Camaroneros to the Rescue

It was only four days after my seventh birthday that the rebels entered Havana in 1959. I didn't know much about the war beyond what I'd experienced living in a fairly small city on the south coast of the island.

 

Cienfuegos, my home town, had experienced a battle, really not even a skirmish, when I was five years old. I knew that much, and knew that the planes that bombed us were sent by the government of Fulgencio Batista. And I knew the uncomfortable feeling when we drove down a highway and had the government's battery of gun emplacements trained on our car until we went around a curve. So I thought that maybe Fidel's eviction of Batista would mean we would not be bombed or shot at by the government. That was a good thing, I was sure.

 

But my family clearly thought otherwise. Even before Fidel's conquest of Havana they, and my extended family—uncles and aunts, cousins, grandparents—all had scared me with the idea that the change in government meant a change of life. The only hope, they said, was an American intervention.

 

That summer after the victory of the Revolution we all went off to Varadero, the gorgeous barrier-island beach where we spent summers swimming and swimming some more. That year we rented a house perched on a bluff right above the beach. The water was marvelously transparent, and the shallow sea made Varadero's sand seem to go on and on for miles into the Straits of Florida.

 

One afternoon, when I was sitting up on the porch that overlooked the beach, I saw a huge fish, a shark, swimming up to within a yard or so of the beach, passing so near to a couple of men that, from where I sat, I was sure the shark's rough skin must have rubbed against their legs. And then the shark swam back out into the Straits.

 

Directly north of us, almost exactly one hundred miles away, I knew, was Marathon Key, half-way down the chain of cays that brought the US, the source of our salvation as my family insisted, so very close.

 

On a beautiful, mild, dead calm evening, as the whole family sat on the veranda at the rear of the house, we saw off in the distance a line of lights coming down from the north.

 

The invasion fleet, my uncle said. The marines are coming!

 

Everyone on the porch grew more and more agitated. Back in Cienfuegos we had been targets; now we'd be at the forefront of liberation. Yay!

 

And then the lights simply moved easterly. It was no invasion fleet, just the camaroneros, the shrimpers out to harvest the shrimp run.

Do What You Must

He came to see me because his life seemed to be too much for him. His mother wanted him to be practical, his father wanted him to do what he had done, his brother laughed at him because he was too smart for his own good, his sister mocked him because he was as pretty as she. What do I do, how do I deal with all the voices that just do not come together into any sense at all, he asked.

 

I said, wait and think it through, feel it through. What are you passionate about? What do you really love? hate? What are you just middling warm or cold about? I had a student once whose parents demanded that he major in accounting. He hated accounting. He despised the classes he had to take. He was so bad at it that at age 19 already he had ulcers and hypertension and just nerves shot to shit. But his parents insisted, and he persevered, barely passing classes, failing the CPA exam, then finally becoming a performance artist and living happily ever after—as far as I know, anyway.

 

The moral is simple but hard to keep in mind. This too will pass. This does not define you or your future or your life. If like that student you feel obliged to pay attention to what others tell you to do, do it if you must but know that in the end you must do whatever you are comfortable with. Nothing more, but also nothing less.

 

But how do I reconcile the different voices, he asked. How do I satisfy such contrary opinions?

 

You don’t, I responded. The only important voice in all this is your own. Look in your heart and act from what you feel. Will your parents be disappointed? Maybe, maybe not. As for your siblings, tell bro and sis to go to hell. It’s your life, not theirs.

 

The boy nodded as I spoke then turned and left my office. He graduated. He left town. Three years later, I saw him walking hand in hand with his boyfriend. They looked happy.

No Balm in Gilead

I see posts from folks in younger generations lamenting the shortcomings of the older generation, that is to say, the Boomers—of which, for the sake of full disclosure, I am one. From what I can gather, much of the lamentation is more than warranted. The cost of living makes it almost impossible for kids newly become adults to get ahead in this country. The political divisions that pit us vs. them are so deep that many of us, and not just the younger folks, despair of moving beyond them and into a more perfect union. The state of the school systems in all the states is so abysmal that I, for one, despair of ever having a well-educated citizenry. The price of even the most routine medical procedure beggars us all—or if not the procedure itself, then hedging against illness with unaffordable insurance.

