Indrajit Samarajiva

1. America Issues A Travel Warning Against… America

I know it's not safe for me to travel to America anymore, I already have an FBI file, but know this now. It's not safe for anyone. ICE is no less chilling than the FBI, and they're picking up randos up at airports. White girls, white boys, and the brown and down as usual. They don't give a fuck. They're just disappearing people and then disappearing court orders. Legal residents, visa holders, Canadians, Germans, Brits, nobody is safe. Even allies are aliens now. As A$AP Rocky said, "It ain't safe for the black or the white girls, It ain't safe, it ain't safe, it ain't safe, it ain't safe."

And also know this, they don't just deport you. They'll make you wish for deportation. ICE disappears and torments its victims for weeks, months, some people still haven't got out. They wipe their ass with court injunctions and you're lucky if get a meal and a cold spot on the floor. They'll torture you and torment your family so much that deportation becomes sweet release, and they don't give a fuck who reports on it. They want people to see it, they want me to write this, the cruelty is the point, the suffering is the message. This is all a warning, a travel warning that America has issued against itself. It happens randomly but with great force deployed against little people, as it has been for non-white people for decades, nay, centuries. After this long while, now that they're doing it to doctors, students, and American Pie actresses, don't say you didn't get the message.

The White People

Recently, for example, they picked up Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian white lady and 'American Pie' series actress, in San Diego. She said, "We were up for 24 hours wrapped in chains." They also picked up Jessica Brösche, a German tattoo artist, who CNN disgraced with the most unflattering Missing Person photograph in history. They put Jessica in solitary confinement (a form of torture) for eight days across more than a month of not being deported but rather tormented bureaucratically. They picked up Rebecca Burke, a British backpacker, at the Canadian border (on her way out), and are still toying with her as we speak.

And this isn't just people on visas, they're picking up legal residents as well. Fabian Schmidt—a German green card holder of 17-years—was, according to his mother, '"violently interrogated" at Logan Airport for hours, and being stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and being put back onto a chair.' She said, "He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn't feeling very well and he collapsed." He was hospitalized with influenza and is also still detained, while his cardiologist doctor partner and US citizen daughter wait. Class is in session people, and class privilege won't protect you anymore.

These are white boujee people covered by the white boujee media. This is chickens coming home to roost, ignoring the slaughterhouse that has been American 'immigration' policy since it was indentured servitude and slavery (it actually hasn't changed). The cannibalistic colony of America requires immigration, but it also requires subjugation and humiliation to make such people easily exploitable. This and worse has been happening and is happening to colored, poor people (Biden deported more than Trump, and Obama was known as Deporter-In-Chief, most recently). What's different about Trump is his fair unfairness. He applies the cruelty to random people who thought themselves safe. He throws everybody in the same dank ICE cells, sleeping on the same cold, bright, floors, eating the same rank rations, exposed to the same goonda torture and bureaucratic torment ('no you can't take THAT flight out, it has to be an approved one, back to jail').

The Non-White People

It goes beneath mention that colored people get picked up even more and that this is picked up much less by the ultimately complicit media. But now the cruel policy that applied to so many people is being covered, because it's being applied to certain people from certain communities. Now the punishment and deportation policy has been extended to educated, 'legal', and otherwise less expendable people, even lawful residents.

The most notable case is Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and frankly model Palestinian (he worked with the British Embassy), abducted from craven Columbia and made an example of quite publicly. In another case, Dr. Rasha Alawieh—a transplant doctor at Brown on an H-1B visa—was abducted and disappeared from the Logan Airport. Then she was deported despite a court order halting the deportation, because laws have been disappeared also. These are not lawless people (under illegitimate and cruel laws). America is now a completely lawless territory. The kind of place the State Department warns about, only now it's (more obviously) their own state.

The Policy

Remember that America is doing much worse than just deportation, people are not being just put on the next flight out. I always wondered why you'd hold people that you want out, but the cruelty is the point, to discourage people from ever making the trip at all. So people are being disappeared into a labyrinth of holding cells and immigration prisons without due process and just completely ignoring courts and court orders. The investigation is the punishment, and in this case, they're not even investigating anything, it's just pure punishment. They want these people to suffer and they want the world to watch. They want to send a message.

The press coverage of white girls in jail and transplant doctors being rejected is not stopping them. Far from it, they want the press coverage, to advertise the new regime, now cleansed of hypocrisy, as Hannah Arendt said of the Nazis. The message is this. America is closed for business, and you have no business coming here at all. As I said, this is a travel warning against America, issued by America. Stay out or you'll wish you could just get out. Will this happen to you? I dunno, it's a randomized trial imposed on random people. As Dirty Harry said, "You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?"

As for me, I know I'm fucked if I set food on American soil, and I've unpacked accordingly. I like my nephews but they've got to come to me. I openly support Hamas and the Axis of Resistance, I might as well fly straight into occupied Guantánamo and save everyone the trouble. If you speak out you have to keep out, that's become clear crystally. You can criticize America in America, but you can't criticize 'Israel'. That's the unspoken law of the land (don't speak about it). The corporate machine that runs America counts as all computers do, from zero. Trump may say America First, but 'Israel' Zero comes even before that. Thus Fulbright scholars are being forced to flee to Canada for sharing Facebook posts about Palestinian liberation. Even vaguely conscientious people are being expelled from school, from jobs, and now from the country. You need to STFU about genocide, or GTFO, that goes without saying.

However, now even guilty bystanders need to understand that America ain't safe for them either, nor people they consider part of their boujee community. Even if you keep your mouth shut, you can still get shut out, after being flushed through the prison pipeline most shittily. It doesn't matter if you're a model white lady, a doctor, flying back from Luxembourg, just backpacking. It doesn't matter if you've never said a word about Palestine and if your paperwork is in order, they'll still disappear you without thinking. Now everyone crossing that border needs to clench their butt-cheeks like colored people have for centuries. When crossing into a stolen land run by thieves, there's no honor among them, not in the least. So forget the Arab, African, Asian, and Latin American migrants who have long been forgotten. If America is abducting a former 'American Pie' actress in chains, you know that pie is fucked.

2. How The Roman Empire And American Empire Are The Same

America posits that its imperialism is not imperialism (just helping out by bombing your village, aw shucks) but it's remarkably similar to the Roman Empire. It's literally the same architecture. The historian Mary Beard (et al) said something in passing which reflects how I've been trying to define White Empire for ages. She said,

Military conquest and the imposition of foreign control (whether in the form of taxation, puppet government or military occupation) inevitably impacts on cultural life — both in the imperial centre and in the provincial territories. No one can be culturally unaffected by imperialism.

Or in context, if you prefer.

I'll focus on the first part of this statement, the methods of control, which are still the basic operating system of imperial power. Today America practices all these forms, financial, political, military and cultural imperialism.

Financial

President Donald Trump openly refers to tariffs as a tax on foreigners, which they aren't really, but he expresses the id of America as always. America—meaning the corporations who actually run America—do tax the world, but they do it through debt. The real tax is debt servicing in USD, which eats up the majority of many nation's budgets (like mine) and can never really be paid off (it compounds endlessly, and if that doesn't work they just coup you). America accuses China of laying debt traps, but remember that every accusation is a confession.

As a recent study of over 1,000 loans to Africa from China found, "We found no "asset seizures" and despite contract clauses requiring arbitration, no evidence of the use of courts to enforce payments, or application of penalty interest rates." America does all of these things through the World Bank and IMF, always headed by an American and a European, because imperialism. The wool changes, but the wolf stays the same.

It's important to understand that debt and slavery were synonymous for most of history (read Michael Hudson's, And Forgive Them Their Debts). If you were in debt you gave your wives, children, or yourself up for slavery. We decry such slavery today, but look at people slaving away. Names change, but ways stay the same. Today Sri Lankan wives toil away as housemaids in the Middle East, effectively and often actually slaves. Today convoys of people march themselves into hostile America to labor away, from both rights and their families. Slaves then, illegal immigrants today, same thing. National debt and personal wage slavery are just the slavery of our times, ask Tolstoy (The Slavery Of Our Times).

America keeps countries in chaos to make the slaves march themselves out, and to get tribute vis-à-vis natural resources for cheap. The places with the most gold, cobalt, and resources often find themselves in the most debt, because they're the most enslaved. Remember that America is still a colony and that mass migration is just colonization. Even the reaction from the last wave of colonizers is the same (and note my Sri Lankan relatives today, complaining about immigrants).

Tim Cornell (in his book The Roman World) said, "Peasant families were driven out in large numbers by rich investors and were replaced on the land by slave labor. Slaves were in plentiful supply thanks to military victories and the resulting mass enslavement of defeated populations." This is still the crux of the 'illegal immigrant' debate, with 'illegal immigrant' being the just modern word for an exploitable and expendable class of labor, ie slaves.

Today, America destabilizes the rest of the world so the slaves walk themselves in, or uses outsourcing to tap the same labor at a distance. It's the same financial sucking sound that characterizes empire, just played using more sophisticated financial instrumentation. As the latter-day Roman Antonio Soprano said, "this thing is a pyramid, since time immemorial. Shit runs downhill, money goes up. It's that simple."

Political

America has long setup up 'democratic' puppets, and tears the whole show down when things don't go their way. Anyone witnessing the twisting of Zelensky in the wind can see the exposed hand of American puppetry, flipping off all and sundry. When Henry Kissinger said 'it's dangerous to be America's enemy but fatal to be America's friend', he was describing what people might think if two South Vietnamese puppets fell, but that shit happened, over and over again. It's been 60 years of reruns and reboots, hyping up some despot like the second coming of democracy and then crucifying them.

