Germany during the first half of the century when both men were in their prime. Indeed, another of the most famous Lutheran poets of the period, Johann Rist, called Scheidemann the “outstanding Amphion of Hamburg”—a reference to the mythical musician of Antiquity, who, with his voice and lyre, built Thebes by charming the blocks of stone to move themselves and form buildings. After his own house and its lavish garden in Lüneburg had been destroyed by marauding Swedish troops, Rist sought refuge in secure Hamburg and he thanked his friends Schop and Scheidemann for lifting him from sadness with their music from the organ loft.
Most of Scheidemann’s surviving keyboard works were rediscovered little more than a half-century ago, and since then his music has been prized by modern organists—as it was in his own time—for its optimism and grace. These attributes come immediately to life on an instrument such as the Anabel Taylor organ, whose case is based on that designed by Arp Schnitger for the large church in the German town of Clausthal-Zellerfeld. That historic instrument was commissioned in the last years of the seventeenth century by the Lutheran pastor Caspar Calvör, a collector and curator of Scheidemann’s music, who attended to its preservation and cultivation even several decades after the composer’s death. It is thanks to Calvör that Scheidemann’s work survives in sufficient quantity to enjoy and appreciate the composer’s unique gifts.
Cornell Baroque Organ (Munetaka Yokota, GoART, Parsons Organ Builders, Christopher Lowe, 2011).
Much of what Schop and Scheidemann played together was improvised; only poetic testimonials to these frequent, evanescent collaborations remain. Their joint music-making was conducted in the favored forms of the day, diverse and engaging. There were variations on dance tunes such as the ever-popular Spanish Pavane, a favorite among north German musicians and across Europe. The pair would also have joined together on florid elaborations of the greatest hits of European vocal music, such as Giovanni Bassano’s popular Easter motet Dic nobis Maria (Tell us, Mary) and Alessandro Striggio’s self-pitying, lovesick evergreen, the madrigal Nasce la pena mia (My torment begins …). Required of all musicians was the ability to decorate John Dowland’s Pavana lachrymae, certainly the most popular of all of these models, arranged many times for lute and keyboard by a diverse composers across several decades. We offer an antidote to this delightful dolor with a Galliard originally by another Englishman, John Bull; this lively dance is artfully elaborated by Scheidemann and further animated by his characteristic panache. While Schop’s untitled sonata (sine titulo) in the Italian vein shares many technical and stylistic attributes with his glosses on Striggio, the violinist’s own composition attests to the increased freedom and fantasy unleashed when he allowed himself independence from venerable models.
Schop was the first violinist in northern Europe to secure the prestige of having his work published. His music for violin and continuo comes down to us in a sumptuous Amsterdam publication of two volumes from mid-century entitled ‘t Uitnemend Kabinet; his voluminous consort music, from which we have arranged our Intrada, was published in Hamburg in the 1630s. Scheidemann, by contrast, left his keyboard music in manuscript, the bulk of it preserved only by Calvör. But as was doubtless customary in seventeenth-century Hamburg, Martin Davids and I have granted ourselves a good measure of interpretative license in expanding on and arranging this music—treating these pieces as templates rather than as works. Our versions of Scheidemann’s intabulation of Bassano’s motet and two-verse setting of the Lutheran chorale Christ lag in Todesbanden and his Canzon in G import into these pieces our own dialogues and occasional digressions conducted in the spirit of the Schop-Scheidemann partnership.
Like the other poets quoted above in praise of the illustrious duo, Rist was a prolific composer of hymn texts and enlisted Schop to write many of his melodies, the most famous of which is Werde munter, mein Gemüte (Be cheerful, my soul), later used by J. S. Bach in somewhat altered form in the cantata movement known in English as “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”—a piece that has, as a favorite of modern wedding ceremonies and Christmas-tide compilations, sashayed its way into the unconscious of global millions. We introduce our fantasy on Werde munter with Schop’s Praeludium, the first published work for solo violin which appeared as opening number of the first volume of ‘t Uitnemend Kabinet, as if to proclaim Schop’s status atop the first generation of northern European violinists. Our ad hoc fantasy—varied phrase-by-phrase reflections by the organ followed by a coda with violin—is offered up in the spirit of our seventeenth-century predecessors, a small tribute to the joyous skill, varied art and good humor of Scheidemann and Schop. From these pious joys of the spirit we charge into the dance-till-you-drop thrills of Schop’s Pavaen de Spanje, unabashedly exuberant music of, and for, friends.
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For more on the performers and their new recording:
All is quiet at 10:30 a.m. on a Thursday in Shibuya, Tokyo’s famous commercial district. In an alleyway just steps from one of the busiest train stations in the world, a short line of tourists huddles outside of a bar. Finally, half an hour later, the door cracks open and, greeted with a soft irasshaimase, or “welcome,” the parties shuffle in to sample one of the rarest dishes in Japan: faux-fish sushi.
“Nowadays, there are many vegan ‘meat’ products,” says Kazue Maeda, one of the four founding employees of the restaurant, Vegan Sushi Tokyo. “But I’m Japanese. What I really used to love is sushi and salmon.”
Her restaurant attempts to fill a relatively unclaimed niche in the local food scene. Even in Tokyo, where much of the country’s vegan population lives, plant-based versions of traditional Japanese food remain challenging to find — most vegan options are yōshoku, a popular cuisine that puts a Japanese twist on Western dishes like hamburgers. Vegan Sushi Tokyo is open only for lunch: Although rave reviews keep pouring in from customers, the small business still doesn’t have a storefront of its own and rents out the interior of a bar by day. It serves 10-piece nigiri lunch sets, which include a plant-based Japanese-style “egg,” “shrimp” tempura, and beads made out of seaweed that look nearly indistinguishable from salmon roe.
Kazue Maeda serves customers at Vegan Sushi Tokyo, where the recommended lunch set includes a tray of faux-fish sushi. Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist
For all its differences from the United States, Japan’s culinary culture takes after America’s in a key way: It’s difficult to avoid meat and dairy. Of course, soybean products like tofu are the star of many dishes. But beef, pork, chicken, eggs, or dairy also feature in nearly everything, from ramen to okonomiyaki, a savory cabbage and pork pancake. And then there’s the fish — served raw in sushi and sashimi, grilled as fillets, fried in tempura, shaved as a garnish, and present in nearly all other dishes as dashi, a savory broth made of dried tuna flakes and kelp.
Maeda became a vegan six years ago, due to her growing concern over environmental and animal rights issues. It’s a familiar origin story for those who have come to defy the typical Japanese diet by giving up animal products. “In terms of the vegan movement, I think we’re maybe behind other countries. The number of vegans is very small,” Maeda says. “But there are more and more vegetarian and vegan restaurants in Tokyo, I think because of tourists — especially from countries with many vegetarian people.”
Outside large cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, vegan options quickly vanish. In a culture that prizes convention and scrupulous attention to detail, individual accommodations — like vegan menu substitutions — are often frowned upon. And as in many other countries, vegan options are sometimes stigmatized as less nutritious.
But recently, things have been changing. The anticipation of a tourism boom for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo pushed the Japanese government to encourage new vegan businesses and menu options in major cities. And in the years since, restaurants like Maeda’s have sprung up, offering novel adaptations of traditional dishes. Under pressure from Japan’s pledge to nearly halve its carbon emissions by 2030, the government has also begun collaborating with vegan activists and advocates and awarding grants to alternative protein start-ups. Though challenges remain, it’s gotten easier and easier to go vegan in Japan over the last decade.