 

And then I think back to when I was a youngster encountering the myriad problems of the last century. Many of those memories are vivid. The unfettered expression of American apartheid in the water-fountain signs that specified this one for whites only, that one for Negroes; the tar-paper shotgun shacks along the highway with hopeless, despairing families barefoot on the front steps; the burning cities and the National Guard everywhere; the debacle of Chicago ‘68, when the whole world was watching a police riot against demonstrators exercising their constitutional right to assemble and petition; the thousands and thousands of kids drafted into and killed in an armed force battling in a senseless neo-colonial war; the corrupt and corrupting politics of Tricky Dicky and his minions in the White House and, finally, in the Department of Justice.

 

It’s true that the economic realities back then were very different from what they are now. Still, although I cannot speak for anyone else, from my own experience the differences are not as large as it appears. I recognize that I’m not the best avatar of my generation’s coming into the working world. I was in school until I was thirty years old, and so I expected to struggle and be financially marginal. Still, even when I finally became a worker, I never ever lived in a house anywhere near the median price nationwide. Indeed, when my wife and I finally bought a house, it was a row house in a poor city, the cost of which was at best a quarter of the median price of housing in America. Even now, after so many years of working and fully retired, we live in a house that’s about one half the median price of housing, which we can afford because we still reside in that same poor city. The one thing that seems to me very unfair in current social reality is the cost of college. The increase in those costs is absurd and obscene.

 

At any rate, the crisis in early twenty-first century America does not seem to me unique or unusual. Here’s the second verse from Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers,” which reflects the realities of 1969:

 

One generation got old

One generation got soul

This generation got no destination to hold

Pick up the cry

 

Would a young person in 2026, when I’m writing this, recognize the sentiment? I think so. What underlies those lines is an experience of social reality very much parallel to current events, from racism to economic inequality and from exorbitant military budgets to the destruction of the planet by pollution, heat, plastics.

 

As is common in the language of our 21^st century contemporaries, the Airplane focused on generational differences. Back then I did as well. I remember the “don’t trust anyone over thirty” mantra, for instance. The people who got us deeper and deeper into the Vietnam War morass were all of them part of that generation that got old. The most recalcitrant of the recalcitrant racists were all of them part of that generation that got old. The despicable leaders who brought the National Guard to foreclose on all legitimate protest against authoritarianism were all of them part of that generation that got old.

 

And then a little bit of reflection. When the Little Rock Nine came to their Central High School classes, it was not that older generation that stood in their way. Their coevals did. When the National Guard soldiers shot and killed students in Jackson State and in Kent State, they were not members of that older generation. They were the students’ coevals. When the Chicago police beat the hell out of demonstrators at the Democratic Convention, they were, for the most part, not part of that older generation. They were the demonstrators’ coevals.

 

The same is true in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The people who bore those tiki-torches in Charlottesville were not Boomers. Only about 40% of people who support our current authoritarian president are Boomers. Most of the tech bros who govern our economic, political, social realities are not Boomers. Zuckerberg isn’t. Musk isn’t. Page and Brin aren’t. Bezos is, but just barely.

 

My point? Blaming a generation for the problems we face, whether we do that in 1969 or in 2026, is just wrong. I’ll acknowledge that the older one gets the less flexible one’s attitudes become. But the “young whippersnappers are fucking up the world” point of view is as common as the “damned Boomers have screwed us over” point of view, I think. As far as I can see, though, it’s not generational differences that create the messes we experience, in 2026 or in 1969. On the contrary, the culprits are the people who hold power, regardless of their generational affiliation. I’ll concede a very important point. Given that older people have had more time to accrue the resources that produce that kind of controlling power, there’s no doubt that older generations have an undue influence on the way the society is organized. Still, I maintain that it’s not the fact that they’re old that makes the difference, but rather the fact that they have power, derived from wealth or social status or whatever resource empowers them.

 

If I’m right about this, that it’s not generational differences per se but rather the accumulation of power among a set of people that produces the circumstances that agitated 1969 as much as 2026, then it follows that the key question to ask is whether it’s possible to forestall such accumulation. As I’ve suggested, in the way that societies are currently organized, older generations do elaborate power for themselves simply because longevity allows for the accumulation of the resources that produce power. But, again, it’s not simply longevity and old age that are at issue. Is such accumulation inevitable? Is it preventable?