If anyone thinks America has friends and not interests at this point, they're on the blink. America installs puppet governments all over, letting them dance enough to be entertaining, but pulling the curtain on them if they ever get independent, or simply when there's no more blood money to squeeze. Besides the complete destruction of Ukraine, America helped coup Peru and Pakistan, and places like Egypt and Jordan have long been this way. Hell, even Australia got couped in the 1970s, and has been reliably suicidal and genocidal ever since.

As the reanimated corpse of liberalism, Joe Biden was a sincere puppeteer, talking about 'shared values' (genocide, torture, and theft, mainly), but under Trump, the ventriloquist doesn't even attempt to still his lips. Trump just made the eunuch of Jordan sit there and eat shit while facially glitching out and made Zelensky sit there while he mocked him for not wearing a suit. He also made Poland's dimwit Duda wait for an hour to get dismissed in 10 minutes and has disrespected the heads of the UK, France, etc, letting them know that they're just puppets on longer strings. A shared sense of hubris has now been replaced with humiliation. The puppeteer isn't even trying anymore, and is petulantly throwing his toys away.

But I digress. The point here is that Empire, be it Roman or American, proceeds the same way. Overt political control is ungainly and unnecessary when you can find local puppets quite willing to humiliate themselves, kill your enemies, and give their own population and resources away.

Military Occupation

Military occupation goes without saying, America has circa 800 military bases around the world. If you showed anyone from the ancient world, they'd be like 'nice empire you got there'. Only myopic moderns deny this, like bugs getting squashed in a rug and calling it massage therapy. Playing spoiler in World War II, America militarily occupied the UK, Germany, and Japan, etc, and they're still there. America never drew down after World War II, because the war never stopped for colored people, and even delusional Europe is still occupied. No country is independent when they have foreign troops on their soil and these are not real countries.

I call it all one White Empire because, to those on the bottom, what's the difference? In places like Sri Lanka we've just seen white people like the Dutch, British, and now Americans exploiting us under different flags, but always doing the same thing. Today brown people like me can become white and participate in our own colonization, yay! Like the diversification of the Roman Empire, we'll do the dirty work just in time to be left with the steaming pile of dog shit that is late-stage empire (DEI did it!).

The present collapse of America, however, is rewriting their triumphal post WWII history. The fact, increasingly plain, is that America did not win World War II and has not really won a war since. They, in fact, went impotent after Vietnam, unable to conscript a mass army ever since. Now they can't even field a professional (re: debt slave) army without knowing they'd get blown away in weeks, so they increasingly rely on conscript colonies like 'Israel', Ukraine, and South Korea. This is just another form of military occupation, nations so occupied that they sacrifice generations of their own children to fight their own neighbors. Each 'conflict' may be cloaked in local ideology and current events, but why are Slavs fighting Slavs, Semites genociding actual Semites, and Koreans pointing guns at Koreans? Divide and conquer is as old as unified empire and it still works a devil's treat. Conquest using the conquered, the same infernal recipe. The only American innovation has been figuring out that there's more money in losing wars than winning them, but it's the same old imperialism.

Conclusion

I glide over these points because to people living today it goes without saying. Biden did it and Trump comes out and saying. Biden just committed a whole-assed genocide in Palestine and a military-industrial pump-and-dump in Ukraine, and Trump continues the same policies with less hypocrisy. Biden and Trump are just good cop/bad cop of the same police state. America is a two-headed monster, but both heads consume lives and resources and shit US treasuries. The financial instruments may change, but the tune stays the same. As Mary Beard said, the definition of imperialism is "Military conquest and the imposition of foreign control (whether in the form of taxation, puppet government or military occupation)." And so it remains.

The only difference is our indifference. Whereas the Roman Empire demanded fealty, Americans laugh at the idea that they're an empire at all. They've discovered that the best place to hide an imperial elephant is in plain sight, covered with newspapers. American Empire relies on sleight of hand like debt, democracy™, and 'defense' to accomplish even greater imperialism largely by changing names. As Keyzer Soze said, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. But American Empire does exist. We can see as it goes out of existence, like a song can only be heard as it's going away.

3. Jewish Extremism Is Out Of Control And We Need To Talk About It

Jewish extremism is mainstream now. They're killing people every day and they'll disappear you if you talk about it. Western politicians are openly in their pay and the western media is in on it. The once fringe belief of Zionism has taken over a majority of the global Jewish population, such that 'Israel' exists and 60% of America Jews think its genocidal response to October 7th is acceptable. This minority has corrupted (and been corrupted by) the already corrupt western elites in a vicious cycle of total corruption.

And it is a cycle, of which Jews and Palestine are just the fulcrum. For every Rothschild receiving stolen land from the British, there is a Balfour signing it over. For every Mileikowsky killing Palestinians, there is a Drumpf making a killing. For all the preponderance of Jews in finance, media, and politics, there is ordinary whiteness (and those becoming white, leaving boot heels on their brethren). I don't mean to ignore the Christian Zionists and capitalists and cowards in on it, but we have to talk about 'it'. The center of White Empire is Palestine, where the Jews were deported to as a conscript colony, anointed in crude oil to become their worst selves and do the dirty work for the British and then the Americans (same thing, hence the term White Empire). Thus Jews find themselves at the collapsing center of Western Civilization, just in time to take the fall for it.

I won't belabor the point of 'not all Jews' because please, we've been talking about extremism in the Muslim community for decades without such qualifications. Indonesians and Sikhs have been catching strays for the minority Arabs for years, Jews can take their lumps along with everybody else. Neither I nor anyone born this side of last century cares about the Holocaust© as some unique thing since Jews began copying it endlessly. After nearly two years of genocide being live-strafed into my eyeballs, I'm done holding my tongue, as much as they try to make it illegal. Now it's time to talk about extremism in the Jewish community, which is killing people and chilling speech more and more heavy-handedly. Since I'm chilling in Sri Lanka and have given up hope of inter-imperial travel, let's actually speak about it.

Jews occupying the Middle East are killing babies and torturing, starving, and bombing people to death across multiple nations. Jews are openly and proudly corrupting the (already corrupt) western world; censoring media, buying politicians, and using state violence to shut down speech and beat and disappear people. They've been doing this for decades, only now—thanks to the bravery of Hamas et al—they must do it openly. Now every stereotype of Jews has been put on blast by Jewish people themselves, claiming a Jewish state, all in the Jewish name. It's not blood libel if it's true, and Jewish people are dripping with blood, and grinning from ear to ear in women's underwear. It's not a conspiracy theory if it's public, and Jews have openly corrupted politicians, media, and institutions, and rub everybody's noses in it.

Generations ago, Zionist Jews made a deal with the white devils, live up to every antisemitic lie we told about your community, and we'll give you the land of 'Israel'. The devil tempted people once with the tree of knowledge, but this time it's the tree of ignorance. Many Torah scholars were long against the ungodly creation of a state of Israel, man cannot give it to you, only the Messiah. Many Jews then and still now decry ersatz 'Israel' as an abomination (assuming kingship from the devils that genocided you, at the price of your own soul) but yet the demonic nation persists. Like all deals with the devil, things go great, until they decline precipitously.

Yet to an outside (of Europe) observer, what are people supposed to make of this? Who gives a shit? We all understand dead babies, and we've been seeing that endlessly. Surprisingly, the people most affected and aggrieved are actually the most understanding. Hezbollah and Hamas are the least antisemitic, because they see the true hand of more inchoate American Empire behind all this. As the late, great Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (we miss you) said, "According to some theories, Israel controls America. No sir. It is America that controls Israel. The story about the Jewish and Zionist lobby is – forgive me for saying this – a joke invented by the Arabs so that they do not have to fight Israel." Or as the Hamas Charter says, "Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity."

What are ordinary (non-European) people exposed to Jews doing everything Europeans slandered them with support supposed to think? We've all seen tanks carve stars of David into the devastated land of Gaza, menorahs stuck in the ruined earth, and Jews praying over their predation. As Hamas said, "It is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity." Are we not supposed to see this? Are we not supposed to name them? Is that not part of their oppression? As Mohammed El-Kurd said, "Jewish settlers stole my house. It's not my fault they're Jewish."

Of course, a religion claiming earthly land and Satanic power is deeply ironic. The fact is that the least Jewish Jews are ruining the whole thing for everybody. Religious Jews within 'Israel' were, until recently, immune from conscription and still avoid it. Orthodox (re: Torah) Jews in America are among 'Israel's' most conscientious rejecters. It is largely a group of Jews who may not believe in G-d, but certainly believe that he promised 'Israel' to them. And so the carnivorous cosmopolitan caste of godless Jews take the whole Jewish community down with them, a sad amount of them quite willingly, or at least quiet about it. We don't talk about this because the Holocaust or something, but that statute of limitations has run out. I guess you get a certain credit limit for killing people, but then you have to pay for it.

If a few Muslims fly into two buildings we have to talk about extremism in the Muslim community for twenty years, but if extremist Jews destroy every building for miles, we have to keep quiet or we're the bad people? Saying that Jews kill children and corrupt nations is antisemitic, so you can't say it, even as they're doing it. It's a circular illogic. Not all Jews, sure, whatever—some are even with the Resistance—but an awful lot of them are behaving awfully and we don't owe them any deference. That belongs to the victims. I'm sorry about Hitler but he's not like the Antichrist that died so you can sin forever. Hitler killed a lot of people but you can't monopolize that to commit your own genocide for much longer. Genocide is not a die in one get one free deal, I don't see the Romani going apeshit. Something is deeply fucked up in the Jewish community and not talking about it is part of the fuckedupedness.