“Climate issues and animal issues are growing,” Maeda said. “For me, I can’t imagine going back to eating meat again.”
The first guests of the day line up outside the door of Vegan Sushi Tokyo in Shibuya.
Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist
Convincing people to eat less meat is key to reaching international climate goals. Up to 20 percent of planet-warming greenhouse gases emitted annually come from animal agriculture alone — all the cows, pigs, lambs, chickens, and other animals (not including fish) that people raise for meat, milk, eggs, and the like. According to one study from the University of Oxford that looked at the diets of over 55,000 people, vegans — defined as those who eschew all animal products — create 75percent less climate pollution through their food choices than those who eat a meat-heavy diet.
For most of the last two millennia, the Japanese diet was a model of climate-friendly eating due to Buddhist and Shinto objections to meat and dairy consumption — although fish has long been a staple. Beginning in 675 A.D., meat-eating was banned by official imperial decree.
The ban set the stage for the flourishing of shōjin ryōri, a traditional cuisine that arrived in the sixth century along with Buddhism and aligns with the religion’s prohibition against killing animals. In the 13th century, the cuisine developed into a spiritual movement focused on simplicity and balance between one’s mind and body. “‘Shōjin ryōri’ literally means ‘food for spiritual practice,’” one Japanese studies professor told the BBC.
A typical shōjin ryōri set meal is vegan, highlights seasonal produce, and is designed around sets of five — five colors, five flavors, and five cooking methods. While it can still commonly be found in the dining halls of Buddhist temples, modern chefs have taken shōjin ryōri into the mainstream, including in Michelin-starred restaurants, where they emphasize the concept’s focus on harmony with nature by using local ingredients and minimizing waste.
It wasn’t until 1872 that Emperor Meiji lifted the meat-eating ban, seeking to usher in an era of Westernization. Meat consumption grew quickly as domestic beef production boomed, and animal products became a symbol of power and status. As reports spread that Emperor Meiji drank milk twice a day, dairy consumption became more popular, too.
But interest in plant-based foods appears to be growing, as it is in Western countries. Japan’s market for plant-based foods tripled between 2015 and 2020, and the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries expects it to double again by 2030. These shifts have taken place as the Japanese population at large has expressed a readiness to shift toward plant-based products for health, animal welfare, and climate-related reasons, according to a 2022 analysis in the Journal of Agricultural Management.
Although no official government statistic exists, a 2021 survey found that 2.2 percent of Japanese people identify as vegan — a potentially higher percentage than in the United States, where estimates range from 1 to 4 percent.
But even though vegan restaurants have been on the upswing since 2017, Japanese vegans seem to have fewer options than their American counterparts. According to HappyCow, a popular directory of vegan and vegetarian restaurant options, Japan has fewer than six vegetarian restaurants per 1 million people in Japan, more than a fifth of them in Tokyo. By comparison, there are nine vegetarian restaurants per 1 million people in the U.S.
“They don’t realize that adding a small piece of bacon or fish is still meat. I still have to explain it.”
“Even many chefs still don’t know what vegan is, they don’t know the concept,” said Azumi Yamanaka, a vegan activist in Tokyo. She met with a reporter from Grist for a late lunch at Brown Rice, a sleek vegan restaurant with an organic, health-focused menu near Harajuku, the country’s famous fashion capital. For her meal, she ordered the weekly teishoku special, which came with a selection of small seasonal vegetable dishes, rice, and miso soup. “They don’t realize that adding a small piece of bacon or fish is still meat. I still have to explain it,” she said, while picking at a slice of roasted lotus root with her chopsticks.
Azumi Yamanaka eats a vegan lunch at Brown Rice in Omotesando, an area near the famous shopping district of Harajuku. Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist
When Yamanaka became vegan 16 years ago, she said, most people in Japan hadn’t even heard of the term “vegan.” Pronounced bi-gan, it joins a lexicon of Western loan words that have been integrated into the language with Japanese phonetics, such as ko-hii (coffee) or chi-zu (cheese). But in recent years, she said, being vegan has become a somewhat fashionable subculture — judging from social media trends and an upswing in photogenic vegan cafes, which she said get more young people interested in becoming vegan, too.
“The average Japanese person is interested in beauty, but usually has little interest in animal rights or environmental issues,” she said. Yamanaka herself is an embodiment of a stylish urbanite — with bright blue hair and strappy high heels, which she wears even while riding a road bike studded with colorful stickers from environmental and vegan organizations.
Even if trendiness is an effective way to draw people toward plant-based lifestyles, Yamanaka said Japanese who commit to veganism are motivated by a variety of issues, including sustainability and animal rights. The country imports between 40 and 60 percent of its meat but depends on domestic factory farming to produce much of its dairy supply. Its animal protection laws have been given low grades by international animal welfare organizations. Other factors include the country’s relatively high rate of lactose intolerance — typical in Asian countries — which some estimate affects the majority of the population. Food allergies are also a factor for many of the country’s vegan converts. Between 2010 and 2019, the prevalence of allergies to eggs and milk, along with peanuts and wheat, nearly doubled among Japanese kids. And eggs are the country’s most common food allergy.
For over a decade, Yamanaka has centered her life around freelance advocacy, meeting with members of parliament, speaking to government panels, and consulting on plant-based food options for large companies. In 2024, she won an award in the animal rights category at the Japan Vegan Awards, which were launched by a marketing association for plant-based businesses in 2018. Yamanaka said city governments and companies don’t care about expanding vegan options until they want to market to tourists. “They believe vegan products won’t sell, aren’t understood, or have failed in the past,” she said. “Many consider them only for foreign visitors.”
Vegan croissants, made with a soy butter, on display at Universal Bakes, a plant-based bakery in Tokyo’s trendy thrifting capital of Shimokitazawa. Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist
Tourism is certainly a huge economic factor in Japan. In 2024, 37 million foreign tourists entered the country, outstripping the previous full-year record by almost 5 million. Over a quarter of these tourists hail from neighboring parts of Asia with large vegan and vegetarian populations, like Taiwan, China, and Singapore, due to the widespread practice of Buddhism.
“Before 2019, the vegan environment was not so good,” said Mayumi Muroya, chair of the Japan Vegan Society, the largest vegan and plant-based industry organization in Japan. “The reality is that many of the foreigners visiting Japan are vegans and vegetarians. And with the Olympics coming up in 2020, the government knew the number of visitors was going to increase hugely.” In the run-up to the games — which ultimately took place a year late and without crowds because of the COVID-19 pandemic — the Japanese government created food guidelines to help restaurants offer more vegan options and distributed subsidies to help them pay for those options.
In December 2023, Muroya’s organization became the first-ever permitted by the government’s Japanese Agricultural Standards to officially certify vegan products. Adoption requires in-person inspections, and fewer than 10 businesses have been certified. A different nonprofit, VegeProject Japan, started unofficially certifying products as vegan in 2016, and its marker has become the most widely used vegan label in Japan — showing up on instant curry pouches, protein bars, and some cosmetics. Recently, in an effort to make dining easier for tourists, Tokyo began offering subsidies to vegan businesses with foreign-language menus available that want to be certified with one of these labels — the Japan Vegan Society’s certification costs roughly $1,000.