 

The current crop of tech bros is informative. Up until some discrete point in their lives, those bros were generally speaking on the progressive side of things. My sense is that the switch to a right-wing political stance came as the Biden presidency and democratic congressional folks exerted pressure to regulate the expansion of the bros’ enterprises. It was then, in 2022 and 2023, that the bros experienced efforts to rein in the increasingly monopolistic practices of corporations like Meta and Google while at the same time the government tried to exercise its trust-busting authority. Those government initiatives coincided with the 2024 election, so that the hitherto Democrat-leaning bros became part of the Trump campaign. The most notorious case of support for Trump is Elon Musk, of course, who having voted for Obama and Hilary Clinton and then for Biden in 2020, now contributed near three hundred million dollars to Trump’s 2024 campaign.

 

The switch is not relevant to the primary question I asked, however. Sure there’s no doubt that plutocrats who want to generate even more wealth would not support politicians who seek to constrain their businesses by pursuing antitrust and anti-monopolistic actions against those businesses. But the power was there before the switch took place. The issue I’m trying to figure out is whether it’s inevitable for any society, under any political or economic arrangement, to produce differences in wealth and status that lead to the kinds of social and economic disparities that agitated 1969 and continue to agitate 2026.

 

Is it possible to have an entirely egalitarian society, in other words?

 

As I see it, history suggests that such egalitarianism is not possible. Whether it’s aristocrats in a latifundist system or monarchs in a feudal system or nation states in a mercantilist system or straightforwardly capitalist enterprises, every society on the planet has produced the kind of disparity in wealth and status that engenders an accumulation of power in the hands of the very few at the expense of deep inequalities and inequities.

 

Revolution seems to do no good. The American Revolution is said to be the exception, but Washington Irving saw the fallacy of that assertion when he made Rip Van Winkle wake up to a newly created United States where the only notable difference was that the George III Inn had become the George Washington Inn. The French Revolution? The Russian Revolution? The Chinese Revolution? All of them reproduce the same disparities, and therefore the same inequities, as existed before the revolutionary “transformation.” Before and after, it turns out, are the same.

 

Marx dreamt of an utterly egalitarian society. But in practice the societies ostensibly predicated on Marxist principles produce even more disparity in power than any other system, with the exception, perhaps, of absolute monarchy. The ruling cadres in Cuba does not suffer the same painful daily existence that the ordinary Cuban does. The same goes for any other country that has laid claim to being “communist.” The argument goes that all such countries are not really communist but rather were working towards communism via the state capitalism that they actually practiced. OK. Marx’s dream remains a dream, and one regular feature of dreams is that they are not reality.

 

Is it the case, then, that a truly egalitarian society is impossible? Hobbes’s vision of the world before and after the creation of a social contract certainly suggests that such a society is absolutely not possible. Before the institution of the great Leviathan, local centers of power come into being in the “state of nature,” where every individual is in battle against every other individual. Might makes right, as they say, and the more might one person has, the more inequities there are. After the institution of the great Leviathan, that imagined creature becomes the “mortal God,” wielding unchecked authority and power as he wills. Society gains a surcease of the eternal war of each against all, but at the cost of even a hint of equity or egalitarianism.

 

At this point I’m reminded of two passages from the works of very different playwrights. In Julius Cæsar Shakespeare has Cassius say that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” I’d substitute “humans” for “underlings” because, it seems to me, the condition that leads to the disparities of 1969 and 2026 are simply a consequence of our humanity. The second passage comes from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where Didi comments, “There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.” It’s the generational difference, we say. Or it’s the economic system, we say. Or it’s the political arrangements of this or that particular society, we say. But Didi knows that it’s our very own feet, our very own selves, the fact that we’re human, that’s the problem.

 

Is there then no solution? I think not. A fantasy might suggest that the solution could come from being governed by an artificial intelligence programmed to ensure that no one group elaborates power for itself. I find that fantasy even more dismaying than Hobbes’s Leviathan. Ultimately, I’m afraid, there is no balm in Gilead. We can fret our hour on the stage of life, conspire to overthrow the oppressive system, battle against the forces that keep us down and out. And then we come back to where we started.