It's considered an antisemitic trope to say that Jews control the media, but they are controlling the media. They get documentaries dumped they don't like and run headlines about decapitated babies and rapes that didn't happen. It's similarly antisemitic to say Jews corrupt nations, but they are corrupting nations. AIPAC is openly bribing politicians, German cops are beating up protestors, and American Presidents are saying SHALOM while shredding their own Constitution. You can somehow criticize America in America but not 'Israel'. It certainly looks like Jews are running things. Western politicians openly declare how much bribes they get, pose with 'Israeli' flags, then go out and sell their dignity in public. The checks clear in the clear, secure in the slur of antisemitism and the silencing of even naming the people cosigning this.

Jews, Jews, Jews, this was a protected word for my whole life, but now that I've seen enough unprotected babies be killed by Jews, I'll say it. I can't not say it, the word has been crammed down my throat so much that it comes up unbidden and acidic. Why should that name be sacred when it's the cause of so much human sacrifice? Why should the Jews go unmentioned when so many martyrs go unburied? Judaism the religion will persist, inshallah, but the abomination of an Israel before its time must be excised like a cyst for this cycle of corruption to finally break. I wake up every morning cursing 'Israel' and wishing for its ending. So many prayers cannot go unanswered, so much injustice cannot go unjusticed.

Ansar Allah has as part of its slogan 'curse be upon the Jews' and this is true if you think about it. Too many Jews took what was not theirs from White Empire, and take the whole thing down around them in the dénouement of every devil's bargain. You can excuse them but you can't excuse them. The Jewish name is cursed now, by 'Israel,' by Zionists, by Americans, by Whiteness, and yes, by Jewishness. Jews today just have to live with that, G-d knows enough people are dying. Jewish extremism is out of control and we don't need to just talk about. We need to end it.

4. My Pirate Library

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I am one of the few people who does almost exactly what they were trained to do in school, write essays. For most people this was an indirect form of learning, but for me, I still do exactly what I've been doing since elementary school. This is not a good career, I'm unclear why everyone needs to be trained to be useless bloggers, but I was brought up that way.

What I learned in school was the five-paragraph essay and I was told to have at least three sources, and I still follow this basic structure to this day. Those days I would literally walk to the Upper Arlington Library, which shared a parking lot with my elementary school, and wander through the Dewey Decimal System. I'd use the encyclopedia for general knowledge and microfiche or bound journals as necessary. I produced a lot of forgettable work on yew trees, electricity, and Benedict Arnold, at least that's what I remember.

These days, however, I am very far from a good library in Colombo. Indeed, the concept of a library feels like something illegal if it was started today. Free books, for everybody? That sounds like piracy. And, indeed, I now use piracy for the same function as the old days. The Colombo library is not great for English, and I can't just walk there. So I browse over to Anna's Archive or (formerly) LibGen to accomplish the same thing. I do not consider this a crime in any way. Everyone has the right to a library.

Conceptually this bad somehow, but it's just what I was taught as a child. It's amazing how we reverse and perverse everything we teach our children—sharing, caring, copying, pasting—this is all effectively illegal as adults. I look at my young cousins and the value of getting them to read anything at all seems to outweigh any capital considerations. Most perversely, the wronging of books under copyright leads to many being lost entirely. Sharing and copying books preserves them, while copyrighting them endlessly reproduces what's profitable while disappearing all else. Copyright is the antithesis of all human preservation, which used to be getting as many people to memorize and/or copy your work as possible, so that it might be preserved during the inevitable capital destruction of ancient capitals.

What used to be common-sense practice (read and share books to preserve them) is now somehow piracy, because books are just another form of capital, with no particular value beyond gathering interest on someone's spreadsheet. God forbid someone should take an actual interest in books, and share them out of the joy of reading. The miserliness of commodified culture is justified as being for the authors, but authors are just peasants getting royalties, most of the money goes to the capitalized kings, ie the owner of the presses or, increasingly, just lawyers that press their made up intellectual property. There are an increasingly shrinking amount of publishers, constantly merging and dumping unprofitable works in their wake.

The scholarly journal system is even worse, scholars pay the journals to publish their research and then universities pay them to read it, forming a perfect circle of rent-seeking. These journals are heinously expensive, meaning global south universities do not have subscriptions, and God forbid you're in independent researcher or just curious, that's forbidden. Please read the 300-word hyperbolic summaries of studies you get in the news, in between a dozen pop-up ads for goji berries or whatever distortion they can capitalize on. It's a fraud dictated by fiat, this whole copyright thing.

I suppose if I was a scholar in a fancy university I wouldn't notice; they get subscriptions, they have libraries, they are part of the 'right' people and thus have copyright privileges. They're in on the whole academic money laundry thing. But I'm not, I'm just a dude, stubbornly doing what my elementary school teachers told me to do, to at least skim three books before writing about something. How am I supposed to do this, cast away as I am in Sri Lanka, effectively out at sea? Thank God for piracy.

So these days (today, for example, I need to check out the Theodosian Code, City of God by Augustine, and maybe the old Roman Empire by Gibbons) I go to Anna's Archive, which sets as its express purpose "1) Preservation: Backing up all knowledge and culture of humanity. [and] 2) Access: Making this knowledge and culture available to anyone in the world."

I won't get into whether this is at the expense of authors, they provide a link to a book on that, if you read enough about copyright you can see that it's a fraud by capitalists to turn books into capital, with only a tangential connection to authors as alienated laborers. And yet many authors still defend their masters out of lack of imagination. This imagination is what we're taught in elementary school, though it's successively beaten out of us afterwards. Sharing is caring, they say, until it's criminal.

I don't care. I'll share. Where I live no one even gives enough of a shit to try and sell us stuff, we are beneath copyright capitalism. For years Adobe wouldn't even let you buy a subscription with a Sri Lankan address, and streaming services like Disney Plus or whatever Max are simply not available here. When I was younger, you could walk into the mall and buy pirate software, the copyright holders didn't care about us and we cared even less about them. That's the nature of copyright, it only prioritizes people and products that are profitable, and all else can just disappear. Without pirates to ferry goods back and forth, I dunno what we would even have access to. As it is, we luckily have access to everything, and more abundantly. Copyright is really about the restriction of information, not its expansion. It's about controlling the flow of information, not letting it flow. As that inveterate hypocrite Thomas Jefferson said,

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

The government he founded doesn't behave like this of course, such things (like freedom in general) were not practiced but preached, all just so much marketing atop rank oligarchy. But this is the nature of ideas, they do "spread like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density", but this ideal is preserved by pirates, not property holders. They're only concerned about their property, and have made the extension of the library into digital space illegal. But certainly not impossible. Shout-out Anna's Archive, my pirate library.

5. The Collapse Of World War II Propaganda In World War III

The victors write the history, and as America loses World War III (already begun if you include Muslims and Slavs), World War II history is being rewritten. The two pillars of Hollywood historiography were that A) America won the war, not the USSR and B) that the Jews were its primary victims. This history was used to ignore Russia and create 'Israel,' but it's turned into half-assed histrionics now.

Both historical lies are being belied by facts on the ground. Russia is asserting its security concerns, and the Axis of Resistance is slowly but surely excising the abomination. Meanwhile America is backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine and committing genocide in Palestine, undoing decades of propaganda. So the present rewrites the past and the future moves on.

A) Who won the war?

The first pillar of America's relentless pillorying of the world was the idea that they won World War II. The actual American position was articulated by then Senator Harry Truman who said (in 1941), "If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible." This broad strategy was reiterated by Lionel Ismay (first Secretary General of) who said NATO was created to, "keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." This has been the America's (in)security framework from the beginning, but the history underpinning it was always a fraud.

The USA did not win World War II, the USSR did. America just swooped in for the spoils. As the American World War II Museum itself states, "For most of the war, 75–80 percent of the Wehrmacht had to be deployed in the East, a preponderance dictated by the sheer size of the front, and 80 percent of German war dead perished there: about four million of the five million German soldiers killed in World War II." These facts have been buried under films about saving privates, but they were written in blood and well known at the time. Historical polling in France, for example, correctly attributed victory to the USSR, until this was propagandized out of them.

When faced with the numerical facts, the cope is that the Soviets were dumb brutes who only did it with western technology (ie, Lend Lease). But this fact is beggared by the numbers also. As Soviet Marshall Georgy Zhukov said in his memoirs, "As for the armaments, what I would like to say that we received under Lend-Lease from the United States and Britain about 18,000 aircraft and over 11,000 tanks. That comprised a mere 4 per cent of the total amount of armaments that the Soviet people produced to equip its army during the war. Consequently, there is no ground for talk about the decisive role of the deliveries under Lend-Lease. As for the tanks and aircraft supplied to us by the British and US governments, they, to be frank, did not display high fighting qualities; especially tanks which, running on petrol, would burn like torches."

The Soviets did not merely beat the Germans back in mindless meat waves, they beat them back with waves of steel, grain, and the superior productive capacity of communism. The Soviets fought many battles with unimaginable heroism, all well known at the time. All America had was landing on a beach and battling a bulge, but what they lacked in reality they made up for with sheer repetition. After World War II, America deployed endless mind waves of propaganda against, primarily, upon its own occupied populations. When the USSR fell, there was no one to counter it, so the counterfeit stuck. So not so much the victors of World War II but the spoilers took credit.