Two hours away by bullet train, the country’s beloved and beleaguered tourism hub of Kyoto has also begun investing money into making the city’s vegan options more visible — both to accommodate foreign visitors and due to the city’s pledge to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. These 17 global goals were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 to end poverty, address inequality, and protect the planet, prioritizing progress for the countries that are furthest behind. Japan has used them as the basis for a public awareness campaign on climate change, conservation, and sustainability.
Despite its small stature, Kyoto has long been considered an easier place to be vegan than the rest of the country. As both the ancient former capital and a youthful university town, the city is awash with historic businesses maintaining the traditions of a preindustrial Japan and a distinctly crunchy-granola youth culture. Although the population is a sixth of the size of Tokyo’s, it has half as many vegan options. And recently, the local government partnered with Kyoto Vegan, an environmental organization that was founded in 2020 to expand and increase awareness of vegan options in the city. The seeds of the group began four years earlier, when local vegan advocate Chisayo Tamaki helped a group of tourists find a local izakaya with vegan options on the menu. (They settled for chilled tomatoes and tofu.) She started building a map to make it easier next time.
Chisayo Tamaki, left, stands next to a calligraphy painting her mother made. Right, Kyoto Vegan’s headquarters are located on the small street Nijō Castle, a popular tourist landmark, close to the city’s busy downtown district. Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist
“After 2020, the city asked if they could collaborate with me,” she said. Kyoto Vegan receives most of its funding from a subsidy from the country’s national tourism agency, but it is also supported by the city as one of its “Do You Kyoto 2050” projects. The initiative aims to cut carbon emissions down to zero by 2050 — the first local government in Japan to set such a target. “They can’t achieve that goal without the support of vegan lifestyles,” said Tamaki. She is also a member of the city’s sustainability working group and has contributed to a slick, city-funded magazine project on climate-friendly lifestyles.
In its plan to reduce its carbon footprint, Kyoto considers veganism to be the 11th most effective way to cut down its emissions, below expanding electric vehicle usage and above teleworking. To meet its goals, the city government is also collaborating with the Plant Based Lifestyle Lab, an initiative backed by a group of private companies to promote and research plant-based food technologies. Last year, a well-known international ramen chain, Ippudo, launched a vegan menu option in collaboration with one of these member companies, Fuji Oil.
“That’s why there are a lot of vegetarian and vegan products on the market these days. Because the government is asking companies to make them,” said Tamaki. For her, it’s a welcome change from just a few years ago when she was told vegans were wagamama, a Japanese word that translates to “demanding” or “picky.”
Two friends catch up over lunch at Choice Kyoto, a long-standing vegan cafe serving Western-style dishes in Gion, the city’s ancient entertainment district.
Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist
In many ways, people in Japan face the same barriers to veganism as anywhere else. There are the logistical limitations — the lack of options on restaurant menus and at grocery stores. But there are also the psychological ones, like the stigma of being considered wagamama, exclusion from social activities, and misinformation about health and nutrition. In 2021, well-known business mogul Takufumi Horie went viral for tweeting “I think veganism is seriously bad for your health.” (Research shows that well-balanced vegan diets are healthy for most people, as long as they take supplements to provide some vitamins and minerals.)
In 2021, Muroya — the chair of the Japan Vegan Society — tried introducing monthly vegan lunches at an elementary school near Tokyo, the first attempt of its kind in Japan. Despite working with the school’s nutritionist to design the menu, Muroya’s effort ran into barriers like the national school-lunch calcium requirements, which promote milk, and pushback from parents worried their children wouldn’t get adequate nourishment. (An article on BuzzFeed Japan about the controversy echoed the parents’ concerns, questioning “how vegan school lunches are good for the environment” and citing “the risk of missing nutrients.”) Efforts to introduce vegan meal programs at schools in the U.K., Germany, and France have encountered similar backlash. Muroya’s program lasted for only a year, but she said the school still regularly does “meat-free Mondays.”
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges to being vegan in Japan is the country’s culture of conformity — which considers standing out to be troublesome. “Having a different opinion from everybody else is very controversial. Everybody wants to move together as a community,” Yamanaka said. “Some people fear coming out as vegan at school or work due to potential bullying.” Although she said she hasn’t faced much adversity in recent years, former coworkers pressured her to eat meat. Ijime — a term broadly used to refer to bullying in workplaces and schools — is a persistent and sometimes dangerous problem that the government has tried to address.
Muroya said her dietary preferences became a professional problem at mandatory work events, like end-of-year parties, when caterers wouldn’t accommodate her. “Even when I called in advance to warn the restaurant, I was told, ‘I can’t do that for you,’” she said. Maeda said she was motivated to find a job at a vegan company after years of limited options at her company cafeteria.
Mumokuteki, a natural lifestyle store with a cafe, serves up soy milk-based ramen on its all-vegan menu at its location on busy Teramachi Street in Kyoto. Sachi Kitajima Mulkey / Grist
For Yamanaka, the best way to make a more sustainable, less meat-intensive Japan is to bridge the gap between vegans and non-vegans. She said that when people discuss various issues that can motivate veganism — like sustainability, factory farming, and allergies — as well as the popularity of veganism among tourists, more local governments and businesses can be convinced to make more options available.
Local plant-based businesses are already making an effort to appeal to as many customers as possible. At Universal Bakes, a cult-favorite plant-based bakery in Tokyo’s trendy Shimokitazawa neighborhood known for its vegan croissants and savory tarts, the ethos is to provide allergen-free food, not necessarily animal-free.
“I want people to understand that vegan food isn’t just for a select few. It’s an inclusive eating style,” Yamanaka said. “Reaching beyond the vegan community is essential for creating a vegan-friendly world.”
This story is embargoed for syndication and will be available on Feb. 5. For questions, email syndication@grist.org.
This is a review of an exceptional photobook, Images of Palestine (1898-1946). The book is a collection of photographs that spans nearly five decades, captured in the period leading up to the Palestine Nakba. Together, these black-and-white images chronicle a vibrant and diverse Palestinian society, highlighting its connection to the land, its achievements in commerce, architecture, and civil society, and its development into a modern socio-political entity chafing to break free from colonial domination.
The photographs cover the final years of the Ottoman Empire, World War I, the establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine, the large-scale European Jewish immigration under the British colonial rule, and the emergence of a popular movement for Palestinian independence.
The photographers were members of the American Colony Photo Department and employees of the Photo Department’s successor, the Matson Photographic Service. The American Colony was a Christian utopian community founded in Jerusalem in 1871. Its members began taking photographs in the late 1890’s, eventually developing a full-fledged photographic division. In the 1940’s, the American Colony ceased to exist as a religious community, but the photographic work was continued by Colony member G. Eric Matson under the name Matson Photographic Service.
More than 23,000 glass and film negatives, transparencies, and photographic prints created by the American Colony Photo Department and the Matson Photo Service were transferred to the Library of Congress between 1966 and 1981. Since then, the images have been digitized for archival preservation by the Library of Congress.
The American Colony did not set out to document the emergence of modern Palestine through its photographs. Instead, its efforts were driven by a religious utopian vision. Composed of American and Swedish immigrants living in Jerusalem, the Colony’s work was deeply influenced by this vision, as well as by the Orientalist perspectives its members carried with them. These influences are evident in both their choice of photographic subjects and the descriptions accompanying the images in their archives.