 

There’s “progress” of sorts, to be sure. I would not want to be a peasant in 13th Century China or Germany or Ghana or Cusco. I acknowledge fully that the average worker in the 21st century works longer and possibly harder than the average worker in the 13th century. But the conditions of life in the 13th century are spine-chilling for someone raised in the 20th and now living in the 21st century. The progress does not come in the reduction of the differences in power that produce our discontent, but rather in the padding that makes the discontent less noticeable. And here again I acknowledge fully that when the padding fails to disguise the discontent, the result is France in 1789 or Russia in 1917 or Cuba in 1959 or. . . . I’m afraid that the United States is now at a point where the padding is getting mighty thin.

 

Again, there is no balm in Gilead.

Writing Accomplished

I’ve written myself into emptiness. Over the last year or so, I’ve produced about five hundred and eighty or so pages of prose. Some of those pages include photographs and pictures, so it’s not all my prose. But still, subtract fifty pages and it’s still a hell of a lot of writing. All of it has been in the retrospective mode. The document with all the images is what I think of as a memoir, which I’ve titled Still Don’t Know What I’ve Been Searching For. It takes seven chapters to complete, one for each place that I’ve lived, from Cienfuegos, Cuba to Miami to Harrisburg to State College, Pennsylvania to Cambridge to Carlinville, Illinois and finally to Reading, Pennsylvania. Seventy-four years of experiences. Like all memoirs, it’s only a partial account of what I experienced. Anything more would take another seventy-four years to complete. It’s also partial insofar as I leave out some things and focus only on events and people who seem to me significant, for whatever reason. I have no intention of doing anything with the document beyond maybe sending chapters to Carlos, my son, so he can get some sense of why his father is so strange a human being. I don’t know how interesting it would be for anyone else, or even for him.

 

The second bit of writing that I’ve done, this one all in the last month, is a fiction, which I’ve titled Never. It's long enough to be a novel, but I hesitate to call it that because it sounds ambitious and pretentious. It’s a fiction. The idea is loosely based on my experiences in the first term of my undergraduate career at Penn State. I don’t mention the school by name in the fiction, but it’s obvious what I mean. The characters in the story are also transparent. I change names, of course, and none of the characters are copies of real human beings. But the intent of the representation is, to me who wrote it at least, self-evident. I suspect that anyone who was around with me in those olden days of yore would be able to figure out the relationship between the fictional characters and real people.

 

The curious thing about writing the fiction was that the whole thing just came out of me without any effort on my part. It poured out like Coleridge’s ceaseless turmoil seething. I’d sit at my laptop and open the document, and the story just came. Even when I took time off from the laptop the story insisted on issuing forth. I’d be in the basement exercising, as I’m in the habit of doing because otherwise my whole body would simply atrophy, and in mid weight-lift ideas, events, dialogues would come into my brain and I would have to stop the lifting and type out an email to myself on the downstairs laptop recording whatever my brain had concocted. The same happened sometimes as I was walking around the neighborhood, also something I do to prevent physical atrophy. Without a laptop handy to type out an email, I would start the recorder app on my iPhone and speak what had flowed out of my mind.

 

The direction of the narrative took its own course as well. I was certain that the narrative would end up sad, verging on tragic. Instead it went in the opposite direction. A happy ending, verging on sappy rather than tragic. That part of it, at least, did not track with my experiences in that first year of college. Not that what I lived through back then was tragic in any sense. It was sad only insofar as something that had seemed precious came to an end, entirely because of my own stupidity I might add. But the fiction did not want to go there. It took a turn that, honestly, I could not have predicted—again, without any planning or pre-plotting on my part. It just happened because that’s the way the play lay, to paraphrase Perdita in A Winter’s Tale. That has never happened to me before. Hell, I’ve never written a fiction before, so there’s never been any time when what came out in my writing was not directed by my rational mind.

 

It’s true that I’ve often said to myself that I don’t know what I think about some subject or topic until I’ve written my way into it. But that is not at all the same thing as I experienced with this fiction. Writing my way to knowing what I think about something is a quite deliberate, rational process. Writing simply helps me think my way through to a conclusion. If I’m then going to turn what I’ve worked out for myself into an essay for publication or for presentation at a conference, I will begin the formal writing with the conclusion I’ve reached more or less as the thesis that I will argue. With the fiction none of that ratiocination took place. It just happened.