Americans still make little distinction between the USSR and Russia, with even Ralph Nader calling Russia a "communist dictatorship" in 2025. Russophobia is deeply coded in the western brain—from Boris and Natasha to GoldenEye 007. This makes them largely incapable of understanding Russia as it is, because they believe their own propaganda about Russia as it is not. To Americans it's incomprehensible that any country might have their own security interests, and certainly not Russia, as historical leftovers, easily beaten by lone agents in countless movies. So America kept pushing NATO eastward, ignoring all historical lessons from Napoleon to Hitler. America couped Ukraine in 2014, helped bomb Russian-speaking regions for a decade, and ignored agreements like the Minsk Accords. When Russia finally had enough, they invaded Ukraine in what they called a Special Military Operation. This was also a special historical operation in that it rewrote it, going back to WWII.

The whole premise of American superpower was that America had won World War II and the USSR only survived with American support. But now America's full support was behind Ukraine, and they were losing. Thus the current fraud revealed the historical one. Remember that history is a theory—this happened because that—but now the theory stands disproven. Russian military strategy, production, and execution have been proven far superior to America's, again. As it is is as it were. Thus the present rewrites the past. Losing the Ukraine War literally loses the plot for America, and the Ukraine War is lost.

B) The special Jews

Despite the Soviets liberating Auschwitz and most concentration camps, the Americans (and somehow the Germans) have taken credit for that also. Jews have been made into the primary victims of World War II, through tonnes of post-war propaganda (America gave a fuck about the Jews at the time and pushed boats back into the slaughterhouses). If you look at the actual history, however, the Jews were not the Nazi's primary target at all. As Martin Niemoller said, first they came for the communists. As the whole poem goes,

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a communists.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Historically, even this poem has been edited to replace die Kommunisten with the more anodyne 'socialists' and the meaning has been rearranged to make Jews Hitler's primary target, which they weren't. In Mein Kampf, Hitler said,

Knowledge of the Jews is the only key whereby one may understand the inner nature and therefore the reals aims of Social Democracy [he uses this interchangeably with Marxism and Communism]. The man who has come to know this race has succeeded in removing from his eyes the veil through which he had seen the aims and meaning of his Party in a false light; and then, out of the murk and fog of social phrases rises the grimacing figure of Marxism.

Communists were Hitler's #1 enemy, and his hatred of Jews came as an extension of this battle, they were not the main course. Niemoller, Hitler himself, and Hitler's actions can tell you what his primary enemy was. Communism. The Nazis concentration camped communists first and killed far more Soviets in the end (many of them captured prisoners starved to death in POW camps). The Americans, however, couldn't very well say this, because they hated and killed commies too! America, in fact, took up Hitler's 'white man's burden' after the war, with plenty of Nazi help.

To cover this up, Jews were made into the perfect victims of Hitler's inexplicable evil, with lots of propaganda to back it. But real Jews were not given back their lives and property in Europe, because America was also wildly antisemitic also. Instead (and to better assimilate the Nazis), Jews were deported them from Europe to 'Israel' (ie, 'go back to where you came from!'). Not coincidentally, this was the Nazi's penultimate solution (the Haavara Plan), now executed by the Americans.

Americans at the time associated Jews with communism, and called for keeping them out of America for that reason. As Isaiah M. Minkoff said in the 1946/47 American Jewish Year Book, "one of their major devices was the use of propaganda based on the false identification of Jews with Communism." As Ed Gossett, dirtbag Democratic Congressman from Texas, said at the time, "Now, I have the feeling and I grant you here again, it is merely based on what people have told me—I have not been there—that there are a lot of folks in those camps who would be detrimental to us, who are hostile to America and the American way of life, and there are possibly a good many there who have subversive intentions in seeking entry into this country."

Again, the physical fact is that European Jews were not resettled in their homes and given reparations by their actual oppressors, they were deported out of Europe to serve European (then American) interests of dividing and conquering the completely unrelated Muslim world, for the crime of sitting on top of oil they wanted to steal. Muslims are the people now incoherently called antisemitic, when that is a category of racism unique to Europeans. As David Nasaw said in his book The Last Million (which I'm quoting from), "For many of the Jewish displaced persons who immigrated to Israel, the exhilaration of leaving Germany and arriving in their new homes was followed rather quickly by disappointment, approaching desperation. They had miraculously survived one war in Europe. They were now entering another war zone." Thus the survivors of one war were turned into a conscript army for the reincarnated White Empire, which is why you see Zionists allied with Americans doing the Nazi salute today.

This was all possibly historically because the European Jews were marketed into special victims who deserved a genocide of their own, because one had been committed upon them (a die in one, get one free deal). This led to the absurdity of land being given not by the losers of the war (Ze Germans et al) but by a completely unrelated party in Palestine. And this led to the ongoing absurdity of Germans lecturing people about genocide, turned into an absolute farce thanks to the courageous Axis of Resistance, fighting a fight that had fuck-all to do with them, but which they have nonetheless taken up.

Hamas's brave October 7th Al Aqsa Flood is the obvious historical corollary to the Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion, people breaking out of a concentration camp to defend themselves, by armed resistance as is their right under international law. This is only covered up by histrionics about 'the worst day for Jews since World War II,' ignoring the fact that Hamas only took prisoners to free the 100x 'Israel' holds, and that 'Israel' killed many of their own in terror and cowardice. The historical hinge that held the war crime of 'Israel' together is now broken and the doors are slowly but surely coming off. The present overwrites western history, which is now collapsing under its own contradictions (genocide bad! except when we do it!).

Unexplaining this history is now unnecessary for entire generation. People growing up now only remember 'Israel' being awful and none of the jumped-up justification for it. As I said in a rare viral tweet, "For generations to come, comparing 'Israel' to Nazis will be unnecessary. Future atrocities will be compared to 'Israelis'" The program of endless Jewish holocaust remembrance along with forgettence of all the other Nazi victims rings hollow now that we are seeing a livestreamed genocide in front of us. Thus the present rewrites the past, and changes the future.

Re-presenting The Past

Thus the battles of World War III (we're already seeing a genocide and war against Russia, what else do you call it) are changing the victors of World War II. American arms are being revealed as wholly inadequate against even the reincarnation of the Red Army, even after being decimated by the neoliberalism of the 1990s. And American words are being revealed as lies, and Jews not as perfect victims but people just as capable of evil as any other, especially when serving as foot soldiers for the White Empire. In the running battles of World War III, American World War II propaganda is falling apart.

References (available on Anna's Archive, or wherever good books are pirated):

• Hitler's Mein Kampf (unreadable but skimmable)
• Andrei Martyanov's Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning
• David Nasaw's The Last Million
• Georgy Zhukov's Reminiscences and Reflections - Vol. 2

Further reading from me:

• How Russia Is Stronger Than America
• Zhuvok's Revenge
• How WW2 Led To WW3
• If You Count Colored People, World War III Has Begun
  

6. The Two Engines Of America (Part 2: Imperialism)

Remember that America, like their flagship Boeing 737-MAX, has two engines of growth. Colonization is the first engine, sucking labor (ie, energy) into their stolen continent. Imperialism is the second engine, sucking labor, resources, and energy from across the world. Donald Trump has thrown a bald eagle into the first engine and a vulture into the other, leading to America going down in flames sooner enough. We've discussed the immolation of immigration, and the engine of imperialism is on fire because Trump is ditching the soft power that made it possible to fly the thing at all.

America became a global (rather than continental) empire after World War II. America took over White Empire (and Europe) from the Europe after WWII. They spent that war fighting for spoils more than against Nazis, whom they promptly assimilated. America went into WWII notoriously force light and this made it difficult to expand or hold the empire without the Soviets doing the work for them. 'After' WWII (it only ended for white people) the American military tried to keep going but either drew (Korea) or lost (Vietnam). America never had the manpower to physically occupy so much land so they occupied it psychologically instead.

The main thing that held American empire together was a story. The story that they won World War II and were the 'good guys' and that's why they were still here. America (and its main bitch the UK) deployed relentless post-war propaganda to switch people from knowing that the USSR won the war to believing that America did. Hence you get all these movies about saving privates and cracking codes and assorted bullshit that had little material impact, certainly compared to the USSR. And this advertising campaign largely worked, especially after the USSR's fall. They refilmed history and hid America's naked imperialism in a celluloid cloak.

This is liberalism. They took liberties with the truth to justify continued imperialism, and call it helping out. This was America's soft power—all the marketing about Democracy™ and Human Rights© and Freedom®—and it saved them much hard graft. With their well-marketed values (and manufactured goods) they could get countries to effectively colonize themselves, with a well-timed coup if anyone started thinking too much. They could hold the stick of their military largely in reserve while holding out the carrot of their 'Rules-Based Order' which well-meaning people all over the world would defend because the marketing was good. As Big Pussy told Tony Soprano, "I'm mindfucking these donkeys like you wouldn't believe."

This is what institutions like USAID and the liberal media were doing. They did a bit of good to cover a bunch of bad, they flattered the conscience to deceive. Trump is publicly cutting this stuff to save money, but soft power is actually much cheaper than hard power. Why hold a gun to someone's head if you can get inside of it? Remember that America hasn't been able to really win anything since World War II, has been unable to conscript an army since Vietnam, and hasn't been able to field its debt slave army since leaving Afghanistan. American imperialism is now completely dependent on proxies mindfucked enough to follow them. And Trump is gutting and humiliating those proxies too. To invert Teddy Roosevelt, America today is talking loudly and carrying a small stick.

The funny thing is that America still has people dumb enough to follow its now cancelled programming (like the leadership of Canada and Europe, and its own liberals), but the general populations of those countries are getting impoverished and deindustrialized and catching on slowly but surely. Ideological imperialism was America's calling card, but now they're not picking up the phone. Another liberal President could try to turn the propaganda on again, but once bitten, twice shy.

