Words

Every now and again I get obessed with something to the point I have to write something about it. Here are some of those, along with a Lexicon of words I’ve come across and enjoyed as well as a commonplace book of quotes I like. Please reach out with any questions

MEXICO DRUG WAR PRIMER: Sinaloa Cartel/Guadalajara Cartel

The relation between the United States and Mexico is one of the most complicated and multifaceted of any in the contemporary world. It would take many dozen books all written by people much smarter than I, some of which have been written and which I’ll recommend at the end, and hundreds of life-times to truly “understand” it. The current drug war, and by current I mean the last 50 years (though, we’ll see that it has roots the stretch back much, much further and deeper) are a good window into seeing how these two nations intertwine and shape one another, as well as offer one of the best examples for someone seeking to understand how the American empire, in its current interaction, functions. To look into this, let's narrow it down and investigate perhaps the largest and most lucrative group in the past decade, and one of the largest and most lucrative criminal organizations in the world, the Sinaloa cartel. Over 60,000 people have died in Mexico as a direct result of this war since 2006, literal billions in aid has been sent from the US to Mexico in the last few years, some insight into this situation would be helpful in thinking about America and its allies.

The relationship between the United States and Mexico is older than either country and is woven deeply into the fabric of both nations. In the popular imagination, the cartels are highly-organized criminal gangs that traffic drugs, murder, extort and terrorize. They are thought of as purely evil groups who stand in opposition to the governments of both Mexico and the United States. But, like with the Russian or American Mafias, or the Yukuza in Japan, the history and allegiances are much more complicated and fluid. Both America and Mexico often shape and use these groups to further their own ends. In some cases, their very existence is the result of American and/or Mexican government policy. This might seem conspiratorial or cynical, despite being widely believed in Mexico itself (when I lived in Mexico a decade ago, you would be hard pressed to find a single person who didn’t believe the Sinaloa was an arm of the Mexican government and supported by the Yankees) but it becomes quite clear when you look at some of the groups individually.

Where to start with the Sinaloa cartel? One could begin with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which highlighted the United State’s insistence that the Western Hemisphere, and Mexico most of all, was their territory, not any of the European powers. This attitude continues well into today, and woe towards a country in this hemisphere that seeks to chart a different course (ask Cuba). Or, one could put a starting point at the Mexican American war, which, among other things, stole large pieces of territory from Mexico, including the land that is today’s contested border. And that border is the crux of the issue surrounding these cartels. The basic premise is simple: the United States started outlawing drugs (and, for a while, alcohol) in the early 20th century, which, since people want to get high regardless of any law, any good free-market economist could have told you would increase the profitability of illegal drugs. Starting in the mid-twentieth century, under Nixon, the modern war on drugs emerged, as a domestic conter-insurgency strategy. Nixon’s aide on domestic affairs, John Erlichman put it most clearly in his book, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

One must never forget the vast, vast amounts of money that are involved in drug smuggling, the Sinaloa cartel is estimated to bring in between $3 and $40 Billion dollars a year, to give the figures for just one organization, which attracts a lot of attention. First, from international banks and financial institutions, who are eager to get their grubby little paws on some of that money. According to a UN advisor, drug money helped several financial institutions stave off bankruptcy during the 2008 crisis. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said cartel money was "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse during the crisis. By his estimate the global economic system absorbed $352 billion of drug profits during this time.

The other groups who are very interested in and involved with this giant pool of blood money are the world’s intelligence agencies. There are many, many books on the links between CIA and other intelligence agencies and drug trafficking. Again, too much to get into now, let us focus on Mexico, Central, and South America. Besides the boatloads of untraceable money available, money the CIA can use for programs they don’t want to ask congress to fund, the drug-underworld also provides ways to move around mercenaries and death-squads, facilitate bribery and blackmail, and generally keep Communism and leftism at bay in the Americas. This works in two directions, on a simple level, the United States can protect the drug operations of groups they support, and the most obvious example of this is the Contras, who moved thousands of tons of cocaine, cocaine that helped spur the crack explosion in the 80’s, into the United States to finance their war on Nicaragua's leftist government. Additionally, they can engage in counter-insurgencies against leftists under the guise of anti-narcotics work, as with Colombia’s USA-financed war on the FARC (who are primarily depicted as drug dealers in American media), or, to take a Mexican example, the long history of Mexico’s “National Security” agencies being used to crush leftists movements.

This requires some detailing, given that these organizations have changed names several times. The original group was known as the Federal Security Directorate (DFS) was created in 1947 under Mexican president Miguel Alemán Valdés, with the assistance of various U.S. intelligence agencies, with the duty of "preserving the internal stability of Mexico against all forms subversion and terrorist threats" which was dissolved thanks to scandals discussed below and replaced, in 1989, with the Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN), which was itself replaced with the National Intelligence Center (CNI) in 2018.

We’ll focus on the DFS for the first part of this short history though it is important to keep in mind that, in 2019 AMLO, the Mexican president, opened the archives of the DFS so more is being learned everyday about exactly how the corruption in Mexico functioned. But as far as what we know now it’s quite clear that the DFS received substantial support and training from the CIA and CIA cut-outs in exchange for working on curbing leftism in Mexico and Latin America more broadly.

For example, Arturo “El Negro” Durazo (the Chief of Police in Mexico City for six years, from 1976 to 1982) and Miguel Nazar Haro (the head of Mexico's DFS from 1978 to 1982) ran, at least, 2 paramilitary death-squads during their time in their respective offices, La Brigada Blanca and El Grupo Jaguar, which were responsible for the killing of, at least, 3,000 members of leftist organizations. The CIA’s involvement with the DFS was long suspected, especially in Mexico, but first came out into the open in ‘81 when Miguel Nazar Haro was indicted in San Diego on charges of involvement in a massive cross-border car-theft ring. The FBI office at the U.S. Embassy immediately registered strong protests, calling Nazar Haro an "essential contact for CIA station Mexico City." San Diego U.S. Attorney William Kennedy disclosed in 1982 that the CIA was trying to block the case against Nazar Haro on grounds that he was a vital intelligence source in Mexico and Central America. Kennedy was subsequently fired by Reagan. Multiple witnesses at the trial testified that Nazar Haro was deeply involved with drug-trafficking as well.

It was during this period, beginning around ‘76, that an arrangement known as “El Sistema,” was put into place. Under El Sistema, groups of traffickers paid bribes to the DFS in exchange for the rights to control certain zones and trafficking routes in the country, colloquially known as “Plazas.” It is this system that fosters the birth of giant cartels, which are easier for groups like the CIA and DFS to deal with and control.

Around this time, the most powerful of these groups was known as the Guadalajara cartel. Ran, at the time, by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero. Besides paying the customary bribes to the DFS the Guadalajara cartel was also protected by the Americans in exchange for supporting the Contras. Rafael Caro Quintero had a ranch in Veracruz that was used as a training camp and drug money, smuggling routes and weapons sales were all diverted from the cartel to the Contras. Operation Leyenda, a major DEA operation that ran from ‘85 until ‘89, breaks up the Guadaljara cartel and leads to splintering from which emerge the modern cartels, including the Sinaloa cartel, Juarez cartel, and Tijuana cartel. But if the Guadalajara cartel was so useful to the Americans, why was it broken up? The answer to that has to do with the brutal 1985 torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena Salazar.

Camarena came to Mexico as part of Operation Condor in ‘81. In an insane twist, there was actually another, more famous Operation Condor overseen by the US, that ran between ‘68-’88 and involved various governments in South America, concentrated in the Southern Cone region but stretching across the continent, that coordinated a campaign of anti-leftist repression that culminated in between half a million and a million violent deaths. The Mexican Operation Condor was a joint program between the DEA and Mexican state to disrupt drug trafficking and growing, especially in the so-called “golden triangle” region between Chihuahua, Durango, and Sinaloa. However, in keeping with the pattern we are tracing, the Guadalajara cartel was being protected and allowed to operate, in exchange for helping with the Contras and various other, off-the-books projects of US interest as well as feeding the authorities information on their rivals. Camarena and his DEA boss, James "Jaime" Kuykendall, become frustrated at the corruption apparent in their Mexican counterparts and higher-ups at the DEA in their refusal to go after the Guadalara group. Camerena posed as a day-laborer and eventually discovered Rafael Caro Quintero's 2,500-acre marijuana plantation, "Rancho Bufalo." He also helped identify Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo as the boss of the organization, and, in 1984, he and Mexican pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar took aerial photos of the ranch.The Rancho Bufalo raid of November 1984 destroyed 5,000 tons of marijuana (worth $8 billion).

Obviously, the cartel was pissed. They paid a lot of money, played along with the CIA/DFS various schemes and thus demanded to know the agent who caused the raid. We may never know who exactly leaked his name but Camarena was abducted in broad daylight on February 7, 1985. Camarena was taken to a residence located at 881 Lope de Vega in the neighborhood of Jardines del Bosque, in the western section of the city of Guadalajara, owned by Rafael Caro Quintero, where he was tortured and interrogated over a 30-hour period and then murdered.

What happened in the murder-house, and who, exactly, was present for the torture and murder is a matter of some debate and speculation. Our best source is a man named Jorge Godoy Lopez, the first eyewitness from the house where Camarena was murdered. Godoy was a police officer in Jalisco, then a bodyguard for a drug-trafficker named Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, also called Don Neto. Much of what Godoy testified to was confirmed by his boss in the state police force, Rene Lopez Romero, who also moon-lighted as a cartel enforcer and has a substantial criminal history, which includes assisting in the rape and murder of 4 missionaires, who were mistaken for DEA agents, in Guadalajara. Godoy lists some pretty interestint people present at the torture-house, including, Bartlett Díaz (cabinet secretary at the time), General Arévalo Gardoqui (secretary of defense), Miguel Aldana (the head of Interpol), Félix Rodriguez, Sergio Espino Verdin (head of DFS). There’s also Juan Matta Ballesteros, a Honduran trafficker and CIA link through his airline company called SETCO, which is supplying the contra rebels in Nicaragua. All of these people are fascinating characters, Manuel Bartlett Díaz, for instance, went on to rig the 1988 presidential election that gave Carlos Salinas the presidency, a post that Bartlett Díaz seemed destined for until the Camarena case made him too controversial. Because of an outstanding warrant to appear before a Los Angeles grand jury, he has not been willing to enter the U.S. for decades. He continued to serve in the Mexican senate. After Obrador's election as Mexican president in 2018, he appointed Bartlett to become the CEO of Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE), the state-owned electric utility of Mexico, the country's second most powerful state-owned company, after PEMEX.

However, for our purpose, the most intriguing is Félix Rodriguez, a major figure in CIA history. Rodriguez is too complex a figure to fully get into in this article, he’s something of a Forrest Gump figure in terms of evil CIA activities. He was involved in the Bay of Pigs, he was present at Che’s execution (and, according to him, owns Guevara’s Rolex as trophy), he participated in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and was heavily involved in Iran/Contra, and was good friends/co-workers with Cuban terrorist/mass-murderer, Luis Posada Carriles, the list goes on. Rodriguez was apparently using his “Max Gomez” alias and interrogated Kiki w/r/t what he knew about the Guadalala cartel/Contra connection. A DEA official named Hector Berrellez as well as Phil Jordan, former DEA Intelligence Director, who were investigating the Camarena murder also say Rodriguez was in the room during the torture. Berrellez is DEA supervisor of Operation Leyenda, which runs from ‘85-’89, to investigate the Camarena murder. It was not until late in 2013, when the Mexican government prematurely released trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero—a main figure in Camarena’s torture and murder — that Berrellez decided to speak out. Quintero was recaptured in 2022.

The web of connections and threads swirling around the Camarena murder continues to be explored and understood, we may never get the whole picture. It’s one of those “deep events” like the JFK murder, or 9/11, or Epstien’s suicide that the more you look into them the more the event spirals out, connects to other people and occurrences and provides a true but blurry map of how power really functions in our world. But to get back to our major subject, the Sinaloa Cartel, the major importance of Kiki’s brutal murder is the destruction of the Guadalajara cartel. In 1989, when Guadalajara leader Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo was arrested, his organization split into two opposing factions: the Tijuana Cartel whose leadership was inherited by his nephews and heirs, the Arellano Félix brothers, and the Sinaloa Cartel. Sinaloa, whose leadership fell to former lieutenants Héctor Luis Palma Salazar, Adrián Gómez González, Ismael Zambada García, Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, and Joaquín Guzmán Loera (El Chapo). The Sinaloa Cartel, which used to be known as La Alianza de Sangre ("Blood Alliance"), was originally active in the states of Sinaloa, Durango, Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo León, and Nayarit, and has since gone on to become perhaps the largest criminal organization in the world. The Sinaloa Cartel went on to become what it is today, by aligning itself with various legitimate power structures in both the United States and Mexico. The list of allegations of collusion is long. And possible there from before the group was even founded.

Ismael Mario Zambada García, also known as El Mayo, who is the only founding Sinaloa figure who is still at large, who, in fact, has managed to never get arrested, despite continuing to live in Sinaloa itself and is the only member of the famous list of the 37 largest Drug Kingpins published by the Mexican government at the start of this phase of the Narco Wars, back in 2009. Everyone else on that list has been killed or captured. El Mayo’s entry into drug-smuggling is shrouded in mystery but from what we do know, it involves Antonio Cruz Vazquez, the man who ended up marrying his sister who has a very suspicious background. Cruz was born in Cuba before the revolution. After Castro took power he briefly worked as a police officer before leaving Cuba and showing up in Nicaragua where the rumors began that he was CIA connected. He eventually ran into trouble in both the US and Mexico before moving to Sinaloa, marrying El Mayo’s sister and setting up a smuggling operation that El Mayo was able to work in. Even after his 1978 arrest in the US he refused to discuss his time in Nicaragua. It was at this time that El Mayo took over his operation and connections in Mexico

In 2012, Newsweek reported about allegations from an anonymous former Sinaloa member turned informant that alleged that Joaquín Guzmán's legal adviser, Humberto Loya-Castro, had also become a key informant for the DEA. Officially, Loya-Castro became an informant of the DEA in 2005 but, in reality, he had already been providing vital information on rival cartels since the 1990s. This intel was instrumental to the takedown of the Tijuana Cartel, the Sinaloa cartel's main rival. These allegations were confirmed by court documents obtained by El Universal. According to court documents, the DEA had struck agreements with the cartel's leadership that would ensure that they would be immune from extradition and prosecution in the US and would avoid disrupting the cartel's drug operations in exchange for intelligence which could be used against other drug cartels. Jesus Manuel Fierro Mendez, a member of the Sinaloa Cartel and ex-captain in the Ciudad Juarez police, testified in El Paso that he had been the “spokesman” of Chapo Guzman in numerous telephone conversations and some face-to-face meetings with agents from ICE “There were two of us that were, so to speak, like spokesmen”, Fierro Mendez said. “ We passed on all the information. But this information we received, obviously, from the highest levels.” He also said that Chapo had authorized him to meet with the ICE and inform them of the activities of enemy cartels.

During the PAN terms, Fox and Calderon, 2000-2012, Prosecutor Steve Fraga, as well as DEA agents Manuel Castanon, David Herrod, Carlos Mitchem, met with Sinaloa reps, including Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, the son of El Mayo, to discuss arrangements to allow Sinaloa to continue to operate, according to El Universal. During the Chapo trial, Alex Cifuentes Villa, a Colombian assistant to the Cartel, claimed Guzman gave Enrique Peña Nieto a $100 million bribe in 2012. This particular bribe has another strange angle to it, which was reported by Villa at the Chapo trail in NYC.

In unsealed documents Alex Cifuentes Villa said that Guzmán was a prolific rapist, particularly of underage girls. According to Cifuentes, a woman known only as “Comadre Maria'' regularly sent Chapo photographs of girls as young as 13 as a sort of perverse menu. Chapo was on the run at the time and was allegedly paying a $5,000 fee per girl to have the victims brought to him in his mountain stronghold. While disgusting, that part seems unsurprising, given what sort of person El Chapo is. However, what Cifuentes told the jurors about “Comrade Maria” on Jan 15, 2019 is quite shocking. Apparently, “Comadre Maria” had also served as the kingpin’s intermediary when he allegedly paid that $100 million bribe to Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto. Who is this woman? What does it mean that someone is both a pimp of underage girls, as well as someone who knows both the President of Mexico and the then-most-wanted-man-in-the-world, El Chapo? The implications of this despite having clear Maxwell/Epstein overtones, remains uninvestigated by the authorities or media of either country.

The allegations go deeper than just snitching and coordination to remove smaller cartels, there are also credible allegations that the US Government provided material support for the Sinaloa cartel. To understand this angle, it’s important to take a step back and look at one of the other illegal trade dynamics at play in the US/Mexico relationship, namely, the movement of guns. While drug trafficking, from Mexico into the US, gets most of the media attention, Cartels and other criminal groups are also trying to move weapons in the opposite direction. Firearms are much more restricted and hard to get in Mexico and obviously essential to any large scale criminal enterprise. Between 2006 and 2011, the ATF let guns “walk” or stood by while purchases were made by “straw-buyers” in Arizona that they knew were going to cartels in Mexico.The two most notorious “gun walking” programs were Operation Wide Receiver (2006–2007) and Operation Fast and Furious (2009–2010). Between the two programs, at least 1,856 guns were allowed to walk, whereupon the ATF “lost track” of these weapons. Other U.S. agencies, federal, state and local, recovered nearly 270 of these guns at crime scenes in the U.S. and 195 of these guns were recovered by Mexican police at Mexican crime scenes. In 2010, Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered in a shootout in Arizona with drug cartel members. Cartel member Manuel Osorio-Arellanes pleaded guilty in 2012 to first-degree murder in the case and was sentenced in 2014 to 30 years in prison. Two rifles from the "Fast and Furious" operation were found at the scene of the crime, but there is no evidence proving that Terry was killed with either of those guns. When El Chapo was arrested in 2016, he had a Fast and Furious gun with him. Eric Holder and Obama paint these facts as a mistake and fuck-up, though there are others that suggest something more sinister.

During his trial in Chicago for trafficking, Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, alleged that Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the cartel in exchange for information used to take down its rivals. Keep in mind that during this same trail it was revealed that Zambada-Niebla was in contact with the DEA. DEA agent Manuel Castanon said on the stand, “On March 17, 2009, I met for approximately 30 minutes in a hotel room in Mexico City with Vincente Zambada-Niebla and two other individuals — DEA agent David Herrod and a cooperating source [Sinaloa lawyer Loya Castro] with whom I had worked since 2005. … I did all of the talking on behalf of [the] DEA.” During this same trial, the US Justice Department invoked national security to prevent Humberto Loya Castro, the lawyer of the Sinaloa cartel, from being summoned as a witness to the trial against Vicente Zambada Niebla. Why does a Sinaloa cartel lawyer have information so damaging to national security? Or, let’s look at another situation where government equipment ends up in cartel hands. In 2007 a Gulfstream jet, filled with Sinaloa cocaine crashed in the Yucatan. The plane, tail number N987SA, had been used to shuttle people from Washington to Guantanamo Bay and seems to have also been involved in some extraordinary renditions. In other words, it was a CIA plane. Is it possible that it’s a coincidence, sure. But when one looks at the preponderance of coincidences, strange happenings and connections a picture becomes clear.

The situation is on-going. Currently, in Brookly, Genaro García Luna, a man who was for many years the leading security chief in Mexico, is being charged with corruption and working with the Sinaloa cartel. Edgar Veytia, a former attorney general in the state of Nayarit, testified that he was told by Felipe Calderón, along with other prosecutors, in 2011, to support Sinaloa and only persecute and pursue their rivals. García Luna, the highest-ranking Mexican official to be tried in the United States for drug trafficking and corruption charges, has been accused, during his trial, of numerous offenses, including getting a suitcase full of cash from El Chapo, alerting Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a major trafficker, of his imminent arrest and sending men to help him get away by disguising him as a federal police officer. In 2012, two CIA officers in Mexico were shot and wounded by Mexican Federal authorities. American officials, including Eric Holder himself, attempted to get footage of the shooting from Luna, who staunchly refused. Eventually the FBI obtained the tape through other means. Luna’s defense partially rests on showing the jury numerous pictures of him with various top US officials, including Holder, Obama, Clinton and others. If he was so corrupt and compromised, why were these Americans meeting with him and not denouncing them, surely they would have known if he was dirty, right? Everyone in Mexico seemed to. We’ll see what happens with the rest of this trial, if the US prosecutors can thread the needle of convicting Luna without implicating anyone on the US side of the border.

Another person who would be in position to know about any possible deeper situation around the relation between the Sinaola group and the CIA was revealed by WikiLeaks, when they published 2,878 out of what it says is a cache of 5 million internal Stratfor emails (dated between July 2004 and December 2011) obtained by the hacker collective Anonymous). Stratfor, which is officially known as Strategic Forecasting Inc. is a consulting company founded in 1996. They provide intelligence gathering and geopolitical analysis for corporate clients (Lockheed Martin, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, etc.) and have been referred to, by Barron's, as "The Shadow CIA." Wikileaks published an email, sent to vice president of intelligence Fred Burton on April 19, 2010 by a source they list as MX1. It reads:

“I think the US sent a signal that could be construed as follows:

"To the [Juárez] and Sinaloa cartels: Thank you for providing our market with drugs over the years. We are now concerned about your perpetration of violence, and would like to see you stop that. In this regard, please know that Sinaloa is bigger and better than [the Juárez cartel]. Also note that [Ciudad Juárez] is very important to us, as is the whole border. In this light, please talk amongst yourselves and lets all get back to business. Again, we recognize that Sinaloa is bigger and better, so either [the Juárez cartel] gets in line or we will mess you up."

In sum, I have a gut feeling that the US agencies tried to send a signal telling the cartels to negotiate themselves. They unilaterally declared a winner, and this is unprecedented, and deserves analysis.”

Bill Conroy, of Narco News, reports that MX1's description matches the publicly available information on Fernando de la Mora Salcedo — a Mexican foreign service officer who studied law at the University of New Mexico and served at the Mexican Consulates in El Paso, Texas, and Phoenix.

Piecing together these pieces and anecdotes and weird stories and coincidences we get a better picture of what is actually going on in Mexico and the United States. It’s frustrating and confusing, we’ll probably never find a document that implicated the American intelligence community in purposefully setting up and assisting the Sinaloa or Guadalajara cartels, we only get these glimpses and insinuations. As long as there is prohibition, there will be money to be made selling drugs, and, more specifically, money to be made moving drugs across the border. Various state actors in Mexico and the United States want access to that money, and they want some control over the actions of the traffickers, typically to support larger geo-political goals. Therefore, it is in their interest to have one large cartel that they can deal with. This was the Guadalajara group, and, until quite recently, it was the Sinaloa organization. Perhaps Sinaloa has gotten too big and too famous to be useful any longer, which is why we’re seeing the arrests of Luna and Chapo, perhaps they are merely trimming the organization to placate a public tired of the corruption and killing. What is clear is that this is more complicated and intertwined than 2 governments fighting against criminals.

OPEN TABS

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/americas-drug-war-is-devastating-mexico/

https://amp.theguardian.com/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims

https://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion-mexico/2014/impreso/la-guerra-secreta-de-la-dea-en-mexico-212050.html

https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/world/americas/mexico-president-sinaloa-cartel.amp.html?amp_gsa=1&amp_js_v=a9&usqp=mq331AQIKAGwASCAAgM%3D#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=16758171382543&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2023%2F02%2F07%2Fworld%2Famericas%2Fmexico-president-sinaloa-cartel.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/world/americas/corruption-genaro-garcia-luna-mexico.html

https://www.propublica.org/article/william-barr-mexico-cartels-cienfuegos-case

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.html

https://www.thedope.co.uk/blog/who-is-el-mayo-frederick-venables

BLOOD ON THE CORN: https://medium.com/matter/blood-on-the-corn-52ac13f7e643

Books

Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion - Gary Webb

The CIA as Organized Crime - Douglas Valentine

Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture - Oswaldo Zavala

Lexicon

I try to keep a running list of interesting words and short phrases from English and other languages. Here is that collection, which, of course, is not in alphabetical order:

Mise en Abyme - copy of an image within itself

Arctolatry - Bear Worship

Geschichtlos - people without a history

Mleccha - sanskrit for barbarian

Weltislehre - world ice theory

Pleonasm - using more words than necessary

Inyenzi - Kingarwanda word for cockroach, slur by Hutu toward Tutsi

Anya - from Aynasiz, turkish for “those without a mirror” aka the police

Kgotla - Public council in historic Botswana, early democracy

Acinteyya - Buddhist term for 4 unanswerable questions

Jahiliyya - pre-Islamic Barbarism

Flagelado - the tormented ones, N.E. Brazilians

Qilin - Chinese chimera, presages good rulers, associated with the giraffe

Euphrosynos - Have fun/enjoy life (found on mosaic)

Eudaimonia - human flourishing, a good life

Swaraj- self-rule, Ghandian term

Dromomania - urge to walk

Drapetomania - condition that causes slaves to want to run away, coined by Sam Cartwright in 1851

Sluggish Schizophrenia - USSR term to diagnose dissidents

Ofay- Pig latin for “foe” Black slang for YT people, ‘20’s

Koyaanisqatsi- Hopi for “life out of balance”

Ethnophaulism - an ethnic slur

Cantinflear - From Cantinflaus, to talk a lot but not say anything, Mexican Spanish

Flyting- Scottish insult poetry, 1500’s

Naqāiḍ - Arabic insult poetry

Ikocha Nkocha - Nigerian insult poetry

Enthousiasmos - possession trance

Charivari/Skymmington - English carnaval/mythical land

Orpheotelestae - Greek doctor who dances around the sick

Horror Vacui/Kenophobia - fear of empty space, especially in an artwork

Iram of the Pillars - lost city mentioned in the Quran

Anatamopoiesis - act of creating bodies

Lampades - underworld nymphs

Paideum - interconnectedness of all aspects of a society’s culture, Leo Frobenius

Wyrd - Anglo-Saxon for fate/destiny

Eusebeia - to perform actions appropriate to the god’s, greek version of dharma

Ta’xet - Haida god of violent death

Tia - Haida god of peaceful death

Interdexicality - ability of some words to have different meanings each time used, like “I” or “here”

Grève dezèle - work-to-rule, a strike where things are shut down by following the exact letter of the rules and work grinds to a halt

Sekrata - Sakalava 3rd gender

Gynaceum - greek term for part of the house for women

Zenana - Indian term for part of the house for women

Andion - part of the house for men

Zermatism - theory of history from Stanislaw Szukalsk. All humans from Easter Island, fighting against Yetinsyny, sons of Yeti/humans

Agartha - Kingdom in the hollow earth

Iatrogenic - brought forth from the healer

Tang Ping - Chinese term for “lying flat” aka doing nothing

Bangaku - Japanese, barbarian studies

Melmastya - Pashto term for hospitality

Jirga - Pashto assembly to make decisions by consensus

Khwaindo Jirga - Women’s Jirga

Gua Gou - lit. “interlocking mechanism” chinese, to explain corruption

Multatuli- Latin, lit, “I have suffered much” pen name of Dutch anti-colonial writer, early 1800’s

Ergi - Old Norse, insult meaning unmanly

Seidr - Norse term for ability to tell the future, considered a feminine trait

Yamy - Russian urban ghetto

Fenya/Ofenya - Russian criminal slang

Myaso - lit. meat, Russian, term for person you escape gulag with that you intend to eat

KOT- Russian tattoo, Native of Prisons

NEZh- Russian tattoo, fed up with this fucking life

ZLO - Russian tattoo, take revenge on informants

Hui - chinese informal loan co-operatives

Zhulong - Pig Dragon, artifact from neolithic China

Gylang - social system based on gender equality

Yaogui - Starving ghost, people with insatiable appetites

Batin - hidden inner form, Islam

Zahir - surface, apperent form, Islam

Kenjataimu - Japanese, post-nut clarity

Ashe - universal life-force in Afro-Cuban religions

YKINMKBYKIOK - your kink is not my kink, but your kink is okay

Xanthic - yellow

Algedonic - characterized by pain associated with pleasure

Echopraxia - involuntary repetition/imitation of another’s actions, name of brothel in BotNS

Apotropaic - designed to ward off evil

Eutarchia - perpetual happiness

Kleos - Greek, renown, glory

Eidolon - spiritual image of double

Onomastics - study of names

Oubliette - place of forgetting, dungeon entered from above

Peryton - any creature with bat wings

Phrontistery - place for study/thinking

Pinakotheken - place for exhibiting art

Scoplanga - beautiful woman

Teratoid - monster-like

Thaumaturge - wonder-worker

Threnody/threnodic - Lament, lament-like, dirge

Conatus - an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself

Abya Yala - lit. “land of vital blood,” used by natives across Colombia and Panama as a sort of South American “Turtle Island”

Katabasis - lit, “going down” trip to the netherworld

Sitra Achra - realm of evil in Kabbalah, home to the Qliphoth

Qliphoth - husks or shells, dark side reflection in Kabbalah

Dunya - temporary world and earthly possessions, Arabic

al-Akhirah - afterlife and eternity, Arabic

Haruspex - person trained to read entrails

Kabloona - YT devil, Inuit. Historic

Qallunang - YT devil, Inuit, current

Tuungaq - devil, Inuit

Sila - breath of soul, life-force, Inuit

Utkiavik - a place for hunting owls, Inuit

Zersetzung - E. German term for gang-stalking

Ori - Yoruba concept of spiritual intuition and destiny.