The photobook is divided into eight galleries, each designed to highlight a unique and integral aspect of the pre 1948 vibrant Palestinian societal structure. The galleries serve as a visual narrative, weaving together the diverse cultural, social, and economic elements that define the collective community. Each segment focuses on specific themes, such as City Life, Commercial, Education, Landscape, Medical, Colonialism and Resistance, Palestine Broadcast Service and Individual Portraits, creating a comprehensive portrayal of the dynamic interplay within the society. This structured approach provides a glimpse into an aspect of Palestinian life, enabling viewers to appreciate the richness and depth of the community’s identity through a curated lens, delivering a meaningful and immersive experience.
During the period when these photos were taken, Palestinians endured three distinct forms of foreign intervention: the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, and the large European Jewish immigration supported by British colonial authorities, aimed at transforming Palestine into a new political and social entity. This was combined with the emergence of a popular movement for Palestinian independence.
The interplay between external interventions and indigenous social and economic structures, along with the resulting conflicts, is vividly depicted in the stories these photographs convey. However, these stories are not bound to a single moment in history. Instead, they are part of an ongoing historical continuum. The underlying dynamics that shaped them persist, with their narratives continuing to evolve and unfold visibly in the present day.
While Palestinian society during this period was often described as “traditional” by external observers, the photographs reveal a sophisticated social fabric. Palestinian cities boasted thriving marketplaces, diverse religious and cultural communities, and connections to regional and international trade networks. Intellectual life flourished in urban centers, with schools, mosques, churches, and libraries serving as vibrant hubs of education and cultural exchange. This blend of tradition and modernity highlighted the resilience and adaptability of Palestinian society in navigating external interventions and shifting historical dynamics.
The over 200 large size page photobook was produced by KARAMA (www.karamanow.org), San Diego, California, an independent non-profit organization dedicated to promoting understanding of the Arab and Islamic world, with a particular focus on Palestine. KARAMA launched its Palestine Photography Project in 2015, believing that distributing high-quality photographs of life in Palestine prior to 1948 could effectively convey the dignity, humanity, and cultural richness of the Palestinian people.
In addition to the photobook, the Palestine Photography Project has created a portable “Museum-in-a-Box,” featuring selected photographs from the book, designed for tabletop display at community events. The photobook and the Museum-in-a-Box, as well as individual prints of the photos, can be ordered from www.PalestinePhotoProject.org.
Images of Palestine (1898-1946) is a must have coffee table book!
A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A still from The Palestine Exception. A […]
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RNZ International (RNZI) began broadcasting to the Pacific region 35 years ago — on 24 January 1990, the same day the Auckland Commonwealth Games opened.
Its news bulletins and programmes were carried by a brand new 100kW transmitter.
The service was rebranded as RNZ Pacific in 2017. However its mission remains unchanged, to provide news of the highest quality and be a trusted service to local broadcasters in the Pacific region.
Although RNZ had been broadcasting to the Pacific since 1948, in the late 1980s the New Zealand government saw the benefit of upgrading the service. Thus RNZI was born, with a small dedicated team.
The first RNZI manager was Ian Johnstone. He believed that the service should have a strong cultural connection to the people of the Pacific. To that end, it was important that some of the staff reflected parts of the region where RNZ Pacific broadcasted.
He hired the first Pacific woman sports reporter at RNZ, the late Elma Ma’ua.
Linden Clark (from left) and Ian Johnstone, former managers of RNZ International now known as RNZ Pacific, and Moera Tuilaepa-Taylor, current manager of RNZ Pacific . . . strong cultural connection to the people of the Pacific. Image: RNZ
The Pacific region is one of the most vital areas of the earth, but it is not always the safest, particularly from natural disasters.
Disaster coverage
RNZ Pacific covered events such as the 2009 Samoan tsunami, and during the devastating 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai eruption, it was the only news service that could be heard in the kingdom.
Cyclones have become more frequent in the region, and RNZ Pacific provides vital weather updates, as the late Linden Clark, RNZI’s second manager, explained: “Many times, we have been broadcasting warnings on analogue shortwave to listeners when their local station has had to go off air or has been forced off air.”
RNZ Pacific’s cyclone watch service continues to operate during the cyclone season in the South Pacific.
As well as natural disasters, the Pacific can also be politically volatile. Since its inception RNZ Pacific has reported on elections and political events in the region.
Some of the more recent events include the 2000 and 2006 coups in Fiji, the Samoan Constitutional Crisis of 2021, the 2006 pro-democracy riots in Nuku’alofa, the revolving door leadership changes in Vanuatu, and the 2022 security agreement that Solomon Islands signed with China.
Human interest, culture
Human interest and cultural stories are also a key part of RNZ Pacific’s programming.
The service regularly covers cultural events and festivals within New Zealand, such as Polyfest. This was part of Linden Clark’s vision, in her role as RNZI manager, that the service would be a link for the Pacific diaspora in New Zealand to their homelands.
Today, RNZ Pacific continues that work. Currently its programmes are carried on two transmitters — one installed in 2008 and a much more modern facility, installed in 2024 following a funding boost.
Around 20 Pacific region radio stations relay RNZP’s material daily. Individual short-wave listeners and internet users around the world tune in directly to RNZ Pacific content which can be received as far away as Japan, North America, the Middle East and Europe.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
Donnybrook Don versus the Joltin’ Joes: Flex-off Before the Inaugural Bout (AI Art Generator).
It was the perfect setting for a cage fight. The circular perimeter and dome soaring above were not enclosed with chain-link fencing coated in vinyl. The floor was not covered with a foam mat. No, this cage was made of bone crushing-marble. Padding to absorb brutal takedowns and the onslaught of hammerfists and guillotine chokes was neither necessary nor desirable.
Commensurate to the occasion, the Capitol Rotunda was far bigger than the usual format—three times broader than the thirty-foot diameter of the standard Ultimate Fighting Championship ring. The CEO of the UFC had been at a pre-fight rally the night before at another arena in the imperial capital bragging about the tale of the tape. Her man had scored a staggering victory at the ballot box a few months earlier, winning by “86 points” and bagging the vote of the nationwide audience to boot. Joining the CEO was the celebrity announcer of these Gladiator Games, eager to call the next day’s bout in his newly acquired tuxedo.
Also in the entourage of the man soon to buckle the championship belt around his suddenly slimmer, fighting-weight midsection was the last Village Person. Clad in police riot gear, he gasped his way through their fighter’s psych-up song, “YMCA.” Even though the Champ was far from being the “Young Man” who picks himself up off the ground in the song’s lyrics, he weaved and punched the air to the disco beat, limbering up for the morrow’s mayhem. He’d plastered a crooked grin across his jaw, which many had long claimed, or at least hoped, was made of glass, while others had been sure it was of American iron.
One of the VIPs slated to be present at, and perhaps even participate in, the next day’s fight had long ago claimed that “It takes a village.” This Wild West Village Show featured a Cowboy and Indian, a Leather Man, a Sailor on shore leave, and a lead-singing Cop—not the kind of villagers she’d been thinking of and not the kind she was eager to let into her gated community. But these elements were pouring in whether she liked it or not.
The next day’s stone venue was vast enough not just for a mano-a-mano clash, but for a right and proper team grudge match, a partisan rumpus. A year earlier, the Rotunda had hosted a live-telecast donnybrook that pitted a Spartan band of police (real ones) against a rabid throng of marauders led by a fabulously unhinged barbarian—Bison Man, in his Germanic tribal skins and horned headgear, wielding a bullhorn and waving a flag on a pole that was a gleaming spear.
For the follow-up of January 2025, cries of agony and the sound of dislocating joints and breaking teeth would again echo off the resonant dome above.