The reanimated corpse of Joe Biden tried to resurrect the image of 'good guy' America, but then he livestreamed a genocide for 15 months, which is definitely bad. This revealed that America was always bullshit, whether branded red or blue. It was always White Empire, doing what such empires do. Corrupting local (or colonial) elites, getting them to sell out their own populations, and funnelling the money, slaves, and resources back home. Trump is merely more transactional about this, but it's the same business model, and now their cover is blown. No American President going forward can cover up the truth. The Empire has no clothes.

Now it's just naked imperialism, with a raging hard-on for filthy lucre. America is now openly extorting 'allies,' exterminating populations, and exclaiming about it proudly. As Hannah Arendt said about Hitler, "it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest." Indeed, it is revolutionary to shatter corrupt institutions and shutter cloying propaganda outlets, these are all bad things Trump is throwing out, albeit for even worse reasons. What Trump doesn't get, however, is that this duplicity was the engine of American power.

Attracting and abusing immigrants (in waves) is what gave their colony power. Pretending to be good while doing bad is what expanded that power worldwide. Trump is throwing a bald eagle in one engine and a vulture in the other (exactly what happened to two 737 MAXes in 2023) and expects the plane to keep flying. He is destroying without creating anything to replace American soft power but sheer bluster and vestigial reputation.

America was going down anyways, but they could have had a controlled landing without the rest of the world even being significantly mad at them. But now they are going down in flames and opprobrium. America's sources of hard labor and soft power are being cut at the same time, and no plane can survive both engines going out, least of all one built like a Boeing.

7. The Two Engines Of America (Part 1: Colonization)

America, like their flagship Boeing 737-MAX, has two engines of growth. As a colony, America requires constant immigration to suck in labor, ie colonization. As an empire, they require global immiseration to suck in labor and resources, ie imperialism. America's two engines of growth are colonization and imperialism, but now it's sucking bald eagles into both and going down in flames.

Colonization

As much shit as Americans talk about immigration, they're still a colony founded on the concept. 'A nation of immigrants,' as politicians used to proudly say. Ye olde colonization was driven by Europeans fucking up their own countries and labor fleeing, and modern colonization is driven by them fucking up ours and the same sort of fleedom. Things always have to be bad over 'there' to drive people over 'here', that's the entire energy gradient of colonization. Colonization is a global battery which requires negative and positive poles for power and energy to flow correctly (up and to the right).

Remember that America is still stolen and unceded land and immigrant is just the new word for colonist. Indic people like me are just among the latest people taking 'Indian' land, turning Christopher Columbus's ignorance into reality. Immigrants are just the latest people colonizing America, that's all this is. The idea that immigration is neutral or a favor to the migrant is part of the erasure of any history beyond colonization, which continues the ongoing genocide of Native Americans and the erasure of that even happening or mattering. Immigrants, like colonists, are complicit in this historical process, albeit quite ignorantly.

As part of the tyranny of names, calling modern colonists 'immigrants' is a liberal hand-washing of all this but, historically speaking, 300 years is not enough to wash the blood off. As Lady Macbeth said, "Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes [re:oil] of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." It is what it was, if you zoom out a little. Immigrants are just the latest labor colonizing America, which is an ongoing process. If we understand that America is in a process of ongoing colonization we can see things as they are, infinitely awful. Colonies require colonists, most of them indentured servants and slaves. America keeps recreating these basic categories with different branding but it is—as my historical thesis goes—same shit, different day.

Indentured Servants/Legal Immigrants

Legal immigrants are the modern indentured servants, usually bound to a corporation to reach their destination. These immigrants still have to work off their foreignness to become American and get full rights. Remember that 'legal immigration' wasn't a concept for most of American history, (European) colonists just showed up unless they couldn't pay the passage, in which case they worked it off through indentured servitude. Now passage is cheaper, but the same indenturing process is replicated through the 'immigration system.' Remember that ICE only started in 2003, for example.

Thus the new indentured servants are legal immigrants. They have some rights, but those rights are usually tied to work, and they have to work their second-classness off for roughly the same period as the old days. Ye olde indentured servitude was about seven years, and today you have to hold a Green Card (second-class citizenship) for five years, plus wait 8–14 months for a decision. So, weirdly enough, about seven years, if you're lucky. I repeat myself because history does, same shit, different day.

Once you get in you can bring your family through another category, like ye olde unindentured servant that made it and could afford to pay passage. As you can see, the same system is replicated through laws as was once regulated through poverty alone. The rule of colonization for the vast majority of colonists is that you've got to sing for your supper, ie be part of an exploitable class of labor, albeit with more rights than the next category, who are basically just slaves.

Illegal Immigrants/Slaves

Via David Galenson (1995), "Abbot Emerson Smith, estimated that between one-half and two-thirds of all white immigrants to the British colonies between the Puritan migration of the 1630s and the Revolution came under indenture." What they elide here is that Black 'immigrants' came as slaves and remained as chattel for generations. This category still remains enslaved under the 13th Amendment, with Black people disproportionately imprisoned and used for slave labor (like many of the firefighters in California). America requires slavery for its most essential labor and since you can't just do that anymore, they categorize native Central and South Americans as 'illegal' and use them accordingly.

American politics makes a big show of how they can't support all these illegal immigrants, but illegal immigrants support them. These people pick their food, butcher their meat, build their homes, tend their gardens, clean up after them, and care for their elders and children. Just like slaves did, and also in an exploitable, extra-legal condition. You can broadly do whatever you want with an 'illegal' and deport them afterwards, just as you could with a slave (and sell them). America has always needed a class of completely exploitable labor, and illegal immigrants are just the latest marketing phrase for the same dirty business model.

American politics is full of this sort of posturing, rejecting the things they're violently demanding. Illegal immigration, drugs, fentanyl, whatever it is that they're sucking up, American elites (ie, corporations) blame other countries for it, while the suckers in the American lower-class fall for it. They attack the slaves and not the masters, as intended. This is not new, in the Roman Empire elites would send peasants to die in wars of conquest and then take over their fields with the captured slaves. The peasants could let off steam by spitting or beating on the slaves, but the play remains the same. The only difference is that rather than overt conquest abroad, America just spreads chaos (especially through the Americas) and the slaves walk themselves in. It's the perfect crime, hidden by a veil of historical ignorance and class unconsciousness.

Energy

It's important to understand that this net flow of humans into the colony is a net flow of energy, as much as oil into an engine. Immigration is a battery with a negative pole 'there' and a positive pole 'here,' driving physical energy into America. If you go back a bit more historically (via Vaclav Smil, for example) you can see that, for the vast majority of human history, 'the sweat of our brow' (and ass) was the only energy source (besides fire). Fire always needed a person to tend, and still does. As Smil said, "Most people in preindustrial societies had to spend their lives as peasants, laboring in ways that in some societies remained largely unchanged for millennia. But the inconsistent food surpluses that they produced with the aid of a few simple tools and the exertion of their muscles and the draft of their animals sufficed to support the unevenly advancing complexity of urban societies."

Even today, human energy has to be applied to any industrial machine in order to make it work. All industrial machinery must be lubricated with the blood of labor, to channel Marx. Capitalists maximize profit by squeezing the most labor out of workers and pocketing the surplus as profit. Out of citizen labor you can squeeze a little, out of indentured labor/immigrants you can squeeze a lot, and out of slaves/illegal immigrants you can squeeze everything above a subsistence level, or just work them to death if you want (though that would be a capital loss). Remember that America is fundamentally a business run by corporations and that everything else is just marketing. At founding only property owners could vote, and this is still how it works. The cruelty and disrespect towards migrants is a feature, not a bug. It allows you to squeeze the most surplus value out.

America is a colonization engine, by default, and colonists are its primordial energy source. This is all immigrants are, and by at least trying to discourage and cut immigration, Trump is throwing a patriotic bald eagle into the main engine of American growth. I use this metaphor because 737 MAXes actually (don't) work like this. In 2023, a MAX ingested a bald eagle and their shitty design gassed the pilots and almost killed everyone. But neither abomination plane nor abominable nation can survive two bird strikes of this sort, which is what they're going through under Trump (mashallah). We'll discuss the second flaming engine next time, imperialism. I'm tired of writing this and the kids have a concert.

8. The Blessed Month Of Ramadan

I fasted last Ramadan largely because of everything going on in Gaza. This year I wasn't planning on it, because waking up at 5 AM is hard, but then on the first day my cat woke me up anyways, like a mewing messenger of God. Pippi doesn't usually do this, but he kept at it, and so I thought. Maybe Allah was trying to tell me something. Cats are generally Muslim after all (dogs bad, cleanliness, etc).

In literal hindsight, Pippi had been bit on the ass the day before and just wanted to go out for revenge. But we believe what we want to believe, and I do believe there are signs all around. As the Quran says, "There are signs in the heavens and the earth for those who believe: in your own creation and all the creatures He has spread about."

And so I ate a bit, prayed badly, and started fasting. Paradoxically, it felt like a relief rather than a deprivation. I always wondered why Muslims wished each other Ramadan Kareem during an ordeal, but I get it now. Ramadan brings order to your life, it's not an ordeal at all. When I stepped out the air felt clearer and decisions also. I honestly missed Ramadan, it's one month which takes the mental burden off not sinning. Small disciplines lead to larger discipline, like bricks make a wall. I don't have to think should I drink that drink, should I smoke that joint, should I pray, should I meditate? Ramadan clears those decisions, like lifting a fog. I could literally see it when I stepped outside because the Indian pollution has blown over Sri Lanka. Another coincidence I'm sure.