Iwa Pele - Yoruba for balanced life

Emere - Yoruba, child who can travel between the spirit world and earth at will. Usually bad and tends to die on days of great joy

Der Irrgarten - German, maze lit. “error garden”

Homoioi - Spartan term for “those who are equal”

Wogie - Checto (Oregon) term for mythical original inhabitants of the land, small and White and driven out. Originally thought that YT people were the Wogie returned

Sangah - Popular assemblies in S. Asia

Pochteca - Aztec warrior-merchant class. Also acted as spies

Sapa Inca - lit. “the unique Inca”

Khipu - Incan knots as records

Khipukamayuqs - Knot keepers in Andean society

Huachuma - Mescaline-based drink in Peru

Ondinnonk - Wendat, concept of special dreams that must be realized

Onoharoin - Wendat, festival to realize Ondinnonk dreams

Izao rehetra izao - lit. “that is all” term for Madagascar

Gezirart al-Komr - “island of the moon” term for Madagascar

Ombiasy - “man of virtue” Sakalava shamen

Maro Taola - time of bones

Ampitifirambazaha - place of shooting Vazaha, deep south

Bath Kol - Heavenly voice, audible in biblical times

Mahlath - female demon

Kavvanah - mystical exegesis

Skeuomorphism - design term for making an object look like the thing it is replacing

JDPON - Joint Dictatorship of the Proletariat of the Oppressed Nations

Eubouleus - good counselor, epithet for Hades and Dionysus

Hyperia - land of dancing

Xenios - God of Strangers

Zeitgeber - time-giver, usually the sun

Chronotaxis - departure into time

Enantiodromia - tendency of things to change into their opposites

Symbiopoisis - act of creating one another

Myxocene - age of slime

Poshlost - Russian, self-satisfied vulgarity

Dveshabhakti - Hate-Devotion, in Hinduism, spending all your time hating a god is thinking about them all the time and, thus good. Happens to Kamsa, who is obsessed with his nephew Krishna, who is destined to kill him.

Scholé - inaction/leisure with a higher purpose, Greek

Theoria - Contemplation

гулять (gulyat) - To wonder w/o purpose

Majdhub - Someone who is mad for Allah

Kakotherēs- Greek, unable to endure the summer heat

Nachash - name of the serpent in Genesis, as a noun it means “serpent” as verb, “to divine” as an adjective, “shining”

Khanqua - Sufi lodge

Misology - hatred of reason/logic

Tetralemma - Indian logical form, each proposition has 4 possibilities

-It is true

-It is not true

-It is both true and not true

-It is neither true nor untrue

G.I.G.O. - garbage in, garbage out

Verschlimmbesserung - German, to make things worse while trying to make them better

Lila - Divine play, child’s play, ease, charm in Hinduism

Ista-devota - One’s chosen deity

Baraka - Spiritual power/authority, Islam

Jama’a - Association of the learned, Islam

N’gana - Mande, man of action

N’gara - Mande, man of words

Majlis - learning circle, Islam

Tulpa - Object or being created by thoughts, Theosophy

Bhava-hatya - ideocide, the murder of ideas or by ideas, Sanskrit coined by Velcheru Naragan Rao

Shlesha - Figure of speech where some expression refers to two different stories at once. Sanskrit

Kottabos - ancient Greek drinking game where one throws wine-dregs at a target in the center of the room.

Shikantaza - Just sitting, objectless meditation, Japanese

Alexithymia - inability to identify one’s emotions

Anagnorisis - sudden discovery of one’s identity and predicament

Geworfenheit: lit. "thrownness" from German. Heidegger's terms for being tossed into a specific context/time/culture

Kozo Oshoku - structural corruption, Japanese

Aflakete - lit. “I have tricked you” name for Legba

Cassés - lit. “breaks” in Haitian Creole. Haitian term for jarring rhythmically dissonant patterns

Telesterion - Secret location of the Elysian mysteries

Umbanda - fusion of Condomble and European spirituality in urban Brazil. Eshu becomes Exu and is fused with the devil

Sondé miroir, O Legba - lit. “to fathom the mirror” to uncover secrets, Haitian

Hen Kai Pan - The One and the All, Greek

Brahmamuhurtha - lit. “The Time of Brahma'' in ancient Hindu time division, best time for mediation/yoga. 1hr 36 minutes before sunrise until 48 minutes before sunrise.

Fana - Annihilation, sufism

Mukhallitun - mixers, syncretists

Zaqqum - tree that grows in hell with devil heads as fruit

Glamour - Scottish word for spell which makes beloved appear ugly to everyone else

Aporia - an irresolvable contradiction in logic or argument

Schreibtischtäter - lit. “writing table perputrator” German for desk murderers or bureaucrats in Nazi machine.

Cosmophagy - eating the world

Sūnyatā - empty of independent existence, Sanskrit

Clinamen - originally meant “unpredictable swerve” by Lucretius to describe atoms, now means inclination or bias

Sabr & Skukr - “Patients and Gratitude” philosophy of life outside of religion, Arabic

Misology - Hatred of reasoning/debate/words

Gaman Kurabe - game to see who will leave the office first, Japanese

Zaitech - “money games” finance that is not productive but is lucrative, Japanese

O.G.U. - One god universe, Burroughs

Ekpyrosis - Stoic belief in period of burning for the cosmos every great year

Palingenesis - cosmic recreation

Kataklysmos - catastrophe, destruction by water

Mundus Vult Decipi, Ergo Decipiatur <the world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived>

Etiäinen - Spirit/image/doppelganger, that goes ahead of a person and does what they will do, a type of Haltija, or spirit connected to people/places, Finish

Servitor - psychological complex, deliberately created to work for the creator, Chaos Magik on the Thoughtform continuum:

Sigils ->Servitors -> Egregores ->Godforms

Emic/Etic - types of field research. Emic is from within the group being studied, etic is from without.

Takwin - goal is Islamic alchemy to create synthetic life. Associated with Jabir ibn Hayyan

Kausaj - man with a short thin beard, thought of as cunning and untrustworthy, Hindi

Kúseh - thin-bearded, insult, Persian

Khush-rish - well-beared, Persian

Hanami - (花見, "flower viewing") is the Japanese traditional custom of enjoying the transient beauty of flowers

Fylgjam- a spirit, often in the form of an animal that accompanies a person and is connected to their fate. Norse

Heyókȟa- Lakota, contrarian, jester. Laughs when sad, cries when happy, etc. Can act as a sort of police at large festivals. Black Elk was one. Must have had vision of Wakíŋyaŋ, or Thunder-beings, as a child.

ULTRALIGHT BEAM: HAVANA SYNDROME, MASS HYSTERIA...OR, THOUGHTS ON HOW TO READ THE NEWS

Recently the story about the so-called Havana Syndrome has reached a fever pitch, so much so that the normally intractable and non-working congress managed to pass a bipartisan bill, called the Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks (HAVANA) Act to investigate the causes and to compensate the victims. Since we first heard about these strange events in 2016 it has been one the strangest news stories of the last few years. What are we to make of this whole story and the many possibilities it suggests, not least of which involves the debate about whether or not Havana Syndrome is even a “real” thing. To think about it helps to identify and separate off the possibilities each time they present themselves.

First, let's briefly outline what exactly is meant by Havana Syndrome and the swirl of news around it. This isn’t reportage or history, plus this story is constantly being updated and spun and leaked in different ways so I’d rather not get bogged down in those details. So if we take Havana Syndrome at its broadest it involves the suggestion that American (and Canadian) diplomats, first in Havana Cuba in 2016, were stricken with strange and debilitating symptoms. They mostly reported feeling pressure in their heads as well as a strange grating sound, almost always when they were in a hotel room. Occasionally other people were standing nearby the victim at the time of attack and didn’t hear the noise or feel the pressure. These experiences left these victims with memory loss, hearing loss, nausea, and, since these attacks are new, we don’t yet know the long term implications. Eventually, after these anomalous health incidents were widely reported, these attacks spread. They’ve now been reported not just in Havana but also in China, Vietnam, and in Washington D.C.. The CIA has also suggested agents of theirs, who’s locations cannot be disclosed, have been struck in yet more nations. The Canadians have gotten in on the action as well, with some on their Cuban Embassy staff succumbing in 2018. The line is that these symptoms are a mystery. They are most likely caused, we’re told, by microwave or infrasound weapon technology of a type we, the USA, doesn’t recognize because we don’t develop such technology. Due to its speculative and unknown nature, I’ll refer to this weapon as The Beam. It is suspected that this weapon, The Beam, is being deployed by some nefarious foreign actor, probably Russia. But people are split, pointing to causes as disparate as crickets-are-causing-this to this-is-in-these-neurotic-people's-heads. As unwieldy as it is, we can slice up the possible scenarios and explanations and gain a clearer and more useful understanding of what’s going on.

So the first split in possibilities is created when you have to answer the issue of whether or not the symptoms, the dizziness, the headaches, the memory loss and all the rest, are being caused by a weapon. If the answer is yes, we can move on to the next fork in the road. If it is a weapon we need to know who wielding it and how, despite spending orders of magnitude more on military research of the darkest, most comprehensive, most eldritch sort (to say nothing of the military budget overall) some other nation we to get so far ahead of us, in terms of this technology, that we not only do we not have our own version, we don’t know how to defend against it, and we’re so far behind we don’t even know what it is. The other answer, that the symptoms were not caused by a weapon, does not fully explain what’s going on either, but it does suggest two interesting possibilities.

First, it might be that the symptoms are psychosomatic or psychogenic, the fancier and nicer way of saying, “it’s all in your head.” This would play into the stereotypes of these diplomats, all career folks in the vast bureaucracy of the State Department Foreign Service (or some shadowy, parallel CIA bureaucrat/torturer/mindwarrior track, or, most likely, some combo) are dweeby PMC types that are simply hysterical hypochondriacs. There’s certainly a criticism of the security state, here meaning both the traditional armed forces as well as folks like the FBI and CIA, of going soft by adopting the sort of SJW language and attitudes that are, in this criticisms telling, endemic to middle-manager PMC-types, from academia to “woke” corporations. Being hypersensitive in that regard is manifesting, in this case, as out-of-control nerves and obsessive health-nuts, crossfit types, who are, not on purpose but merely through personal failings, experiencing things that aren’t really (or physically) happening to them. One could pair this with another explanation that the symptoms are the physical manifestation of guilt from people who were continuing on America’s dark legacy in Cuba. This slight variation, the Tell-Tale Heart scenario, is just another way to get at the same idea.

Here I suppose I should throw in another possible explanation besides psychosomatic or natural-but-unknown, which is the possibility that the victims made it up (or some number of them, especially towards the beginning) on purpose to advance their career or get some money. I view this as pretty unlikely, despite my suspicion of this type of person, and I haven’t seen anyone seriously suggest it so I’ll merely note and dismiss it, or, at least, classify it as “least likely”, for the sake of a complete review of the possibilities.

This possibility, hypochondria regardless of explanation (PMC goofiness vs. “are we the baddies?” guilt) was perhaps the first and most prominent counter-narrative, it seems supported by some of the physical evidence, or rather the lack of some crucial physical evidence. Specifically, at this point dozens of people have been examined by numerous experts in all sorts of niche medical fields, and have had the full clout and financial resources of the USA’s government trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. I can’t imagine there are tests to be run that haven’t been run yet, regardless of cost. And the medical community doesn’t seem to be able to agree on a physical explanation, backed up by some physical evidence, as to what has happened to these people. I think there is a tendency among people steeped in cultures that pride themselves for their “rationality,” and the USA is certainly one of those nations, there is a strong tendency to discount or underrate “irrational” impulses, urges and events. People in these places tend to think things like witch trial hysterics or mass irrationality are features of the past. This is simply not true, and people’s insistence that they and the people around them are enlightened and thus immune to irrationality and derangement is, somewhat ironically, itself deeply irrational. At the beginning this was the explanation that made the most sense to me and is still the one I tend to lean more towards when I think about Havana Syndrome.

The other fork off of the weapon-or-nah? split suggests that there is something physically happening, thus it isn’t in these folks’ heads, but that the cause isn’t a weapon, rather it is instead some heretofore unknown natural, environmental or biological phenomena. One more prominent version of this theory comes from Berkeley and University of London scientists who suggested these symptoms were caused by the song of a type of Cuban cricket (Anurogryllus celerinictus) Or, perhaps proximity to some sort of pollutant or pesticide is to blame. Global Affairs Canada, a government body, suggested as much in their report on the matter. The National Academy of Sciences reported suggested that the symptoms might be related to the then-current Zika virus, which Embassy staff were not tested for. These non-weapon theories have yet to find consensus, though they are being proposed by serious people with some evidence and shouldn’t be totally dismissed. It will be hard to disprove these theories, or ones like them, outside of a very convincing explanation. It’s pretty difficult to fully disprove the idea that something environmental that we don’t understand is doing something beyond our understanding, since we, by definition, know we don’t understand it. So these possibilities will always lurk in the background, but this explanation doesn’t feel very convincing to me.

So now that we’ve exhausted the endpoints not-a-weapon path, we can look at what happens if we assume that these injuries are being caused by a weapon. Two explanations present themselves at this point. First, the official story, which says that this theoretical weapon, The Beam as I’ve been calling it, is beyond the current understanding of the US Military-Industrial complex. This suggests we don’t know what The Beam is or really how it works, and we don’t have one, or some version of it, ourselves. This strikes me as unlikely for a couple of reasons. First, as stated more than once but really it can’t be harped on enough, the USA spends a lot of fucking money on “defense” and “research.” There’s the obvious stuff like the $750+billion a year we put directly into the Pentagon but, to get a real sense of the scope one would have to include organizations like the CIA, NSA and NASA, as well as things like government funding for certain projects at Universities, to name just a few examples, to actually get the full picture of how much we’re willing to spend to anticipate threats, develop technologies, “defend” American and maintain our imperial grip on much of the world. To me, the idea that another nation, even a big-defense-spender and a known irregular-warfare enthusiast like Russia doesn't spend fractions as much as we do and is constantly under surveillance and intelligence efforts from the USA and others. Under these conditions we’re to believe someone secretly built and deployed technology a)without the US or any of its allies knowing anything about it and, b) so technologically advanced that the limitlessly rich American Defense apparatus can’t identify it. Hard to believe.

Which leaves us with another explanation, that the powers that be do recognize these injuries since they themselves also have The Beam or equivalent technologies and understand their causes and effects. In this scenario they’re lying to the public by suggesting they don’t know what is causing these injuries, though it is possible that under these circumstances they still wouldn’t necessarily know which nation (or which non-nation-state-actor, like a terrorist group) is wielding The Beam. If The Beam does turn out to be real, this scenario seems more likely than the one described immediately above, i.e. The-Beam-is-real-and-beyond-American-tech, mostly because of the money and funding issue I outlined.

That leads us to ask, why would they lie about this? Why not tell us about The Beam and put all one’s cards on the table to get to the bottom of this strangeness? The most likely answer to this, it seems to me, is that they would very much like The Beam, or, more specifically, the American iteration, to remain a secret. Is this because they use The Beam in similar ways, against enemy diplomats, and this admission might lead people to look back at strange symptoms patterns from the past and identify possible American instigated Beam attacks? Likewise for the idea that The Beam has been used by these same agencies against American citizens here at home. The idea of a Beam is ubiquitous in gang-stalking accusations and the more fringe wing of US conspiracy talk, perhaps some instances of such Beam usage does exist in the past and the American Beam’s owners really don’t want journalists and others looking back into such accusations. Heavy suggestions of MKULTRA and other dark-arts projects float right up to the surface when one indulges speculation in this direction. Perhaps there is a fear that if our government admits that these attacks are the result of a weapon that we ourselves have a version of, but whose existence, creation and use was a secret, would cause renewed interests into what other sorts of secret weapons the US has, how much we’re really paid to create them and, if the weapon is secret, surely the ways in which its deployed are secret too, how we’ve used them.

A version of this happened, at a smaller scale, when WikiLeaks published their “Vault 7” findings which detailed secret technologies the CIA had created and deployed to fight cyberwars. They include tools to compromise smart devices, hack phones, insert and manipulate malware, hack and control cars from afar and all sorts of other devious tricks. They’ve been relentlessly pursuing the people responsible for this leak since it dropped in 2017 and are, as a write this, still harassing and tormenting Assange to foment suicidal madness. We just learned about their plans to kill him in a London shootout. All that’s to say if they’re willing to pursue a relatively smaller leak about some cyber tools, what would they do to protect information about much more dangerous and shocking Beam technology?

That’s a quick summary of issues and explanations surrounding Havana Syndrome. When given bizarre and ongoing news events, especially ones that involve dozens of actors, some of whom, like the CIA, are literally in the deception business, I think it’s helpful to admit one does not have all the facts, indeed it is more likely than not that certain facts are being withheld or spun on purpose, but to still try to follow out all the possible explanations. From there we can sort of rank the possibilities and when new information comes in we can reevaluate which scenarios now seem more likely and whether new explanations have presented themselves. At this junction, regarding Havana Syndrome, the most likely scenario to me is that most of the victims have been hit by a Beam, and that the American government knows much more about this technology than they’re admitting at present, but is acting faux-naively to protect American Beam tech. Second most likely, to me, is the psychosomatic explanation. After that I’d rank the theory that the symptoms are caused by something physical but unknown and thus there is no weapon. Least likely to me is the explanation most pushed through official channels, namely that these victims have been hit by a Beam of some sort by another country, using technology that we don’t know about.

What did it all mean?: CHAZ/CHOP Analysis

I’m writing this because I want us to win. Let me backup; we’re about a year out from the era of the CHOP. Specifically, during the afternoon of June 8th 2020, the Seattle Police Department, after over a week of constant protest on the population’s part and violence on SPD’s part (I wrote a whole different thing about the week of protests between George Floyd’s murder and the formation of CHOP), stoped patrolling or servicing the area around the East Precinct. Until they violently retook the station, arrested and roughed-up protesters and build a fence, first of cops then of metal, around the park in the early morning hours of July 1st the whole area, or zone, became the sight of one of the strangest and most unusual arrangements of power in the US this millennium. Like I said, I’d like to win, by which I mean live in a world without police and much closer to the loftiest values the CHOP aspired to, and while I don’t think we were very close at all to creating such a world at large or even lived up to those values while the CHOP existed (and, in many ways that I’ll get into, deeply betrayed some of these ideals), I do think there are lessons to learn and information to consider. 

As such, I’m not setting out to write a general history or a personal account. As I’ll get into, this whole event was phenomenally well-documented. People were, at all times and from all angles, filming and streaming and recording and documenting every aspect of these few blocks over those 22 days. It is quite possible to stitch together a complete document of the whole event from instagram streams alone and I’d certainly trust what you see on a stream over what you gather from me here. Any personal account would also leave much to be desired but would be especially lacking because I was nowhere near the most plugged-in or engaged person. I’ve written a brief narrative about my personal experience that is also on this website if you’re more interested in that. I was incredibly lucky that I lived 3 blocks from the north edge of Cal Anderson Park and 4 blocks from the East Precinct. While this meant I got woken up and stressed out by the blast bombs and low helicopter flights that typified this period, it also meant I was able to visit the CHOP every day for its existence (exempting Juneteenth, since there was a call for YT people to stay out of the space). I spent a few late nights, out till 4am walking around, and spent at least a few hours there a day but I was working during this time so I was not one of the people who was occupying through camping, nor was I one of the people arrested when they retook the station. All of these people, and there are a lot of them, know much more about this than me and what I say should be understood in this context. Likewise, I was only plugged into some of the projects. Most of my involvement centered around the daily General Assembly, which was inspired by a similar project at Occupy Wall Street (early on, people purporting to be “original organizers” of Occupy tried to teach us some of their tactics). I attended or attempted to attend almost daily and this was my main point of contact. My partner, who’s a teacher, and was on summer break, was able to go down more often and plugged into an art co-op and we both worked on supporting the people sleeping at the station itself, mostly through doing people’s laundry and walking around with a sign offering “Emotional Support.” That means I don’t have much first-hand experience with some of the other larger groups, like security (though I did spend time with them at the barricade a couple of nights) or the Black Star Farm collective who were doing the gardening (though I did help them pack up quickly after one of many “the cops are on their way right now” false alarms) nor any of the numerous free-stores/free food co-ops so, again, please keep that in mind when your evaluating what I’m saying. 

The material conditions that lead to the CHOP were so specific I don’t believe they could or will be recreated anywhere, even Seattle. In many ways the whole thing felt something like a very bizarre side-quest to a larger mission. Irregardless, I hope to squeeze some meaning out of the whole thing and, inshallah, help someone else, with goals similar to mine but in circumstances foreign, use these experiences and insights to avoid some of our mistakes and get closer than us to the ultimate prize.

When the cops pulled out on the 8th it wasn’t immediately clear what was going on. By the end of that day, when night fell and dozens of tents had shown up, along with a projector to show 13th, the police had not reappeared and folks immediately started making plans to hold this cop-free space for as long as possible. Later, we learned that the SPD were staged, along with the National Guard, at a nearby parking lot. Apparently, they were waiting for activists, with arson on their mind, to enter the station itself as their que to ride in and crack skulls as well as their way to let the public see there was no reasoning with these firebug anarchists. When this didn’t happen, it became clear they didn’t have a plan B and we, the protest community, ended up with this strange prize that no one had even considered the day before. While we were out daily chanting for George Floyd, no one was demanding or planning for the police to move out of one of their precincts and the surrounding area for 3 weeks. From the very beginning we wrestled with what to do with this strange set of circumstances and this tension is even reflected in the name of the space. 

THE CHAD CHAZ AND THE VIRGIN CHOP: NAMES, AUTONOMOUS ZONES, LEGACY

You might remember the CHOP as the CHAZ. CHAZ was among the first and the stickiest of the terms for the physical space. That very first day I saw graffiti welcoming people to “Free Capitol Hill” as well as to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. The first day I noticed that CHAZ was now mostly CHOP was on 6/14, based on graffiti and signage and what people would say when you talked with them. I have never met anyone who claims to have, or claims to know who, came up with any of these names. The “OP” in CHOP itself had 2 definitions, either Occupied Protest, or Organized Protest. I was given an explanation at one point that all of the land in Seattle is already an “occupied” piece of unceded Duwamish land. There was also an attempt, by some, to separate CHOP from the Occupy movement. However, by the time the name had changed to CHOP zone, CHAZ had already caught on and grew far outside of Seattle. The idea of an “Autonomous Zone” might end up being Seattle's most lasting contribution to the global justice movement during this uprising. I’ve seen/heard about “Autonomous Zones,” inspired directly by Seattle, being attempted in Portland (of course), New York City, Austin, Chicago, Asheville NC, Washington DC (where activists tried to create a Black House Autonomous Zone near 1600 Penn.) and I’m sure there are others. Recently, I’ve seen footage of protests in Colombia that have managed to secure the areas around abandoned police stations and journalists are calling them “autonomous zones.” I’m still trying to figure out if this is language that Colombian protesters are using for themselves and if they are aware/inspired by CHAZ. Something about the idea of an “Autonomous Zone” is clearly quite memorable and Seattle didn’t make it up.

 One way to trace the history might look back to Minneapolis in the very early days of the George Floyd uprisings, where someone had graffitied an “Auto Zone” store to read “Autonomous Zone.” Of course, this was the same AutoZone that was vandalized by the mysterious “Umbrella Man” who was one among the first subjects of the “Agent Provocateur'' discourse (and who, last I checked, Law Enforcement has decided was a right-winger), a discourse that would occupy an amazing amount of time in the CHOP. The phrase itself, “Autonomous Zone” comes from the famous-amongst-brainy-leftists book, TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONES by celebrity anarchist and pederasty advocate Hakim Bey. The basic idea is that we can and should create physical spaces that operate outside of the rules/regulations of the normal world. The most famous example of a space directly inspired by TAZ is Burning Man, and the book itself lists antecedents like medieval carnivals and pirate utopias. It’s actually this high-mindedness, this sort of hippy day-dream quality, that I believe doomed the original “CHAZ'' name. Completely predictably, the critique that the space was being used as a silly YTppl distraction cropped up almost immediately. The idea of a CHAZchella or that this was just another off-shoot of the Capitol Hill Block Party or the Summer of Love, to quote the mayor, was a very active critique, especially at the beginning. There’s a long, depressing history of once-vital protests movements being defanged and transformed into a sort of vague feel-good festival for the comfortable who want to feel like they’re “doing the work.” I was at a GA when a woman who claimed to be “in marketing” did suggest, in an amazing feat of self-parody, that CHOP ought to be rebranded as a “lifestyle” festival in order to win some goodwill back from regular citizens. The history of Pride, from literal riot to branding opportunity for Raytheon is a good example of this dynamic. Calling something an “Autonomous Zone'' rather than an “Occupied/Organized Protest” certainly leaves one wide open to critiques of adventurism or cerebral YT back-patting. But as I said before, while the critiques worked and a few days after the 14th I hardly saw CHAZ stuff at all, the “autonomous zone” meme was out, either inspiring leftists in other cities and nations or getting the rage-fueled attention of prominent right-wing goblins. While it didn’t last, the name Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone does beg the question, how autonomous was this zone?

HOW AUTONOMOUS WAS THE ZONE?: HOMELESSNESS, AUTONOMY AND A WORLD WITHOUT POLICE

On the most literal level, there really weren’t any cops coming into the greater CHOP area or the Polices station during those 22 days. They weren’t responding to 9-1-1 calls inside of the park or any other part of the CHOP proper. They also refused to coordinate with EMS, the Firefighters or the Mobile Crisis team (a group that is supposed to handle mental health emergencies, not uncommon in the CHOP, in a way that minimizes law enforcement presence) rendering these services likewise inaccessible to the CHOP. The SPD managed to be so obstructionist they almost certainly cost at least one of the shooting victims their lives. They seemed very determined to push the message that the police, and the much more beloved/respected firefighters/EMS workers, are a package deal.

 They also did not respond to calls near the CHOP. Even if you consider the CHOP as covering the maximum possible area (the boundaries shifted throughout its existence) the police treated residential areas nearby, like where I live, as no-go zones. This had nothing to do with the wishes of  protesters or the cops being genuinely worried about provoking violence, this had everything to do with turning the neighborhood against the protests. And, anecdotally, it worked. I spoke with neighbors who were ambivalent at the beginning and then against the Zone when they began to read stories about the violence and realized that they were also not going to receive police assistance. 

 Early in the CHOP era I witnessed a very intense standoff between the owners/employees/family members of an auto-repair shop located on the edge of the CHOP and a group of protesters. The owners of the shop were holding a man at gunpoint that they, the owners/employees/family members, claimed had been caught in the act of robbing and burning the building. Many of the protesters did not believe the owners’ story and wanted this man freed. Cops were called by people on both sides and they refused to respond. The tension reached a nearly murderous climax when protesters began pulling down the fence and some of the auto body people pointed guns at the crowd. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and no one died that night, but it was illustrative of the sorts of concerns and tensions that arise when the police are removed. This seemed to be a form of collective punishment for the neighborhood, in the hopes of turning sympathetic residents against the CHOP and thus eroding support. 

Beyond demonstrating their pettiness, the absence of the SPD in the neighborhood highlighted another ongoing issue. Seattle, like many large cities, especially on the West Coast, and especially recently, has a monstrous homelessness problem. This issue has a historical dimension; Seattle is not new to a huge slum-dwelling underclass. During the Depression, Seattle had one of the largest Hoovervilles, which today we’d just call a slum or a favela or a township, in what is now SODO. The term “skid row” as meaning “a run-down district full of the destitute” originates in Seattle and Yesler is the original Skid Row (the skids were from logs rolled down the hill to the docks). And the recent skyrocketing of housing prices has created a homelessness problem on a totally new scale. I work at a homeless shelter (right next to the historic Skid Row, in fact) so I’m fairly familiar with the phenomena and the way homelessness works and is policed in Seattle. What CHOP brought home for the whole city was the extent to which the police silently maintain the boundaries of the homelessness crisis. 

For instance, everyone knows we have a homelessness problem in Seattle. You can see it downtown, you can see it at our bigger tourist sites, you can see it looking out of your car on the highway. However, there are places in Seattle you can go to forget. Places where the SPD are much more diligent about clearing out the area. Cal Anderson used to be such a place. I’ve lived by the park for a few years now, I walk through the park everyday to get to work. Before CHOP, the longest you’d be able to sleep in Cal Anderson was a night or so. Occasionally, I would see people on the grass in the morning, sleeping peacefully in the dew. Rarely, would I see a solitary tent, clearly put up hastily, without the accouterments I’m used to seeing at a more permanent campsite (ie, platform for the tent, chairs and furniture outside, a tarp or some other way to keep out the rain, a generator in the more established and left-alone areas). These would inevitably be gone the next time I’d walk to the station. This is because Cal Anderson is a park in a nice, expensive part of the city where people complain if they have to see the results of our brutal economic system, so the cops used to make it their business to make sure the park was being used in the correct way, by the right sorts of people. 

Like much injustice and cruelty, this process was pretty ad hoc and slapdash. The homeless men I work with complain constantly about how the unofficial “rules'' about where one can and cannot camp change constantly and are seemingly based on the whims of the cops and the housed citizens. Camps in out-of-the-way highway traffic islands will last weeks or months until they grow large enough to be spotted from the road and are then broken up. Areas in more rundown segments of the city might last for months or years before someone decides they’re redeveloping the block and the tents are scaring off investors and the sweepers, formerly led by a group called the “Navigation Team,” who have actually since been defunded, a major victory for the movement, are called to begin the process of removal. 