The architecture of this two-hundred-year-old indoor arena was based directly on that of Rome’s Pantheon, erected two millennia earlier during the reign of Hadrian, who, not coincidentally, also had a thing for border walls.
When the Scottish surgeon-turned-novelist Tobias Smollett arrived at that required stop on the Grand Tour for the first and only time in 1765, he was, as so often on his continental travels, underwhelmed: “I was much disappointed at the sight of the Pantheon, which, after all that has been said of it, looks like a huge cockpit.” Smollett’s was a prescient description of the opening bout on Monday’s fight card. This was to be a cockfight between two aged roosters. They had clucked and crowed back in June in a trench war of words during which they’d each boasted about the length of their drives and challenged each other to a golf match. Now they could follow words with deeds, opening the brutal festivities with a wheeze and a bang, lurching right into a clinch, then toppling over for some slo-mo ground-and-pound.
The Capitol Cage was the ideal setting to welcome a self-styled Caesar and a still-more ancient Consul soon heading off to claim his spoils in Delaware after this, his last bout. He must remain mindful (if he could remember to be) to tell the cameras on his way to the locker room after a victory certain only to him that he was “going to Disneyland!” Or was it Disney World? Or … what’s the name of that diner I love to eat at in Dover? Or is it in DC? That’s it: “I’m going to Scranton!”
In a more lucid moment, Scrappin’ Scranton Joe had thundered thusly during his own pre-fight hype (in another richly renumerated plug, this one for Gladiator II): “Donnybrook Don, I knew Emperor Marcus Aurelius. You’re no Marcus Aurelius.” Even Joltin’ Joe’s smack-talk had been plagiarized, though he’d been inadvertently honest about his age lied about in the fight program: he really was so old that he had known the second-century author of the Meditations, a Stoic also credited with inventing the Peruvian Necktie, defined in the UFC glossary as “a choke hold in which a fighter uses arms and legs, as well as the opponent’s own arm and positioning, to apply pressure to the neck.”
Respectively even redder and paler in their faces than usual after grappling on the ground for a few minutes, these doddering fighters could tag-team tap in their somewhat younger fellow fighters: ex-champs, Bashing Bill and Gorgeous George, or the more youthful contenders, Mark the Murderer and Elon the Electric Eel also nearby. These last two had already hyped their own mega cage fight in the Roman Colosseum, which, to the enduring disappointment of the global masses, had never happened.
With these individual duels raging on, all would stand as one and then lock horns. Only the cameramen wouldn’t’ enter the fray; at least, they hoped not.
The call to battle came from uniformed legionnaires blowing through long, straight ersatz-Roman trumpets, the blood-curdling strains of their Imperial fanfare amplified and elongated by the rotunda’s cavernous acoustic. I repeat: Give the People what they want!
But the battle never came. Instead, a church service broke out.
The Presidents’ Own Marine Corps Band played light military marches distractingly inoffensive enough to pacify. These jaunty tunes conjured the unbroken succession of American victories that all can take pride in. The armed services choir was vague and calming, the righteous fury of the Battle Hymn of the Republic diluted by their tepid arrangement.
Trump team crooner Chris Macchio tried to inject some heroic grandeur into the ludicrous national anthem. If Macchio is to remain “America’s Tenor,” his presidential patron is going to have to immediately impose 10,000% tariffs on all operatic klaxons, bel canto belt sanders, and refurbished auto-tune Carusos.
Between the numbers of the band’s light parade-ground hit parade and these patriotic anthems, an unseen piano vamped on a medley of Victorian hymns like “For the Beauty for the Earth.” Those congregants on the losing side let their gazes drift towards the dome, painted portal of trumpet-playing angels ushering thoughts still farther up to heaven.
The Champ had just won in a walkover and now it was his time to bluster through a rambling victory sermon of acid boasts and body-blow insults. Unbloodied and sweat-free, the cage fighter turned Prophet of the Angry God, excoriating the Democratic sinner just over his left shoulder, a vacant smile pasted across the face of his defeat.
But what should not be forgotten is that many people sitting piously in church hate each other, having fallen out over reasons as diverse as the morning’s flower arrangements, the furnishing committee’s choice of color for the pew cushions, or that scratch inflicted on the Senior Warden’s Mercedes in the church parking lot and never admitted by the perp.
Instead of fisticuffs, the Capitol Cage seethed with impotent rage. Some sought solace in singing along in their heads as the piano played on:
For the joy of human love,
Brother, sister, parent, child,
Friends on earth, and friends above,
For all gentle thoughts and mild,
Christ, our Lord, to you we raise
This, our hymn of grateful praise.
Notwithstanding the Champs’ fighting words, the peaceful transfer of power was by now well underway.
Across the country and the globe, Jilted Joe’s fans had long since tuned out, bored and beleaguered. Their erstwhile hero and his grin stayed the course.
When a string of monotheistic benedictions threatened to conclude the ritual without a tussle, though much violence was implied by these prayers, the nonplussed Plebes and Plutocrats were still waiting for what they’d been promised: Instead of Christians being fed to the lions, blue donkeys and their fallen riders would be fed to Christians.
Art and politics should mix. In fact, art and politics do mix. This is true whether or not the viewer of the art recognizes this truth. There are some artists whose works leave no doubt. In the modern world, most art is used to sell things. The reader might argue that what I am talking about is advertising, not art. Unfortunately, the fact of the latter does not eliminate the fact of the former. Most advertising is art. The fact that it is used to sell things is what adds a political element; it is being used to uphold, maintain and promulgate the system of capitalism. In doing so, this art supports and proselytizes for the political structure designed to keep the capitalist economy in command.
Sue Coe’s art serves no profit-seeking enterprise. Neither does it support political systems constructed to protect the profiteers. It does not hide behind pretense or lies and it does not promote either. It exists to disturb our comfort and expose the lies—lies essential to a political world that seeks conflict, encourages prejudice and thrives on war. Her art is not pretty and neither is her subject matter. Like George Grosz or Kathe Kollwitz; Spain Rodriguez, Greg Irons or Ron Turner and his Slow Death comics, Coe excels at portraying the darkness inside the men and women who exist, rule and even revel in that world.
Her latest book—a joint effort with writer Stephen Eisenman—is titled The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism. The artwork, which takes up the bulk of the book, is composed of mostly single reproductions of blockprints and drawings. All in black and white with occasional shades of gray, the works provide a relentless litany of a future we are already in, but one that is pretty certain to get much worse. Eisenman’s commentary describes in a very accessible style Coe’s approach to her work and her subjects, while also presenting quick discussions of topics like art-for-art’s-sake versus “political art.” His introduction to the text features a brief history of US fascism and its roots in the legacy of chattel slavery. An important point he makes that echoes an understanding of US fascism popularized by Black Panther George Jackson(among others) can be found in these sentences: “Not everyone agrees on when a regime is fascist; it exists in the eye of the beholder….If you were an African-American in the US in the era of lynching and racial terror…,fascism was the dominant factor of social life.” (13)
The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism is not just for young people. The fact that it will likely be banned from young adult and juvenile sections of public libraries in parts of the United States illustrates why its primary target is young people. It’s art, however, makes it a book for everyone who is convinced the United States is already fascist (or awfully damn close); if for no other reason so it can be shared with those one knows who need convincing.