It's as DMX said in his dialogue Damien (speaking as the character Damien),

Got some weed? Go 'head, smoke it! (What?)
Go 'head, drink it! (Word?)
Go 'head and fuck shorty!
You know I can keep a secret (Aight)
I'm about to have you drivin', probably a Benz
But we gotta stay friends, blood out, blood in

09 Damien 0:00/222.16 1×

Damien has DMX killing his friend by the end, because Damien is of course Satan incarnate, and all the Benzes and bitches are temptation. But how do you see this when as the Quran said, "Satan has embellished their fantasies." As (the late) DMX said, "The snake, the rat, the cat, the dog; How you gonna see him if you livin' in the fog?"

What he and They are talking about is Satan. You can consider this an imaginary figure, but you still need imaginary numbers to make higher math work, what matters is the results of symbol manipulation, not the symbols. So it is with higher understanding. I see no particular contradiction in this, the message must fit the medium, to roughly invert McLuhan. Human brains are largely allocated to processing humans and this is why God appears as a person and his nemesis like another person, a bad one.

Is God a person, is Satan real? are stupid questions. Is a map a territory? Is anything anything else? This is simply how to fit higher realities into lower dimensions, like the confines of an ape skull. Water has no particular shape, but you have to put it in a glass to drink it. In the same way, we have to put higher beings into effectively human forms to understand them. So let's talk about Satan, using ape grunts represented as squiggles presented as pixels. This stuff is all unreal, except the feelings they evoke.

Ramadan is the month when Satan is symbolically chained, he doesn't work, and if you follow a few simple instructions, he actually doesn't. Fasting focuses your attention away from bodily things, and if the attention wanders, it's just a month, c'mon. The injunction to pray five times a day, which seems insurmountable on a daily basis, becomes just a hill during Ramadan. A month is long enough to be habit-forming, so the injunction is really quite ingenious. During Ramadan, I am clean as a cat (wudu) and very clear of mind (besides the hangriness). Islam is, in my experience, the simplest religion to follow. It tells you exactly what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. If you just go through the lower motions, the higher emotions come naturally.

Last Ramadan, however, I found this quite difficult, the first time around. Going without food is fine but going without water all day in Sri Lanka is excruciating. But it really makes you think about how tenuous this hold on life is, how much we need the external for our internal existence. Ramadan—by tying food and water directly to Allah—makes you appreciate things on a deeper level than 'I have money and bought stuff to put in my mouth.' Our daily sustenance becomes a gift from God, rather than a thing we just purchase. It replaces desire with gratefulness, which are very different experiences. As the Quran says,

Can then he who takes his stand on clear evidence from his God be likened to those for whom the evil that they do is made to look beautiful, and who follow their own desires?

'Following your own desires' is the base programming of capitalism, higher interest is supposed to emerge out of self-interest (with compounding interest on top). Greed and usury are supposed to make good somehow. This is the supposed invisible hand we're supposed to trust our souls and societies to, but it sounds an awful lot like Satan if you think about it. Capitalism is an illusion which fades when you go on sin-strike for the month of Ramadan.

Islam, like all religions, calls the world an illusion (in Buddhist terms). The Quran says, "The life of this world is only a game, a pastime, but if you believe and are mindful of God, He will recompense you and will not ask you for your wealth." You can read this all you want, but it's self-evident when you pray before breaking fast. It's a ritual thing which I can understand with my Christian wife, saying grace before dinner. Allah just means God in Arabic, it's the same God. All things come from Allah, and to Them all things return. There is obviously something higher—just look up—but what's interesting is that you can ritually get there by suppressing the lower urges, ie food and water.

You can get to this insight how you want (my opinion, not Quranic). The Ayatollah Khamenei, may he outlive 'Israel', recently said, "All of humanity today is suffering from moral ailments. They are afflicted with envy, stinginess, suspicion, laziness, selfishness, and the tendency to prioritize their own interests over those of the society as a whole. The solution to these ailments is in the Quran." This is true, but Sinhalese like me are notoriously easy to convince but hard to convert. Apocryphally, when the Christian evangelists came (again, the Indic churches are older than Rome) many said, yes, that also, putting Jesus next to the Hindu gods we still worship next to the Buddha in our trishaws. I know this is wrong, my wife says you can't pick and choose, but I'll call the right Hail Mary on my deathbed, inshallah.

As the Bhagavad Gita says, "All beings (before birth) were unmanifest. Only during an interval (between birth and death), O Bharata, are they manifest; and then again, when death comes, they become (once more) unmanifest. What grief then is there in this?" There's obviously something higher than this life going on, being that we're above ground only for an instant and then we're gone. We're undead and then dead for much longer than we're ever alive. Even when we're here we're just a speck on a spinning rock, dimly remembering some deep connection like everything post Big-Bang remembers being one.

Following the cycles of the sun and moon (like Ramadan) is considered atavistic when we have nuclear clocks, but this is merely missing the higher point with high precision. The point is that we are not separate from the higher or lower, these are all relative terms, and we are all ultimately relations before a God we might as well call father, not understanding relations otherwise. Whether you get these signs through the moon or mews is literally immaterial. What does Ramadan—the time between crescent moons—mean for our present predicament? Nothing. What does the moon turning relative to the earth illuminated by the sun mean to the universe? Even less, but if you turn to Allah during the blessed month of Ramadan, it can surely illuminate a person nonetheless.

9. The Flood Of The Free

Ersatz 'Israel' so unrighteous that it's taking multiple floods to teach them. First the Al Aqsa Flood of October 7th and then the Flood Of The Free that's happening as we speak. Hamas's fire led to the terms of the ceasefire, which was the Resistance's plan from the beginning. As Hamas said in Our Narrative: Al Aqsa Flood,

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7 targeted the Israeli military sites, and sought to arrest the enemy's soldiers to pressure on the Israeli authorities to release the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails through a prisoners exchange deal. Therefore, the operation focused on destroying the Israeli army's Gaza Division, the Israeli military sites stationed near the Israeli settlements around Gaza.

Freeing prisoners is an urgent need across the Palestinian community because the conditions in 'Israeli' prisons are horrific. At least 60 prisoners have been killed during the Battle of Al Aqsa Flood, many of them tortured to death. People are shackled constantly, to the point that their limbs need to be amputated. Scabies and bacterial diseases are endemic and spread intentionally by the 'Israelis'. Medical neglect is targeted, people are denied treatment as torture and punishment. Prisoners are not allowed to change clothes for months on end and barely allowed to bathe. They are regularly tortured with heat, cold, being made to kneel, loud music, dogs, beatings, and sexual abuse. Prisoners are raped to death in front of other prisoners, and 'Israelis' protest for their right to rape and the rapist are heralded on 'Israeli' TV. The food is execrable if it exist. These horrific conditions are broadcast on 'Israeli' TV, where the public bays for them to be made more horrific. It is a hell on earth and the Resistance moves heaven and earth to get people out of it. This was a big reason for the Al Aqsa Flood, for good reason.

I must admit that I avoid this subject. I find the cruelty and suffering very disturbing, and the idea that this torture is ongoing troubles me in my daily life. So I avoid it. I follow RNN (the Resistance News Network) but I don't follow RNN Prisoners because I just find it too difficult. But the Palestinian people themselves have never forgotten about their prisoners, which is deeply commendable. As Paolo Caridi said in her very useful book on Hamas,

For Palestinians, the cycle of arrest and release from Israeli prisons is not considered to be a mark of shame. It is estimated that from 1967 on, at least 700,000 Palestinians have passed through Israeli jails; in every family, in other words, there is or was someone who is defined simply as a prisoner, whatever the reason for their arrest.

As Caridi also discusses, when there was effectively civil war between Fatah and Hamas, it was the prisoners who bridged it. As she wrote, "In a surprise move, however, this cycle of violence was broken on May 11 by the prisoners held in Israeli jails, the only group within Palestinian society whose moral standing was high enough to bring both Hamas and Fatah together at the negotiating table."

Keep this in mind as we discuss the political as well as the moral reasons for fighting for the release of prisoners from the occupation. In announcing the ceasefire under the terms Hamas had offered since October 8th, the Prisoner's Media Office said,

The honorable exchange taking place today is a living expression of the strength of our national project, which views the liberation of detainees as a unifying national achievement and a right that will not be compromised, regardless of the sacrifices.

These moments have come as the fruit of the sacrifices of our people in all arenas and the persistence of the resistance in fulfilling its promise to our detainees and people. The current exchange deal, "Flood of the Free," represents a milestone in our struggle and an added victory to the long march of liberation, affirming that the will for freedom is stronger than all the jailer's chains.

Understand, then, that the reason Hamas took prisoners was to free prisoners. Palestinian prisoners are being freed at rates of 100:1 and higher, because that's how many prisoners 'Israeli' holds in, again, horrific conditions. Now they're being released 100:1, 300:1, in waves. And as much as the western media tries to focus on only the whiteness of 'Israelis' taken hostage, the sheer volume of Palestinian prisoners being released speaks volume. The Al Aqsa Flood was more than proportional to the predations of 'Israel', and the treatment of prisoners is entirely different.

While Palestine's hostages return kissing their captors and thanking them, 'Israel's' return starving, sick, tortured, mentally ravaged, or dead. In many cases, 'Israel' doesn't even return their bodies after they die, keeping some bodies for decades, for no reason other than torturing the families. When prisoners are freed, 'Israeli' stormtroopers invade the family's houses, destroying any food and decorations. It is evil upon evil upon evil. The punishment is the point. And this is a big reason why resistance is necessary. Remember that 'Israel' takes and tortures prisoners for the same reason America does (it's all one White Empire). The cruelty is the point, and the terror it causes in families and entire communities. In another case of 'every accusation is a confession', this is another manifestation of western terrorism, if you can ascribe feelings to non-white people. And yet the resistance to terror is the essence of resistance.