As a side note, it’s important to remember that these sweeps are not only heartlessly cruel, they are also counter-productive and stupid, especially so during a pandemic. The homeless lose important documents, medications, cell phones with vital numbers (not to mention sentimental items like photographs of loved ones, etc.) constantly, a process that entrenches them further in homelessness and deepens mental health issues. They are supposed to be connected with shelters or temporary housing but, and I say this as someone who works in the business, this is a joke. The gap between the number of shelter beds and the number of homeless on a given night is in the thousands. But what this means in effect is that the SPD have imposed a set of rules and boundaries that apply to the homeless. While these rules are constantly on the minds of the homeless, the “regular” or housed Seattleite in the nicer neighborhoods is able to forget them (or never consider or learn them) and indulge the fantasy that they live in a city that isn’t as cruel as it is. The SPD, and the city as a whole, put lots of time and effort into maintaining this fantasy.  In the “normal” world, which is to say, the policed parts of Seattle (which, like most “normals,” doesn’t actually include most people in the city), there is a fantasy that there isn’t a mental health crisis in the state. We don’t live in a society that funds mental health care or has humane options for those who happen to be poor and mentally unwell, but the SPD can make it look like we do. Instead of bringing reality in-line with what we can tolerate seeing we’ve authorized the police to adjust what we might see. With the CHOP, the SPD decided to punish the neighborhood by reversing the fantasy and constructing a sort of projected nightmare-world without police, to act as a literal example of what would happen to all of Seattle if we weren’t nicer to cops and didn’t shut up about this defund the police stuff.

In some sense, Seattle is already full of “autonomous zones” if we use the phrase to mean an area where the police are not patrolling or enforcing rules. It’s just that they’re typically called encampments and they’re less overtly political than the Capitol Hill version. But if the main feature is a lack of police oversight, these places fit the bill. And they struggle with the same issues the CHOP had to deal with and, sadly, I don’t think we did a good enough job learning from these situations and we, sadly, recreated some of the exact systems we were looking to correct. 

Let me be more clear. One of the major problems with homeless camps (and I’m basing this here off my experience with them working in homeless services, which occasionally involves encampment outreach and puts me in close contact with people who’ve lived this way for years and years. I’m no expert and I’ve never personally lived in a camp so take whatever I’m saying here with that in mind.) has to do with how you protect against internal and external threats. As you might imagine, a homeless encampment is likely to feature people who don’t know each other super well, people who have serious drug problems, people experiencing severe mental health issues, people exhibiting strange behavior. It also attracts people looking to take advantage of this quasi-lawless zone through drug-dealing or mugging or general destructiveness/violence. All of these elements were present at CHOP, supercharged because the news that this area was cop-free was widely disseminated. It was big news across the city that there was a part of Seattle the police were staying out of, what sorts of people do you think that attracted?

So, of course, the question became, how do we deal with this sort of behavior and these threats? How do we create a space that is both radical and open and free but also manages to provide safety and security to protesters? Like I said, I don’t think we handled this well. In fact, at many points we recreated the exact power dynamics that the larger protest sought to destroy. By which I mean that “security” often came down to groups of armed folks who at first we’re largely from the John Brown Gun Club, an organization that we knew about from before the George Floyd protests, but after the JBGC quit there were ad hoc groups, most prominently a group calling themselves The Sentinels, that took it upon themselves to “protect” the space. It was never clear to me exactly what their goal was. They didn’t shoot it out with the cops when the police came to retake the building. Theoretically, they were protecting against a Right-Wing assault (there was a large facebook group of self-proclaimed “Bikers 4 Trump,” who were, ostensibly, organizing to invade on the 4th of July. The CHOP was gone by then and the only motorcycle gang I ever saw in the space was a Black club called the Buffalo Soldiers MC) but that also didn’t really materialize. I have heard from others, but did not myself witness, a story about them stopping a group of people bent on burning the station down at one point. I spent a few late nights watching barricades and wandering around the borders and did see Chuds drive up and flash YTpower hand-signals, and pistols and their lights at the people behind the barricades. At one point a group of locally infamous Proud Boys walked through and did not assault anyone until they were off CHOP territory. So perhaps the Chud would have attacked or shot up the CHOP had the Sentinels (what the armed group was calling itself by the end) not been there, but I find this unlikely.

Instead, what this meant in practice was a bunch of different people, many of whom were armed, were going around trying to provide security and safety. As you can imagine, this role wasn’t selecting for people with the emotional maturity and subtly to do this job. Much like police departments, it was attracting people exactly the opposite sort of persona that you’d actually want in that job. Again, I work in a homeless shelter and manage conflict there constantly. What 80% of these self-appointed security folks were doing was very basic rookie mistake stuff that comes from a mindset that I can only call cop-adjacent. What is boils down to is a person who is not involved and doesn’t know the people involved, coming into a volatile or conflicted situation and seeking to impose their will and “solve” the issue as quickly as possible by making a decision about the way things should be and who is wrong and how people should be acting then imposing that decision on others as much as was possible. 

Additionally, the CHOP had the unfortunate dynamic of problems escalating due to passerby interest or rumor. Again, this is something I’m familiar with from my work but, basically, if you have 2 people in conflict, adding an audience will make the situation more volatile and the people in conflict less likely to back down. At the CHOP this dynamic manifested itself almost daily. People or small groups of people would disagree or get upset with each other or otherwise get into conflict and as they got louder or became more physically aggressive crowds would form and other “security” people would arrive to “solve” the situation. The audience makes people dig their heels in in order to save face while the waves of “security” people often gave conflicting demands that they thought would be solutions, since each subsequent wave of “security” personnel had less context than the one before. This was most dramatic to me in the car-lot stand-off that I described above where protesters and the shop-owners would calm down and talk to one another and get close to a resolution before a wave of people would show up because they’d heard some crazy rumor about some guy holding someone hostage and would inflame a situation that they were just entering and didn’t fully understand. This back-and-forth played out a few times at the car-lot and fortunately didn’t get anyone killed but did make clear a dynamic that plagued us.

Likewise, there was tons of attention, thoughts and resources coordinating communication, from walkie-talkies to encrypted chats (and long, tedious-to-me, discussions of what encryptions services are/aren’t ops) in order to be able to rush people to the site of an attack or problem when we needed to be figuring out how to do the opposite. How can we coordinate to take the pressure and escalation level down at sites of conflict? Instead of making sure our communication is as fast as possible, how do we shut down dangerous, hyperbolic rumors? Sadly, in our effort to move closer to a world without police, we allowed an unaccountable, armed group to reproduce some of the police’s worst qualities and failed, on a large scale, to behave as the sorts of people who can live without police.

HOW WE SPOKE TO ONE ANOTHER: LEADERSHIP, COMMUNICATION, PARANOIA, GOALS 


In this section I’d like to discuss some of the things I witnessed and heard about w/r/t communication (both inter and intra CHOP), leadership and structure. Of course, these questions were ever-present. They were discussed within and between the Coӧps, the various security teams, the gardeners, etc. My main exposure here comes from the People’s Assembly/General Assembly (it never seemed like we landed on a name), which I tried to attend as much as possible during the CHOP-era. As you might be able to imagine, it was difficult to establish a set time and place for a daily meeting. In the beginning I spent many a frustrated afternoon waiting around for a meeting that had either already happened or had been cancelled without my knowledge. However, through the herculean effort and determination of a handful of protesters, we did have a bit of a groove going by the end. The format allowed for people to speak to a large-ish (I’d say maybe around 50 most days) group. 

There were people who had the same routine each assembly. Among them were people who were focused on chanting and getting the crowd pumped up and excited, which was slightly out of resonance with the “discussion and listening” vibe the majority were trying to create. There was a one of the self-appointed security guys who would, while 2 guns were strapped to his body, go on a long rant, which remained remarkably similar day to day, in which he’d stress that he was here for the movement and here for peace but if anyone was going to threaten the safety or integrity of the movement (he was particularly obsessed with “whiteboy anarchists”), he wouldn’t hesitate to kill. He’d end the speech, often in tears, saying, “don’t make me kill you” which was at first disturbing but he did it so often it became tedious, as in, “yes yes, the “don’t make me kill you” speech, we know, let’s move on.” There was a man in a yellow vest, who was, in fact, supporting an American Gilets Jaunes organization who gave a speech almost every time about how some of us were CIA agitators and snitches and he was going to figure out who exactly. I actually recognized him from before the GA meetings. On one of the first days of CHOP I saw a man walking up and down the park screaming that he knew that some of us here were CIA affiliated “agitators and agents'' and he was going to root them out. He was confronted because he’d been using the term “Spook” which he insisted referred to a spy while folks in the crowd tried to get him to understand why a YT man yelling, “spook” at a BLM-focused occupation might be a problem. Everyday there were several people who’d get up to give long tedious rants about the tenets of Satyagraha and how powerful non-violence is. It’s these last two recurring issues I’d like to drill down on.

I think one of our big problems was even how we were speaking to and about one another. I think this issue manifested itself in two major ways, one was an unnecessary and non-productive level and type of paranoia, another was an inability to speak in concrete and avoid heroic but vague rhetoric. 

The first problem is fairly self-explanatory and was a problem since before the CHOP zone even existed. During the week of siege and marches beforehand, rumors swirled about which march leaders were working with cops or trying to lead people into getting arrested or who were only interested in raising their profile. This dynamic continued and became worse during the CHOP era. We were constantly derailed trying to organize due to this sort of paranoia. We’d get to a place where we’d want to share information, say phone numbers, and people would strongly caution against it. People would be suspicious of question asking. It was hard to get “real” names for bail funds. This wasn’t at meetings discussing illegal activity, this was, as far as I could tell, basically a concern to some degree at every meeting of any sort. One protester summed it up nicely at a People’s Assembly when he told the crowd he wasn’t interested in playing a game of “secret Hitler” with everyone he talked with and begged the crowd to move on. 

It’s important to note that it, of course, isn’t without precedent that the government would use sneaky and/or illegal means and infiltrators/snitches/plants to break up a social movement it didn’t care for. Historically, it would be much more unlikely that this didn’t happen. I, of course, witnessed bizarre behavior from “activists” that made me question their motives and allegiances. Perhaps years from now it’ll come out that people I considered very commendable and admirable turn out to be stooges, the Ernest Withers story comes to mind, and I’ll change my position on this. But, I believe, we sadly did the devil’s work for him when we erred so far on the side of paranoid caution we slowed ourselves down. Despite people constantly bringing up COINTELPRO (and often tediously presenting it as new information that none of us, in an anarchist People's Assembly, had heard of before) and related programs, people seemed to miss one of the major lessons to draw from that history. Namely, not only was it the goal of the FBI and others to spy on and infiltrate radical organizations in order to steal actual information, it was also important that those organizations know they were being spied on and infiltrated in order to breed a debilitating mistrust. You can read memo after memo where the FBI is trying to get the Black Panthers to spend all their time “snitch hunting.” We were already weakened by not having a variety and diversity of preexisting structures of organization as well as the normal, American, I-don’t-know-my-neighbor dislocation but we further disadvantaged ourselves by adding to this a harsh layer of suspicion, disguised as hard-nosed realism. It was inspiring that this attitude, as you would guess, melted somewhat over time as people began to recognize one another and, if not learned to agree and get along, at least learned to let their guard down slightly. And, wonderfully, tons of new organizations grew out of connections forged in the CHOP. However, we lost a lot of time and momentum letting ourselves be paralyzed with suspicion. 

The other issue is a little more slippery but no less pernicious. There was a problem people had with their tone and register when they were talking to a group. The countless People’s Assemblies and Community Meetings and Discussions I saw all had a similar problem where everyone who spoke wanted to be the person who gave the rousing, soaring, inspiring speech, the one that threw a harsh light on YTsupremacy and pointed a way forward, but it was very hard to speak about current, material concerns. Again and again, people would plead for speakers to stay on topic and talk about, for example, ways to deal with the increasingly frequent public mental health incidents, or the fireworks instead of delivering another verbal manifesto. Perhaps this is the result of our culture. One sees Malcolm X’s speeches in the movies, not the long, tedious, logistical meetings about getting everyone to the Mosque safely under violent police oppression. Our culture, even on the Left, is so hierarchical it only publicly acknowledges the labor of the people at the very top, it’s the same mindset that sees people like Bezos or Musk as the major driving forces in their respective companies. And this mindset drips down to the point that large groups were more interested in writing a “new bill of rights” than organizing for the short-term survival of the CHOP.

Finally, there was an issue with streamers/”new media” folks/documentarians. Technology has made it so that basically anywhere you are, someone is streaming off their phone, broadcasting live at all moments. The CHOP showcased this instinct to an extreme, and, like I said, you can basically watch any moment of the whole event from a dozen angles. Beyond just being a strange experience to walk around an area where everyone is filming themselves and everyone else at all moments (perhaps I should just get used to that) this created 2 problems for the movement itself. The first has to do with police surveillance. I know I just went on and on about people being too paranoid about a certain type of informant, but in the same breath I would stress that the police very much are watching all the social media and documentation going on at all these events. A woman was caught, allegedly, burning cop cars in downtown Seattle based on zoomed in streams that showed her distinct knuckle tattoos that matched an Esty account. As the event went on, people got much better about not streaming every moment and basic best-practice things like not filming the protesters (even when they’re bloc’d up), instead focusing on the police, but we had to stop people from streaming multiple times at every single GA meeting. The second problem, beyond security, is that the streaming makes, definitionally, anything you're filming a spectacle. It removes you from the event, you’re no longer a participant or a curious bystander, you’re documenting what’s going on. You’re actively trying not to influence the events, to remain impartial; you’re just trying to report. We didn’t need more people to report what was going on, if anything, we needed the whole thing to seem intriguing and curious so people would come check it out and see for themselves. We needed few people “documenting” and “making content” behind a screen and more people engaged and plugged in.

Conclusions

Overall, I think we failed to get the most out of the CHOP situation largely based on never coming to an internal agreement over what we were trying to do. Were we trying to fortify, defend and hold this few block area? Was the goal to expand the boundaries and try to disrupt the city as much as possible to force change? Were we seeking to send representatives to bargain with the city, now that we had some leverage? Were we trying to build a model society in this weird liminal space? Again, no one had planned for this outcome. No one was suggesting we’d protest until we drove the police clear out of the neighborhood and then occupy the streets for weeks. Obviously, this went double for the police. They had expected folks to burn the station and give them a reason to crack skulls and look like the good guys again (in the week before the CHOP was formed, they were getting a lot of bad press w/r/t gassing sleeping children). When this didn’t happen they also didn’t know what to do or how to handle the public perception. What ended up happening, from a public perception point of view, was a flourishing of goodwill and interest before the idea of violent anarchy was pushed really hard, throw in a few “unsolved” murders and it became possible for the SPD to retake the station. I here I mean “possible” politically. The SPD always could have rolled up and flashbanged-or-worse’d their way in. Nominally, the leftist gun-toters were there to stop that but I have a hard time believing that most/many/any of them were really ready to shoot it out with the cops. And when the police did roll up, they were gone. So what really changed with what the police thought would be acceptable and I would say the pivot on this perception hinges on the Larenzo Anderson murder on the night of the 19th. From the very beginning there was the perception that the CHOP was violent. Fox News ran a famously photoshopped image of burning chaos and attributed it to Seattle but in the city itself the vibe was much chiller for the first week or so. There were lots of kids and families, there were lots of teens and curious older folks (and, of course, very deeply involved, political older folks and teens present the whole time) wandering through and checking out the scene. This was deep in the pandemic and at the beginning of summer, there was nowhere else to hang out. The CHOP’s earliest days offered lots of creative free services and tons of eye-catching art. While this did bleed over into a CHOPchella attitude and did attract people who were coming to take pictures and not engage with the politics this was also the most creative time and the time when the most outcomes seemed possible. 

However, simply removing the police does not make a utopia and as we faced conditions (that should have been predictable if we’d listened to our homeless comrades about the dynamics and dangers of encampment life) that got more violent (you can read my tinfoil hat section about the ways in which I think the police aided this) we didn’t respond as well as we could have and were often mirroring the structures we seek to abolish.

I also think it was a mistake to never have never made a clear demand about the station itself. Seattle has a number of buildings that began as occupations. The DayBreak Star Cultural Center, El Centro de la Raza, The NWAA History Museum (which, at the time of this writing, is the subject of another occupation, which also features a garden from Black Star Farmers) all trace their history to a group seizing the building and holding them until a deal was worked out where the physical space and building was given over to the community. My two cents: people have been trying for years to get a safe consumption site as part of a larger campaign to end the genocidally racist War on Drugs and a former police station makes some poetic sense. And we certainly don’t have enough low-incoming housing or community centers, all of which would be infinitely better than a police station. But, for a variety of factors, there was never a clear demand w/r/t the building issued to the city. 

I don’t want to be overly critical or suggest that the CHOP was a total failure/mistake/waste of time. In fact, quite the opposite. On a personal level I saw some unbelievable things and got to be part of some really exciting actions and conversations. Many of the problems stemmed from us, the protest community, not knowing each other and trusting one another and the shared experience of the CHOP has made future actions easier. Put simply, I now know which people I trust and can work with. In Seattle as a whole, we’re still fighting over the CHOP’s legacy. As part of an attempt to save face, the city gave over some property in the Central District to a Black-run organization. A majority of the City Council committed to defunding the SPD, which, of course, they, like cowards, have walked back since the summer of 2020. As it stands at the time of this writing, the SPD is down 20% from pre-CHOP funding levels. Not what we wanted but at least we’ve stopped the limitless increases of the previous years. Additionally, over 270 cops have quit the SPD and I have to feel like CHOP was at least part of that. I’ve been on  dozens of marches since last summer and the police have a much more hands off approach, generally, which I also credit the CHOP with. A handful of organizations and networks sprung up at CHOP and are still ongoing. There are candidates running for all sorts of local offices now running on some version of “defund the police” so we’ll see over the next few years if some legislative inroads get made. And, like I said towards the beginning, the idea of an Autonomous Zone or protesters trying to hold an area for any amount of time has proved incredibly sticky and we’re seeing examples pop up all over. As someone who started getting political around the Iraq War, I’ve always associated the American Left of my lifetime as having a tinge or more of a destined-to-lose mindset or a hopelessness in the face of a system that seems like it will go on forever. Maybe other arrangements and systems are possible, here we have a lived example of stranger, unplanned possibilities arising. Next time will both look different and we have an obligation to push it further. I’m hoping that some of the things I noticed and criticized here will allow us to do just that. 


ADDENDUM: TINFOIL HAT SECTION

While I want to take my own advice and not spend this essay playing “Secret Hitler'' I would like to use this addendum to briefly indulge and speculate and answer some of the “are we being GLADIO’d/COINTELPRO’d/MHCHAOS’d/CONUS’d?” questions. Like I said, if you want to get more in depth, and say, get my opinion about which CHOP people were working with the police, I’d love to speak with you in person about it. I don’t think I want to “publish” my more specific suspicions but I would like to speculate more broadly on some troubling trends. 

All that being said, there does/did seem to be some level of police protection for the most violent on both the Left and the Right  and I will speculate directly on a situation in Portland. On the Right, it’s quite clear; obviously police departments, law enforcement agencies generally, and the military attract a reactionary, Right-Wing type person so it is no surprise that rank-and-file officers are consistently caught with III%er tattoos or Proud Boy affiliations. Some of those that work forces, etc. What’s been interesting since Jan. 6th is the discovery that the leadership of these organizations are, in fact, working with and/or controlled by police. The leadership of both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, despite all their anti-government posturing, turned out to be FBI “informants.” There’s, of course, the tail-wagging-the-dog question with these revelations but it also brings to mind groups like the Legion of Justice, or the SOA, 60’s Right-Wing groups, made up of “off-duty” cops, who were able to get violent against Left-Wing threats. 

There’s something different happening on the Left. Let’s look at the two of the most prominent and dramatic events from last summer in the PNW. In Portland, on Halloween night, a man named Michael Forest Reinoehl shot and killed a member of a Patriot Prayer, a group of violent dipshits from Vancouver, Washington. A few days later, Federal Marshalls and local cops murdered Reinoehl outside of an apartment building in Lacy, Washington, shortly after Trump called for his extra-judicial killing. He died with a gun in his pocket that witnesses (including a literal pastor) and common sense (the cops are suggesting he drew a gun, fired, returned the gun to his pocket then got shot to death) say he didn’t draw, which puts this whole incident in the Fred Hampton-style domestic death-squad territory. Seems open-and-shut, the police are Right-Wing, they were personally offended when one of their own (ie the Patriot Prayer goon) got killed and they sought revenge, knowing they wouldn’t get in trouble. It’s almost the inverse of the Kyle Rittenhouse situation and illustrates what side the cops are on.

However, I’d like to pause on Reinoehl for a moment and highlight some interesting biographical details. Firstly, he reported multiple times that he’d been in the Army but he “hated it,” and the Army itself, as of the time of this writing, have sent mixed signals about exactly what he did in the Army or whether he was in the Army at all. More interestingly, his posting about “Social Justice Issues” as well as his “100% ANTIFA” quote only started after he’s arrested on June 8th. That night, he was caught on the highway, drag racing, at speeds over 100mph, with his underage son in another car and his underage daughter in his. He had weed, prescription pills, a large dog and an unregistered gun in the car, on top of driving under the influence. He walked away from this incident and failed to appear in court roughly a month later. In the meantime, he got himself caught with a loaded gun in public on July 5th in downtown Portland, where he also resisted arrest. Again, he spent no time behind bars and the charges were dropped without explanation. It’s not even clear if the cops kept his gun or gave it back to him. He wasn’t actually plugged into any of the larger Antifa groups, like Rose City Antifa, but his social media was full of stuff talking about him being Antifa and how Antifa needed to get more serious and start fighting violently. Like I said, the police made no attempt to arrest him, they simply murdered him in broad daylight so we’ll never get his side of the story. 

So perhaps we need to broaden our understanding of what we think of as infiltration or undercovers or ops or whatever terminology we want to use. I think folks are hung up on the more traditional William O’Neil (who infiltrated the Black Panthers and helped kill Fred Hampton) or Raymond Wood (who worked undercover for the NYPD and FBI and helped kill Malcom X) style infiltration where someone who seems like a protester is actually and consciously a double-agent who is gathering information and purposefully subverting the movement. Instead, what we have here looks looser and less controlled, closer to the agent provocateur model. Instead of the classic undercover (tho, I’m sure they were there too) we have the police adding violent people to the mix and who are making sure they don’t face consequences. 

We can look to history, local Seattle history, to see examples of this as well. In May of 1970 the Seattle police were tipped off by the FBI that the local Black Panthers were targeting a local real estate company called Hardcastle Reality since they were engaging in red-lining and otherwise profiting of decimating the Central District. A police informant, a man named Alfred Rudolph "Alfie" Burnett, who was facing robbery charges, had convinced an a-political Vietnam veteran named Larry Ward to help him bomb the Hardcastle office, on the corner of 23rd & Union. When they arrived the police were already waiting for them. Ward attempted to flee;  Officer John Hannah killed him with a shotgun blast to the back. Burnett himself was never charged with anything and never appeared in court, even for the civil trail initiated by Ward’s son. 

There did seem to be an attempt, especially after the early peace&love, summer of love, reports, to paint the CHOP as violent, unsafe and full of armed maniacs. More broadly, it plays into There is No Alternative (TINA) or Thin Blue Line arguments that keep this world in place. Namely, that the way we have the world set up now, especially w/r/t the police, is the only possible arrangement and as soon as we try something else or criticize we’re plunged into a world of chaos and violence that makes the “real world” seem all that more appealing. It reminds me of people who suggest you “move to Somalia” when you say you’re an anarchist.

On the Seattle front there has likewise been a puzzling lack of police attention on what I’d broadly describe as the “gun folks.” Reinoehl, despite not being part of a group, apparently spent his nights in Portland, “breaking up fights.” There was no shortage of this sort of person in Seattle, a man who has deputized themselves to “solve conflict” but, since they’re unskilled and boneheaded, they typically escalated the situation. They seemed sus at the time, many of them were quoted extensively by ignorant journalists (the “don’t make me kill you” guy got prominent, uncritical coverage in the NYT) and almost all of them vanished as mysteriously as they arrived.

The most extreme example of this is the second murder, the one of Pocket/Mays, which acted as the death knell for the CHOP as a physical space. I’ve heard alot of recollections and theories about what exactly happened that night, and while I won’t rehash the specifics here (talk to me in person for that), I will say it remains interesting that no one has been arrested, let alone convicted, for this pretty spectacular murder. This 16 year-old was killed outside of a police station, in an area of Seattle surrounded by cameras and full of people who were constantly live streaming. I do not believe the station was not under surveillance by the authorities at the time of the shooting. It is not very hard to get a list of people responsible from basically anyone who had any connection to the CHOP. So maybe the cops were genuinely in the dark about who did they and maybe they made a good faith effort to solve this crime and maybe it’s possible that everyone involved, as either a participant, witness or someone who knows through the grapevine, has refused to speak with police and kept their mouth shut, frustrating their legitimate investigation. This would be the first time in the history of Leftwing militants in the USA that this has ever happened, that we were able to hold our own version of the Blue Wall of Silence or Omerta, but maybe. Or, there are other reasons the police don’t want this killing solved or the people involved with the killings discovered, both because the murders played into their narrative about the CHOP and because the nature of their relationship to the killer(s) might be less than savory. Seattle also briefly hosted national figures who seem to be not all the way on the level, like John Earle Sullivan and Dan Baker. Alright, that’s the furthest out, most conspiratorial I’m prepared to get in this essay. Again, these more sensitive and speculative topics are ones that I am interested in but would insist on discussing in the meat-space. 


https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/09/capitol-riot-oath-keeper-fbi/

https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/08/man-under-investigation-in-fatal-shooting-after-pro-trump-rally-allegedly-took-loaded-gun-to-earlier-portland-protest.html

https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/09/arrest-warrant-against-michael-reinoehl-for-2nd-degree-murder-unlawful-use-of-a-firearm-unsealed.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_and_Michael_Reinoehl

ADDENDUM ii: THE OFFICAL ACCOUNT

We, the public, have now been made aware of the official story w/r/t the abdondoment of the East Precinct, first through a KUOW story, originally published July 9th 2021, and, more officially, through the Office of Police Accountability report (case number: 20200PA-0354) which was released to the public on the 30th of September 2021. I’ll start with a brief disclaimers about the sources. KUOW is a source I find somewhat trustworthy. They’re the typical NPR station. Seattle is home to a large, large number of NPR-liberals, who are almost exclusively PMC-types who are focused on incremental change and would bristle at the suggestion that the SPD isn’t fixable with some bureaucratic tinkering. I find their police coverage pretty naive. The OPA is a different story, like police accountability boards across the country, they are themselves an arm of the SPD and routinely let off cops for literal murder. The idea that they’d hold a cop accountable for anything is laughable. That being said, it is unsurprising that the OPA document finds that no cop did anything wrong, they all tried their best and if there is blame to go around, it’s not SPD’s. Long story short, the cops didn’t want to change anything about the pre-CHOP arrangement besides getting bigger and better barricades. Eventually the mayor, over the objections of the police, orders them to open the streets (12th st. and Pine St.) with the hopes that the protesters would march by. According to the OPA and KUOW the police chief, Best, delegates the authority to make this happen to Assistant Chief Tom Mahaffey, the incident commander, who hates the idea of leaving the precinct but eventually gets cops to empty the station of valuables (evidence, guns, etc.) and abandons it totally (originally, there was a plan to leave some cops in the station itself, but this was eventually deemed too dangerous). This seems like careful buck-passing to me, a bunch of people who don’t want to be thought of as responsible for what happened. Page 20 of the OPA reads, “Ultimately, the evidence is confliction as to whether NE#1 (Best) approved of the plan to evacuate the East Precinct, or if NE#2 (Mahaffey) mad this decision independently. OPA believes it is much more likely that this ambiguity was the result of a number of complicated decisions being made during a highly stressful rapidly evolving situation.” So ultimately we’re left in a situation where no one cop (nor any number of cops) can be held accountable since the decision was complicated and stressful, and since creating such situations is the role of the OPA all we’re seeing here is a job well done.

Some things did stick out to me in the OPA report, first, it is interesting to me that the report mentions again and again that the FBI Seattle Field office was consistently telling the mayor and others that they had “good intelligence” that the protesters meant to burn down the station. Later, the report notes that WO#3 (identified as the Assistant Chief - Criminal Investigations Bureau, aka Deanna Nollette) reached out to the FBI letting them know that the protesters had “painted over SPD’s exterior precinct cameras” and they needed help since the FBI “had resources in the group of protesters.” By its own admission the OPA did not have access to whatever intelligence the FBI was passing on to the police and mayors office so they don’t look further into it. We don’t find out where the FBI was getting it’s intelligence (which turned out to be quite incorrect), we don’t figure out how they got this intelligence (informants? Intercepted calls/text?, reading social media?) which is especially concerning given the FBI’s history with activists and leftists. Seems like we were COINTELPRO’d. The OPA wrote, “The OPA cannot discern any motive for the threat to the precinct to have been either fabricated or exaggerated.” which I guess tell you all you need to know about the mindset of the OPA. Why would the famously honest FBI lie? Why would the police overstate the dangers posed by protesters they’re gleefully assaulting nightly? The OPA can simply not discern a reason. The report is strange for how often it mentions that basically everyone in a position of power thought the protesters would burn down the building as soon as they got the chance, yet abandoned it anyway. Presumably, to allow protesters to try which would allow the police to come back in and look like heroes. And, as an aside, as someone in the crowd, we were all aware that the East Precinct is connected to other buildings and is quite close to a number of residential structures, no serious person was suggesting we do that. Likewise, there was a smaller group of people who suggested that if the barriers were down and the police gone, the crowd would simply march by the station and leave. Both of these ideas were very, very stupid and are helpful in showing how disconnected and confused anyone in authority was about these demonstrations.