B. Traven is one of the twentieth century’s most popular writers. It is estimated his works sold more than 25 million copies in more than a half dozen languages. Yet, his actual life remains something of a mystery. He used different names throughout his life; a life that lasted almost a hundred years and traversed at least three continents. A revolutionary who was part of the German revolution that began near the end of the First World War, Traven was a member of the workers council that briefly governed the German state of Bavaria. That council, like the other revolutionary committees that blossomed during the revolution, was destroyed by an alliance between the Social Democrats (SPD) and a right-wing militia composed of many future members of the Nazi SS.
His most recognized work in today’s world is probably the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was turned into a very popular film directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart. His novels were told from the perspective of the world’s downtrodden. The Death Ship was about the lives of sailors on a tramp ship carrying illicit cargo—most likely illegal weapons. His series known as The Jungle Novels chronicles the lives of indigenous peoples in Chiapas, their work, their oppression, their families, their resistance and rebellion. The books in that series are among several that reflect his years of living in that part of Mexico.
Golo (Guy Nadaud) is a French-born artist. His multitude of graphic novels include travelogues, biographies and more. His most recent work (translated into English by Donald Nicholson-Smith is titled B. Traven: Portrait of a Famous Unknown. Simultaneously an unveiling of the mystery that is B. Traven and an addition to the self-same myth, the story flows easily across the works and the life of the writer, revolutionary and vagabond. The drawings alter between black and white and color; occasionally somewhat cubist in their viewing, at other times rudimentary and stark. Then, other times the art is painstakingly detailed, every line in the building bordering a city street sketched in. The graphic novel format tells Traven’s story effectively and captivatingly, doing justice to a man whose life meant more than he wished to accept and acknowledge.
Two LGBTQIA+ advocates in the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) are up in arms over US President Donald Trump’s executive order rolling back protections for transgender people and terminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs within the federal government.
“While we know policies and practices promoting these values have proven to be positive, we know how futile it is to convince Trump or his supporters that diversity, equity and inclusion are human rights.”
President Donald Trump . . . “We will forge a society that is colourblind and merit based. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation
Transgender rights have become a contentious political topic in recent years. During November’s election season, many Republicans campaigned on reversing transgender laws with a particular focus on transgender women participating in sports.
In his inauguration speech, Trump said: “This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.
“We will forge a society that is colourblind and merit based. As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders — male and female.”
Last month, the US Supreme Court tackled a major transgender rights case, and its conservative justices asked tough questions of lawyers challenging the legality of a Republican-backed ban in Tennessee on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.
Challenging argument
Santos presented an argument to Trump’s position on two genders and his declaration they could not be changed.
“To speak specifically to his statement about there being two and only two genders, I believe he’s referring to what we call biological or anatomical sex, and the construct of male and female as gender is a social construction,” Santos said.
“So, the inaccurate terminology he’s using is a testament to how ill-informed he is on the matter.”
Marianas Business Network president and founder PK Phommachanh-Daigo, meanwhile, discussed his journey as a Southeast Asian refugee from Laos in response to the diversity question under the second Trump administration.
“My family and I were sponsored by an Irish family in a small, conservative town in northeastern Connecticut. Growing up as the youngest of six children, with my eldest sibling 15 years older, we were culturally accustomed to a straightforward view of gender — male, female, or ladyboy, a concept common in Southeast Asia.
“It’s clear that the current debate over gender and DEI programmes is more politically charged in the US, especially among Republican and liberal factions.”
On Trump’s announcement to recognise only two genders and eliminate DEI programmes, Phommachanh-Daigo said it was not surprising “given the ongoing cultural war between the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement and the so-called ‘woke’ culture”.
“The elimination of DEI programmes could potentially lead to a regression into systematic exclusion and discrimination, perpetuating cycles of inequity and racism.”
Cultural richness He said this was in sharp contrast to the CNMI community, which was deeply rooted in cultural richness and familial bonds.
“We are generally accepting of people regardless of their gender or sexual orientation,” he said.
“Societal issues often stem from external influences rather than within our tight-knit local community. While the immediate impact on our government workforce may be minimal due to strong familial ties and the predominance of local employees, the long-term implications of eliminating DEI initiatives could erode the inclusive environment we strive to maintain.”
The message to the LGBTQIA+ community in the CNMI message is for them to just focus on personal growth, family, and positive contributions to society, regardless of the policies of the new Trump administration.
“Be a role model for others, and continue to foster a community that values acceptance, understanding, and mutual respect.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
“There’s a sort of evil out there,” says Sheriff Truman in an episode of David Lynch’s iconic TV series, “Twin Peaks.”
That line gets to the heart of the work of the filmmaker, whose family announced his death Jan. 16, 2025. Lynch’s films and TV series reflected the dark, ominous, often bizarre underbelly of American culture – one increasingly out of the shadows today.
As someone who teaches film noir and horror, I often think about the ways American cinema holds up a mirror to society.
Lynch was a master at this.
Many of Lynch’s films, like 1986’s “Blue Velvet” and 1997’s “Lost Highway,” can be unsparing and graphic, with imagery that was described by critics as “disturbing” and “all chaos” upon their release.
But beyond those bewildering effects, Lynch was onto something.
His images of corruption, violence and toxic masculinity ring all too familiar in America today.
Take “Blue Velvet.” The film focuses on a naive college student, Jeffrey Beaumont, whose idyllic suburban life framed with white picket fences is turned inside out when he finds a human ear on the edge of a road. This grisly discovery draws him into the orbit of a violent sociopath, Frank Booth, and an alluring lounge singer named Dorothy Vallens, whom Booth sadistically torments while holding her child and husband – whose ear, it turns out, was the one Beaumont had found – hostage.
Beaumont nonetheless finds himself perversely attracted to Vallens and descends deeper into the shadowy world lurking beneath his hometown – a world of smoke-filled bars and drug dens frequented by Booth and an array of freakish characters, including pimps, addicts and a corrupt detective.
Booth’s haunting line, “Now it’s dark,” serves as a potent refrain.
The corruption, perversion and violence depicted in “Blue Velvet” are indeed extreme. But the acts Booth perpetrates also recall the stories of sexual abuse that have emerged from organizations including the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts.
As the exposure of such crimes continue to pile up, they become less an aberration but a dire warning of something that’s deeply ingrained in our culture.
These evils are sensational and appalling, and there’s an impulse to perceive them as existing outside of our realities, perpetrated by people who aren’t like us. What “Twin Peaks,” Lynch’s hit TV series, and “Blue Velvet” do so effectively is tell viewers that those hidden worlds where venality and cruelty reside can be found just around the corner, in places that we might see but tend to ignore.
And then there are the uncanny and eerie worlds depicted in “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive.” The characters in those searing films seem to live in parallel realities governed by good and evil.
“Lost Highway” begins with a jazz musician, Fred Madison, being convicted of killing his wife. He claims, however, to have no memory of the crime. Exploring the theme of alternate worlds, Lynch thrusts Madison into an illusory realm inhabited by killers, drug dealers and pornographers by merging his identity into that of young mechanic named Pete Dayton. In doing so, Lynch combines the worlds of “normality” and perversity into one.
In the 1990s, artists like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, whose music is included on the official soundtrack of “Lost Highway,” also confronted audiences with images of decadence and social decay, which were inspired by his own disturbing experiences in Hollywood and the music industry.
These dark themes have since been personified in rich and powerful men like Sean “Diddy” Combs, Bill Cosby and Jeffrey Epstein who, for years, skated along the surface of high society with their perversions hidden from the public.