Jailing someone is the act of imposing your will on them, and torturing them as 'Israelis' and Americans do is terrorism against an entire community. It is rule by fear, and this rule is only broken by the refusal to fear, and the rejection of their physical control over both mind and body. Which is what the Flood Of The Free accomplishes.

In stark contrast to the 'Israeli' government, which invokes the Hannibal Directive to kill their own people rather than negotiate for them, the nascent Palestinian state cares deeply for its own people and takes hostages disproportionately to free them. And the communication—if you can peek it through the western propaganda and censorship—has been of Palestinians defending 'Israeli' hostages with their own bodies against 'Israeli' bombs, and treating them with the basic care due to prisoners. This has been then demonstrated at orchestrated release events, with 'Israeli' captors thanking and even kissing their captors. You could call this Stockholm Syndrome, but that term is misunderstood. After some hostage event in Stockholm, the hostages felt that their 'rescuers' were going to get them killed, and only their captors actually gave a shit about them. So yes, I guess it is Stockholm Syndrome, understood correctly.

Politically, the act of freeing Palestinians—whether they're Hamas or not—has unified and extended Hamas's political appeal across the entire nascent State of Palestine. With the Al Aqsa Flood, they proved that they are a people's army, and with the Flood Of The Free, they prove that they are a people's government. Especially with the 'Israeli' corrupted Palestinian Authority cutting off payments to prisoners and martyrs families, this consolidates Hamas's power, which is why 'Israel' fears these exchanges so much, so much so that they'll kill their own people to avoid them. Is it 'worth it,' having Gaza destroyed entirely and hundreds of thousands killed and basically everyone in Gaza sickened or injured? I can't say. I defer to the Resistance on the nature of resistance, and the martyr Basil Al-Araj said,

6. Our direct human and material losses will be much greater than the enemy's, which is natural in guerrilla wars that rely on willpower, the human element, and the extent of patience and endurance. We are far more capable of bearing the costs, so there is no need to compare or be alarmed by the magnitude of the numbers.
7. Today's wars are no longer just wars and clashes between armies but rather are struggles between societies. Let us be like a solid structure and play a game of biting fingers with the enemy, our society against their society.

I don't know what 'a game of biting fingers' means but I like it. Al-Araj talked about a struggle between societies, and what the two Floods show is two very different societies. The 'Israelis' killed their own people and immediately hid under America's iron skirt, while the Palestinians fought to free their own people almost alone in this world (shout out to the Axis of Resistance, of course). One nation was a picture of bravery and decency (the Palestinians) and the abomination showed only more and more depravity and cowardice, covered up by cruder and ruder censorship. I don't know what messages mean amidst such massacres, but war is just politics by other means, and this is a political victory for Hamas and the Palestinians.

What I publish on this subject isn't analysis so much as dialysis. If you've been poisoned by western media at all you don't hear from the Resistance directly, it is in fact basically illegal in the core White Empire to read or speak about this. But I live at the very edges and I follow the Resistance channels and try to channel them for you, my audience. In these matters, I don't project but I try to reflect what the Resistance is saying, and they very clearly tie these two floods together. The Al Aqsa Flood leads directly to the Flood Of The Free, and there's a deep belief that this leads to liberation eventually. As Mansour Shreim—sentenced to 14-life sentences by an abomination on its last legs—said,

We are a people who do not leave our prisoners in prisons. This culture, God willing, is the culture of a people until we are free and end the occupation from our land. We ask for mercy for our martyrs always and forever for a people who do not remember their martyrs do not deserve life. We will always raise our heads high through our martyrs and we will not say that we lost them but rather we gained them with God. God willing, Palestine will be free, even if we are deported from our land. We came out as fighters 23 years ago, our deportation is only the beginning of liberation, we will return to a free Al-Quds and pray in Al-Aqsa!

In the Bible and Quran (it's the same God!), floods are sent to rid the world of evil and start again. This I think is the conscious aim of the Resistance, and amidst all the carnage of the news cycle, there is a very conscious strategy being enacted. Take 'Israeli' hostages to free Palestinian hostages. Fight 'Israeli' cruelty with Palestinian decency. Free prisoners of all types, to unify the factions and the nascent Palestinian nation. Amidst all the horror, all the torture, all the cruelties known to man, there are these people and they are taking a stand. Will they drown in the flood themselves? I don't know. Many have. But these Palestinians are building a political ark with these political acts, and they believe in a promised land. In word and in deed, they have shown that a free Palestine is in fact a safer place for Jews than the 'Israeli' state which is actively trying to kill them. They are, in short, righteous. They are the flood, mashallah, and the flood keeps coming.

To help people start reading the resistance directly yourself (like Basil Al-Araj), I edited this collection:

Reading-Resistance-Print Reading-Resistance-Print.pdf 2 MB

10. Labbaik Ya Nasrallah - My Friend In History

When Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was martyred I was depressed for weeks afterwards, and when I'm depressed, I'm awful to be around. I cried when I finally talked about why and I apologized because I didn't know him at all. My wife graciously said that I did know him, and that my grief was understandable. A writer is a reader and readers are writers, it's a conversation. In that sense, I spoke with Nasrallah a lot, and it hurt me a lot when he was assassinated. They say you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with and I am, on average, a dead cat. Like Petrarch or Machiavelli in their studies, I spend more time communing with the dead than communicating with humans. But I was lucky enough to walk the earth with Nasrallah. Now he is among those Petrarch called,

my company of secret friends.
They come to me from every century
And every land, illustrious in speech,
In mind, and in the arts of war and peace.

I knew Nasrallah very well, though I knew him not. He was my friend but now he's dead, so he joins the ranks of those I call friends in history. I thought this was a phrase I picked up from somewhere august, but this is the only example from literature I can find now:

Good enough.

I don't know Petrarch from Adam, but I know both of them through reading. As Petrarch said, "here I gather all the friends I now have or did have, not only those who have proved themselves through intimate contact and who have lived with me, but also those who died many centuries ago, known to me only through their writings, wherein I marvel at their accomplishments and their spirits or at their customs and lives or at their eloquence and genius."

I didn't know Nasrallah besides a nefarious name before October 7th, but since then, I came to hang on his every word. Nasrallah's speeches deeply explained what was going on, and he did it with eloquence, genius, and humor. He told me many things I didn't know, and challenged me to think differently. Nasrallah always surprised me, and not always in a good way. I waited for his speech on November 3rd, and left disappointed. Why weren't they rushing in immediately? Why wasn't Hezbollah they saving the Palestinian people right now? I didn't realize how long Nasrallah had been at this, and how late I came to the conversation. How long the timeline of Resistance was and had to be, because space belonged to the occupier (time and space are one phenomenon).

So I dug up a book (included below, with all my sources) and walked backwards through time with him, for context. I found that he had been right (and righteous) long before it was obvious. Back when resistance seemed futile, he had been in fighting form. Nasrallah said, "In 1983 the resistance started with 200 mujahidin, and now, in 1992, there are thousands of them… We are counting on the day when the will of the people is manifest to all." Looking back, I could see his perspective with perspective. And I understood the scope of patience involved. Not months, not years, but generations. And with his death, the ranks move forward but do not stop.

Unlike me, the younger Nasrallah was very much like the older Nasrallah. Allah said, "Among the believers are men who have been true to their covenant with Allah. Some of them have fulfilled their vow, and some are still waiting, and they have not changed in the least" and Nasrallah was one of them. In the land of the three temples, most leader are vassals, but Nasrallah didn't vacillate at all. He was what they call in the streets an OG, an original gangster. A Gangster of God.

I take some comfort, as his people must, that Nasrallah is surely in the ranks of the martyrs now, near to the Prophet. As much as I don't believe it, I believe it. As Nasrallah himself said in 2023, "So our fallen martyrs are not dead. They are alive. Not in the Judgement Day, when all the human beings will be resurrected, no. Those fallen martyrs are now alive in God's paradise. Do not think they are dead. They are alive, only you cannot feel them."

In a way, I supposed this is what the poet Al Jâdiz meant in the 800s, in a more secular way (by my interpretation). He said, "a book is like a garden that can be carried in a sleeve, a being that speaks on behalf of the dead and acts as an interpreter for the living, a friend who will not go to bed before you yourself have fallen asleep." The Quran describes paradise as a garden (with rivers flowing underneath), something I always found deeply evocative. But we only know this because of the Quran as a book. As long as people are remembered, recited, and read, they do live on. This is what the very first writers said, as evidenced by the Egyptian poem The Immortality of Writers from circa -1000.

Man decays, his corpse is dust,
All his kin have perished;
But a book makes him remembered
Through the mouth of its reciter.
Better is a book than a well-built house
Than tomb-chapels in the west;
Better than a solid mansion
Than a stela in the temple!

Scribes are a bit biased—men who can't create life must narrate it—but there is some basis in fact. We're still talking about that papyrus, for example, over 3,000 years on, though that writer neglected to leave his name lol. Of course, walking through a magnificent monument or reading a beautifully bound book in a study is a far cry from the modern experience. All of this digital media is like having a miserable video call with a ghost instead of the vivid and peaceful communion as latter-day sages described. As Machiavelli said,

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born, where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, in their humanity, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.