Otherwise, it was good to read from a cop that the panicked evacuation of the East Precinct was “gut-wrenching” for the police. An officer is quoted as saying it was “hugely demoralizing” and he saw many officers “crying” and that this was “one of the most difficult events that I’ve been through in my life” (what a great life) which does make the whole situation seem like more of a win for the protesters. I don’t think it was reasonable to expect that we’d hold the station forever, but putting the police into a hard situation that caused hundreds of them to quit and more of them to feel bad while on the job should be counted as a success.

Finally, there is one last aspect I’d like to touch upon. According to the report, if the station wasn’t burned down, it was always the plan to return to the precinct after the protesters had marched past. The OPA claims, on page 4, that, “However by 5:31 A.M. [on June 9, the first day of the CHOP] SPD officers reported that their efforts to gain access to the area around the East Precinct had been stopped by an armed individual who ordered the police off of the protesters’ “sovereign land.” This does not seem true at all. I never heard this story from anyone at the CHOP, I never heard anyone claiming to be this individual, it strains credulity that an armed person stopped police officers, plural, from going to work. In your experience, if someone with a gun tells a cop to leave, what would happen to them? Even if we imagine that they weren’t immediately shot to death, don’t you think they’d be arrested later? No follow up on this guy at all?

https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/OPA/ClosedCaseSummaries/2020OPA-0354ccs093021.pdf

https://www.kuow.org/stories/we-know-who-made-the-call-to-seattle-police-s-east-precinct-last-summer-finally

What Happened at the CHOP? A narrative.

Note: This is adapted from a journal I kept during this period. People’s names are obviously not in it and I’ve changed or removed some sections because I don’t want anyone to go to jail. If you read this and are interested in a specific part, we can talk about it in person.

I wrote a whole other thing about the days leading up to the formation of the CHOP so I’ll skip to Monday the 6th. At this point the police had erected fences and concrete barriers around the East Precinct, with 2 on Pine Street and 2 on 12th street. Every barricade had protesters but typically the largest group gathered at the 11th and Pine barricade. Every night drew thousands of protesters who yelled and chanted until we were gassed and beaten off. A handful of people, typically older people who didn’t want to be present for the spicier stuff, would sit or stand and protest during the day, so there was a constant presence. I live very close to this intersection, less than a 5 minute walk, so I was not only able to walk down every night, I could hear the bombs from my apartment. The night of the 7th was particularly violent. We received a brutal gassing and a protester was shot in the chest with a less-than-lethal round and needed medics to revive her. The police, of course, also attacked this medic. 

I don’t work Mondays and the 8th was a Monday so I went down in the morning, around 11 and noticed construction on the fence and protesters. The police and National Guard, who were also present, often moved around the barriers and fences during the day to try out different formations. I checked in again around 5 and noticed fencing around the station itself and lots of cops leaving on a bus together. I thought this was strange but figured maybe it was a shift change and went back to my house to eat before the nightly protesting. At 8, when I walked back, it was completely different. The barricades were down. The East Precinct was boarded up but you could walk right up to it. You could touch it. There was not a police-person in sight. It felt victorious and like a trap. They clearly wanted someone to break in so they could return and swarm. It was clear the police would return in an instant if we broke in. Apparently, they told protesters as they left that they would not allow the building to be burned. We’ve learned since then that they were waiting less than a mile away in a grocery store parking lot ready to swoop back in and demolish the anarchist firebugs they were so sure were in the crowd. This turned out to be as dumb as it sounds, we weren’t interested in burning a building, we were interested in abolishing to police. It also became quite clear that the police didn’t have a plan B when it turned out no one set the building on fire. As of this writing it is still not known who gave in order to abandon the station, with the Mayor, Police Chief and Fire Marshall all blaming each other and telling the courts their text messages from this time period are gone for some reason. Personally, and this is speculative, I assume the order was given by a Federal agency of some sort, specifically the FBI or the DHS, both of whom were all over the city at this point, and since this plan didn’t work, they’ve been pressuring the Seattle folks to do them a favor and keep quiet. Either way, the Seattle Times is suing the mayor and other relevant actors to get these texts, again, supposedly deleted by mistake, so I’ll update this when/if we find anything out.

 People immediately began giving speeches and talking about next steps and made plans to occupy. Within an hour there were several tents pitched in the road in front of the station. When I left that night people had set up a projector and were watching 13th. 

The tents that were put up the first night to encourage around-the-clock occupation

The tents that were put up the first night to encourage around-the-clock occupation

By the next day, the zone was named and in full swing. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, CHAZ, as it was already called in numerous graffiti posts, had expanded down Pine and into Cal Anderson Park. I’ll get into the CHAZ vs CHOP in another post, but it should be pointed out how sticky that original name was, we were all over twitter and the news those first days.

The Barricade on 12th

The Barricade on 12th

IMG_20200610_201551.jpg

The next day, there were huge crowds on the Bobby Morris playfield, the flat field on the southern edge of Cal Anderson, listening to speeches. The Seattle Teachers’ Union was the most vocal about getting the Police Union out of the labor movement. On the side streets, 10th and 11th, there were more mutual aid tents, including ones that give out hot food, which is a real step up from the Cliff Bar sort of fair that had been on offer in the pre-CHOP days. The barricade had been moved, now blocking 2 points on 12th and 2 on Pine but further out and more fortified, with cars and dumpsters. Cars-used-as-weapons driving into the area was (and is) a major concern. A few days before this a man had tried to run his car into the protesters, got out and non-lethally shot someone. Turned out to be the cousin of a cop, but I’m sure that’s a coincidence. The John Brown Gun Club was doing the security the first little while of the protests, which makes sense since they’re a known presence on the Seattle Left. I’m not a member but I’ve seen them at protests throughout my time in the PNW.  The strangest thing I witnessed that first full day was a member of the National Guard, who had been deployed by Trump to back-up the SPD, in uniform speak to the crowd, and, bizarrely, told us they supported what we were trying to do here. This was strange given how recently they were attacking us. It hadn’t been 48hrs since they last deployed gas and batons on these same streets. The station itself was now more graffiti’d, my partner and I witnessed folks using a ladder to string up a huge, “this is now property of the Seattle People'' sign. Over the next few days the debate over the meaning of and narrative around the space really picked up. Fox featured a story about Seattle Warlords and chaos, using a badly photo shopped image. The police lied about local businesses being extorted before, quietly, admitting they didn’t actually have any examples. Trump himself tweeted about “Ugly Anarchists” which had a somewhat reverse effect here in Seattle, where squishy, NIMBY liberals, who were on the fence about the CHOP decided that  if Trump was against they needed to #resist and support it. 

A member of the National Guard speaking to us. I still have no idea if this solider had permission to speak with us and to voice support. I also have no idea why they would do this.

A member of the National Guard speaking to us. I still have no idea if this solider had permission to speak with us and to voice support. I also have no idea why they would do this.

These first few days were all excitement and growth. The No-Cop Co-op, which predated CHOP, grew to include fresh produce, cooked food and clothing. The park itself got more tents daily, from families with young kids to an all-black “Goths 4 BLM” tent, from tents giving out explicitly revolutionary literature to the normal, sunning day-drunk young people who populate the park during less bizarre times. The tents and structures slowly spread north through the park over the course of a few days until there were people camping across the entire thing. A popular “Decolonization Café” opened on the corner of Pine and 11th, which consisted of lots of couches and chairs, along with free coffee, for people to sit down and talk about political justice issues. People were giving out everything from books and clothing to more esoteric services like sound baths and baptisms. 

Part of the NO COP CO-OP, forgive the thumb in the photo

Part of the NO COP CO-OP, forgive the thumb in the photo

The backlash also continued. In addition to the Cruz and Trump tweets, as well as the Fox News nonsense and the lies from police, a Facebook group called BIKERS 4 TRUMP, made up of sad, sloppy YT boomers, started organizing an event to “liberate the CHOP” on the 4th of July. The only bikers I ever saw in the space were the all-Black Buffalo Soldiers, who were there in support of CHOP; the space didn’t last long enough to test whether or not these Trump bikers were serious. 

On the 10th a group began painting a very large “BLACK LIVES MATTER” mural on Pine St, with a different artist painting each letter. This seems to have been a very popular tactic, deployed in dozens of cities during the summer of ‘20. It’s basically the least a city can do to gesture towards the goals of the movement. Since the city retook the space it’s worked hard to scrub the graffiti and other physical remains of the CHOP. Only the mural, which is now city-sanctioned, the garden and the large fence around the precinct remain as physical reminders of the CHOP. On the morning of the 12th, people told me that police had  come by the previous night and went into the station to retrieve “documents.” To me, this means one of two things: a) that they have documents that there are no copies of and they really don’t want seen by the public or burned or b) they’re trying to provoke. Later in the week, a guy I came to know as a real loose cannon, ex. doing things like running around with a bat or yelling at people then laughing maniacally or setting off fireworks, does go into the station and sort of putters about before walking out and goes about his day. He was, apparently, arrested later that same day after he left the CHOP area. 

At this point, we’re getting featured more and more on the national news and the reports become darker. There’s more emphasis on reports of assaults and violence which, of course, creates a positive-feedback loop where people are now more nervous and on edge within the CHOP and more and more people with bad intentions are hearing about a “lawless” zone where you can do whatever you want. 

During this early timeframe I begin to hear about and try to attend a General Assembly that is supposed to happen everyday. As you can imagine, it was hard to settle on a time/place as well as to get that information out to everyone who would be interested (there were a handful of people, who I really admire, who put in a ton of work to make these happen), but I started hearing about these things and trying to attend on the 12th and was able to attend my first one on the 15th. In the meantime, there was lots of music and speeches and general festival-y vibes. I got to watch someone shoot a music video as well as hear the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in both Lushootseed and a Siouan language. At this point the garden, overseen by the newly created Black Star Farmers, between the Bobby Morris Playfield and the north end of Cal Anderson was coming along quite nicely. They built a gazebo. 

 Sunday, the 14th, was the first time I saw signs that the name had been changed from CHAZ, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, to CHOP, Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (or Organized Protests, depending on who you were talking to). It is also the day I saw one of the more intense encounters of my whole tenure. That night at a nearby auto shop, I noticed a small crowd gathered near their gate, and I noticed that the crowd appeared to include PSJBGC folks so I stopped to watch. I was told that the folks were tense because the owner of the store had caught someone who’d broken into his shop and started a fire, and now the owner was holding the attempted arsonist at gunpoint. 

This seemed extreme so I wandered over to the fence where the owner himself confirmed much of what I’d heard. Except the owner insisted the man was no longer held at gunpoint but he was still being held. The owner claimed the police were refusing to come down to pick the guy up. People in the crowd had trouble believing this story but the owner doubled down that he personally himself witnessed a fire being started. The crowd was divided on what to do and worried about the situation but some in the crowd were very aggressive and loud. They demanded the would-be thief be let go and the police not summoned. Things spiraled when a different, larger crowd, who had heard about this situation in increasingly lurid rumors, marched over from the park. They seemed to think cops were in the process of arresting someone and were ready to stop it. It got tense and people climbed the fence and shook the fence, all while the owner was now pointing the gun at us in the crowd, before some of the more level-headed PSJBGC folks were able to settle things. However, it was hard to get the crowd to leave. I waited a while to watch but decided my presence too was heightening the situation so I left. Later, we read in the paper that this went on for hours before the police did eventually come pick the guy up. Incidentally, they charged him with both that burglary and one from the previous night, which also involved a fire, at a different auto shop in a different neighborhood.

I finally got to see my first General Assembly on the 15th. It was a sizable crowd but there was tension when we broke into groups and a woman-only break-out group formed, whose existence upset a number of intoxicated men. Several people of different genders/races/ethnicities attempted to calm the men but were all unsuccessful. Eventually, I was able to have a pretty good conversation with some people about the goals of the CHOP and ways to keep the vibes good. I heard people talking about the Proud Boys, specifically the Vancouver, WA chapter that I’ve seen around here for years, had been in the CHOP earlier. I didn’t see them personally but read reports and saw photos of Andy Ngo and his buddies walking around the CHOP with their guns. Fortunately, no one took the bait inside the CHOP itself, though they did assault someone when they were off the CHOP grounds leading to the eventual arrest of “Tiny” Toese, who is a PNW-famous fascist brawler, for violating his parole. 

By Tuesday the 16th the barriers, which had been left by the cops, had been moved to try to create a space for cars to drive through but still protect people walking. I was able to make it to another assembly featuring a guy who, falsely, claimed he “started occupy” and promised to teach us some of the tricks they learned in NYC. I never saw the guy again. It was also the least engaged assembly I attended, the participants were mostly teens who were focused on drinking beer and enjoying the atmosphere. 

Over the next few days  the GA time was changed and I was unable to locate it. I was able to go to a rally to remove the Seattle Police Officer Guild (SPOG) from the Labor council and attend a march that shut down the highway and received no news coverage at all. This would prove to be an ongoing media blackout. It’s also during this time that I noticed the NO-COP CO-OP was gone. At this point there were still dozens of tents in the park offering free everything. 

The 19th, Juneteenth, was the only day I did not enter the CHOP. This was on purpose, a call went out to make the space Black-only for the day so I attended a march and rally elsewhere in the city. 

The next day I woke up to the news of the first murder. Two men were shot on the corner of 10th and Pine and one lost his life. It happened at 2:30am, by the time I was in the CHOP on the 20th there were already a dozen different stories being told. The two most popular stories were 1) there was an argument between the victims and guys in a white pickup truck before the shooting, and 2) the shooting came from a black SUV. The cops apparently came, guns drawn and screaming at everyone, long after the people who were shot had been transported to the hospital, by CHOP medics, and were met with hostility. I went down to the CHOP to get lunch at around 2 and noticed the makeshift shrine, complete with candles and his friends/family mourning. The young man who was killed was named Horace Lorenzo Anderson. It is unclear as I write this if this was a right-wing killing (certainly the most popular theory, but the one with the least evidence) or if this was the case of an argument that got out of control, or if people wanted Mr. Anderson dead for reasons unrelated to the CHOP and this is just where they happened to catch him. It has certainly made things tenser. 

Later that day, on the way home from work, I noticed the GA in the park and I sat in. It went over 2 hours and was mostly good. There were references to a vague leadership structure, specifically to a “council” that apparently would simply be getting advice from this assembly. The “council” was claiming to be all Black but was otherwise opaque. 

While the meeting was going on there was an intense situation with a Jesus-Guy, one who is quite familiar to me from other protests over the last couple of years. He’s a real glutton for pain and is very aggressive and disruptive. He was screaming and slamming into people and completely manic. People maced him and he was undeterred. The ambulance and MCT (the Mobile Crisis Team, a group of mental health specialists who are supposed to intervene in public mental health crises) apparently have refused to come to the park to help in any way. I helped hold him, hoping he would calm down, for a while until the situation seemed to attract too many people, which gave him an audience and seemed to rev him up. A middle-age, visibly-armed, Black guy who was running a discussion cracked him in the face when he broke into their circle and dropped him but he continued his rampage. 

On the way home that night I ran into armed guards by the auto shop and asked them who they were. At first I got sass about how “everyone’s read about us” but I told them I hadn’t and I live here and I’d like to know who the guys with guns are. They changed the tone and told me they were Iconic Global and were hired by business on 12th to “keep the peace.” I looked them up on Facebook and they do indeed have pictures of themselves, armed, protecting the auto shop. They also have a post about finding a “trove of guns” by said auto shop, the day after the stand-off, an allegation that hasn’t been elaborated on since. 

At this point, there were also daily marches from the CHOP to the West Precinct, about a mile and half away. I started going on these marches daily which often included blocking the highway. The police were trying to avoid open conflict so they no longer blocked the on or off ramps as they had in the past. Instead, they made a habit of shutting down the highway before we even started marching. It made walking on the highway itself very strange, since it was less a road and more an abandoned stretch of asphalt. I did get to see some incredible views of the city. It becomes clear when standing on the interstate how large these spaces are, how wasteful they seem without cars, and how much of our city we give over to these barren stretches. The media blackout of these shutdowns continued as well, not even a mention in the paper, despite being nightly at this point. 

Later that day I spent the night walking around the CHOP, seeing what was going on. Not only did more PSJBGC people have the long-guns out, which they typically didn’t during the day, I also witnessed right-wing chuds, in their big, dumb trucks, coming up to the barricades and flashing their lights or their YTpower hand signs or their pistols. They drove around the perimeter all night doing this, trying to freak-out or intimidate the security folks. They would also harass and occasionally assault people leaving the CHOP. It’s also during this time that the general paranoia increased dramatically. I returned from a march late the night of the 21st, around 10pm, and saw a whole area duck and cover when a series of fireworks went off. It turned out someone was shot later that night, though non-fatally. At night the park itself had a real exciting and dangerous end-of-the-world vibe, especially at night. Lots of large makeshift structures and open fires. The people camping in the park, at this point, seemed to be largely people who were homeless before the CHOP, as opposed to people who were housed but choosing to stay in a tent for protest reasons.

On Monday the 22nd, we got our first announcement for the city officials about clearing the CHOP. About 5pm I noticed the Mayor and Police Chief were speaking at a press conference on TV about CHOP. The mayor stood in front of “Black Leaders,” none of whom were involved with CHOP. Basically, the mayor said that the East Precinct will be returned and the park will be cleared between 8pm and 8am. It was not dissimilar to a plan I had heard floated at a recent GA meeting, one that involved a constant occupation of the station but clearing the park at night because of the violence. I went down to CHOP right after this for the 6pm GA which now seemed like it was going to be focused on the upcoming eviction. 

Members of this mysterious “Black Leadership Council” spoke and they struck an apologetic tone. They were apparently asked to meet with the Mayor and attend this conference, but, to their credit, they said they couldn’t, in good faith, represent the CHOP. At first, some of them seemed confident that we could move this protest elsewhere, like the Central District  (Seattle’s historically redlined Black district) or near the Space Needle. It became clear quickly that the crowd didn’t like this idea and we collectively agreed to keep occupying the current CHOP. 

The meeting pivoted to a discussion about how we could pull this off but people again could not help themselves from speechifying instead of talking about concrete plans. I broke off with the gardeners who seemed to have their shit the most together. People hunkered down, moved tools and vowed to stay through the bitter end. Many folks were convinced the cops were coming at 8pm exactly but this seemed unlikely to me. The City mentioned that they would seek to send in “Black Leaders” (there Black leaders, not our Black leaders) to convince folks to move as well as social workers/the Navigation Team to try to connect with the unhoused in the area. And since this “outreach” hasn’t happened yet, which always, in my experience, proceeds a sweep, I doubted they’d sweep that night. It also seemed weird they’d tell us the exact time they’d come through. It seemed more of an attempt to sow chaos. 

After helping clear the garden of tools the gardeners didn’t want to lose in a sweep, I walked up to the precinct to see how they were preparing. A rather unhinged security guy was being yelled at, rightfully so, for pulling down signs. For a guy who is supposed to de-escalate situations, he never does. People wanted to lock hands but that seemed unnecessary since they (the cops) weren’t on their way right then and there. I said fuck it, and went on the march to the West Precinct and to shut down the Highway. I found out the next morning there was no sweep but there was another shooting. No deaths this time.

Wednesday the 25th, the GA meeting was again overtaken by a small group. One of the main facilitators was heroically trying to run an actual GA but this group, who called themselves the “Leaders the CHOP'' came up and read a list of demands. They suggested everyone come up to the precinct to defend it and that we should abandon the park encampments. They suggested there would be a march on Saturday to an “undisclosed” location. My guess at the time was that this was to be the “sit on the highway” plan I’d heard floated for a while. This plan, as explained to me, involved taking tents and chairs and barricades onto the highway in an attempt to block it as long as possible. Like I said, the evening marches were shutting down the highway daily but were getting no coverage in the media, people were hoping to reverse that. The “highway sit” plan struck me as a bad idea since it would get all the most dedicated people arrested and beat up. 

Also during this GA, an old YT man, who said he was a Yippie and a Black Panther, came up to push Ibogaine and suggested we could replace the police and the carceral state with Ibogaine. I still have his literature. A group of Black teens pulled off people for a 7pm march, berating the crowd. People tried to say that there is already an 8pm march but they dismissed it saying that this one is led by Black women. The 8pm one is as well, but they didn’t know this. At this point there were now two daily marches from CHOP to the West Precinct; I typically marched with the 8pm one.  

Friday the 26th was the first day the city attempted to clear the CHOP. Early in the morning, it appeared that a construction crew tried to move some of the barriers. They were there at 5am but enough protesters laid down on top and besides the barriers that the crew couldn’t move them and there were no cops with the crew to arrest the protesters and give the crew access to the barriers. After this failure, the Mayor agreed to meet with a group of 25 protesters and it is my understanding that there was tension about who this would be. I went to the GA later that day and this meeting was still a topic of debate. Not only was there the question of “who should represent us to the city?” but also, “should anyone be authorized to speak on our behalf?” Different groups, including the newly formed Black Femme Voices and the older, established Africatown, attempted to crowdsource a list of demands which got confusing. 

One person partially hijacked the meeting by saying he was running for governor and would take questions (never heard from this guy again). Additionally, a YT woman, who claimed to work in “marketing finance” suggested turning the CHOP into a festival. We also learned that last night’s march had been attacked on the way back to the CHOP. My partner and I had left the march around 10 but apparently they were out and on the highway until 1am. During the mile or so hike back to the CHOP a car drove through the group and some said a gun was pulled (tho a friend of mine who was there denies the gun part). 

The next day, Tuesday the 23rd, we marched again but halfway to the station  we got a call that the 7pm march folks, who were already at the station, were under police attack. We sped up and got down there quickly. The crowd was in commotion and a front window was broken. Then the police exploded out of the door in riot gear like a trapdoor spider and pushed into the crowd. The crowd retreated but they grabbed a woman and pulled her into the station. The crowd began to chant “let her go” and it was very tense. Black Bloc folks pushed a dumpster against the garage door. Eventually the police let an older Black man I haven’t seen at marches before, inside the station to see an alleged video of the grabbed woman breaking the window. When he tried to tell the crowd what he’d seen on the tape, they turned on him, since the implication was that she deserves to be in jail if she broke a window. I missed the actual window breaking but the crowd was pretty sure that this other gentleman who I also didn’t recognize from previous nights, and who was both belligerent and visibly intoxicated, was actually the person responsible. Lots of folks were yelling at him. A row erupted w/r/t men speaking over women. The police claimed that they were going to book the woman but wouldn’t transport her until we all left. The group decided to take the highway. 

Over the next few days of marches we had several cars driven through our group, drivers jumped out to yell and threaten us, sometimes armed. We had water and potatoes thrown at us from rooftops. Over the weekend my partner and I kept going on the marches, offering to do people’s laundry in the park and attending the GA meetings. There was increasing tension between the more protest-oriented people camping in front of the station and the scene in the park, which at this point was mostly people who had been homeless before the CHOP. Some of the station-camping folks were upset that the violence and craziness of the park was distracting from the political message of the movement while the homeless people in the park, who, of course were disproportionately Black, felt that protesters were putting rhetoric and ego over their lives.

Early Monday morning there was another shooting, this time fatal, of a young man we later learned was Antonio Mays jr., but who people around CHOP had been calling Pocket. I saw the car the next morning, which was still crashed into the barrier around the station, broken glass and blood on the ground, in the morning, and went to the GA that afternoon to hear people talk about the incident. I’ll be a bit coy here about exactly what I was told, given the open nature of this case and the rumors surrounding it, but the general consensus was that a group of young guys were hanging out and getting lit, then, after dark, started assaulting and robbing people up. A person spoke to us who said he’d been blinded by them. There was controversy both about whether there was such a group and, if so, whether or not Pocket was part of the group. Eventually a group of people living in the park fought the marauders off. Shortly thereafter a SUV returned and, according to some, drove around the field, where people were camping, shooting at tents randomly. Eventually that SUV, which had been stolen from a near-by neighborhood, drove by the station, perhaps shooting, where someone(s) on the security team, who were no longer the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, but a new organization called The Sentinels, shot into the car killing the 16 year old driver and badly wounding a 14 year old in the passenger seat. 

As you can imagine, the tension around the CHOP was heightened yet again. The reputation for violence now crowded out any other CHOP related discussion. The CHOP had now been the site of the deaths of two Black men. It was also in these last few days that the daily marches to the West Precinct split into 3 distinct times. There was now an 8pm, march that I typically attended, a 7pm march that was led by high school students and a morning march which was led by a group of activists, one of whom I consider to be the best chant leader in Seattle (a different discussion). We continued to have more people drive through our group, including at least one off-duty cop, as well as people brandishing weapons at us. 

Early in the morning of the 1st, I got a message on my phone, an SOS, that they were sweeping the park and station. I rushed down but by the time I got there the whole area was blocked off with what must have been all of Seattle’s cops (we later learned the FBI and DHS were involved in this part as well). They arrested around 40 people, who they roughed up, assaulted and abused, and threw out all of the camping mutual aid supplies. When I got off work and came back in the evening a group of protesters were yelling at a group of cops who were holding the line on the edge of the park. The CHOP ended exactly as it began.

one of the early days on the Bobby Morris Playfield

one of the early days on the Bobby Morris Playfield

The early stages of the community garden

The early stages of the community garden

The barriers were moved often around the police station

The barriers were moved often around the police station




A GUIDE TO THE TOTEM POLES OF DOWNTOWN SEATTLE

Without a doubt, the most famous of the Seattle totem poles is the one in front of the Pioneer Building downtown. Known as the Seattle Pole, or the Pioneer Square Pole, it was originally carved sometime in the 1790’s and was known as the Chief_Of_All_Women Pole, in whose honor it was raised. It originally stood on Tongass Island, which is located right next to Canada, in the Southern Alaskan panhandle, at the mouth of the Nass River, in an area where the Tlingit and their ancestors live and have lived for thousands of years. Before it was stolen, the pole was already remarkable for being one of the few totem poles known to be dedicated to a woman. The information available to me about Chief_Of_All_Women is scant, except how she died. Downed in the Nass River, on a journey to visit an ailing sister. After she died, her loved ones organized a huge potlatch and raised the pole close to the shore, where it stood unmolested for decades. 

Fast forward to 1899: the Klondike Gold Rush has changed everything for Seattle. The decade before, Tacoma, Seattle’s southern sister, had been chosen to be the terminus for the Northern Pacific Railway. While maybe not spelling doom for the Emerald City, it did make it seem like Seattle would be playing second fiddle to Tacoma, now destined to be the major metropolis in the upper left section of the nation. But things changed and when gold was discovered in Klondike Alaska in the mid-to-late 1890’s, an estimated 100,000 prospectors moved to the frozen North to get rich quick. And since you have to spend money to make money, Seattle profited as the last stop before venturing out into the great northern tundra. Folks from all over the country would take everything they had, travel from around the world then stop in Seattle to buy the necessary tools and equipment to live the harsh life of a far-north prospector. Few of these men became rich, many of them died alone and cold, but Seattle cashed in and grew into a major and important city. In 1899, as the rush was slowing down, the Hearst-controlled Seattle Post-Intelligencer paid for an expedition up to Alaska, to be undertaken by “leading citizens”, in order to increase trade and tourism and investment. On their way back, they stopped at Tongass island where they saw several poles and no people. They decided Seattle needed a pole for itself and that the Chief_Of_All_Women pole was the best-looking one. They chopped the pole down like a tree, cut it in two, and brought it back on the boat. The curved beak of the bottom figure, was broken in transit. After putting it back together, the pole was erected by cranes in Pioneer Square. The whole thing was a huge civic ceremony. A local poet read a poem, written from the perspective of the pole itself, claiming that this was the only “civilized” totem in the world. A member of the expedition talked about how they saved the pole from loss and destruction. 

3d57a59f4ec822ac390f5f6af1c5f936.jpg
Tongass Island before the theft.

Tongass Island before the theft.

Of course, this was a lie. The town that the expedition members claimed was “abandoned” was not. Pacific Northwest Indians move throughout the year. Winter villages, like the one this pole was stolen from, are unoccupied during the summer months; this arrangement did not mean that all of the items the Tlingit left were free. Descendants of Chief_Of_All_Women were obviously furious and demanded the pole be returned. A grand jury in Alaska agreed with them and said that 8 men on the expedition should be indicted for stealing government property (at the time, all Indian property was considered government property) and the village should be paid $20,000. However, when a new district judge was assigned to Alaska, he stopped in Seattle on the way to his post. Apparently, the city fathers really wined and dined him, in the newly opened Rainier Club, since when he finally made it to Alaska he dropped the penalty to a $500 fine, which the Post-Intelligencer paid. By 1909 the pole was fully a part of Seattle history and identity. The pole was featured on the front page of the brochure advertising the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific exposition. The A-Y-P, a sort of  World’s Fair, not unlike the famous World Colombian Exposition, itself was one of the first major events where Seattle tried to brand itself internationally. Seattle has always been a brand-conscious city. Totem Poles and the mysterious, lost cultures they’re supposed to stand in for, were a big part of that brand. Seattle was trying to present itself as the crossroads between the far east and the rugged PNW frontier. They literalized this desire by building a Torii (the stylized Japanese gate you see at the entrance of Shinto temples) where the pillars were carved like totems and the eyes of the totem’s animals were lit up with then-new electric lights. This association of Seattle and Totem poles continues well into the 20th century. The last professional hockey team in Seattle, the Seattle Totems, played their final game in 1974. 