In his 2001 film, “Mulholland Drive,” Lynch turns his attention to Hollywood and the wretchedness that seems baked into its very nature.
A wide-eyed and innocent aspiring actress named Betty Elms arrives in Los Angeles with visions of stardom. Her struggle to achieve success – one that ends in depression and death – is certainly tragic. But it’s also not very surprising, given that she was trying to make it in a corrupt system that all too often bestows its rewards on the undeserving or those who are willing to compromise their morals.
As with so many who go to Hollywood with big dreams only to find that fame is beyond their reach, Elms is unprepared for an industry so consumed with exploitation and corruption. Her fate mimics that of the women who, desperate for stardom, ended up falling into the trap set by Harvey Weinstein.
Lynch’s vital body of work warns that the cruelty of such people isn’t really what we should fear most. It is, instead, those who laugh, cheer or simply turn away – faint responses that enable and empower such behaviors, giving them an acceptable place in the world.
When Lynch’s films were first released, they often appeared as surreal, funhouse mirror reflections of society.
Today they speak of profound and terrible truths we can’t ignore.
Community leaders surprised by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s removal of Melissa Lee from the ethnic communities’ portfolio are calling on her replacement to build on the strong foundations of engagement she established.
After sitting on the back benches as an MP for five terms, Lee was given the ethnic communities, economic development, and media and communications portfolios after the coalition government won the 2023 election.
Lee was demoted from Cabinet in April last year, with Luxon stripping her of the media and communications portfolio.
On Sunday, he sacked Lee from her remaining ministerial roles, giving ethnic communities to Police Minister Mark Mitchell and economic growth (formerly economic development) to Finance Minister Nicola Willis.
Lee, a former broadcaster who produced the Asia Downunder diversity television programme, currently remains a list MP and was ranked number 13 on the National Party’s list for the 2023 election.
She narrowly lost her bid to win the Mount Albert electorate seat to the Labour Party’s Helen White by 18 votes.
Kelly Feng, chief executive at Asian Family Services, said the demotion announced Sunday was “significant”.
‘Not good optics’
“Replacing somebody who comes from ethnic communities, with someone who, shall we say, comes from the mainstream, is definitely not good optics,” Feng said.
“It’s not just me saying this, rather research proves it. The leadership should be more representative of our diverse population. This motivates our younger generation to come forward and strive for leadership roles.”
Feng thanked Lee for serving the ethnic communities of New Zealand for a long time and being a strong advocate for them.
Tayo Agunlejika, former president of Multicultural New Zealand, expressed shock at the announcement.
“I feel sad for her because I know how hard she worked over the past two decades to rise through the ranks and get the ministerial position,” Agunlejika said.
“For her to have lost the role within a year, and that, too, after finishing strong in 2024 with the launch of the Ethnic Evidence Report is shocking.”
Jaspreet Kandhari, general secretary of the New Zealand Indian Business Association, acknowledged Lee’s efforts in managing the ethnic communities’ portfolio.
Significant contributions
“She made significant contributions during her tenure as the minister for ethnic communities, particularly in publishing a comprehensive report on ethnic communities,” Kandhari said.
“Her work laid a foundation for important discussions on diversity and inclusion.”
Former National MP Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi, who entered Parliament with Lee in 2008, called her “exceptional in [her] ability to connect with the broader ethnic communities, fostering understanding and inclusion”.
“I believe the PM has made this decision on its merits. He has rightfully acknowledged the significant contributions Melissa Lee made as the minister of ethnic communities,” Singh said.
“Mark Mitchell, as the new ethnic communities minister, will bring his own strengths to the role. I am confident that he will be a strong advocate for ethnic communities and continue building on the foundations set by his predecessor.”
Similar sentiments were expressed by Lois Yee, vice president of the New Zealand Chinese Association, who also shared a desire to work with Mitchell “to realise a vibrant, cohesive and inclusive Aotearoa New Zealand”.
Seeking holistic view Meanwhile, Feng, whose organisation primarily works in the mental health space, wants Mitchell to take a holistic view of the issues faced by ethnic communities in New Zealand.
“The new minister of ethnic communities, who is also the minister of police, will definitely have a better understanding of law and order, which is one of the major issues for ethnic communities,” Feng said.
“But our hope is for Minister Mitchell to engage with the ethnic communities at a wider level, and look at other issues such as mental health, bullying in schools, and discrimination, which affects us disproportionately.”
Agunlejika said New Zealand’s ethnic communities needed “someone with an in-depth understanding of the community needs and aspirations, and the complexities within the ethnic communities”.
“I think Mike Mitchell’s relationship with New Zealand Police Ethnic Advisory Group might help,” Agunlejika said. “But, in 2025, I don’t think the appointment is reflective of the community, although [the appointment] might be the right experience needed.”
Mitchell said he was honoured to take on the ethnic communities’ portfolio.
“Law and order remain a significant issue for ethnic communities, and I welcome the opportunity to bring these portfolios [police and ethnic communities] together,” Mitchell said.
“Ethnic communities make a huge economic and cultural contribution, and I look forward to continuing to engage with a range of communities in this new role.
“I will spend the coming weeks getting up to speed with the challenges and opportunities, before setting out my priorities.”
Luxon told RNZ on Sunday that Lee had committed to staying on as a National MP to the 2026 election “at this point”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This is the ninth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia — to spend some time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of President-elect Donald Trump. (This week Trump has been wagging the dog over the annexation of Greenland and busy filling up his cabinet’s clown car with what MAD Magazine would call “the usual gang of idiots.”)
Gara du Nord, the main passenger station in Bucharest. Photo by Matthew Stevenson.
In the late afternoon, when I was back from Bánffy Castle and had inspected a 1990s memorial dedicated to those killed in the anti-Communist movement (many East European cities have one), I retreated to my empty hostel to pass time before dinner.
I had thought of riding out to the Ethnographic Park Romulus Vuia, a collection of old Transylvanian wooden houses (many with thatched roofs that would have thrilled my wife), but by the time I was ready to head there, it had begun to rain and the cobblestones were even more treacherous than before.
Instead, I read my Kindle until I could go to dinner. The best time to visit Cluj-Napoca is in the summer, as the city is full of outdoor restaurants and terraces, but still I found a good place to eat indoors, even though the waitress wasn’t thrilled to see me lugging my folded bicycle to the table. (I try to avoid locking it outside.)
Unlike Western Europe, Eastern Europe—and especially Romania—remains a bargain, and dinner out or a berth on an overnight train can be found for less than $100 (unlike Amtrak, which charges about $600 for many overnight compartments, some of them the size of coffins).
Politically, much of Eastern Europe has never been integrated into the West. Yes, many countries, including Romania, are members of the European Union and NATO, but on the ground they remain a world apart, and the big hole in the donut is former Yugoslavia; few of those republics are EU members, and all are outsiders, as would be Ukraine if admitted into the EU.
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The sleeper to Bucharest did not leave until 22:15. A few minutes before departing, the long train pulled into the Cluj-Napoca station. There was no indication on the platform where each numbered car would be stopping.
On the advice of a station officer, I lined up at one end of the platform, only to discover that my sleeping car was at the other end of the arriving train. With only two minutes to get aboard and not wanting to lug the folded bicycle the length of the fourteen-car train, I unfolded it, mounted my bags, and pedaled the length of the train in less than a minute.
I am sure I violated a few rules of Romanian station etiquette, but no sooner had I loaded my bicycle and bags onto the vestibule than the engine whistled and the train rolled into the night.