 

I remember reading many times comments from authors who said that their writing worked in that way, that it just came to pass as if the writer were transcribing something produced by someone else. Joan Didion has a wonderful essay, “Why I Write,” that traces out exactly that phenomenon as she experienced it in writing two of her major works. Her conclusion in the essay, her answer to its title, is that she writes in order to discover what happens. I’m no Joan Didion, but I now see exactly what she meant.

 

I have no intention of doing anything with Never. I did forward it, all two-hundred and ninety-six pages of it, to my wife. She hasn’t read it yet. I suspect that she’ll find it not just sappy but silly. That’s ok. I have no ambition to be a novelist nor of publishing what I’ve written. But I am curious what she will say about the dialogue. I think I’ve done that ok. It’s something I never thought I could do. I’ll be happy if she doesn’t hate the dialogue.

The Strangest Dream

All the talking heads are going on about the midterm elections as if they were going to proceed as elections have always proceeded since 1788. I had a nightmare last night, which I’m afraid may turn into our reality come November.

 

I dreamt that the Speaker of the House and the president pro tem of the Senate refused to accept the votes of states and districts where democrats won. I dreamt that when people gathered to protest that action, the leader of the executive branch declared a state of emergency and nationalized and deployed the National Guard to protect Congress. Not that the demonstrations were violent—nothing at all like January of 2021. But there were crowds jeering and cheering, and that set off the executive branch.

 

I dreamt that when the demonstrators persisted in exercising their right to peaceably assemble, the National Guard was ordered to fire on the crowd. Many of the Guardsmen refused to follow the order, but many did. And to ensure that orders would be followed, the executive deployed regular Army troops in support of the “loyal” National Guards troops.

 

I dreamt that at the Pentagon all the top brass that objected to the orders from the executive were not just dismissed but imprisoned. Armed guards were posted in the Pentagon to ensure that there’d be no response from any recalcitrant officer.

 

I dreamt that the House and Senate leadership appointed their own choice of representatives and senators. I dreamt that representatives and senators who objected to what was being done were jailed, declared traitors by the executive, and hanged, their chairs given over to people appointed by the leadership.

 

I dreamt that when finally a case came to the courts, the SCOTUS decreed that under the theory of a unitary executive, everything that had happened was entirely constitutional.

The Post-war Order

I have to say that the US did wonders for the whole world in its post-World War II invention of a world order that sustained peace and tranquility for over half a century. Well done indeed.

 

What made that order possible was the bipolar division of power after the war. I don’t mean that the presence of the Soviet Block was necessarily planned, or that it was in itself essential for the order. What I do mean is that the existence of a mortal enemy to the order as the US conceived it made it possible for the US to be ruthless without seeming to be ruthless and in the event to increase its power, influence, and wealth.

 

Think about all the actions that the US took, either on its own account or by proxies, to stop Soviet expansion, or rather the expansion of communism with the Soviet Union as the ultimate agitator in the process—forgive me the terms I’m using here, from “expansion” to “agitator” and a lot of others in between. I’m writing from the angle made necessary by being in the US myself.

 

There were the big ones, both in the number of casualties and in the direct engagement of US troops. In Korea there were more than five million dead, and in Vietnam somewhere over four million. The minor engagements—minor from the point of view of total dead and a marginal involvement of US combatants—are so myriad that they cannot be easily counted. To pick a continent: there’s the Angolan Civil War, the Congo Crisis, the Ogaden War in the Horn of Africa. There was much manipulation of political actors elsewhere—in Kenya, in Nigeria by deliberate inaction, in Sudan, in Mozambique.

 

Perhaps the slyest of destructive interventions took place in South Africa, where the US supported the apartheid as a counter to Soviet influence while at the same time objecting to the domestic effects of the apartheid system. The absurdity of that position still stuns. In practice, South Africans of all races, except the whites naturally, suffered decades of displacement and psychological denigration predicated on the ostensible superiority of whites and therefore the ostensible inferiority of Blacks, Coloreds, Indians—all the mincemeat categories invented by the Afrikaners to justify their control of the nation.