The Chief_Of_All_Women pole features, from top to bottom, Raven (holding the crescent moon in his beak), a woman holding her frog child, her frog husband, Mink (a somewhat rare figure to be featured on a pole), Orca with a seal in it’s mouth and, finally, Raven-At-The-Head-Of-The-Nass (sometimes known as Grandfather Raven, you can tell it’s him by the downturned beak). I don’t have the expertise to relay how these mythical figures fit into the complicated Tlingit cosmology, but rest assured all important mythological figures. In fact, this pole relays (at least) 3 myths: One about a woman who inadvertently marries a man who is actually a shape-shifting frog, one about Raven stealing the sun and moon from Raven-At-The-Head-Of-The-Nass and bringing light to the world, and one about Mink and Raven living in the belly of Orca for a while, cooking and eating the fish the whale swallows. 

In 1938, an arsonist burned the pole badly. I haven’t found a source that even speculates as to the motivation of the arsonist(s). Drunken revelry? Anger at the theft of the pole? Just a mistake? Irregardless, no one in Seattle had the ability to fix it so it was sent up to Alaska to be worked on by Tligit and Haida carvers as part of a depression-era CCC project. The pole was re-raised in 1940 and has stood in Pioneer Square since. 

Besides being stolen the pole also represents a style of artwork and woodcraft that is not actual indigenous to the area. Seattle, the city, sits on Duwamish land. The closest indigenous landmark to the pole is dzee-dzee-LAH-letch, a village formerly located roughly where King Street Station is today. The Duwamish, like all the tribes in what we now call Cascadia, were master wood-carvers. They built enormous wooden houses, sturdy canoes, beautiful boxes and baskets, all carved by hand out of the copious local lumber. The Duwamish, did not however, carve totem poles. Even the word “Totem” is not indigenous to the PNW; it comes from an Ojibwe word. While poles are traditionally, which is to say in the YT imagination, thought of as free standing columns, carved with a number of figures stacked on top of one another, this is  not always the case. Often poles were used as functional architectural support in large houses, and/or positioned and carved in such a way that the mouth of the bottom figure is the door to the building. Other times the only a single figure is carved on the very top of the pole.The other totem poles downtown show some of this variety.

Not 3 blocks over, in Occidental square, there is another pole. This pole, which was made for the 1974 World’s Fair in Spokane, also depicts the legend of Raven stealing the Sun and Moon. You can see the bent-corner box they’re kept in at the bottom of the statue. This pole also highlights the Northwest Artistic practice of not always depicting Raven in a raven’s body, since the gods can shapeshift. The large statue just next to it shows a man riding the tail of an Orca, while the 2 statues facing each other nearby are of a bear and the Tsonoqua (it’s more typical to see this word rendered as “Dzunukwa”). Have you ever been camping in the vast Northwest woods? Heard that creepy wailing noise the wind makes through the trees? That’s the Tsonoqua. It’s why her lips are always rendered like she’s blowing out a birthday candle. She’s also known as the “basket ogress” for her habit of kidnapping children and carrying them in her basket to eat. Despite, or maybe because of this fearsomeness, she can also be a source of wealth, if you’re able to outsmart her, in some versions you have to steal her child. This is why the statue of her at the Burke Museum shows her holding a tináa, a copper shield that is often a symbol of wealth in Northwest Art. There’s another statue of her frozen in the act of pushing over a child’s play structure in University Playground, appropriate given her historical role as a killer and eater of children. 

If you walk North on Alaska to get to the other downtown poles, you’ll pass Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, which also has a place in Totem Pole history. Ye Olde Curiosity Shop opened in 1899, the same year the Chief_Of_All_Women pole was stolen. The shop, run by “Daddy” Stanley, sold and sells Native art from around the PNW as well as weirdo shit from around the world (shrunken heads, fiji mermaids, etc). Obviously, a lot of this stuff was and is fake, though Daddy apparently did have some understanding, appreciation and expertise in Native sculpture. Eventually, he gained a reputation for offering good prices to reputable carvers, though he was never above selling a fake to a rube. Several museums, including the Royal Museum of Canada, the National Museum of the American Indian, as well as the University of Washington bought poles from Daddy.  

Further north, past Pike’s Place, you can still visit Victor Steinbrueck Park and see 2 more poles. One is what YT-PLP typically think of as a totem pole, ie a vertical carving that has figures all the way down. On this pole, from the bottom up, we have bear holding a hawk, the head of Raven, Orca, a human head, a human holding a tináa and topped by Raven holding a Salish-style spindle. This pole was designed by Marvin Oliver a person of Quinault/Isleta-Pueblo decent and carved by James Bender, a non-native artist who specializes in replicating historic Northwest Coast art. The pole next to it was also carved by Bender but was designed by Victor Steinbrueck, the person the park is named after and someone who also isn’t native. The Pole is tilted, “Honored farmers-1984” and is smooth until the very top, where Bender carved 2 famers, a male and a female, standing back to back. I think the male farmer looks like Mario but it’s hard to tell if that’s on purpose. 

This pole is something of a nod to the most famous pole in this style, the Lincoln Pole. The Lincoln Pole, now on Saxam Park, Alaska is the most famous example of a whole genre of pole. Here’s a quote about such poles from book about the cultural history of totem poles, “Early Alaskan tourists found one type of pole, largely confined to Prince Wales Island, especially delightful-those that depicted whites. While white observers assumed such images honored their subjects, some such poles, in fact, mocked them. These may have developed from existing traditions of erecting shame or rivalry poles to challenge other chiefs.” The most famous of these shame poles is of William Seward, the man who helped orchestrate the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Apparently, he was such an ungrateful dick during his visit up north that the locals thought it worthwhile to erect a pole ridiculing him and showing him as greedy piece of shit. Seattle YTs have a totally different view of the man, there’s a large revenant bronze statue of him in Volunteer Park and he’s the Seward in Seward Park. The Lincoln Pole is a little more complicated, I’ve found numerous conflicting backstories. The official story, which seems the least likely to me, is that the Tlignit, heard about Lincoln, who never travelled west of Kansas, they admired him and raised a pole in his honor.  Another version says that they carved Lincoln version mockingly. Something along the lines of you freed the slaves but at the same time here we are, the Native inhabitants, being treated like slaves. A third version also has it as a shame pole but this time directed against Lincoln, a wooden metonymy for Federal government, for forcing the Tlignit to give up their slaves, which they were forced to do in 1867 when the US purchased Alaska. My favorite version holds that the pole has nothing to do with Lincoln, per se, rather the pole was carved and placed to commemorate an ancestor whose claim to fame was the first sighting of a YT man. When they asked with the local YT for a photo of a YT person to carve from, the only photos available were of Lincoln, in his famous stove-pipe hat, who as far as the original carver(s) were concerned, was just some YT man. 

However the most interesting and powerful pole downtown is further north, in the shadow of the Space Needle. The Space Needle itself is somewhat an updated version of the Chief_Of_All_Women Pole. Both were built for World’s Fairs, or World’s Fair style events. Both are powerful symbols of how the city wishes to be seen. Originally, as a rugged frontier of mysterious and rich forests, with access to the vast wealth of Alaska and beyond. In the 60’s as a space-age jet city. The land of Boeing. They both draw the eye upward, to the sky. Both leave you wondering how the people who made this thing made it and why? Like the Chief_Of_All_Women Pole, this one was created in memory of an indigenous person who died tragically. Chief_Of_All_Women died crossing a river to visit a sick sister, John T. Williams was murdered by the Seattle Police. John T. Williams was a 7th generation Nuu-chah-nulth carver who lived in Seattle, Vancouver and Victoria Island. He was well-known downtown, frequently seen in Victor Steinbrueck carving beneath the poles there. Because he was always carving he carried specialized carving knives with him as he walked around downtown. In the afternoon of Aug 30, 2010, a police officer named Ian Birk noticed Williams crossing the street with something in his hand. Birk jumped out of the car with his gun drawn, yelled “put the knife down” and, 5 seconds later, murdered John T. Williams at the corner of Howell and Boren. For what it’s worth, Williams was hard of hearing and the knife he was holding was closed.  Since William’s murder, the Seattle Police have killed 40 other people. The coward Birk, of course, wasn’t charged with anything though he did quit the SPD. As a sort of secondary tribute, the crosswalk at Howell & Boren was repainted with a white deer design that was common in William’s carving. 

Because of their physical dimensions, raising a pole traditionally requires a large group of people. The cooperation required to get the pole into position acts as a sort of  shorthand for the sort of collective group effort (and this effort could be directed towards honor, or remembrance, or shame) the pole represents. When Canada and the US outlawed Potlatches, the traditional gift-giving ceremonies that defined a lot of PNW indigenous life, in 1885, they effectively outlawed totem poles since the important part, the rituals and ceremonies that surrounded the poles were banned. To be clear, not all Potlatches involve raising Totem Poles, groups like the Duwamish who don’t historically carve totem poles still hold/held potlatches, but all traditional pole raisings were done in the context of a potlatch. So when the Chief_Of_All_Women pole was originally raised on Tongass, it was part of a feast and a ritual. When the YTs raised the same pole, they did so not as a group.  but with a crane. The John T. Williams pole was raised by hand. John’s brother, Rick, carved the pole in public view at Waterfront Park. He did so less than 100 feet from Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, where his grandfather and great-grandfather had sold carvings. He carved Eagle on top and a mother and child Raven at the bottom. Between these two figures he carved his brother, a master carver, displaying his own carving. The figure that this wooden brother holds is a Salmon and Kingfisher design that was the personal signature of John and the design which originally elevated him to the status as Mastercarver. Hundreds of people joined the procession that took the 3500 lb red cedar log from the waterfront to under the monorail, next to the EMP and raised it in the traditional manner, with a mob of people working together.

jtw pole rising.jpg

Further Reading:

SEATTLE TOTEM POLES by Viola Garfield

ART IN SEATTLE’S PUBLIC SPACES by James Rupp & Miguel Edwards

THE TOTEM POLE: AN INTERCULTURAL HISTORY by Aldona Jonaitis & Aaron Glass This is the book I’d recommend on the subject.

DISCOVERING TOTEM POLES: A TRAVELER’S GUIDE by Aldona Jonaitis




COMMONPLACE BOOK

“They change their sky, not 

Their soul who run across the sea”

-Horace

“The dice of drowned mens’ bones he saw bequeath an embassy”

-Hart Crane

“And silent answers crept across the stars”

-Hart Crane

“This fabulous shadow only the sea knows.”

-At Melville’s Tomb, Hart Crane

“I can’t watch the seat for a long time or what happens on land doesn’t interest me anymore.”

-Monica Vitti


“I have seen what men have only dreamed they saw.”

-Rimbaud


“The mountain nymph, sweet liberty.”

-Milton


“All mathematics leads, doesn’t it, sooner or later, to human suffering.”

-Pynchon


“It was one of those moments that are the opposite of blindness.”

-Anne Carson


“What are these utopian dreams of ours but defective forms of time travel?”

-Pynchon


“He’s an American, a cowboy, his idea of romance begins and ends with me on my back.”

-Pynchon


“There are the lover and the beloved but these two come from different countries and somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new strange loneliness and it is this knowledge that makes him suffer...And it is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that , in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover and with the best possible reason. For the lover is forever trying to strip the beloved. The lover craves any possible relation to the beloved, even if it only causes him pain.”

-Carson McCullers, BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE


“We say our communities exist, nations do not.”

-Huey Newton


“My life was full of routine surprises.”

-DeLillo


“To be a tourist is to escape accountability.”

-DeLillo


“As an adult, I’ve only been two ages, 23 & 40.”

-DeLillo


“I told him I was a traveler only in the sense I covered distances, I traveled between places, never in them.”

-DeLillo


“Photography is alright if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops for a split second.”

-Hockney


“I would annex the planets if I could”

-Cecil Rhodes 


“The endless indignities and sadomasochistic games that inevitably follow from top-down organization.”

-David Graeber


“There really is an epidemic of sorrows sweeping our world, the brunt of which is being borne, for now, by only a luckless few.”

-Teju Cole


“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”

-T. S. Elliot


“Your internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there is no innocence, anywhere, never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter death-wish for the planet, and don’t think that’s changed, kid.”

-Pynchon


“The sun beats lightning on the waves,   

The waves fold thunder on the sand;”

-Hart Crane

 

“And silent answers crept across the stars”

-Hart Crane

 

“The bottom of the sea is cruel”

-Hart Crane


“Should I the Queen of Love refuse

Because she rose from stinking ooze?

-Johnathan Swift


“Cats are prowlers, uncanny creatures of the night. Cruelty and play are one for them. They live by and for fear, practicing being scared or spooking humans with sudden rushings and ambushes. Cats dwell in the occult, that is, the hidden, in the middle ages they were hunted and killed for their association with witches. Unfair? But the cat really is in league with chthonian nature, Christianity’s mortal enemy...Cats are telepathic, or at least they think they are. Many people are unnerved by their cool stare..they are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking the rules. Their “evil” look at such times is no human projection, the cat might be the only animal that savors the perverse or reflects upon it. 

Thus the cat is an adept of the chthonian mysteries...It is narcissistically always wanting to be seen, when it is disheveled its spirits fall. Cats have a sense of pictorial composition...Haughty, solitary, precise, they are arbiters of elegance-that principle I find natively Egyptian. 

Cats are poseurs. They have a sense of persona-and become visibly embarrassed when reality punctures their dignity. Apes are more human but less beautiful; they posture but never pose...The cat is the least christian inhabitant of the average home...The cat is a law unto itself. It has never lost its despotic air of Oriental luxury and indolence...cats have secret thoughts , a divided consciousness. No other animal is capable of ambivalence.”

-Camille Paglia


“Sadomasochism is a symptom of a cultural thirst for hierarchy.”

-Camille Paglia


“We must make our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of this reality, by forging new realities which will in turn fashion us. Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the inertia of bad habit, custom, law or prejudice and it is up to you to create these situations.”

-Crimethink




“Like when you dream of killing a person

Who never stops dying”

-Bolano


“Soñé con detectives helados en el gran 

Refrigerador de Los Ángeles

En el gran refrigerador de Mexico DF”

-Bolano


“Determinists forces are wrong

Though irresistibly strong                                                        

But of god there’s no dearth                     

For he visits the earth

But not for sufficiently long”

-PKD


“All that’s colossal is fraud”

-PKD


“Such charity is not a gift. The recipient of a gift, sooner or later, be able to give it away. If it does not really raise him to the level of the group, it is just a decoy, providing him with the daily bread while across town someone is buying the bakery. This “charity” is a way of negotiating the boundary of class...At its worst, it is the “tyranny of the gift” which uses the bonding power of generosity to manipulate people.”

-Lewis Hyde


“The YT folks in Washington, they know how

To give a colored man a nickel, just to see him bow”

-Bourgeois Blues


“Charity: promoting the happiness of our inferiors”

-William Paler


“Poverty here [europe] is decent and honorable. In America, it lays one open to continuous insults on all sides.” -Ezra Pound


“and I will resolve to never be happy enough to 

forgive you

and I promise from now on I will only

have emotions that can be perceived as neutral.”

-Mira Gonzalez


“And it’s sad because being forced to face up to your ordinariness, your lack of nobility, is so beautiful.”

-Ta-Nehisi Coates


“A good pimp is always really alone.”

-Iceberg Slim

“A pimp is really a whore who’s reversed the game on whores.”

-Iceberg Slim

“There’s nothing wrong with a utopia unless you have just one.”

-David Graeber


“The Southerner and the Russian are both “types” in that they both have recognizable and national psychological traits. Hedonistic, imaginative, lazy and emotional- there is surely a cousinly resemblance.”

-Carson McCullers


“More bad reasons for her sorrow”

-Keates


“An evening steep’d in honeyed indolence.”

-Keates


“All myth is enriched pattern.”

-Anne Carson


“But you overlook 

an important cultural functions of games

To test the will of the gods.

Hulzinga reminds us that war is a form of divination”

-Anne Carson


“I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitive and participle oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.”

-Anne Carson


“My religion makes no sense

and does not help me

therefore I pursue it”

-Anne Carson


“Nothing vast enters the lives of mortals without ruin.”

-Antigonick


“You can rot here [LA] without feeling it.”

-John Rechy


“Rusha wants to mirror the dreamlike state that many people find typical of California living, to give the feeling that there is no longer any hierarchies-of ideas, emotions or events. He is the essence of California cool.”

-Ed Lucie-Smith


“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us think the rest is real.”

-Baudrillard


“It is delusion that makes men bold

Knocks them sideways

Causes grief.”

-Anne Carson


“Sometimes I wonder if Euripedes saw the very texture of reality as ironic.”

-Anne Carson


“TV ain’t got no temperature.”

-Pimp C


“The relationships we have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. One should aim not for liberation but rather for a general economy of pleasure not based on sexual norms.”

-Foucault


“One must take into account the shocking fact that we live in a world that spins. After considering this truth, nothing should come as a surprise.”

-Ligotti


“Dirt is matter that crossed a boundary it ought not have crossed.”

-Anne Carson


“She fancied that she could hear voices, and that the voices might belong to creatures like herself.”

-Dog Soldiers


“And so, not knowing how to believe in god and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I along with people on the fringe, keep a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the loss of unconsciousness, which is the basis of life.”

-Pessoa


“They shall ask thee concerning what thou shalt expand: say, the abundance.”

-Qur’an Sura 2


“The wonder lingers, the shame remains”

-Pale Fire


“Efa maty daholo ny efa lehibe, fa izahay zaza mpandimby fotsiny no sisi” <The adults/leaders are all dead, we, the children, are all that is left>


“To restore silence is the role of objects.”

-Beckett


“There is no fist large enough to hide the sky”

-Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Panther


“White people, lacking in community, must make due with property.”

-Teju Cole


“Time measures nothing but itself.”

-Sebald


“The ceaseless creasing of the morning sea”

-Wolcott


“The perpetual ideal is astonishment.”

-Wolcott


“Every night has a different smell, my friend. It would be unbearable otherwise.”

-Bolano


“Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.”

-Gertrude Stein


“To address God is a violent act.”

-Anne Carson


“To fall, after all, is our earliest motion.”

-Anne Carson


“Someday, you’ll need less evidence;

the missing won’t cease to exist.

For now, you stop to eat the free fruit

only you knew would appear

& for that you have your human hands,

infinite nature, a single

body standing on this earth—”

-Brenda Hillman


“I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone, and that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.”

-Obama


“These jobs were swallowed up by the words that describe them. The job title was the job. The job looked back at me from the monitor on the desk where I absorbed my situation in full command of the fact that this is where I belonged.”

-DeLillo


“Apocalypse is inherent to the structure of time.”

-DeLillo


“Everything we do belongs to a world we have not created.”

-Nagel


“Ego, that cyclone of calamities.”

-Parliament of Birds


“They built worlds suitable to the creatures they’d become.”

-Gene Wolfe


“What can be expected of a man who has spent 20 years of his life putting heads on pins?”

-Tocqueville, review of THE WEALTH OF NATIONS


“My plan was never to get married. I was going to be an Art Monster instead. Women almost never become Art Monsters because Art Monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella, Vera licked his stamps.”

-Jenny Offill


“If my mother tongue is shaking the foundation of your state, it probably means you built your state on my land.”

-Apê Musa


“Manan-jandry, dia afak’olan etina; mana-joky dia afak’olon-teny” <if you have a younger sibling, you should have no problem carrying packages, if you have an older sibling, you’ll have no problem speaking>


“Ny marary no andriana” <sick people are kings>


“izaho sy ny vary dia mitovy” <The rice and I are the same> 

-Andrianampoinimerina w/r/t draining a swamp to build Tana


“ Ny ranomasina no valapariako” <The sea is the boundary of my rice field>

-Andrianampoinimerina


“Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly “inferior” capacity to feel deeply. Built in this way, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.”

-Audre Lorde


“Anyone who has met an anorexic 14 year old knows that she is terrifyingly violent, even if she is doing absolutely nothing. In fact, it is the doing of nothing that makes her so violent. It is her commitment to nothingness.”

-Audrey Wollen


“Oh beauty? - Yeah, it’s this thing I make with my hands every day.”

-Audrey Wollen


“i like my body when it is with your body...muscles better and nerves more.”

-e.e. Cummings


“Truth, like love and sleep resents 

Approaches that are too intense”

-W. H. Auden


“The “essential” totem pole is that which is fixed in the contemporary imagination as what a totem pole should be. The tall, free standing columns decorated with multiple images that convey the legends of the owners. To be deemed authentic this essential pole must have been developed before YT contact, during some presumed golden age of cultural purity. That cultural purity discredits most, if not all, hybridity, and disregards the dynamic nature of cultural interactions.”

-Totem Poles, a cultural history


“Technological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of human subjectivity, not only within its memory and intelligence, but with its sensibilities, affect and unconscious fantasms.”

-Guattari


“To see beyond, one must change the way one pays attention.”

-Luhrmann


“There is no invisible but coherent cause behind historical phenomena. Rather, absent causes generate uncanny connections.”

-S.P. Miller


“The signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic. Useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth - I know I presume - you must look into the technology of these matters. Even in the heart of certain molecules...you must ask two questions. First, what is the nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control.”

-Gravity’s Rainbow


“The overlap between the grave, the bath and the bed; strategic escapes from the burden of verticality.”

-Anne Carson


“An object does not have a color, it makes a color (the way a bell makes a sound)”

-Anne Carson


“North Carolina: a valley of humility between two hills of conceit.”

-Lord Culpepper, gov. of VA


“As regards our neighbors North Carolina is and always was the sink of America, the refuge of our renegades, and till it is in better order, it is a danger to us.”

-Lord Culpepper


“Patricarial societies have generated a strong demand for such love magic on the part of economically vulnerable women.”

-R. Chestnut


“The evil that men do lives on after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”

-Shakespere


“Thousands of people are maintained on comfortable salaries in air-conditioned offices simply in order to ensure that poor people continue to feel bad about themselves.”

-Graeber


“How vain the opinions is of some certain people of the East Indies who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding and that they can speak but will not, for fear that they should be imployed (sic) and set to work.”

-Antonine Le Grand c.1675


“I turn to the most prominent example: the birds. The habit of flocking, smallness, similarities of traits, their ancient connection to the two twilights, the beginning of the day and the end, the fact of being more often heard than seen-all of this moves us to acknowledge the primacy of the species and the almost perfect nullity of individuals.”

-Borges


“Experiencing anxiety does not mean that anyone is doing anything to us that is unjust.”

-Sarah Schulman


“We can see, in other words, that the human body and not the steam engine and not even the clock was the first machine developed by capitalism”

-Silvia Federici


“Who would want to discourage the people of the world from translating, merely because it is fundamentally impossible?”

-Thomas Mann


“This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjectures here or there, try out continua of intensities, segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bring froth continuous intensities for a BwO”

-Deleuze and Guattari


“When the anthropologist arrives, the gods depart”

-Haitian proverb


“Jingfei-yijia” <cops and gangsters belong to the same family>

-Chinese proverb


“Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could turn to our friends and say, I felt anxious and I exaggerated and instead of them using that as a reason to ignore us, disparage us, or punish us, whenever we say, I feel anxious and so I exaggerated, our friends would put their arms around us, hug us and kiss us and thank us for telling the truth.”

-Sarah Schulman


“We mourn not man, but a man; and we lament nof for his lot, but for our own. His death is as the closing of a door upon the singular, particular self which, projected through his flesh, nourished the world of substance, which we shared. We mourn this man because to us his spirit was not like any other. The moment of death is as a separation of the mold from the form to which it had transferred, all the particularity of its configuration.”

-Divine Horseman, [my father’s citation]


“This world of dew…

Though a world of dew it remains

Still, even so…”

-Issa [haiku]


“This world of ours:

Viewing blossoms on the surface

Above hell”

-Issa [haiku]


“Winter drizzle:

Mice skittering across

Zither strings”

-Buson [haiku]


“Just my luck,

Paradise turned out to be

A real yawner”

-Ochō [haiku]


“The bureaucrat's tot

Learns about grabby-grabby

An awful lot”

-unknown haiku


“Outta one hole

But thanks to another hole

Into one more hole”

-unknown haiku, 1804


“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space”

-Van der Rohe


“Cultural solutions are organisms, not machines and cannot be invented deliberately or imposed by prescription. Perhaps all one can do is to clarify as well as possible the needs and pressures that bear upon the process of cultural evolution.”

-Wendall Berry


“Nobody but a southerner knows the wrenching, rinsing sadness of the cities of the North. Knowing all about genie-souls and living in haunted places like Shiloh and The Wildernesses and Vicksburg and Atlanta where the ghosts of heroes walk about in broad daylight and are more real than people, he knows a ghost when he sees one, and no sooner does he step off the train in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, then he feels the genie-soul perched on his shoulder.”

-Walker Percy


“Il est interdit d’interdire” <it is forbidden to forbid>


“We believe that when the state finally fades, nations will be named after people and people will be nations.”

-Abbie Hoffman


“To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least a single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money or a little money or less money or more money but money, always money, and if you have money or you don’t have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?”

-Henry Miller


“Space is heaven; time hell”

-Carl Smidt


“Even the southern physical world was a kind of cosmic conspiracy against reality and in favor of romance.”

-W.J. Cash


“Men are free when they’re living in a homeland, not when they are straining and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized, purpose. Not when they are escaping, to some wild west. The most unfree souls go West, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of their freedom. The should is a rattling of chains, always was. Men are not free when they are doing just as they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care to do.”

-D.H. Lawrence 


“Ideally the museums should be looted every 50 years or so and their collections returned to circulation.”

-Bruce Chatwin


“Time is a road in 5 directions”

-Mesoamerican concept


“Porque la vida es sueño y los sueños sueños son”

-Calderon de la Barca


“I’d have to be like a mirror, reflecting her secret needs and dreams. She’d have to see me as the means to these gratifications.”

-Iceberg Slim


“I realized she was like me in every other street poisioned nigger spawned behind the invisible walls of the ghetto stokades. She was a trapped, vulnerable but hurting human beneath the tough facade of leopard rage and bravado. But in the cruel nature of our special entrapment, and my survival, my comrade in pain was ironically my prey. I would have to scrape to the raw nerve ends of her emotions, put her on the rack to steal her.”

-Iceberg Slim


“Girl, why are you so fucking square in this rich, fast, cold world where every motherfucker in it that’s copping a big, easy fast buck and silky living ain’t?”

-Iceberg Slim


“Men are frightened by their bones”

-Popol Vuh


“Every era puts invisible shackles on those who live through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”

-Liu Cixin


“The humility of the subjects creates the dignity of the throne.”

-The Emperor


“Those who were sent to the colonies did not take on a proletarian status. They were used as cadres, administrative functionaries, as tools for surveillance and control of the colonized people. And it was certainly in order to avoid the forming of an alliance between these “lesser whites” and the colonized people- an alliance which would have been just as dangerous out there as proletarian unity would have been in Europe - that a ridgid, racist ideology was foisted on them: “watch out, you’ll be living amongst cannibals.””

-Foucault 


“Only when ideas of honor change is it possible to envision a change in ideology.”

-Toby Green


“Nazism is the application of colonialism to Europe” 

-Aime Cesaire


“Technologies of self: techniques that permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and in a manner to transform themselves, modify themselves and to attain a certain state of perfection, happiness, purity, supernatural power.”

-Foucault


“In America, one likely candidate for the protagonist of a reborn trickster myth is the Confidence Man, especially as he appears in literature and film. Some have even argued that the Confidence Man is a covert American hero. We enjoy it when he comes to town, even if a few people get their bank accounts drained, because he embodies things that are actually true about America but can’t be openly declared. As examples, the degree to which capitalism lets us steal from our neighbors, or the degree to which institutions like the stock market require the same kind of confidence that criminal con men need… the Confidence Man is one of America’s unacknowledged founding fathers...If by American we mean a land of rootless wanderers and the free markets, the land not of natives but immigrants, the shameless land where anyone can say anything at anytime, the land of opportunity and thus opportunists, the land where individuals are allowed and even encouraged to act without regard to community, then trickster has not disappeared. “America” is his apotheosis, he’s pandemic.”

-Lewis Hyde


“Contradiction is the lever of transcendence.”

-Simone Weil


“Culture is something done to us, art is something we do to culture.”

-Carl Andre


“A happening should be like a net to catch a fish, the nature of which we do not know.”

-John Cage


“Incorporeal domains of entities we detect at the same time we produce them, and which appear to have always been there.”

-Guattari


“Oportet operatorem interesse operi” <the operator must put themselves into the operation>


“Resonance is, of course, the complete opposite of reflection. While reason implies the disjunction of subject and object, resonance inoves their conjunction. Where reason requires separation and autonomy, resonance entails adjacency sympathy and the collapse of the boundary between perceiver and perceived.”