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My first visit to Romania, also on a night train, was in spring 1975, when my father and sister visited me—a student in Vienna—and together we traveled to Budapest and Bucharest. (Actually we went all the way to Constanza, a workers’ paradise of high-rise summer apartments on the Black Sea.)
On the overnight train from Budapest to Bucharest, we made up a bed for my sister (then thirteen) on the floor of the compartment rather than let her sleep alone in her assigned compartment.
That night train left Budapest around 10 p.m., and while waiting for it to back into Keleti station my father taught my sister and me the rudiments of boarding a moving train (we practiced on a few slow-moving locals backing along platforms).
A child of the American Depression, my father had acquired the skill in college, when he got around the United States by “riding the blind,” a perch behind the coal tender of steam engines and in front of the “blind” baggage car at the front of the train.
“Riding the blind” (sometimes also called “riding the blinds”) was a step up from hopping freights, which to bindlestiffs and other itinerants in the 1930s were known as “side-door Pullmans”.
After graduating from Columbia in 1940, my father and his close friend Bob Lubar (later managing editor of Fortune and my godfather) rode “the blind” from New York to Los Angeles for $40.
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As I had eaten dinner, there was little for me to do on board the night train other than to lock the door and go to sleep. The porter explained that we would arrive in Bucharest around 6:30 a.m., provided the train was on time, and that he would bring breakfast at 6:00 a.m.
On most night trains in Europe—even on some of the newer Austrian trains—breakfast is yogurt, a prepackaged croissant, and lukewarm coffee, which is what I was served at dawn’s early light.
Then, perfectly on time, the train pulled into Bucharest’s Gara du Nord, which both in name and spirit echoes a terminal from Paris in the 1930s.
On only one of my trips to Romania have I come by air. All the others have begun at this station, which has a stately exterior but inside exhibits the jumbled air of a flea-market with trains running out the back.
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Rather than spend the night in Bucharest, I had decided to fly later that day directly to Ankara, Turkey.
To be faithful to my plan of taking night trains all the way from Geneva to Armenia, I originally thought of catching a sleeper from Bucharest to Istanbul, and then the high-speed Turkish train to Ankara.
But when I gamed out the connection from Bucharest to Istanbul, I discovered that it would involve three changes at small intermediate stations in Romania and Bulgaria, as the through service—once a mainstay of the historic Orient Express—was no more.
In summer, the train schedule might have been more forgiving with a direct couchette, but in autumn, I was looking at twenty hours on Balkan day coaches and there was no guarantee that I would make all of my connections. So reluctantly I decided to fly.
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With the morning free in Bucharest, I assembled the bicycle and went for a city ride. I only had about an hour before I needed to catch a train to the airport, but I decided it would be enough time to make a loop through the downtown.
I began at the Palace of Parliament, by some reckoning one of the largest buildings in the world, conceived as a monument to its spiritual architect, President Nicolae Ceaușescu, whose ego would have been the only thing that might have filled all 365,000 square meters.
The president, however, was tried and executed in 1989, eight years before the building was finished. Twenty-five years later, it remains an endless ballroom in search of dancers.
Nominally, the Romanian parliament meets there, but there are still acres of empty marble rooms sufficient to display 480 chandeliers, not to mention the 1,409 ceiling lights and mirrors that found homes there, thanks to the labors of 700 architects.
Think of Versailles but without all the modesty. Perhaps its best use came in 1992 when the pop singer Michael Jackson put on a concert with the facade as a backdrop. On stage, Michael greeted the audience by shouting: “Hello Budapest, I’m so glad to be here.”
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From the Palace of Parliament, I weaved through traffic (it was rush hour on the larger boulevards, but fine to ride on some of the back streets) to the Athénée Palace Hotel, which is located in the city center on Revolution Square.
Down the road were various ministerial offices, which explained why, in the 1989 revolution, protesters tore apart the square and some of the hotel facade as symbols of repression.
I liked riding by the hotel (now part of the InterContinental chain), as that’s where we stayed in March 1975, when I was in Bucharest with my father and younger sister.
While at the hotel, we were joined by a close family friend and my sister’s godmother, whom we called Aunt Marge. She was then in her sixties and had spent a productive life as a social worker, with much of her career spent abroad in places like China and Japan.
She had warmed to the idea of a family trip behind the Iron Curtain to Romania, and had booked herself to London and Bucharest on various airlines. But something went awry when the airport taxi stopped in front of the hotel (then the best in town but still a little shabby).
I was waiting by the front door to greet her, but when the taxi arrived she flew out the rear car door, shouting at the driver and leaving her luggage untouched.
In waiting to get paid, the driver (who spoke no English) had used some gesture, which she interpreted to mean than he would accept payment in a more emotional currency, and she wanted nothing to do with such means of production.
I think part of the problem, lost in transaction, is that in those days the Romanian currency was called the lei.
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On this occasion, I ended my bike ride around Bucharest in front of the Museum of the History of the Romanian Jewish Community, which is located in the former United Holy Temple. It was only open between 10:00 and 15:00, but I didn’t need to go inside as I had been there on a recent visit and the display cases (of a vanished Romanian civilization caught in the vice of World War II) were fresh in my mind.
Later, in wanting to know more of this Holocaust story, I downloaded to my Kindle Paul Kenyon’s excellent Children of the Night: The Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania.
Kenyon is a celebrated broadcast and magazine foreign correspondent who has covered conflicts around the world, and he married into a Romanian family, which is the reason he wrote this history of Romania in the 20th century (the book ends with Ceaușescu and his wife Elena up against the wall of a firing squad in the city of Targoviste).
Of the internal war waged against the Jews Kenyon writes:
It was only in the months and years that followed that the full enormity of Romania’s Holocaust emerged. More Jews were killed by Romania than any other Axis state, aside from Germany itself. According to the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, the number of Romanian and Ukrainian Jews who perished in territories under Romanian control was between 280,000 and 380,000. Between 120,000 and 180,000 of them died as a result of deportation to Transnistria.
Part of the reason that the fascist leader of Romania, Ion Antonescu, threw in his lot with Hitler’s Nazis is because he hoped that such an alliance might bring back to Romania in a postwar settlement the lost paradise of Transylvania.
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Romania joined the Tripartite Alliance with Germany, Italy, and Japan in November 1940 (foreign correspondent Derek Patmore tells the the story of this treachery in his memoir, Balkan Correspondent, which I recommend to anyone who wants to wallow, as I often do, in the politics of betrayal).
Kenyon describes how in the early 20th century nativist anti-Semitism—plus fears of Jews emigrating from Russia and the nearby Pale of Settlement in what is now Ukraine and Moldova—produced toxic nationalism in Romania, no matter whether the leader was a king, a fascist, or a republican.
Of the late 1930s, Kenyon writes: “Jews were barred from marrying Christians and, no matter how long their family had lived in the country, could never acquire the status ‘Romanian by blood’, a term that was written on the official papers of all non-Jews. The policies of hate and discrimination were designed to flatter Hitler into keeping Hungarian hands off Transylvania.”
It all came to naught, however, when Hitler awarded Northern Transylvania (including Cluj) to Hungary in August 1940. After that, Romania could only prove its bona fides to Hitler by being more ruthless against the Jews than even some Germans.
It is not lost in modern European politics that in 1941 Romanian troops spearheaded the Nazi invasions of southern Ukraine, notably Odessa, where atrocities followed them.