 

I am not considering the interventions in South and Central America and the Caribbean—there are limits to what I can write more or less briefly.

 

All those manipulations, intervention, actions, and wars were justified because of the threat of Soviet communism to the order that the US established. And there’s no doubt that Soviet communism did indeed represent a threat to the world order. I am by no means excusing the USSR. What I am suggesting is that the USSR played right into the hands of the American world order. I cannot imagine such actions taking place without the threat of communism to justify them. And the result of the Soviet threat was obviously the concomitant expansion of US power, prestige, and wealth. Many millions died. But the American century was secured.

 

Again, the post-war world order was on the whole a good thing. It would have led to increasing global wealth and welfare for everyone, the "everyone" especially emphatic had there been no Cold War antagonism between the US and the USSR. That antagonism simply made it easier for the US to improve its own position in relation to the rest of the world and to reward those who followed its lead, albeit with dire consequences for compatriots who resisted the US position.

 

The Soviets . . . I don’t understand the Soviets. I am assuming that the ideological stance of communism as opposing the depredations of capitalism is little more than smoke and mirrors, as it was in the US for domestic consumption, so that even now to accuse someone of being communist almost guarantees that the person will be persecuted, if not prosecuted. It’s obvious that the Soviet agenda lost again and again. It’s equally obvious that nations that adhered to communism fell further and further behind those that followed good old US capitalism. Think North Korea. Think Cuba. Other than for the sake of preserving the power and wealth of the ruling class in those nations, and perhaps—just as a possibility—the desire to resist American hegemony, why persevere in communism? China might be held up as a counter-example. It seems to have become an economically successful nation despite being “communist.” Is it? It is a single-party state. It is ruthlessly authoritarian. So was Nazi Germany.

 

To finish the thought of the US and the post-war world order as benefitting from the Cold War, consider what happened when the USSR disappeared and the threat of Soviet communism with it. The US—I guess “the West” is now a more appropriate term—immediately discovered a new threat to its hegemony, namely Islam. Indeed, I recall a radio broadcast by one of the right-wing Christian fundamentalist pastors (could it have been Pat Robertson? I can’t recall), which aired within a couple of months of the dissolution of the USSR. The pastor made reference to the Book of Daniel and its warning that Israel would be assailed from the north. It may be needless to point out that the pastor understood “Israel” as both the current state of Israel and the community of Christians derived from the promises of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, with special emphasis on the US. And what’s north of the state of Israel? It had been the USSR. That was gone. What remained is Islam.

 

The threat of Islam hasn’t replaced the threat of godless communism as easily as that pastor imagined it would. Certainly the folks currently in charge of the world order keep trying. But the success of the strategy is nothing like the success of the anti-communist agenda. The result? The world order staggers. It may be on its way to collapse and replacement by something else.

 

Yeats predicted that what’s to come is a “rough beast . . . slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born.” He may be right. I don’t know. What I do know is that the American century, and the post-war order that codified that century, was also pretty rough.

Terrorism and Patriotism

Was John Brown an agent of liberation, or was he a terrorist? That is an unfair question because it does what so often happens in discussions of controversial subjects. The “or” produces the unfairness. Brown’s actions were brutal, deliberately so. In 1856, at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas, Brown and a group of his followers dragged five men and boys from their homes and killed them. Surely that is a terroristic act. But then the motivation for the act remains within the realm of liberation. The people he killed—at Pottawatomie Creek and then later in Missouri and in Virginia, Harper’s Ferry—were active proponents of slavery, slave owners, fierce defenders of their “right” to own other human beings as chattel property. In Brown’s religious fervor, and in any morally righteous universe, such men represented evil. His actions worked towards the liberation of all the enslaved people of the United States.

 

Change the “or” to “and,” then.

 

According to the OED “terrorist” as a political epithet doesn’t come into English usage until well after our Tea Party, during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, when a British newspaper of 1794 called “terrorists” those radical Jacobins who ignited the Terror. In usage not associated with the Terror, the word doesn’t appear until 1806 when another British newspaper refers to Irish freedom fighters as “terrorists.” As a religious epithet, “terrorist” appears at the same time as in political discourse to describe the hell fire and damnation sermons of radical sectarians.