-Veit Erlman


“The wounded cry as the clown / doubles his meaning”

-W. H. Auden


“The psychotic drowns where the mystic swims.”

-Joseph Campbell


“A vast visage of perfect evil. It was metal and cruel and, worst of all, it was god.”

-PKD


“To see beyond, one must change the way one pays attention.”

-Luhrmann


“There’s no invisible but coherent cause behind historical phenomena. Rather, absent causes generate uncanny connections.”

-Stephen Paul Miller


“The signs are real. They are also a symptom of a process. The process follows the same form, same structure. To apprehend it, you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversion tactic. Useful to you, gentleman, but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth - I know I presume- you must look into the technology of these matters. Even in the hearts of certain molecules...you must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?”

-Gravity’s Rainbow


“Technological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of human subjectivity, not only within its memory and intelligence, but within its sensibility, affects and unconscious fantasm.”

-Guattari 


“Caring labor is best conceived as labor that is directed, ultimately, at maintaining or enhancing another’s freedom.”

-David Graeber


“If I took over as master, wouldn’t it be for a mere name? And such a name is only the guest of reality, wouldn’t I be a mere guest...Go home and rule through idleness.”

-Zhungzi


“If you have no use, you have no grief.” 

-Zhungzi


“To insist on lecturing a tyrant about humanity and duty and codes of conduct - that looks like using his sinister ways to show how wonderful you are. This is called injuring others.”

-Zhungzi


Comes Meus Fuit in Illo Miserrimo Tempore” <it was my companion in miserable times> -Walter Raleigh's’ tobacco pouch 


Ichi-go ichi-e <for this time only, just once>


“”Last forever!” who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.

-Annie Dillard


“My gift to you will be an Abyss, she said, 

but it will be so subtle you’ll perceive it

only after many years have past

and you are far from Mexico and me.

You’ll find it when you need it most,

and that won’t be

the happy ending,

but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.

And maybe you’ll remember me, 

if only for a little.”

-Bolano


“Our situation may not only be stranger than we suppose, it may be stranger than we can suppose.”

-McKenna


“May you live long enough to know why you were born.”

-Cherokee birth blessing


“A man is another person - a woman is yourself.”

-Djuana Barnes


“We all carry about with us that house of death-the skeleton.”

-Djuana Barnes


“That things just go on is the catastrophe.”

-Walter Benjamin


“We are not 

Pleased the way we thought

We would be pleased”

-Kay Ryan


“Today, everything exists to end up in a photo. A way of certifying experience, taking photos is also a way of refusing it- by limiting the experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”

-Sontag


“The mother of useful arts is necessity; that of fine arts, superfluidity and abundance.”

-Schopenhauer


Panta rhei <everything flows>

-Hereclitus


“Other purples also

Leave us vacant

Portals, susceptible

To vagrant spirits

…

          …an

Impersonal and 

Intermittent immortality 

Of purple”

-Kay Ryan


“You aren’t swept up whole, 

however it feels. You’re

atomized. The Wind passes.

You congeal. It’s 

a surprise.”

-Kay Ryan


“Perhaps you 

Specialized 

More than 

You imagined”

-Kay Ryan


“Everything contains some

Silence”

-Kay Ryan


“Great thoughts 

do not nourish

small thoughts

as parents do children


Like the eucalyptus

they make the soil 

beneath them barren


To stand in a 

grove of them

is hideous”

-Kay Ryan


“In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds”

-Wallace Stevens


“Confusion & clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information.”

-Tufle


“All things are always on the move simultaneously.”

-Churchill


“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

-Marx


“The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism.”

-Octavio Paz


“What could be more productive than a life of isolation, where the only relations we have with each other are relationships of reciprocal discipline. Daddy controlling mommy, mommy teaching the children that life is hard and survival problematic, neighbors getting together to keep the neighborhood “clean,” sociallity shrinking to those occasions that help us find and keep a job?”

-Caffntz & Frederici


“The wasteland grows, woe to him who hides wastelands within.”

-Nietzche


“What characterizes the modern West is its success in masking its fascination with death with a fascination with the future, thus freeing its creative energy.”

-Fatima Mernissi


“All monotheistic religions are shot through with conflicts between the divine and the feminine.”

-Mernissi


“Nothing is closer to a cry than music”

-Tchicaya U Tam’si


“Nothing is pure which resists the mixing of things; I mean that real purity abhors all purity”

-Tchicaya U Tam’si


“Environmentalism without class struggle is gardening.”

-Chico Mendes


“My religion is my politics, my politics is my religion.”

-William Blake, Gandhi


“Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit” <called or uncalled, god will be present> 

-Inscribed over Jung’s door


“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”

-Osama Bin Laden


“The YT man is a spoiled child, when he gets the blues he gets neurotic.”

-Mezz Mezzerow


“Never remind a gangster of his pulse unless you want to lose yours.”

-Mezz


“Life appears only as means to life”

-Marx


“It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

-F. Douglass


“Foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country, give money to the rich people of a poor country.”

-Parenti


“Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own egos and cannot live well with others in the world. They have lost the tune of life. They only live in cold thinking. Their feelings are deeply repressed while they attach themselves forlornly to the earth.”

-Joost A. M. Meerloo


“Not one of them is demented with the mania for owning things, not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived 1,000 years ago, not one is respectable or unhappy over this whole earth.”

-Whitman w/r/t animals


“Cold war-era conception of “democracy” which reduced it to a morally glamourous label for the way rulers are elected, rather than the kinds of power they hold, or the ways they exercise it.”

-Pankaj Mishra


“He is a disturbing symptom of the malaise to which he promises a cure.”

-Mishra


“I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled everyday, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday- that they’ll come out, and forget death, and lose their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level - and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive.”

-Gravity’s Rainbow


“I am so tired of waiting

Aren’t you,

For the world to become good

And beautiful and kind?

Let us take a knife

And cut the world in two-

And see what the worms are eating

At the rind.”

-Langston Hughes


“When the stranger says: “What’s the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?” What will you answer? “We all dwell together to make money from one another”? or, “ This is a community”? Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.”

-T. S. Eliot


“Where wolves are killed off, foxes increase.”

-Melville


“We are all slaves in the eyes of the man”

-Slogan, above confederate flag on Young Patriots logo


“When there are no trees left, birds will land on men’s heads.”

-Fante saying to look for unusual reasons when something odd is happening


“It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine”

-Huxley


“The strikingly frequent repetition, especially in the English Puritan literature, of warning against any trust in aid and friendship of man.”

-Weber


“While the medieval peasant created festivals as an escape from work, the Puritan embraced work as an escape from terror.”

-E. Hregreich


“Race is a theory of history”

-Tavia Nyong’o


“Yet theory is, at its best, nothing more than dreams/myths/histories aimed at giving expression to new ways of seeing and being in the world.”

-C. Riely Snortor


“He who hates vice, hates humanity”

-Melville


“Now I am not unaware that there are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take strange delight in showing what they think have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.”

-Melville


“It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured.”

-Tacitus


“Humor: a method of exploring the implicit themes in thought or in a relationship…that is to say, the explosive moment in humor is the moment when the labeling of the mode undergoes a dissolution and resynthesis.”

-G. Bateson


“We make the path by walking”

-Chuang Tzu


“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

-Goodhart’s law


“A measure colonizes behavior.”

-Goodhart


“Before you understand life, how can you understand death?”

-Confucius


“Menos burros, mas elotes”


“There is a reason, after all, that some people want to colonize the moon, and others to dance before it as before an ancient friend.”

-Baldwin


“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior “righteous indignation” - this is the height of psychological luxury - the most delicious of moral treats.”

-Huxley


“For mankind is ever the same and nothing is lost out of nature, though everything is altered.”

-J. Dryden


“Never tell a cop the truth.”

-Russian proverb


“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”

-Tolstoy


“Every day is a god”

-Annie Dillard


“But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot, there never has been a generation of whole men and women who lived well, even one day…But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.”

-Annie Dillard


“Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets everyday and to thrust his benevolence out to the most remote circumference, to people he doesn’t know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.”

-C.S. Lewis


“You can’t get Awo <spiritual knowledge> from a book.”

-Yoruba proverb


“We must plow over language in its entirety.”

-Wittgenstien


“Aspice ut aspiciar” <look at me so that I may be looked upon>

-above door over Atrium of Time, BotNS


“It is not the slumber of reason that produces monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”

-Deleuze


“Hence our motto must be: reform of consciousness, not through dogmas, but by analyzing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or political form.”

-Marx


“The energy of pain must be kept moving.”

-Laura Lapsky


“Fucked up situations fuck us up.”

-W. Gass


“Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it; be cool, but care.”

-Pynchon


“The society which rests on modern industry is not accidently or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally speculist. In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing but itself.”

-DeBord


“Half of the time you think you’re thinking, you’re really listening.”

-McKenna


“”Mountain Lords” we called the apes, when we got them drunk.”

-Li Po


“There is another world, other than this one we choose to live in.”

-Li Po


“You’ll never live to be a thousand

Much anguish leads to an early death

Drink deep, and dwell within the cup

Conceal yourself, your only true treasure.”

-Li Po


“Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to stay the same; leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.”

-Foucault


“Though you remain

Convinced

To be alive

You must have somewhere 

To go

Your destination remains

Elusive”

-Keorapeste Kgositsile


“The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you have gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words so I can talk to them?”

-Zhuangzi


“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world in their own hue, and each one shows only what lies in focus.”

-Emerson


“All investigations of time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.”

-Pynchon


“Who claims Truth, Truth abandons.”

-Pynchon


“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”

-Pericles


“When an Inuk leaves a round home and enters a square house, he gets a headache and gets nervous.”

-Armand Tagoona


“I am part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world whoes margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.”

-Tennyson


“The United States is also a one-party state, but, in typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”

-Nyerere


“Duos habet et bene pendentes” <he has two and they dangle nicely> said by a cardinal to confirm that the new pope has testicles. To prevent a “Pope Joan” situation, mythical female Pope who gave birth while pope


“All the labor-saving machinery that has hitherto been invented has not lessened the toil of a single human being.”

-John Stuart Mill


“Societies live by borrowing from one another, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.”

-Mauss


“Caring labor is in a way the very opposite of mechanical labor; it is about recognizing and understanding the unique qualities, needs and peculiarities of the cared for…in order to provide what they require to flourish. Caring labor is distinguished by its particularity.”

-Graber/Wingrow


“We have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as rather stupid.”

-LeGuin


“No longer a slave to ambition

I laugh at the world and its shams

As i think of my pleasant condition

Surrounded by acres of clams”

-Francis Henry


“To learn which questions are unanswerable and not to answer them; this is the most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

-LeGuin


“Those whose enduring object is power in the world are only too happy to use, without remorse, the others, whose aim is, of course, to transcend questions of power. Each regards the others as a pack of fools.”

-Against the Day


“Conspiracy is the poor person’s cognitive mapping of the postmodern age.”

-Jameson


“Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles.”

-MacBeth


“Truth is most deceptive”

-Anglo-Saxon proverb


“Only connect”

-E.M. Foster


“This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.”

-DeLillo


“Caput Gerat Lupinum” <Let him wear the wolf’s head> to make someone an outlaw, it’s okay to kill them


“There is no such thing as an innocent metaphor”

-Thomas Moynihan


“Every object is an hourglass.”

-Thomas Moynihan


“Ubi Sunt qui ante nos fuerunt” <where are those who were before us?>


“Omni mutantur - nihil interit” <all things change, nothing perishes>
-Ovid


“Dialectics, matrices, archetypes, all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across the table, to cheating and lost hope, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West’s ancient curse.”

-Gravity’s Rainbow


“The most beautiful kosmos is sweepings piled up at random”

-Heraclitus


“All foreigners and beggars come from Zeus”

-Homer


“Arms themselves can prompt men to use them”

-Homer


“And when they finished their lovemaking, they shared another pleasure - telling stories”

-Homer


“If we are to survive, we must take nothing that is dead and choose wisely among the dying”

-Black Marxism


“Capitalism will always be racist and sexist because it has to mystify its core contradiction- the promise of prosperity versus the reality of widespread poverty- by denigrating the “nature” of those it exploits: colonial subjects, women and the dispossessed.”

-Silva Frederici


“The more closely we associated the diet with cavemen the more we loved it. Cavemen wer not famous for living a long time, but they were famous for being exactly what the fuck they were supposed to be, something we could no longer say about ourselves.”

-Patricia Lockwood


 “Both intrinsically structured and free-associative, not unlike a nightmare.”

-Infinite Jest


“Travel is the saddest of life’s pleasures.”

-Theroux


“What did weekends mean to the leasuried poor?”

-Little, Big


“She will never be happy and honest at the same time.”

-Everything is Illuminated


“Act so there is no use in a center.”

-Gertrude Stein


“Our dependance on plants breeds a contempt for them…In this somewhat topsy-turvy view plants remind us of our weakness.”

-Pollan


“Andriamanitra tsy mizaha taran’olona” <God is not resperter of persons>


“They were merely loud in a dull way.”

-House of Mirth


“They crossed impossible deserts. They were assaulted by thieves and left for dead. They went mad. They murdered. They starved. Allies in a hard and lonely mission, they quarrelled and accused each other of being homosexual, living sepretly in their own tents and communicating by letter. They ran out of water and drank their own blood to stay alive.”

-The Strong Brown God


“Too much travel…too much strangeness and novelty could loosen the moorings of the soul.”

-Rushdie


Puro reloj <nothing but the clock> - Spanish expression w/r/t American life


“Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.”

-W. S. Merwin


“For certain more curious and disenchanted spirits, the pleasure of ugliness comes from an even more mysterious sentiment, which is a thirst for the unknown and a taste for the horrible. It is this sentiment, the germ of which all of us carry to a greater or lesser extent, that drives certain poets into clinics and anatomy theaters, and women to public executions. I’m sorry that no one understands this - a harp without a low-string. There are people who blush about having loved a woman when they realize that she is a fool…Stupidity is often the ornamentation of beauty. It is that which gives eyes the lackluster limpidity of blackish ponds, and the oily clam of tropic seas.”

-Baudelaire


“I loved my friend

He went away from me

There is nothing more to say

The poem ends

Soft as it began-

I love my friend”

-Langston Hughes



“There is in the world only one choice, between loneliness and vulgarity.”

-Schopenhauer


“Joy is the nature of things. Look closely-where is this fleeting consequence you’ve tangled your life in.”

-Du Fu


“It is here in idleness that I become real.”

-Du Fu


“Here a tradition of seated men keeps women on their feet.”

-Du Fu


“I know the earth absorbs perfume and urine with the same indifference.”

-Zora Neale Hurston


“Beauty is always bizarre.”

-Baudelaire


“Stranger, here you will do well to stay; here our highest good is pleasure.”

-Inscription on garden of Epicurean school


“Knowledge is not for knowing, it is for cutting”

-Foucault


“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.”

-Baldwin


“Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.”

-Pascal


“What is this strange madness, this mania for sleeping each night in a different bed.”

-Petrach


“To live in one land, is captivity

To run all countries, a wild rougery.”

-Dunne


“This life is a hospital in which each sick man is possessed by a desire to change beds…I think I'd be happy in a place I happened not to be, and this question of moving is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.”

-Baudelaire


Solvitur Ambulando <It is solved by walking>


Mundus Senescit <the world grows old>


“I have sometimes thought it possible to advance a theory of settlement - and therefore civilization- as “the lean season capitalized.”

-Chatwin


“Political questions become unsolvable when disguised as cultural ones.”

-Gramsci


“All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being.”

-Vonnegut


“Most desire is non-consensual; most desires aren’t desired.”

-Andrea Long Chu


“We are imprisoned in ourselves, but it is a very big prison.”

-Wendy Doinger


“None of them feels that work, per se, is good; it is only the means to idleness. The theory of the YT man, no matter what his practice, is the reverse; he feels work is good, and idleness, being agreeable, must be evil.”

-William Percy


“We men and women are all in the same boat on a stormy sea. We owe each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.”
-G. K. Chesterton


“Weapons of defense: Silence, Exile, Cunning”

-Joyce


“The dream is the aquarium of the night.”

-V. Hugo


”Cock is okay but only schoolboys have dicks. Thus civilization advances by humps and licks.”

-Willaim Gass


“Certainly nothing else will do for fellatio, which has never had its poet.”

-William Gass


“Fucked up situations fuck us up.”

-Williams Gass


“How do we short-circuit control?” 

- W. Burroughs 


“You know, the only good trip, is a bad trip” 

- Genesis P-Orridge


“Everyone in heaven is 33”

-Al-Ghazali


“And no dream is entirely a dream.”

-A. Schnitzler

“Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on.”

-Saidiya Hartman

“Naming can also be a covering over.”

-Kathryn Yusoff


“What we call history is perhaps a way of avoiding responsibility for what happened, and is happening, in time.”

-Baldwin


“Whiteness: ownership of the Earth, forever and ever.”

-W.E.B. DeBois


“Slavery and genocide are the ur-text to discussions of species and geology. Their empirical bedrock and epistemic anchor.”

-Yusoff


“The person who records cannot intervene; the person who intervenes cannot record.”

-Sontag

“Neither from itself nor from another

Nor from both

Nor without a cause

Does anything, anywhere arise.”

-Nagarjuna


“Stasis does not endure”

-Nagarjuna


“What language expresses is non-existent.”

-Nagarjuna


“Whoever is uprooted, uproots.”

-Tiqqun


“How much better is the silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here forever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”

-Woolf


“The soul is a form of the body.”

-Klossowski


Communal Ritual Ingredients 

  1. Synchronized singing/dancing

  2. Collaborative music making

  3. Extreme physical exhaustion

  4. Feeling of common fate

  5. Shared experience of danger/terror

  6. Supernatural/mystical beliefs

  7. Casual opacity/lack of instrumentality 


“So long as we stay in place, Satan is more than satisfied. He loves circular, obsessive activity. Entropy is his meat. When the world becomes a pendulum, he will inhabit his throne.”

-Mailer


“In this awakening, there has been a good deal of pain. When I lived in other places, I looked at their evils with the curiosity of a traveler; I was not responsible for them, it cost me nothing to be a critic, for I had not been there long and I did not feel like I would stay. But here, now that I am both a native and a citizen, there is no immunity to what is wrong. It is impossible to escape the sense that I am involved with history.”

-Wendell Berry


“The whole world is just food and the eater of food.”

-Upanishads


“Man is not a rational animal, he’s a rationalizing animal.”

-Heinlein


“The statement of a terrible truth has a kind of healing power.”

-Wendell Berry


“Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus.”

-Nietzche


“All of you who are in love with hectic work and what is fast, new, strange - you find it hard to bear yourself, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself.”

-Nietzche


“The principles of the con are basically the same on every level.”

-Iceberg Slim


“To spot the similar in the dissimilar is the mark of poetic genius.”

-Aristotle


“Though the earth is solid, the chameleon is cautious with its steps.”

-Ewe saying


“Divinity is an energy not an act, do not say, “I believe,” say, “I serve”

-Maya Deren


“Myth is the smoke of history.”

-John Keay


“This collection was not an accumulation of excerpts intended to facilitate the writing of a study but constitutes the main work, with the writing secondary. The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they may illustrate one another and were able to prove their raison d’etre in a free-floating state, as it were.”

-Walter Benjamin 


“A great Truth is a Truth whose opposite is also true.”

-Mann


“Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one another in life-long activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all actors the world over are the same.”

-MIlan Kundera


“To speak is to lie.”

-W. Burroughs


“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”

-Wittgenstien


“Man needs play and danger. Civilization gives them work and safety.”

-W. Burroughs


“Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before…he is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer seeking to get off of the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it.”

-Pynchon


“Exuberance is beauty.”

-Blake


“Mindforg’d manacles”

-Blake


“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.”

-Therou 


Male Archetypes

-King

-Warrior

-Magican

-Lover

Female Archetypes

-Amazon

-Mother

-Medical Woman

-Hetaira

-Jung


“To be a one at all you must be a many and that’s not a metaphor.”

-Donna Haraway


“Shame is a flushed, abject feeling while humiliation is the entire apparatus that causes shame to erupt, the entire theater in which the shame appears.”

-Kaustenbaum


“Dread is only memory in the future tense.”

-Elisabeth Ayrton


“The left has no map, but it has a compass.”

-Fernado Coronil


“Paradoxes explain everything, since they cannot be explained. That was a paradox, of course, or rather it was a great truth, embodied in a paradox. The truth being that a thing cannot be employed to prove itself.”

-Wolfe, On Blue’s Waters


“But what is the gnostic situation? A basic definition: you are in a trap and you need to escape.”

-Erik Davis


“The point is to get drunk on a glass of water.”

-Henry Miller


“In our unenlightened state, we are food for the moon.”

-Gurdjieff


“If you get the message, hang up the phone.”

-Alan Watts


“The conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number.”

-Angle to Descartes in a dream


“Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest

And passage through these looms

God ordained motion, but ordained no rest.”

-Henry Vaughn


“For the Gods have ordained that everything should be hard for the abstemious.”

-Horace


“With a piercing scream, racpacious fortune snatches the crown from one head and likes to place it on another.

-Horace


“What’s the point of wearying your brain (which isn’t up to it) with plans that stretch to infinity.”

-Horace


“Why do we, valiant fellows that we are, aim at so many targets in our short lives? Why give up our country for one that is warmed by another sun? What expatriate has ever succeeded in escaping from himself as well.”

-Horace


“Declaring forbidden what is not forbidden is forbidden.”

-Alam ad-Din ibn Shukr


“Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: the Mark inside.”

-Burroughs


“Capital is, at every level, an eerie entity: conjured of nothing, Capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.”

-M. Fisher


“Izaho Maditra Amin’ny Rariny” <I am stubborn in justice> 

-Rakotomaditra (originally, Rakstonanhary)


“Every word was once a poem.”

-Emerson


“You have to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people far removed from any political game. The reason is quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the State to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and bombings which remain unpunished, because the State cannont convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”

-Vincenzo Vinciguerra, Italian neo-fascist bomber


“The ass stops being the behind, and moves upfront to become the booty.”

-Kodwo Eshun


“Human beings are the sex-organs of the machine world.”

-McLuhan


“Metafoolishness is the sudden awareness of the frame you’re in, the blinding realization of the games you’re in, games set up to play you for a fool.”

-Kodwo Eshun


“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

-Weil


“The individual is a bourgeois fetish.”

-Bogdanov


“The cosmos is change, life is discourse.”

-Democritus


“To fools, every serious thing is a joke. To the wise, all jokes are serious.”

-Mawlānā


“I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary…I didn’t come from here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way. Whomever brought me here will have to take me home.”

-Rumi 


“The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything... That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.”

-Weil


“Writing prejudicial off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic.”

-Burroughs


“Perception and understanding have come to a stop. And the spirit moves where it wants, etc.”

-Chung Tzu


“I hope to ruin the appetites of every son of a bitch that ever eats in that room…Make those rich bastards feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.”

-Rothko, w/r/t painting a mural for the Four Seasons restaurant in NYC


“Nature Lover, or Something

I am 

Not particular.


I like whatever

The sky happens

To be doing at the time.”

-Braughtigan


“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

-Wittgenstien


“Sad passions like empathy are used for exploitation.”

-Spinoza


“Not speaking of the way,

Not thinking of what’s to come after

Not questioning name or fame

Here, loving love

You and I look at each other.”

-Yosano Akiko


“Better get drunk and cry,

Than show off your learning, 

In public.”

-Ōtamo No Tabito


“I loathe the twin seas

Of being and not being

And long for the mountain 

Of Bliss untouched by 

The changing tides”

-Anonymous 

 

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

-Wilhoit’s law


“The war on drugs is a long-term fix to capitalism’s woes, combining terror with policy making in a seasoned neolibral mix. Cracking open social worlds and territories once thought unavailable in global capitalism. This project is about re-thinking what is called the war on drugs: It isn’t about prohibition or drug policy. Instead, it looks at how, in this war, terror is used against populations in cites and rural areas, and, how paralle to this terror and resulting panic, polices, that facilatate foreign direct investments, and economic growth, are implemented. This is drug war capitalism.”

-Dawn Paley

“It would not be sad like whales

with their immense and patient sieving

and the sobering modesty

of their general way of living.”

-Kay Ryan


Each soul knows infinity, everything, but confusedly. When I walk beside the sea and hear it, I hear, though without distinguishing them, each wave of which the total sound is made up, and so our confused perceptions come from the impressions which the whole universe makes on us.” 

-Leibniz


“It does not make much difference how you divide the sciences, for they are one continuous body, like the ocean.” 

-Leibniz

“It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from the effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting any immediate reward, to love without instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition.”

― Thomas Merton





WHY WE WON: NOTES OF THE CHAZ/CHOP PART 1

The CHAZ/CHOP got a lot of attention during its brief, 22 day existence. However, the events leading up to the abandonment of the East Precinct, also deserve scrutiny. Currently, this whole tumultuous summer of 2020 here in Seattle can be divided into 3 sections. First, from Friday May 29th until Monday, June 8th. This period covers the very beginning of the George Floyd-related protests in the city, up until the moment the Seattle Police Department leaves a large section of Capitol Hill. The second era runs from this desertion until early July 1st, when SPD retakes the East Precinct. This section is the lifespan of the CHAZ/CHOP. As I write this, we’re in the 3rd era (though, I was at a protest on the evening of July 1st where people chanted, “chapter 2” so perhaps my chronology is controversial) and we’ll see where we go.

 Presently, I’d like to focus on the first era, the days before Seattle caught on nationally for our Autonomous Zone, when Seattle was just one of dozens of American cities experiencing unrest in the aftermath of George Floyd’s police lynching. In fact, the people of Minneapolis burned down a police precinct on the 28th of May, a day before the protests in Seattle got going. This action in Minneapolis would go on to inform the SPD’s choices. 

On Friday the 29th groups of people smashed windows down the block from the East Precinct, at a Ferrari dealership. That Saturday a much larger group protested downtown. Early in the day, the SPD maced a child and threw flashbangs in a peaceful crowd while speakers were still speaking. A group of protesters blocked the highway. Others, including myself, were maced and teargas and flashbanged downtown. Eventually, some cop cars got burned and some stores were looted. Sunday, large groups of us marched around the city under the intense gaze of SPD bike cops. By that Monday, protesters fixated on the barricades the SPD had put around their East Precinct, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood by Cal Anderson park. The cops used concrete barricades and fencing to block the streets in four places, twice on 12th, twice on Pine. The Western Barricade, on Pine between 11th and 12th (the cops moved it slightly up and down the street, day to day) was the site of the largest and most well-documented site of protest. Over the next week the protesters and cops and, eventually, the national guard, stayed out there, day (and especially) at night, locked in conflict. Eventually, during the day on Monday the 8th, the cops simply boarded up the station, drove away and the protesters were left to figure out what to do. It was very strange and probably not repeatable, even in Seattle. Nevertheless, I think there are some lessons, 5 to be precise, about what sorts of things work and what factors played into this bizarre victory:


  1. Space: Like I said, actions began across Seattle before settling on the East Precinct Station. I’ve been on marches with all sorts of groups (Urban-Native Education Alliance, SIEU, the Seattle Teachers’ Union, the Womxn’s march, Refuse Fascism, various environmental groups, etc.) for as long as I’ve lived in Seattle and they all go the same way. There exists a “elite” unit of bike cops that follow and control marches. Even when the march is tiny, say 30 people, there’s still a phalanx of bike-dweeb cops circling, blocking traffic and springing into action when they feel things get “out of hand.” They mostly arrest people, mostly, for property “violence,” graffiti and knocking over trash cans. Their main concern seemed to be making sure the marches keep moving, so as not to block streets too long. If you wait at an intersection, they get antsy and threaten to arrest. Their tone and demeanor changes based on who is marching (ie, lots of deference  and bonhomie for the Womxn’s March yuppies with their clever signs, disdain and violent tension for the “radicals'')  This action is the first Seattle event I’ve been involved with that’s found a way around this. And the solution was so elegant and simple: identify a place and protest there constantly. Frankly, the cops made this choice for us by barricading and reenforcing the EP to such an insane extent it practically begged for sustained protest. Instead of having to be at a specific place at a specific time to go on a march or picket it was possible to show up to the EP at any moment of the day for a week and make your voice heard. Additionally, the neighborhood that the EP is in offers us some insight w/r/t why this worked. Capitol Hill is one of Seattle’s most famous neighborhoods. It’s slightly over a mile from downtown, has a reputation as an LGBTQ+ hub as well as a nightlife center. The area immediately around the station includes the Pike/Pine corridor, as it’s known, which is a series of bars and clubs and restaurants as well as a Cal Anderson Park. The neighborhood is predominantly YT and affluent . Expensive apartments and condos near Cal Anderson, shading into large homes and mansions as you get deeper into the neighborhood. I think this is significant for a number of reasons. Capitol Hill, being a large popular neighborhood, is on the light-rail (the subway) line as well as dozens  of bus lines. It’s quite easy to get to and most Seattleites are familiar with the neighborhood. Secondly, and more importantly, because the neighborhood is rich and YT, holding a week-long siege there was both morally acceptable to the protesters and inhibiting the police. If this was a police precinct in, say, the CD (Seattle’s historical black district that is literally blocks away from Cap Hill) the idea of shutting down a neighborhood and spray-painting everywhere and being loud at all hours would have been more fraught. Likewise, the Police were prevented from going all out based on their surroundings. I have no doubt that if we were in a poorer neighborhood, with less rich people filming from their balconies, we would have been gassed more, beaten more and generally treated rougher. Every time they gassed us, they had to gas folks living in $2.5k/month apartments. There were reports of babies in these apartments being gassed and convulsing. There was ample video of all of this since balconies overlook the entire engagement area. Now I think anyone would complain about their child foaming at the mouth and convulsing due to a chemical attack by police. The difference here was that the people making these complaints were not folks the city ignores. Plus Seattle as a whole considers itself liberal and part of the #resistance and “one of the good ones” so I think the spectacle of nightly police violence roused more local sympathy than it would many other places.