WTF is he talking about four hours? I can't go four minutes without some sort of interruption. Today we are constantly being electrocuted by our gadgets, not to mention the pesky liberation of women and children. But I digress into distractions. I have managed to converse with Nasrallah through his speeches and question his motives through interviews, just as I lace him through this text with you. He lives on though dead. Martyrs, indeed, only become louder when you silence them.

And yet I'll be damned (as I probably am) if it doesn't hurt. I revere The Book but am not a man of The Book. I am a man of books (plural) and thus fundamentally a polytheist. I am also a coward, and thus die many times before my death. So a part of me died with Nasrallah, I feel. He was a part of my thinking, and his death registered as a sharp pain which I maneuver around but cannot escape. It's just another sharp thing I file away with all the other sharp things I don't think about, though I keep bumping into them, unbidden and often. Nasrallah joins the ranks of history and I can find him there forever. But I can't help wishing he was just around.

Nasrallah talked about a moment when "the will of the people is manifest to all," and he lived to see that, which was a lot. This seemed like poppycock in the 1990s when he said it, that was the end of the history and America had won. The only will was their will to power and at century's end their Manifest Destiny extended across every ocean they touched (it's all one ocean). Polluting through the Mediterranean, America made the holy land unholy and there was nothing you could do about it. The punishment, the torture, the murder, the theft, that was the point. They wanted us to see the suffering, like Christians in the Colosseum. As the Colombian President Gustavo Pedro said, describing what I simply call White Empire, "The European Union, the United Kingdom and above all the United States—they all support dropping bombs on people because they want to teach a lesson to the entirety of humanity. They are telling us: look at our military power. What happens to Palestine can happen to any of you if you dare to make changes without our permission."

In the 1990s saying NO to this was either a death sentence or the end of your sentences in English at least. The American media repeated the name Nasrallah often enough, but never let him speak for himself. Nasrallah and Hezbollah were just names that sounded Mooslem and we were supposed to hate them along with Rooskies, just because. Nasrallah was deemed a Terrorist™ by the White Empire, which had trademarked the word. Terrorist™, of course is just another shibboleth, a magic word like savage or 'nigger' that makes people disappear. In common usage, however, a terrorist is just someone who scares White Empire, a good thing in hindsight. But I couldn't see 20/20 till 2020. For most of my life, Nasrallah was just another bearded baddy I was supposed to hate. If the opposite of love is not hate but indifference, I did.

In truth, Nasrallah was a great man with a great plan. A historical figure heralded by hysterics from a dying Empire. Far from being a mindlessly angry Muslim baddie, Nasrallah was eminently reasonable if you listened to him at any length at all. As he said in 1986 (when I was four, in defense of my ignorance),

We would like to allay the fears of those who think that Hezbollah intends to impose Islamic rule by force, and to tell them that we shall not impose Islam; for us, this is a matter of general principle. We are now intent on removing colonialism from this region, doing away with colonial means of information and culture, and making the people understand Islam as it should be understood; a lot of Muslim political terminology has been distorted by colonial interpretations.

We do not believe in multiple Islamic republics; we do believe, however, in a single Islamic world governed by a central government, because we consider all borders throughout the Muslim world as fake and colonialist, and therefore doomed to disappear.

We do not believe in a nation whose borders are 10,452 square kilometers in Lebanon; our project foresees Lebanon as part of the political map of an Islamic world in which specificities would cease to exist, but in which the rights, freedom, and dignity of minorities within it are guaranteed.

Therefore, in order for this project to be realized, priority should be given to removing Israel from the scene, because it was established for the express purpose of dividing and partitioning the Muslim world. We are not only against the partition of Lebanon, but also against the partition of the Muslim world; this explains why we see no alternative to fighting Israel, with all means at our disposal, until it ceases to exist. Then we will attend to following [certain] steps.

America makes a big show about Muslim rule being bad despite all of its vassals being Muslim rulers, or military despots. What they're really against is independence, and the Muslim world defining itself on its own terms, which is what Nasrallah stood for. Given the perfidy of other Muslim leaders he carried far too much of this weight on his own, and was ultimately crushed by it. But he had a plan, and he stuck to it. And the plan goes on.

One of the main things Nasrallah taught me was timing. Raised on a Hollywood diet—where scrappy teenagers saved the world at the last minute—I had no concept of the 'heroic epics' Hezbollah mentions in its communiqués. As Nasrallah said in 1992—after his predecessor had been assassinated—"We are not unrealistic. We do not pretend that our military capabilities and the numbers of our mujahidin would be enough to regain Jerusalem; none of us have ever made that claim. We do, however, believe that the resistance has to finish the job it started. It is impossible for us to fight the Israeli enemy through traditional and classical methods, but rather [we must fight] through a war of attrition, whereby we drain its energy, weaken it, then one day force it to withdraw."

By 2023, however, the Resistance was talking about Jerusalem, in all seriousness. Communiqués more and more concluded with 'on the road to Al Quds' (Jerusalem). The heroic Hamas operation of October 7th was called the Al Aqsa Flood for a reason. Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem is the third temple of Islam and the Resistance more and more talked about setting foot there in freedom. And Nasrallah came so close. As Fotros Resistance said, "A bottle of soil from Al-Aqsa mosque was sent by the people of the Al-Quds (Jerusalem) to be placed next to the pure body of martyr Sayyed Nasrallah, who ascended in order to liberate Al-Quds from the 'Israeli' occupation." That's how close Nasrallah was.

From 200 men in the field in what's called Lebanon, from just one truly independent state in the region (Iran), the Axis of Resistance has grown into a formidable fighting force with global support. Nasrallah was a fighter philosopher, and along with Iran's Qassem Soleimani, he was a military strategist par excellence. On a vastly uneven playing field the Resistance achieved air power without an air force (rockets), naval power without a navy (Yemeni rockets and sheer cojones), and ground power by going underground. Master Sun said, "To excel at defense means hiding oneself away in the deepest recesses of the earth. To excel at offense means striking from the highest reaches of the heavens," but I don't think he imagined anyone would take him so literally. The Axis of Resistance changed the rules of guerrilla warfare and literally unwrote the book on counter-insurgency. It was a triumph of brainpower over firepower. And yet so many of the brains that dreamed this defiance are gone. Not just Nasrallah, so many martyrs were lost.

When I feel bad about this, which is often, I think of the words of another martyr Sheikh Saleh Al-Arouri of Hamas. He said,

Our heroic martyrs, when they are from the leadership, and from the first ranks [of leadership], they awaken all the ranks of our people to be part of the Resistance. This is the indication of sincerity. When the leaders and the first ranks come forward to martyrdom… We affirm in a categorical and definitive way that our blood and souls are not greater nor dearer than that of any martyr. We are equal. The martyr that precedes us by one day is better than us. Better than us.

This is comfort, I guess, but cold. I look at these men and I wish they didn't have to fight at all, let alone die. But now the world can see the cruel occupation their people live under, and the necessity of self-defense. As Nasrallah said, "We support a military solution because we do not see a better alternative." There's enough scripture and UN resolution to support this, but now it is written in clear red marker As Nasrallah said, "Experience has shown us that red blood is capable of obliterating red lines, and if the nation chooses to follow this path, Israel and America will find that they are incapable of changing anything in the equation."

This was a fringe position once, especially after the Oslo Accords. But that was a betrayal and those days are long gone. Now the Resistance is legion, regional, and international. And they have defeated 'Israel' in the field and fought the whole White Empire to a draw across all combined arms. And across the world, the will of the people is certainly manifest to all. But the man, the man who told me so. The man is gone. So yet I mourn.

While it was heartening to see so many million turn out for his funeral, it was also heartbreaking all over again. At the funeral people kept saying Labbaik Ya Nasrallah, which seemed important but I didn't understand. Luckily Nasrallah himself explained it, if the Shia Forums are anything to go by. He said,

We will remain here, and our call will remain for the Americans to understand. The Americans do not know what 'Labbayk Ya Hussein' means. 'Labbayk Ya Hussein' means to be present on the battlefield, even if you are alone, even if people abandon you, accuse you, and leave you without support. 'Labbayk Ya Hussein' means that you, your wealth, and your family—your wife and children—are present in this battle.

'Labbayk Ya Hussein' means that a mother sends her son to the battlefield, and when her son is martyred, his head severed and thrown back to her, she takes it home, cleans the dust and blood from it, and says to him: 'I am pleased with you; may Allah honor you as you have honored me for the Day of Judgment and in front of Fatimah al-Zahra.' This is the true meaning of 'Labbayk Ya Hussein.'

As the 'Israelis', reduced to mere delivery-boys for American bombs, flew over Nasrallah's funeral, they showed how little they understand. The dedication of the Resistance is framed as zealotry by the Empire (why do they hate us?) but now the world has seen the predation that the entire region lives under, and the global majority hates America also! But what a lonely fight for Nasrallah to get to this point, what a long time before faith could become acts could become facts on the ground, and what a long, painful, road we are left to walk without him. But another meaning of labbyak (as dimly as I know) is I hear and I follow, and I do. Labbyak ya Nasrallah. I heard you my friend in history. I am at your service, as in your funeral (in spirit), and at the service 0f your spirit hereafter.

Voice of Hezbollah -- Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah -- 2007 -- Verso Books -- 9781844671533 -- 2c311152b0bd71a6a54aae910b9b1d4e -- Anna's Archive Voice of Hezbollah -- Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah -- 2007 -- Verso Books -- 9781844671533 -- 2c311152b0bd71a6a54aae910b9b1d4e -- Anna's Archive.pdf 2 MB Reading-Resistance-Print Reading-Resistance-Print.pdf 2 MB