 

Destructive as they were, even the Jacobins are both/and—terrorists to be sure, but also patriots seeking the radical liberation of the people of France. So too the Irish “terrorists” seeking freedom from British domination and the radical sectarians who wished to terrorize their audience into salvation.

 

And so the categories of patriotic hero and terrorist come trailing clouds or perspective. The savage white men disguised as Native Americans who threw British tea into Boston Harbor are our heroes, but their terrorists.

 

Not as violent as the Jacobins, the participants in the Tea Party nonetheless had in mind the same sort of goal as did the Jacobins. The OED, again, defines the more general sense of “terrorist” as follows: “A person who uses violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims; esp. a member of a clandestine or expatriate organization aiming to coerce an established government by acts of violence against it or its subjects.” The tea-partiers to a T.

 

Nowhere is the coincidence of terrorism and patriotism clearer than in the Middle East. From the perspective of Israelis every one of the Palestinian groups, from the PLO and Fatah through Hezbollah and Hamas, is a terrorist organization. There is no doubt about the truth of that designation. Random shooting, coordinated attacks, constant subversion of the Israeli state add up to the use of “violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims.” The political aims are themselves terroristic insofar as one articulated goal of the groups, some of them at any rate, is the destruction of Israel itself. The rallying cry, “from the mountains to the sea,” means erasing Israel in order to establish a comprehensive Palestinian state.

 

From the Palestinian perspective the political goal of the terrorism is necessary, essential to freeing the people of Palestine. They note that the state of Israel is itself founded at least in part because of the terrorism of Jewish groups like the Irgun. Irgun bombed the King David Hotel, located in the British-controlled Palestinian Mandate, in 1946. Many Jewish groups in the 1940s condemned the terrorism, which was in effect part of a comprehensive militant campaign against the British mandate, ultimately seeking the establishment of a new state, Israel, as the homeland of all Jews.

 

Britain and the US had moved towards founding a new state regardless of the Jewish militancy, and in 1948 the UN agreed. Israel became a new country. Israel would have been born without the terrorism. Whether the terrorism worked to hasten the birth is arguable. It may be worth noting, however, that Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun, ultimately became prime minister of Israel. Also of note is the current prime minister’s opinion that the bombers of the King David Hotel were “heroes.” Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument? It is “very important to make the distinction between terror groups and freedom fighters, and between terror action and legitimate military action.”

 

So too would Fatah and Hamas and Hezbollah argue. After all, the British mandate in Palestine happens to coincide almost exactly with the borders of Israel.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine#/media/File:Map_of_Mandatory_Palestine_in_1946_with_major_cities_(in_English).svg

 

The Palestinian terrorists’ political goal is to recuperate what the Jewish terrorists accomplished. Currently Israel is responding to that goal as ruthlessly as possible. The attack on Israel by Hamas on Oct 7^th 2023 has given the Israeli government license systematically to destroy Palestinian communities in the Gaza Strip. That approach to “solving” the Palestinian problem has also empowered Israeli “settlers” to attack piecemeal Palestinian households and communities in the West Bank. In any other context those “settlers” would be labelled “terrorists” because their tactics come straight from the terrorists’ handbook, to “use violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims.” Whether the government’s approach to Gaza is also terroristic, state-sponsored terrorism, is a live question. Much of the world seems to think so, at any rate.

 

In any morally reasonable universe there ought to be a clear dividing line between terrorism and patriotism. Unfortunately we do not live in a morally reasonable universe. We’re stuck with perspective and point of view. To be sure, most people—I have no idea what percentage of humans, but suspect a very large majority—respond with revulsion to acts of violence and intimidation. Until self-interest of some sort enters the question, that is. Once that happens, terrorism becomes justified by the political goal of the terrorists.

John Brown is not unique in this regard. Hamas justifies the October 7^th attack as a step towards “freeing” Palestine. Netanyahu thinks the bombers at the King David Hotel are heroes in the “freeing” of Jews.

 

Early Modern revenge tragedies tell us the result. An endless cycle of violence, all of it justified on the basis of some grand political objective. Simply put, there is no balm in Gilead.