  2. Time: When this happened is just as essential as where. It’s important to remember that before NYC stole our crown, Seattle was “America’s Wuhan,” the center of the COVID19 outbreak in North America. The first 6 American deaths were right outside of town. We were the first place to shut down; our mayor declared an emergency on March 3rd. Schools have been closed since March 12th. No one has been to a bar since March 15th. Many people are no longer even seeing coworkers. The psychological impact of this was profound. The isolation that everyone has been feeling has extracted a profound toll. Coupled with this is the intense and scary uncertainty of the situation. It has become more and more clear over time that the government is not interested in helping out. I think this hopelessness raised the stakes. I think the isolation made the atmosphere incredibly electric. People went from being at home all the time to pushing into thousand person crowds, yelling and screaming. People were out-of-work or working from home, making it much easier to spend time at a protest. It seemed to prove that suspicion that the increase in work hours over the years and the seepage of work into every part of life was, partly, to drain us of exactly this energy. The energy was like nothing else I’ve ever experienced.

  3. Consistency: I think we wore them down. By placing them in the position to be guarding four barricades constantly for days at a time was too much for them. The plan was surely to wait out the protesters, to hope the numbers dwindled every day until the general public forgot about them. However, the protests never really dipped in attendance (there were certainly much busier days, for instance, the weekends, but there were a couple hundred each day) and the cops really couldn’t handle the long nights and the endless standing and the constant tension. They couldn’t handle that there was no end in sight, they couldn't’ handle the protesters constant chants of “EVERYDAY” and “YOU LOOK TIRED/WE’RE NOT TIRED” Because, like every fight with the cops, they’re better equipped but there’s more of us. A community around the protest popped up quick and made this consistency possible. Tons of free food and water and PPE and hand-sanitizer and medical care and, towards the end, music and entertainment, popped-up to make it possible and indeed desirable to come to the protest, yell at the police for a few hours, then leave knowing others were coming to take your place. As the nights went on you could feel the patience of the cops slipping. It was obvious they’d manufacture a reason to clear out the area as it was getting late each night, simply because they wanted to fight it out, arrest some people, be done with it, so they could go home. And the protesters wouldn’t allow anything to change. It’s my belief that they didn’t think they could keep this all-day, every-day struggle up, especially given how insane the overtime money was, right at a moment when the police budget is under scrutiny. Additionally, the tactics themselves remain totally consistent. Every day, people showed up at the barricades, especially the Western Barricade, and chanted and yelled and protested. The cops changed where they were standing and how many of them were out there and in what formation, but the crowd’s response was the same. They tried installing speakers and lights to “reason” with us and give directions but every-time they tried it, their voice was drowned in a sea of “fuck you”. Even after they cleared intersections by force, deploying poisons and bombs, the crowd would simply reform moments later. Cops feel their job is to take control of situations; putting them in a situation so anathema to their being placed them in a tortuous bind. The fact that nothing they tried changed the response led to the cops bowing out of the exchange altogether. 

  4. The Limits: The bottle-throwers, laser-pointers and umbrella-wavers are responsible for the success that created for CHOP. There’s a long-standing, mostly tedious, debate on the “left” (especially if you define the left as broad as, “everyone physically involved with the barricade protests”) about the necessity of non-violent protest and what exactly counts and non-violent and where property destruction or similar “grey-area” activities might or might not be acceptable. In my years of going to protests around Seattle I’ve always seen and heard from the so-called “peace police” who stress the importance of, say, not spray painting all over stuff or, definitely, not throwing bottles. These people were certainly at the Precinct Protest, I saw a kid scolded for throwing a bottle, for instance, but I saw way less of them. Partly, I would guess, this had to do with the protests being so spontaneous, and therefore it was harder for people to feel “in-charge” (not that it didn’t stop some from trying) and thus self-deputized to proclaim what sort of protest this was to be. Additionally, and no less likely, many, if not most by the end, of the crowd had been victims of unambiguous violence by the very SPD we were normally asked to treat civilly. Well over half of the protest days ended or contained an instance of the police tossing bombs or firing sponge rounds or wantonly macing. After experiencing that, it’s a much harder sell to say it’s wrong to throw a water bottle at them. And the reason I think these boarder-line “violent” (Hopefully, it’s clear how silly I think it is to consider throwing a half-full water-bottle or pointing a laser-pointer at a man in 50k+ worth of protective gear, including a baton, guns, chemical weapons, helmet and visors is, in any non-symbolic way, violent) tactics worked is directly tied up with one of the main criticism abolitionists have w/r/t the police. Namely, their inability to de-escalate. The New York Times did a great internet interactive about one of these interactions, the famous one from June 26th which gave the movement one of its symbols: the pink umbrella. On this occasion and protester held up a pink umbrella as part of a would-be wall to block an anticipated mace attack (they turned out to be right about an attack being imminent). A cop brushes the umbrella, and decides he must have it, that the protester is being insolent and uncooperative by not allowing him to simply snatch it. There’s a brief tug-of-war before other cops, not even the ones directly next to the action, see all this and start spraying mace right at people’s faces (the “proper use” of this chemical weapon involves spraying it above crowds, not directly at faces). Then it’s the flashbangs and the tear gas and the batons. This incident was particularly well-documented. It happened in broad daylight and involved a bright pink object in a sea of black. But it wasn’t isolated and this dynamic pushed the police into violence over and over. A bottle is thrown, a laser pointed, a cop gets scared and they all have to attack. Because the Police will always value the safety and authority of each other, rather than the general safety and health of anyone else, actions like the ones I’ve described put the Police in a place where they have to “have each others’ back” and lash-out and take control of the situation. The only way they know how to do this involves a level of violence in unacceptable in liberal Seattle. I would, finally, add another tactic to this list of specific tactics that seemed really effective. At the other, non-western, barricades, the crowds were much smaller, sometimes around 50, sometimes less than a dozen. Of course, there were still full lines of war-LARPing cops and national guard folks who had to just stand there. Because there weren’t enough protesters to create a deafening wall of chanting, like at the Western Barricade, protesters switched up the tactics and started yelling really mean, personal aggressive stuff at the individual cops. I can only really speak anecdotally but this seemed to really bother the cops. People yelling, “what will your children think of you?” “If you took off that badge I’d fuck you up” “This is a terrible way to process your trauma, who hurt you?” and “40% of your co-workers abuse their wives” as well as singling out individual cops for ridicule, especially when they’re ordered to just stand there passively, fucked with them. I saw several incidents of “commander” telling cops on the line not to respond. On the last day, that Sunday, I saw a few cops lose it and get into actual flustered arguments with the protesters. Again, I don’t have anything beyond anecdotes to prove that this particular strategy played a role in the victory, but I have been on other marches and protests where the organizers specifically eschew this edge-of-peaceful tactic. And, at least in this case, it was the folks pressing the limits of a “peaceful” protest who were and are responsible for putting the police in an unwinnable position. But why was their position so unwinnable? For that we have to look at the third, and I think, most important factor:

  5. POLICE MINDSET: It does seem insane when you think about it. After 10 days of constant siege, dozens of violent skirmishes, including some that got national media attention (the SPD famously shot an MSNBC reporter, on live TV, with a tear-gas canister)  and truly no end in sight, the SPD packed up their shit in the early morning, boarded up the windows and left the scene. They even left the precinct doors unlocked. They weren’t gone, of course. They were, in fact, less than half mile away, parked in the Safeway parking lot. The National Guard was waiting in Volunteer Park about a mile away. They were waiting because they were expecting the protesters to try to trash or burn down the precinct so they could sweep back in, this time being seen as rescuers and heroes, bulwark against violent anarchy, not the assholes who’d turned the neighborhood into a warzone. This obviously didn’t happen and because the Police made a dumb miscalculation. They really thought that the crowd in front of them, night after night, made up of regular people from across Seattle, would pillage and burn down the precinct the second they got the opportunity. They really believed they were all that was stopping these people from turning a dense urban neighborhood into an inferno. I say, “The Police” made this decision but that’s actually speculation on my part. As I write this, in early July, it is actually unclear who gave the order to abandon the station. Both the Mayor and the Chief of Police have both gone on the record saying that it wasn’t their idea or their order. You know it was a stupid decision when the mayor and the head cop can’t even agree who’s decision it was. Either way, whoever made this choice, made it because of the oversized position the “Anarchist terrorist” occupies in the police imagination. It’s hard to overstate how worried about Antifa violence and rioters the police in Seattle are. Last December, back when we were still allowed to be in groups, I went to the Vera Project, an all-ages venue steps from the Space Needle, to an anarchist book-fair. When I got there it was surrounded by cops. Cops in riot gear, cops with tear gas guns, cops with battens and, of course, the bike-dweebs. It turns out that a lone insane (he was later yelling at us for supporting Hillary Clinton’s infant-cannibalism) Alex-Jones t-shirt dude called them saying that he was worried there were violent terrorists at the book fair. The cops heard Anarchist (presumably, they can’t even hear the word “book”), and, like always, came out guns blazing. On the night Trump was elected I marched from downtown to UW as part of a protest. Right after we got to Red Square a shot rang out and a man fled the scene as a guy, clearly part of the Black Bloc, fell to the ground, shot. The cops swarmed, formed a circle around the shot man and pushed back the medics. They told me and others that an anarchist had shot the man, even though it was clear to everyone that the man was himself an “anarchist” and we had all just watched the shooter slither away unmolested by the police. At the EP siege there was a day when the police attacked to push back the line because a riot cop saw what he thought was a pipe-bomb by his foot. After themselves throwing flashbangs to push back the crowd, it turned out to be a candle. There’s clearly a pattern here where the cops won’t even believe their own lying eyes and consistently and luridly overestimate the strength, cunning and brutality of their opponents. I wonder often about why this is. On the one hand it seems to go back to the ‘99 WTO protest. Those 3 days are still famous around the world and certainly must have been seen as a stinging blow to the SPD. Do you think other cops, in other cities, teased them at cop conventions? Mocked because they couldn’t handle a few silly hippies and anarchists? Maybe they vowed to never let it happen again. Perhaps it’s prudent to look further back. SPD has fought, violently, against the Black Panthers, the United Indians of All Tribes and the General Strikers. So maybe it’s deep in their bones to treat any dissent with total force. I also think it has a lot to do with the psychology of getting all of these military weapons and military training. If you’re driving around Hummers, wearing Call-of-Duty style tactical gear, holding several lethal and chemical weapons, yelling at people to comply or face violence and have a mindset to control the streets at all cost, it’s probably psychologically necessary to imagine an opponent as obsessed with violence as you are. It’s projection and environmental influence. If you see weapons and barbed wire, concrete barricades and the National Guard around, it must be because your opponents will stop at nothing, not because your budgets are overstuffed and you bought a bunch of toys. Additionally, the training and demographics of the police force seem to be a factor. Only about 11% of Seattle cops live in Seattle. That’s a huge problem. It’s exacerbating the Us vs. Them dynamic. It allows them to passively absorb (cops, as a whole, are not curious and thoughtful people) all sorts of stereotypes about dumb libtards and violent antifa which in turn colors their response since they aren’t responding to real people, they’re responding to their cartoonish projects of what Seattleites are like. Additionally, they receive warrior cop training, including training from Israeli cops who quite literally see themselves as holy occupiers, that encourages them to see themselves as brave, manly cowboys, fighting off unwashed hordes and dishing out righteous justice. Just look at how many of them have The Punisher shit on their trucks and tattoos, etc. 


Those five factors are the main reason Seattle was able to successfully drive the police out of a few-city-blocks wide area, occupy a police precinct and create a space, the CHAZ/CHOP, that really resonated around the country. I’ll get more into what happened during the 22 day CHAZ/CHOP era in a later essay, here I’d like to end with some things that the cops seemed to be successful with during the protest that we should think about going forward. First, they cops were most successful when they picked out people in the crowd to communicate with and through. While there are the obvious fears about “police plants” and “double agents” I’m not talking about authentic protesters who get manipulated by the police. To give a specific example, on that Tuesday, I was in the crowd on 11th when we got pushed back by flashbangs and gas. The crowd reformed but a small group of young men (the police almost always seemed to choose men for this, for obvious reasons) said the cops had told them to hold off and that we could move back to the square in “10 minutes” the men told the crowd that when we got back to the square, they would be in front to “keep everyone calm.” People dissented but the men yelled at them to “do this the right way.” They repeated the police rationale, that we had been pushed back because they saw a pipe bomb. It turned out to be a candle. While this was going on, another part of the original Western Barricade protest, who had been pushed down Pine instead of 11th, were pushing the police line in front of them by chanting “hands up don’t shoot” and walking towards them. Eventually, our group of cops backed up as well and the day went on. The desire to be the leader or the one “in-charge,” especially in young men, is pretty easy for the police to manipulate and should really be guarded against. We’re at our strongest when we aren’t negotiating or “doing it the right way.” Likewise, there were many attempts throughout the week to move or alter the protest. People would loudly try to rally people to take the highway, or march to city hall, or change parks. Each time they couldn’t get enough support to really alter the situation which I think was the correct analysis on the part of the protesters. When something is working and we’re clearly putting our opponents in a situation they don’t feel comfortable in, we should keep pushing. At least until they figure out an effective response. Then, and only then, we should move on. 

Like I said before, I’m not sure that you could really recreate this action anywhere else, or even Seattle again. It was one of the most exciting and truly dynamic events I’ve ever been part of. If anything, it shows that radical strangeness is possible if you push hard enough. It shows you that you don’t always get what you are asking for, sometimes you get something much weirder. It shows you have to be ready when your opponent fucks up. The extent to which we were able to capitalize on the SPD’s fuckup is the next question.



RIGHT WING SYMBOLISM

Here, I’d like to take a break from commenting on the activities and ideas of the Left and look into some of the  visual and symbolic culture we see in the Right-Wing protesters, from counter-protesters who come out to heckle and antagonize marchers to those that initiate their own actions, like storming a State capitol. The term “Right-Wing” is so stuffed with types, from regular racist-uncle Trump goons, to trolls and clout-chasers, to actual Nazi death-squads members (popular up here in the PNW, from WAR to the Atomwaffen), it’s nearly bursting, but I think it is possible to look at them as a whole, make some observations about some motifs the reappear again and again and, from that, extract some insight into the way these people think. To do that I’d like to hone in on 2 phenomena. The first is the ubiquity and ideology of the Punisher skull and Thin Blue Line flag. The second is the more nebulous but still noticeable and concerning turn towards a “Special Forces” style dress and outlook.

I don’t think I need to harp too long on how popular the Punisher skull has become. You can see it everywhere, from obvious stuff like stickers and t-shirts and the like, to more elaborate displays like large truck-murals or tattoos. I remember being in high-school, during the early days of the endless Iraq war, back when it was on the news, noticing that an awful lot of our soldiers had punisher logos, in the form of stickers on their gun stocks or tattoos or whatever, visible. It’s hard not to see our soldiers wearing skull insignias and not think of the Mitchel and West, “Are We The Baddies?” sketch. Nowadays, the logo has morphed into a sort of template one can affix with secondary superimpositions or additions. There’s a goofy version with Trump’s hair, there is, of course, the Thin Blue Line colorway, there are Confederate versions, there are versions for all of the armed services branch, and a slightly modified version serves as one of the logos for the III% movement, a violent right-wing militia/paramilitary squad active in both the US and Canada.

It almost isn’t worth mentioning that Gary Conway, the man who created the comic, is vehemently against the appropriation of the logo generally, and by law enforcement especially, going as far as publishing a comic where Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, lecture some cops wearing Punisher stuff about how about how they shouldn’t look up to him and how their admiration makes them bad cops. Conway has sold Punisher skulls with a BLM motif superimposed over it and donated the money to BLM-related charities. Of course, the people engaged in this self-branding are not interested in reading the comics (or reading, generally) or the character or whatever, they like it because the skull is badass the the Punisher does what they think law enforcement, if they were allowed to practice it as they wish, is supposed to do. He punishes. 

Let’s take another symbol that is meant to say the same thing. The Blue Lives Matter flag, unlike the Punisher skull, is recent and, as you can tell from the name, a direct response to Black Lives Matter. In 2014, a YT college student named Andrew Jacob decided, after seeing some of the uprisings resulting from Michael Brown’s murder, to create a flag to represent the ideology of the police and their supporters. It’s important to keep in mind that Jacob wasn’t/isn’t a cop, nor is he from a family of cops, but he was still able to graphically distill their philosophy. There was already a tradition of placing a black stripe across the flag to honor a KIA officer.  Jacob took this symbolism, which that still practiced (at least here in Seattle) and allows police officers to obscure their badge numbers with those black sashes, and added some melodrama. I’m sure you’ve seen what he came up with, it’s a black and white version of American flag with a blue stripe in place of the middle white stripe. Part of it is, of course, a visual version of the phrase, “the thin blue line,” an idea very popular with this set. Despite calling to mind the much more real “Blue Wall of Silence” the “Thin Blue Line” mindset tells us that Hobbes was right and the world is mostly violent chaos and only strong, violent men can stand against this chaos and protect our civilization. In Jacob’s words, “The black above represents citizens, and the black below represents criminals.” And the above and below aspect of this is important to keep in mind, the police have nothing to do with the citizens, their relationship is only one of the citizens thanking and honoring the police, they (the citizens) are not themselves policed since they aren’t, by definition, criminals. I’m hoping you don’t need too much prompting to consider how America’s racial hierarchy might map itself onto notions of criminality. The police don’t police citizens, they hold the line against, and punish, the criminals. 

This is the resolution to that leftist critique about the seeming hypocrisy of the same people who go on and on about government oppression and tyranny and whatnot are, seemingly hypocritically, the first to bootlick and espouse that the police have the right to execute those who don’t immediately obey them. Think of that satirical remake of the Gadsden Flag where the snake is wearing a BDSM ball-gag and the text is “tread on me daddy.” It does seem like a contradiction but you have to understand that, to them, this is easily resolved because the cops, again, are not policing citizens, who are sometimes referred to as “patriots'' when they’re trying to make it even more clear. Obviously citizens would not stand to be treated the way cops treat criminals, but these citizens trust cops can know the difference and would never assume them to be in the under-class.

 So when they demand  state violence against BLM protesters while demanding that armed, anti-mask activist who occupy (to use a left term) State capitals remain unmolested, the contradiction isn’t in what sorts of tactics can be used, it is rather a deeper division between the actions of citizens and those of criminals. It explains the silence of the Right generally, and the NRA specifically, around Philando Castille’s murder. On the one hand, here’s someone being killed for having a legal, constitutionally protected gun, surely the same people who constantly underline the need for an armed citizenry (there’s that word again) to keep the government in check will lose their minds and demand justice. Of course they didn’t. We can look back to the 60’s and see how even some as revered as Reagan was quick to jettison supposedly sacrosanct 2nd amendment rights when the Black Panthers decided that amendment applied to them too. Part of this is, of course, due to the fact that the Right-Wing is just generally smarter and better about protecting it’s fringe (look at how mainstream republicans talk about violent anti-abortion activists vs how mainstream democrats treated Occupy) and brutally cracking down on the Left’s, but another piece is that this dangerous, stupid worldview is becoming more and more mainstream. We need only to look at their flags and stickers to see what they want since these two major motifs connect and reinforce one another. They see criminals as an a priori category, kept below, and most importantly separate from the citizens. The criminals themselves, since criminality is their nature, cannot be reformed or made into citizens, one cannot cross the Blue Line (“Hold The Line” is a popular slogan among pro-police types, at least here in Seattle) so what is left is punishing. 

The other trend I’ve noticed and am interested in is actually more wide-spread than the Punisher/Blue Lives flag and points to something much larger and sinister about our culture. On the street level, I’m talking about the prevalence of the “Special Forces” look among the protesters. This is actually a phenomena, unlike the Punisher, that is visible on the Left and the Right. The John Brown Gun Club as well as the CHOP Sentinels also have this look, but it is much more common on the Right. On the surface level, this trend mostly presents as comedy. The pasty hentai-nazi (or elderly uncle) keyboard warriors, now out in public with 3xl “tactical” vests, Gap cargo shorts, a nervous look and an enormous gun. You see these types a lot at Right-Wing rallies here and they are laughable; the gap between their masculine aspirations and what they’re actually able to manifest would almost be touching in a sad way if they weren’t so odious otherwise. It is important to keep in mind these people are still dangerous in spite, and perhaps because, of their naïveté. Kyle Rittenhouse pops to mind. But this isn’t about a group of men LARPing to work out a perceived cultural emasculation. Almost all of the major movies about the War on Terror wars, from Black Hawk Down (admittedly, a precursor, set in 90’s Somalia) to Zero Dark Thirty to The Hurt Locker to Lone Survivor to to American Sniper to 12 Strong, even to romances like Dear John feature Special forces soldiers, not the “regular” grunts we see in Vietnam or WWII movies. Outside of art, Chris Kyle, the famous liar and Special Forces sniper, is easily the most famous soldier since, at least, Vietnam and he has the added benefit of embodying not only the Special Forces ethos but the Punisher skull/Blue Lives one as well when he publicly insisted he’d driven to New Orleans during Katrina to use his sniping prowess to kill criminals. An incredibly telling lie. Pat Tillman, who also joined a Special Forces unit, is probably the only other contender for “most famous solider of our era.” Beyond that, there are diffuse examples like certain islamophobic coffee companies and books claiming teach you how to eat/train/lead like a Navy Seal. The idea that our wars are now fought by a small elite group of ultimate warriors is prevalent, seductive and seems to have replaced the regular grunt soldier as the archetypical armed forces figure in the popular imagination. It is not only just a negative trend in the sense that they’re killing people (they being both the actual Special Forces, who in many senses are death-squads, as well as their Rittenhouse-style fanclub), the rise of the Special Forces Operator as a cultural figure both obscures awful things that are happening now and suggests a really dark future. 

Before we get into what this popularity means” and where it’s headed, it’s important to highlight the difference between a regular soldier and a Special Forces Operator and for this we can look at how they are dressed. What to me, separates the “Special Ops'' look, and reflects the underlying difference in mindset between them and traditional soldiers, is a mixture between cutting-edge military gear and “civilian” clothing and signifiers. The Special Ops guy is the quintessential War on Terror soldier, for reasons that I’ll get into in a moment, so it’s fitting that our introduction to this style came in the early days of the Afghanistan war, when we were crushing the Taliban in a heroic lighting-war. We’d pushed these terrorist masterminds back to Tora Bora, where special forces, the famous “Horse Soldiers” they’ve gone on to make at least 3 movies about (Delta Force this time, the SEALs  didn’t steal their thunder as top Ops until the Bin Laden thing) were going to hunt them down and kill them in these cave-pocketed mountains. In the pictures we saw, they were dressed as some sort of hybrid between an Afghani citizen and a super-soldier. They wore the beards forbidden since WWI to our regular soldiers, they wore the Pakol hats, which have been an Afghani symbol of resistance since at least the Soviet invasion, some of them even, as their name would imply, rode horses like the locals, something you don’t see a lot of regular enlisted men do these days. But, they also carried cutting-edge armaments and technology resulting from the literal billions we spend on “defense.”  And, like almost all the groups under the “Special Forces” umbrella, they were almost certainly involved in a massacre, in this case in the Dasht-i-Leili massacre desert. The Special Forces visual aesthetic, of combining the highest grade weaponry you can get your hands on, with local costumes in order to blur the solider/civilian line, has reached its current peak with the Boogaloo Boys, a new accelerationist Right-Wing militia/terrorist group who’s calling card is the guns and vests and whatnot of a traditional militia guy, paired with a Hawaiian shirt, a joke both about how much fun they intend to have in the upcoming civil war they’re trying to hurry along, but also about how blending in with Americans would involve a dumb, loud shirt. 

But if we zoom out, I think the cultural rise of the Special Forces Operator is being encouraged because it’s very useful in 2 specific areas. First, it provides a much more comforting way to think about our forever wars and secondly, it tries to solve a contradiction between the types of people we’re encouraged to be and our apparent need to have an enormous standing army. 

On the first point, during the time period in which this cultural shift towards the Special Forces guy happens there’s an actual shift in the nature of the way the US fights wars and it’s towards unmanned drones. The US government has used unmanned drones for surveillance since, at least, the first Gulf War and they started putting missiles on Predator drones around 2001-2002. The first recorded drone strike took place on October 7, 2001, less than a month after 9/11, a turnaround speed that tells you they were predicting warfare would move in this direction for some time before the attacks. One of the reasons this type of warfare is so desirable to those in power has to do with how many fewer people have to be involved and thus how much easier it is to keep control of information. As such, it’s quite hard to know how many people have been killed across the world in this manner since that date but the Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts the number dead between 9k-17k and the total casualties in the 10-20k range. Obviously, the number of people the various Special Ops groups have killed during this same time period is much, much lower but they take up almost all of the cultural space (where are the romances about hunky but troubled drone pilots working outside of Las Vegas?) and the reason seems pretty clear. There’s something uncomfortable and icky about the idea of drones that belies a more basic sense of fairness and even courage and masculinity in war. There’s been debates about what constitutes a “fair-fight” for as long as people have been fighting and you can certainly see these issues in something like an arrow, but the idea of bombing someone from abroad, so far removed that you are not even flying the plane (and thus couldn’t be shot down or crash by accident) does not seem to comport with what we traditionally think of when we think of war or a fight. During a more traditional war that involved heavy bombing, like WWII or Vietnam, the bombing was part of a campaign that did involve boots on the ground and this a more “fair” venue for our opponents to strike back. When you compare this to the situation in places like Yemen, where our bombs have killed thousands (tens of thousands if you count bombs we sold to the Saudis to drop), and where there has never been a formal declaration of war, there are no American troops in the country and most Americans are unaware of the situation. This isn’t a formula for feeling like the good guy. This is where the Special Forces come in. If they get all the cultural attention the bombings should be getting, the general public can find these endless, boundary-less wars more palpable. The idea that our nation is brutally bombing some of the poorest places on earth constantly and for no clear reason makes us seem like murderers. The idea that an elite cadre of brave men will go to whatever lengths to track-down and kill the most dangerous people in the world is much more agreeable so it’s what we’ve been given. The reality that most of these “most dangerous people in the world” super-terrorist types that act as the foil to these Special Forces figures are actually 15 year-olds who grew up without electricity is easy to ignore and the narrative helps clean up a number of nagging concerns with these endless wars. 

First, because we’re talking about such an elite, high-level group of course the actual facts of what they’re doing and why it’s necessary to do it must remain vague at best. Do you think the average American, or anyone really, can explain why we’re bombing villages in Niger? Or Somalia? But if you were to, say, pitch it mostly as “Special Forces Missions” in Africa it’s very vagueness and shadowy implications become proof that it’s vital, high-level and important. It also helps overcome the American public’s reluctance to have it’s children die in battle. During the more traditional beginning of the Iraq War, before they fully switched to this Special Forces messaging, the American casualties became a huge issue. America, correctly, didn’t seem totally convinced that it made sense for our young people to die terribly in a place that didn’t really seem to have much effect on our lives. It bears constant repeating that when it comes to the children of other countries we couldn’t care less. There are now about 4500 US soldier deaths total in Iraq and during the worst parts of the war there were about that many Iraqi civilian deaths in a month. This set of affairs makes sense when you think of our soldiers as regular people, neighbors, relatives and average folks. When you think of our soldiers as all Special Ops guys the math gets different. These sorts of people didn’t die needlessly. It wasn’t the case that they needed college money then got cut in-half by an IED a month later, these are people who devoted their whole lives to this, warriors who know exactly what they’re getting into and are presumably in some Red White and Blue Valhalla now. This also explains Trump’s rush to forgive war-criminals from both the private (Blackwater) and public (SEALs) sectors for their war crimes. The brutality and unforgiving warrior spirit is exactly what you need these people for and we certainly can’t punish them for it.

The second major contradiction this mindset resolves also centers around how we think of soldiers. Traditionally and for obvious reasons, the soldier is not an individual. The soldier, more than basically anyone else, is part of a larger body and the whole point of being in an Army is that you’ve put your basic instinct for survival on hold to advance the whole. Basically, a soldier is supposed to not hesitate to die for the larger group; it’s this quality, the quintessence of the soldier, that makes them brave and heroic. This doesn’t quite jibe with our current notions of individuality. Over the last 30 years or so this push has gotten even stronger. The army has struggled with this reality for a while now, outside of a few bad economic years the various armed forces have struggled with recruitment my whole life. At one point early in the ongoing War on Terror, they even tried to tackle this contradiction head-on with the paradoxical slogan, “An Army of One.” They eventually choose to drop that silly slogan when they found a better solution in elevating the Special Forces figure. Unlike a traditional soldier, the Special Forces guy is individual. We’ve already talked about how they get to differ in dress, but they often carry non-standard weapons, including, in the case of the Seals, specially made knives and hatches from a NC blacksmith working near Ft. Bragg. They’re assumed to be expert enough to not be in a traditional chain-of-command, they get to make some of their own choices and decisions in a way that a regular soldier is expected not to. It’s easy to see why this archetype has taken the place of the normal soldier in the American Imaginary, the Special Forces guy is much more in-line with our values. 

Beyond even its function in the USA, the Special Forces as a type of warfare and soldier is, troublingly, both gaining traction internationally, as well as decoupling from formal governments. From an American perspective, there’s no bigger symbol of this than the Dark Lord himself, Eric Prince. In addition to being the brother of Betsy DeVos, he was, of course, a SEAL. Prince founded the notorious Blackwater, which changed its name first to Xe and then to the now-current Academi, which began operating in Iraq at the beginning of our endless Iraq War and now operates across the globe. When the US needs these sorts of services but doesn’t want to get “our troops'' in trouble, Prince and Academi are the first call. They recently took charge of our on-the-ground efforts in all of Somali, in the hopes of continuing our influence on that nation without getting into another Black Hawk Down Situation. Another shadowy group of former Special Forces Operators, known as Spear Operations Group, was paid by the UEA to carry out assassinations (and who know what else) as part of Saudi Arabia and the UAE genocidal war in Yemen. I see more and more downtown Seattle security run by G4S, a global security firm that helps protect buildings around the globe (they protected a lot of US government buildings in Madagascar), and are accused of committing atrocities to protect oil interests in South Sudan. Local to Seattle, the CHOP days, and specifically a standoff at the Car Tender auto-shop, brought along upstart private security firm Iconic Global who were a continuous armed presence, dressed in the Special Forces style, at CHOP even after the station was retaken by police. 

Internationally, the most prominent examples of this contemporary military arrangement probably include things like the Wagner group, which is a Russian Paramilitary group that operates all over the place, most famously in Ukraine, and is owned by a Russian Billionaire named Yevgeny Prigozhin. Erik Prince, who is, of course, also a billionaire, has proposed Academi and The Wagner Group work together in places like Libya. Looking further afield, things like Kenya’s Rapid Response team, the newly reported upon 01 group in Afghanistan  and the Mexican Cartel, Los Zetas, seem cut from the same mold. The RRT is a sort of police special forces set up in 2004, tasked with the sorts of raids these Special Forces groups specialize in, who are nominally meant to combat “Islamic Terrorism” in East Africa. They’re, you’ll be shocked to learn, funded and trained by both the CIA and MI6, and, again, shocker, they’re accused of summary executions, torture and posing as aid workers to infiltrate refugee camps. Likewise the 01 Group is an Afghani Special Forces unit that has been credibly accused of raiding Madrasas full of children and murdering them and receives direct CIA support.

Los Zetas are a drug cartel active across Mexico. For what it’s worth, when I lived in Mexico City, circa 2012, the general tabloid consensus was that these guys were the most brutal in a crowded field. A lot of that might be typical notas rojas hyperbole but it was noticeable. Irregardless of their relative brutality, Los Zetas also stand out by virtue of their founders being former-members of Cuerpo de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), a Special Forces unit of the Mexican army. Before some of them broke off and formed Los Zetas, GAFE was most famous for murdering and mutilating Zapatistas in Chiapas in the mid-90’s. Would you be shocked to learn that many of the GAFE commandos who went on to be Zetas were trained by US and Israeli special forces members at Fort Bragg in North Carolina? The list goes on and on getting darker and weirder. 

I think this is the model for our warfare for the perceivable future, or at least until they can replace the Special Forces guys with kill-bots or until we get into a more conventional war with China (the bots seem inevitable and I guess we’ll see about China). So looking at Right-Wing symbolism on the ground at protests, especially the Punisher stuff, the Blue Lives Matter stuff and the general Special Forces vibe we actually get a pretty coherent and clear articulation of the world they’re proposing. A total bifurcation between citizen and criminal coupled with a healthy dose of punishment for these criminals, at home; a series of elite units (by which we actually, mostly mean drone bombers) we’re allowed to dispatch to kill anyone, anywhere for any reason in total secrecy abroad.



Open Tabs

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/06/08/the-short-fraught-history-of-the-thin-blue-line-american-flag

https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/a-flag-for-trumps-america/

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-08-28-revealed-the-cia-and-mi6s-secret-war-in-kenya/

https://narco.news/the-shadow-war

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/04/g4s-global-security-company

https://taskandpurpose.com/opinion/army-special-forces-back-to-basics-oped/

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/18/afghanistan-cia-militia-01-strike-force/

https://theintercept.com/2020/02/01/navy-seal-collin-retire-green-eddie-gallagher/





ZONES OF TOTAL PERMISSION

We learned the men had been burned to death while planning Christmas vacation. It was 2013, I was living in Madagascar, and my friends and I were sitting around discussing what part of the island to travel to for the holiday. This lynching, shocking and unusual in Madagascar, was relevant because the men had spent the last minutes of their lives on the white sand beaches of Nosy Be, one of the destinations we were considering. Nosy Be is a small island off the northwest coast of Madagascar and is the stuff of postcards. White sand beaches, perfect weather, chameleons and lemurs. The year after this incident, Nosy Be was the location for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue. But back to the men, one French and one Italian, beaten in the streets, marched to the beach, tortured and forced to “confess” before being shoved inside of tires and set on fire. The reason for all of this leaked out over days and months in rumors, newspaper articles, Facebook posts, cellphone footage and, finally, bootleg DVDs of the footage, sold in markets across the island. The story that emerged looked like this: days before the burning a local Malagasy boy went missing in Hell-ville, Nosy Be’s capital. The boy washed ashore days later, apparently missing, at least, his genitals. According to a growing and increasingly volatile mob, human organs were found in coolers by police during a search of the foreign men’s boat. The mob eventually stormed the police station and carried these men off to their grisly end. Later, a third man, the uncle of the dead boy, was also lynched for his alleged involvement. The reason these men died in agony can be traced to conspiracy theory I’ve heard variation of all over the world. This idea of a global conspiracy that exists to kidnap, murder and harvest the organs of an underclass. It’s been documented in nations across the globe, from Brazil to Mozambique, from South Africa to Poland. It is the subject of a few UN reports as well as movies in, at least, India, the USA, Canada, France, South Korea, Japan and England.  I’m calling this theory the Global Organ Harvesting Conspiracy (GOHC). Why is this particular urban legend so widespread? Where did it come from?

A major  lineage traces to the Cold War. The USSR engaged in numerous campaigns of disinformation directed at the US and this might have been one that stuck around. Russian propaganda is very much in the news right now but it is by no means a new phenomena. During the Cold War both Russia and America had a powerful interest in promoting themselves and denigrating the other side. And it didn’t all need to be bullshit; one needn’t retreat to fantasy to portray the USA as a racist empire. The most successful of this stuff highlights and exacerbates preexisting fissures and fault-lines. In fact, Russian propaganda pointing out the hypocrisies of Jim Crow in the “Land of the Free” was a big factor in Presidential support for Civil Rights measures. Some of the most famous Soviet art features the Scottsboro boys, Nixon, as VP, had “Little Rock! Little Rock!” screamed at him on trip to Latin America and no less the John Dulles said that, “this situation [here, he’s referring to the Soviets airing footage of Arkansa] is ruining our foreign policy.”  “А у вас негров линчуют” which means, “and you lynch negroes.” became so well-known as a catchphrase and Russian retort to hypocritical American complaints (on, say, Hungry), it became a cliche. Or, to take a much more recent example, the Mueller report recently confirmed that the first actual IRL rally that the GRU, through the Internet Research Group, was able to pull off, in America, was a Confederate rally. Later they set up fake BLM groups, in order to agitate the underlying, and preexisting, animosity. 

The most well documented instance of a USSR-manufactured idea outliving the Cold War, is the theory that the US government is responsible for HIV. Typically, the conspiracy goes, the virus was concocted at Fort Detrick in Maryland and spread throughout the world to target Blacks and Gays as part of an ongoing extermination campaign. The KGB for the campaign to spread this rumor was known as Operation Denver (it is often misreported, as it was in earlier versions of this essay, that this operation was codenamed “Infektion”). Nowadays, Denver influenced or adjacent beliefs aren’t all that fringe, there are politicians in South Africa who are on the record supporting some version of this, and it’s featured in Kanye West songs. To quote a 2006 NCBI study “over a quarter of African Americans and over a fifth of Latinos with slightly lower rates in whites (a fifth) and Asians less than one in ten,” believe that the origins of HIV are part of a “genocidal conspiracy” (this study also mentions that 55% of Latino men and 50% of black men, in this study, believe that the US government is hiding an HIV vaccine, a non-USSR addition/twist on this story).

I don’t personally believe this theory but it is interesting and telling that it caught on. Again, there were hundreds of these false information campaigns. The KGB cultivated contacts and papers around the world that would disseminate these stories in an “organic” fashion (the HIV rumor has been traced back to an original article in an Indian paper) and they did this constantly. When you consider the cost of arming communist rebels or propping up a faltering socialist state, this was really cost effective to weaken America. But why would this one, in particular, catch on? We don’t hear much about the US involvement in Jonestown, or alternate theories as to who shot down Malaysian Air Flight 17, to take other theories pushed this same way. It’s obviously reflecting something back that we feel is important. 

I think the answer is tied to the ways this conspiracy summarizes and clarifies the actual situation as well as the way the conspiracy highlights a more subtle current of history. As when you look at the history, the United States has most certainly been caught medically meddling and worse with people it considered disposable. Tuskegee, Holmesburg, MKULTRA, Operation Top Hat, the list goes on. It would be silly to say that the idea of the American Government acting unethically, in a medical/public health sense, is outside the realm of possibility. For reference, revelations about Tuskeegee were barely a decade old when these HIV stories started and Fort Detrick really does deal in infectious diseases and was the center of the US bioweapons program as well as the birthplace of the MKULTRA suite of “experiments''. 

Likewise, the HIV crisis really was a biblical plague and the government slow response, an indicator of their deep and obvious homophobia and racism, lead to unimaginably high death rates in certain (the infamous 3 H designation: Homosexual, Haitian, Heroin) communities. The conspiracy’s utility comes in when we notice how it allows us to feel that rage at so many needlessly dead by rhetorically transforming the totally-out-in-the-open, murderous inaction into a secret, genocidal action. It’s always psychologically easier to blame action over inaction (I chalk this up to humans’ well-known propensity to freeze up, but who knows) so this sharpening of the narrative, a sort of collective dysphemism, gives what is a messy, sad and awful history a utility, clarity and clear villain that makes the HIV conspiracy so resilient and explains it’s longevity.  If we look for the same utility and clarity, we can see what the GOHC points to. 

It might be useful to define terms and zero-in on exactly what I’m talking about. The Global Organ Harvesting Conspiracy, like any folktale or urban legend or rumor has numerous sources and precedents. As I stated above, I do think it’s possible to trace a pretty direct line, a main thread if you will, to KGB propaganda. In 1987 Pravda, the leading Soviet newspaper, carried a story on their front page which recounted, and embellished, a Honduran story about kids who vanished, then turning up murdered with organs missing. The paper heavily implied that Americans were behind these gruesome killings. It was certainly true these rumors predated the KGB involvement, they were “reporting” on “real” rumors, but by publishing it as news the USSR began it’s worldwide spread. It took only until 1994 for foreigners to be attacked by mobs. In Guatemala, an Alaskan woman was put in a coma, 2 died, and Peace Corps members evacuated due numerous attacks connected with the belief that foreigners (specifically Americans) were stealing children to sell their organs.

However, this rumor predates the reporting and explosion in popularity, and the general concept clearly taps into something older. Hoaxes like Jewish Blood Libel and the 80’s Satanic panic share elements in common, creepy, occult cabals that abduct and murder the innocent. There is definitely a version of the GOHC where the killer is a witch or Satanist who needs the organs for dark rites or the sell to other sorcerers, perhaps internationally. Anecdotally, this was most common explanation I heard, from Malagasy people, about what the Nosy Be lynching victims were up to. Another popular variation says the motivation is illicit organ transplants to aid the rich in living longer.

The West Memphis 3 (a classic 80s Satanic Panic case) also approaches embodying this archetype but, in some ways, invert the dynamic. In the “classic" versions the killer is acting on behalf of a hated elite. It’s the rich and powerful who are ordering these killings and buying these livers. The illuminati, Reptilians, rich Satanists, etc. With the West Memphis 3 you have a shadowy cabal of evil Satanic killers made-up of weirdo teen outcasts, and it was the town elites who were after blood. The WM3 case also shares a much more specific and grotesque resonance with the Nosy Be case, in both instances the bodies of the victim(s) were found without genitals. In both cases, understandably, this was taken as a sign that something deeply fucked up had gone down. However, it is apparently the case that dead bodies get their (external) gentiles eaten routinely and quickly (first things animals, aquatic and terrestrial, go for) if they’re just left in the woods/floating. It’s interesting that two places so apart in time/space/culture drew the same conclusion about an upsetting but explicable phenomena but choose to blame people at the opposite end of the power spectrum.

But when we try to think about what the GOHC is reflecting, anchored-in, or based-on, I think we need to consider what type of place Nosy Be is. As stated above, in many ways it is a paradise. It’s always warm and beautiful, there really are white sand beaches and crystal blue waters, there’s all sorts of amazing flora and fauna. Also it’s cheap. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world. Over 90% of the people live on less than $2 a day. This means that many of the tourists spent a lifetime of money, in Malagasy terms, on the flight over. Nosy Be compounds this by being one of 2 places in Madagascar where you can fly to directly from Europe. The other is Antananarivo, the capital, a wonderful city but very in-your-face in terms of the economic realities of Madagascar. Nosy Be allows you to bypass all that, you can go straight from Paris or Rome to the beach. Nosy Be is the nexus between sizable populations with vast wealth disparities. And wealth, as we all know, doesn’t stay wealth, it transforms into power and permission. 

Across the Global South there is a pervasive feeling that citizens of the North who visit are above consequences. Not just the soldiers and diplomats, that’s been the case forever, but everyone. If they choose to behave in a non-monstrous way, well, that’s simply their druthers, it is not because they fear consequences. This attitude is very common; you see it all over the place if you spend time in these areas. It’s easy to bribe cops, it’s easy to give money to bars or restaurants to bend the rules, it’s easier to get into a club, it’s easier to settle a disagreement with money. After all, in a place like Madagascar, to a foreigner it’s basically Monopoly money anyway. The only country in the Global South that I know about that doesn’t suffer from some version of this is North Korea, who are very clear and consistent in the rules and consequences for Western visitors. The exception that proves the rule, if you will. 

Either way, this situation takes its darkest form in places where climate, economic reality, the legacy of colonialism and the physical beauty of the environment arrange themselves to form a hub of global sex tourism. Nosy Be exists somewhat in the French imagination the way Thailand or the Philippines does for Americans/Britain. A beautiful tropical paradise that is also well known as a place with a lot of prostitutes. A lot of young prostitutes. Child sex trafficking and child abuse, obviously, exists all over the world, but these hotspots allow every Western retiree to be Jeremey Epstein. The disparity of wealth and thus power is so great, and international travel so common-place, that the average Westerner is now able to afford to dip in and out of consequences. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these organ trafficking stories also show up with high frequency in places like Thailand and the Philippines, other sites of these zones. 

Central America, where  GOHC likely began, has a similar problem with sex-tourists and exploitation. However, there’s an extra element that I believe is being sublimated: human rights abuses in adoptions. Reporting by Rachel Nolan about adoptions in Guatemala shows us a situation terrible enough to reproduce itself in folklore. She recounts social workers being helicoptered into “the sites of massacres to pick up the children. These children were then held in… orphanages and put up for adoption, often with incomplete information about the identities of their birth parents or their places of origin.” And again we see the intrusion of Westerns, who’s power and influence allows them to skirt the rules and act without consequence, “But the vast majority of adoptees did not pass through the state orphanages. Using an infrastructure of lawyers, middlemen, and connections with foreign adoption agencies that was created during the chaos of war, the private sector built a thriving commercial market for adoptions…Through FOIA requests, Siegal McIntyre found that in 1987 [American] embassy officials learned of a private nursery in Guatemala City where children were sold to American couples for $10,000 each. According to the embassy documents, the women who ran the nursery allegedly traveled to the country’s rural interior to “steal children.” Nolan herself goes on to link these circumstances with the violence in ’94. But despite the geographic and temporal differences I think people in both Guatemala City and Nosy Be were experiencing the same thing. Westerns were coming into the country and treating the bodies of local children in any way they choose. Either as sex-objects or by physically removing them, the Westerners were making it clear through their actions that viewed these spaces and locations as places beyond consequences, as zones of total permission.Faced with these facts and feelings people who find themselves living permanently in these zones have used the same metaphor, GOHC, to clarify and reflect these feelings.

Here’s where things get really weird. It would be interesting enough that various countries across the world, all with a similar economic position, i.e. poverty and as sites of exploitation, reached for the same explanatory metaphor. But now there’s a twist, a first-world iteration of this same set of fears, sublimated into a very similar (if anything, more bizarre) metaphorical apparatus: Qanon. Q changes rapidly, by the time you read this, especially after the 2020 election, the cartography of Q could be totally different. If I had to guess, I could see Q evolving into a new religious form (it’s already making incredible inroads amongst YT evangelicals) joining that pantheon of great American folk religions that includes Mormonism, Scientology, the Nation of Islam, etc. Or, I can see it just becoming the platform and base of the Republican Party. Or, this is America after-all, both. Or it could just die out, who knows?

Irregardless of its ultimate fate, the basic premise is this: within our government, behind the scenes, there is a battle raging. On one side you have heroic patriots, including DJT, and on the other, a shadowy cabal of satanic child murders. We know about this because one of these patriots, who has Q-level security clearance (get it? He’s got Q-level clearance and is anonymous), leaves cryptic posts on internet message boards (4chan then 8chan) which true believers can decipher and thus inform themselves about this secret war. Beyond this barebones explanation, Q has as many versions and offshoots. Some of these versions involve JFK jr., satanic performance art, 5g stuff, secret tunnels under major cities to move child-slaves, etc. In many ways, its omnivorousness, its ability to fold in all sorts of conspiracy sub-groups, from anti-vaxxers, Christian millenarians, 9/11 truthers, Alex Jones/Bill Cooper types, etc. accounts for some of it’s incredible success. And it has been incredibly successful. It’s somewhat difficult to get figure for the number of people who believe in Q, or some part of Q, but so far it’s adherents have engaged in terrorism at the Hoover Dam, led an armed assault into a pizza restaurant, been involved in a handful of kidnappings and killed a mob boss. Q has also inspired Micheal Flynn and his family to swear a Q oath on video.  Law enforcement guarding the vice president have been filmed wearing patches touting their allegiance. Trump, for his part, basically pretends to not know what it is beyond a vague sense that he likes it because it likes him. But it’s not the diversity of beliefs within Q, nor it’s real world impact (tho, both of these facts are fascinating) that interest me here, it’s the fact that the basic narrative is so powerful it can hold together such a diverse, nutball coalition and inspire so much intensity and real-world action. The narrative clearly hits a nerve. And it’s the same narrative that animates the GOHC in the 3rd world. Specifically, that a wicked rich are stealing and killing children. The Q version typically focuses on sexual exploitation and/or satanic murder not organ theft (though the “Adrenochrome'' variations of the Q myth are almost exactly inline with GOHC) the gist, the emotional engine if you will, is the same. 

Not unlike the GOHC and the Guatemalan adoption story (and, evidence would suggest to me, the Falun Gong) Q seems to have “real world” or “factual” equivalents. There’s the Dutroux affair and Sachsensumpf, to take 2 European examples. However, the most obvious of these, and an almost exact contemporary of Q’s, is one that I’ve already briefly touched on, Jeffery Epstein. While some of the galaxy-brained,“Q is a psy-op” people claim that Q was created to distract from Epstein and to make those, true, allegations seem as ridiculous and unbelievable as the most far-out Q stuff, it seems more likely to me that, as insane and dark as the Epstein story is, the catharsis people are looking for, when they digest the state of the world, more generally, requires an even more outrageous and lurid set of facts. Which is impressive, if you think about it. The “real” Epstein story involves former presidents, A-list celebrities, British royals, famous professors, Victoria’s Secret, a child-sex island, a plane known as the “Lolita Express,” the first suicide in over a decade in a hyper-secure federal prison (that was holding both El Chapo and 6ix9ine at the same time), and yet still managed to not be wild and depraved enough to convey the horror people feel when they look at the state of the world. People are able to look at Epstein and say, “it’s worse than that.” Fundamentally, both the GOHC and Q are about a fear that we can’t keep our children safe, because there exists a class of people who, due to Satanic powers or Satanic levels of wealth, are beyond accountability and have cruel designs on the young. They both posit that the world is cruel and exploitive and run by evil-doers and that nothing we do on the levels we have access to will change how these people operate. It’s not hard to see why people across the world, in both 1st and 3rd world nations, would seek to clarify and sharpen this sense of exploitation and dread, especially dread about the sort of world their children will live in, by placing it into a lurid but neat metaphorical framework. 



OPEN TABS

Russia/Disinfo/Operation Denver/Q

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/russia-facebook-race/542796/ - An overview of Russian disinformation in the USA 

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/russia-tried-to-use-martin-luther-king-jr-s-assassination-to-start-a-race-war-9eeab04f1b82 - An article about Russia attempting to influence US race relations around the assassination of MLK

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/14/is-russian-meddling-as-dangerous-as-we-think - A New Yorker story about Russian propaganda efforts in the USA

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/operation-denver-kgb-and-stasi-disinformation-regarding-aids - A (Right-Wing) think tank paper about Operation Denver

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1405237/ -An paper about the prevalence of HIV conspiracy beliefs

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/llhe5nm - A podcast about the origins of Qanon, including a, to me, convincing theory about who controls the Q account.

The Sword And The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive And The Secret History Of The Kgb by Christopher Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin, V. M. Basic Books, Sep 23, 1999 - I’d recommend this somewhat tedious book if you want a total overview of Russian/Soviet  “active measures” in the USA and around the world. 


Organ Theft, Guatemalan Adoption

http://pascalfroissart.online.fr/3-cache/1994-leventhal.pdf - A UN Report about the GOHC

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/28480/ - An academic paper exploring the nexus between neoliberalism and GOHC in Mozambique

http://pascalfroissart.free.fr/3-cache/1996-scheperhughes.pdf - GOHC in Brazil

https://harpers.org/archive/2019/04/destined-for-export-guatemalan-adoptions/ - A piece about exploitation in Guatemalan adoption

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/05/world/foreigners-attacked-in-guatemala.html - one of the early stories about the consequences of GOHC in Guatemala

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1500384 - An academic paper about organ theft narratives

CHARISMATIC MEGAFAUNA & AND DATA FETISHISM

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

-Goodhart’s Law

There is actually a problem in the larger donations/charity based, do-gooder-iverse, especially in the corners that I’m familiar with, roughly, education, youth empowerment, houselessness, that constellation of buzzwords, that mirrors one I’ve only heard described (since I have no first-hand experience in this realm) from people in the environmental charities. Namely, that there’s a marketing/publicity problem where donors, at all socio-economic levels, are drawn to charities, causes and organizations that focus on large, recognizable animals (like, say, issues surrounding the ivory trade) while efforts that are scientifically proven to be more impactful and urgent (like, say, protecting plankton diversity) don’t get the same sort of attention and therefore money. That makes sense when you realize that so much of this sort of work is geared towards providing a jolt of personal virtue to the donor. It's much more practical, when we viewed from the perspective of the individual donating (and thus operating in a market) and this is the only way were ever supposed to think about anything, to get a photo of a whale you’ve adopted rather than a technical explanation as to how your money is being used to reduce emissions slightly in some far-away region. These animals, your lions or elephants or pandas, are collectively and somewhat derisively known as “charismatic megafauna”

There’s a similar dynamic in the fields I’m more familiar with. For years I worked with kids in the foster care system who had profound behavioral problems. Seems like a pretty easy match for charismatic megafauna, people love kids, especially kids who are in a hard place. But even here the logic was at work. For years the easiest part of the job was Christmas, the typically hard-to-wrangle volunteers became plentiful, there were people lining up to sing or donate cookies, and the kids always got an almost laughable amount of presents. These kids had, almost to a person undergone some of the most horrific trauma I’ve ever heard about, so good for them for cashing-in one day a year, but the scale of the donation (it’s important to keep in mind that this is all taking place in wealthy Seattle), bikes and stuffed animals and Switches and Xbox games and remote control cars, etc., was truly astounding. And doubly astounding when coupled with the economics of the facility otherwise. The job was very hard and the pay wasn’t great and, as you might guess, the state cares very little for these children so the facility actually lost money on every single kid, every single day. Getting money donated to, say, pay people more, retain staff better, or hire more people to keep the ambient milieu calmer was near impossible and a source of constant stress for everyone (which the kids, hyper-vigilant from trauma, obviously picked up on). Unlike an orphan opening up a present on Christmas morning, the sense of feeling slightly safer because the adults around you are better equipped, doesn’t quite hit like that.

 I once received this message in a very blunt manner early on during my “career” in this field. When I was 18 I worked at Americorps, specifically City Year, in Chicago. AmeriCorps, as you might guess from the name, is actually partly supported by the government, but like so much these days, it also must raise money itself through donations and other outside support. Large corporate donors would sponsor City Year teams at specific schools and want to be mentioned in all the material and to have us plan a “service day” that their employees could attend. That trickled down to us, the City Year Corps Member, in the form of making sure all of our service days included at least one photogenic element. Typically, this took the form of a mural. I vividly remember that we once planned a day of repainting a school gym in the existing color layout, which was cracked and chipped but cool and retro and had clearly be chosen by someone, long ago, who knew what they were doing. But, were told that there’d be volunteers from one of our corporate sponsors (the vile Deloitte, if I’m not mistaken) present and they wanted to make sure there’d be a photo-worthy mural at the end. We did counter that the gym would be photographically different and improved under the original plan but they wanted something with a bit more pop. City Year, at this time, was an education-focused organization, the main thing we did was literacy tutoring for elementary school students. While there were some talented artists in our cohort, people didn’t join City Year because they could draw or create murals and we weren’t ever trained to do so. Sadly, none of the graphically talented Corps Members were on our team that day so this gym on Chicago’s Southside ended up with a comically and impressively bad Michael Jordan mural. But when you structure the parts of our world that are meant primarily to better and improve the world, the larger do-gooder-iverse I spoke of that includes everything from NGOs, to government programs like Teach For America or the Peace Corps, to nonprofits, to churches or political organizations, around the same monad/consumer framework that structures seemingly everything else in our world you end up with the metric for “success” being the jolt of feeling elicited from the donator (these sorts of organizations also offer reputation laundering of the Epstein sort at the very highest levels as well, but that’s a separate and more limited problem) and this arrangement will always and definitionally run up against the Charismatic Megafauna conundrum. 

As a brief addendum, I’ve recently noticed a twist on the Charismatic Megafauna conundrum, namely the emergence of a pernicious and shallow data fetishism. I’m sure cultural historians have and will trace the genealogy of this line of thinking, I noticed a real uptick in the Obama years, with the rise of Nate Silver being the most obvious example, but, briefly, there’s been a recent trend, to fetishize and revere “data.” Talk of being “data-driven” is mandatory at this point. If you aren’t constantly logging and analyzing data, you’re doing it wrong. While this might make sense for, say, a baseball team, in more complex realms, like say teaching, this approach can and does obscure. The problem is that there’s a seductive quality to data, it seems to promise to break complicated issues down into math that an intelligent person can interpret and grow wise from. So you don’t need to be an expert on the subject at hand, what you can be is someone who understands data and can therefore direct those with the practical experience but who lack data-fluency. The result is spending as much time doing the thing that’s your nominal job as entering or collecting “data” that is, again nominally, supposed to streamline and increase efficacy. In the Peace Corps I would have to travel for literal hours to find an internet connection good enough to fill out a quarterly form about how I spent my time. When I worked with foster children I frequently had to stay late to fill out state forms about how the children, whom the state was spending as little on as they possibly could, spent their time. At its most extreme, this data fetishism doesn’t just waste time, though that is plenty annoying, it also distorts results. For example, years after working in Chicago, I got a different job at City Year, this time in LA and this time in a management position. I was overseeing a group of volunteers who were providing direct tutoring to elementary school students. At the beginning of my time some of the teachers asked me to instruct my tutors not to pull the kids out of class to give them one-on-one instructions, but instead to sit next to the kid in the class and offer one-on-one assistance that way. Not a problem, I thought. I told the volunteers that and didn’t think about it until I was spoken to by my boss about my “numbers” and the data. Since, of course, the volunteers have to fill out forms that say how they spend their time, my team's numbers around out-of-class one-on-one instructions were dropping. I explained why and I got a great answer to illustrate why this sort of thinking is short-sighted. I was told that number needs to be high because that is what donors can see. That because these rich people weren’t teachers and hadn’t really thought about teaching, they needed to see numbers, that they could both understand and that demonstrated “impact”, even if they didn’t understand what is lost when you reduce something as subtle and complicated as learning to data. Because to the data fetishist everything can be understood if you are clever and sophisticated enough to collect the right data about it. And again, this is so seductive because it posits that you don’t need experience or specific expertise in an area to make decisions or be in-charge, armed with the right data and a data-driven mindset, you can actually be more effective than those who are engaged with the work on a real-world level. This is how you not only end up with MBAs in charge of Education programs but how you end up with everyone telling you that this is preferable to someone with classroom experience.