Category: WKPS

CBA

Consolidated Business Act

An act to provide for a consolidated line of business conducted by NOVUS SYLLABUS LLC, a freely associated service provider, to the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) of the people of the world, to provide a system to supplant the public schools and universities, and for other purposes. 

Know all by these presents that there is hereby charted and established among the firm league of friendship of the decentralized autonomous organization of the people of the world a Company of:

بيت مدرسة
בית מדרש
Beth Midrash
153d CORPS
Curricular Operations Research and Publication Service
Division of the Political Bureau of Education
of the Universitas Autodidactus (UA) of the
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)

Whose Members and Officers shall be: 

  • The Preceptory (the Student Body; members) whose duty is to study and report on the sapiential law (“wisdom literature”; “mysteries”) of all ages. 
  • The Student Body President (and Vice President, if so desired) whose duty it is to represent the Student Body assembled, elected by the Preceptory.
  • The Faculty, the elected officers of the Preceptory, including the Rapporteur, Parliamentary Ombudsman (PO), and Secretary Treasurer (“Sec’y Treas.”, aka “Bookkeeper”), whose duty is to guide and conduct the study and reportage of the sapiential law of all ages. 
  • The Preceptor (Chair of the Preceptory; Director of Curriculum) whose duty is to provide the instruction, interpretation, explanation, elaboration, and exegesis of the sapiential law of all ages. 

ART. 2. This Company shall provide for the Policy, Praxis and Process of educational instruction in the UA of the DAO, and it shall be administered in fee by NOVUS SYLLABUS, L.L.C., a freely associated service provider (the “ministry” or the “server”). 

ART. 3. The use of logos, trademarks, and other intellectual property identifying the UA and DAO which are copyrights of the server are subject to end-use licensure by the server.

ART. 4. As to the Members and Officers enumerated at Article 1 herein, the Synchronized Decentralized Autonomous Command System (SDACS) is incorporated herein by reference.

(Last Amended 15 Feb. 2024 as to Art. 4 and Art. 1)

Curricular Operations Research & Publication Services
Provided by the Governor and Company of:

Free Association

D.R. 01-14: The Fed &c.

Volume 1, Issue 14

Special Edition on Political Economy

Contents — Art. 1. …On the FedArt 2. Charter F.A.Art. 3. …Consol DAOArt. 4. Notes from the DAOArt. 5. …XArt. 6. Culture…

Article 1

Notes on the System:
On the “Federal Reserve”

Comp. Ed. by Antarah Crawley | Last Modified 11/28/2023 at 9:40 PM

The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, provides the nation with a safe, flexible, and stable monetary and financial system.

Banner of the Official Website of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, as of 27 Nov. 2023
The old clubhouse, Jekyll Island, Georgia. (Courtesy of Tyler E. Bagwell)

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.

Book of Isaiah, Chapter 9, Verse 2

Introductory Editorial Note: It is economic, social, and political suicide to question the legitimacy or constitutionality of the System (just ask Ezra Pound, Mr. Mullins, and Chairman McFadden). Notwithstanding that unfortunate circumstance, we must educate the public as to its mechanisms.

Preamble

[…] the Federal Reserve System is not Federal; it has no reserves, and is not a system at all, but rather, a criminal syndicate. From November, 1910, when the conspirators [U.S. Senator Nelson Aldrich of the National Monetary Commission, his secretary Arthur Shelton, U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury A. Piatt Andrew, Senior Partner Henry Davison of J.P. Morgan Co., President Frank Vanderlip of the National City Bank of New York, President Charles D. Norton of the First National Bank of New York, Benjamin Strong of J.P. Morgan, and Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb & Co.] met on Jekyll Island, Georgia, to the present time machinations of the Federal Reserve bankers have been shrouded in secrecy. Today [1991], that secrecy has cost the American people a three trillion [now 33 trillion] dollar debt, with annual interest payments to these bankers amounting to some three hundred billion dollars per year, sums which stagger the imagination, and which in themselves are ultimately unpayable.

[…] American history in the twentieth century has recorded the amazing achievements of the Federal Reserve bankers. First, the outbreak of World War I, which was made possible by the funds available from the new central bank of the United States. Second, the Agricultural Depression of 1920. Third, the Black Friday Crash on Wall Street of October, 1929, and the ensuing Great Depression. Fourth, World War II. Fifth, the conversion of the assets of the United States and its citizens from real property to paper assets from 1945 to the present, transforming a victorious America and foremost world power in 1945 to the world’s largest debtor nation in 1990. […] Will Americans act to rebuild our nation […] or will we continue to be enslaved by the Babylonian debt money system which was set up by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 to complete our total destruction? This is the only question which we have to answer, and we do not have much time left to answer it.

Eustace Mullins, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, 1991; Forward to “Secrets of the Federal Reserve,” Author’s Special 70th Birthday Edition: Bankers Research Institute: Staunton, Virginia: 1993. (Emphasis mine.)

Primary Sources

Some people think the Federal Reserve banks are United States Government institutions. They are not government institutions. They are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers. The Federal Reserve banks are the agents of the foreign central banks. Henry Ford has said, ‘The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debts.’ The truth is the Federal Reserve Board has usurped the Government of the United States by the arrogant credit monopoly which operates the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks.

Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the U.S. House Banking and Currency Committee, June 10, 1932. (Mullins 153-154.)

Whereas I charge them, jointly and severally, with the crime of having treasonably conspired and acted against the peace and security of the United States and having treasonable conspired to destroy the constitutional government in the United States. Resolved, that the Committee on the Judiciary is authorized and directed as a whole or by subcommittee to investigate the official conduct of the Federal Reserve Board and agents to determine whether, in the opinion of the said committee, they have been guilty of any high crime or misdemeanour which in the contemplation of the Constitutions requires the interposition of the Constitutional powers of the House.

Chairman McFadden, January 13, 1932, introducing a resolution indicting the Federal Reserve Board of Governors for “Criminal Conspiracy,” on which no action was taken. This, and the Chairman’s December 13, 1932, motion to impeach President Herbert Hoover was the last nail driven into his political coffin. (Mullins 154.)

I wrote into the bill which was introduced by me in the Senate on June 26, 1913, a provision that the powers of the System should be employed to produce a stable price level, which meant a dollar of stable purchasing, debt-paying power. It was stricken out. The powerful money interests got control of the Federal Reserve Board through Mr. Paul Warburg, Mr. Albert Strauss, and Mr. Adolph C. Miller and they were able to have that secret meeting of May 18, 1920, and bring about a contraction of credit so violent it threw five million people out of employment. In 1920 that Reserve Board deliberately caused the Panic of 1921. The same people, unrestrained in the stock market, expanding credit to a great excess between 1926 and 1929, raised the price of stocks to a fantastic point where they could not possibly earn dividends, and when the people realized this, they tried to get out, resulting in the Crash of October 24, 1929.

U.S. Senator Robert L. Owen, testifying before the U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, 1938. (Mullins 157.)

The Federal Reserve Bank is an institution owned by the stockholding member banks. The Government has not a dollar’s worth of stock in it.

W.P.G. Harding, Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, testifying in 1921. (Mullins 157.)

The people did not know the Federal Reserve Banks were organized for profit-making. They were intended to stabilize the credit and currency supply of the country. That end has not been accomplished. Indeed, there has been remarkable variation in the purchasing power of money since the System went into effect. The Federal Reserve men are chosen by the big banks, through discrete little campaigns, and they naturally follow the ideals which are portrayed to them as the soundest from a financial point of view.

U.S. Senator Robert L. Owen, testifying during the Gold Reserve Hearings of 1934. (Mullins 161.)

At the moment, 1934, we have 900 million dollars excess reserves. In 1924, with increased reserves of 300 million, you got some three or four billion in bank expansion of credit very quickly. That extra money was put out by the Federal Reserve Banks in 1924 through buying government securities and was the cause of the rapid expansion of bank credit. The banks continued to get excess reserved because more gold came in, and because, whenever there was a slackening, the Federal Reserve people would put out some more. They held back a bit in 1926. Things firmed up a bit that year. And then in 1927 they put out less than 300 million additional reserves, set the wild stock market going, and that led us right into the smash of 1929.

[…] The money of the Federal Reserve Banks is money they created. When they buy Government securities they create reserves. They pay for the government securities by giving checks on themselves, and those checks come to the commercial banks and are by them deposited in the Federal Reserve Banks, and then money exists which did not exist before.

Benjamin Anderson, economist for the Chase National Bank of New York, testifying during the Gold Reserve Hearings of 1934. (Mullins 161.)

The Board of Governors opposes any bill which proposes a stable price level, on the grounds that prices do not depend primarily on the price or cost of money; that the Board’s control over money cannot be made complete; and that steady average prices, even if obtainable by official action, would not insure lasting prosperity

Marriner S. Eccles, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (1934–48), in “Memorandum on Proposals to maintain prices at fixed levels,” Monday, March 13, 1939. (Mullins 163.)

The Government controls the gold reserve, that is, the power to issue money and credit, thus largely regulating the price structure.

[…] The Federal Reserve Board has the power of open market operations. Open-market operations are the most important single instrument of control over the volume and cost of credit in this country. When I say “credit” in this connection, I mean money, because by far the largest part of money in use by the people of this country is in the form of bank credit or bank deposits. When the Federal Reserve Banks buy bills or securities in the open market, they increase the volume of the people’s money and lower its cost; and when they sell in the open market they decrease the volume of money and increase its cost. Authority over these operations, which affect the welfare of the whole people, must be invested in a body representing the national interest.

Chairman Eccles, testifying before the U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, 1935. (Mullins 163-164.)

The cash [of a Federal Reserve Bank], in truth, does not exist and has never existed. What we call ‘cash reserves’ are simply bookkeeping credits entered upon ledgers of the Federal Reserve Banks. The credits are created by the Federal Reserve Banks and then passed along though the banking system.

Congressman Wright Patman, “The Primer of Money,” p. 38. (Mullins 164.)

The trick in the Federal Reserve notes is that the Federal reserve banks lose no cash when they pay out this currency to the member banks. Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in anything except what the Government calls ‘legal tender’—that is, money that a creditor must be willing to accept from a debtor in payment of sums owed him. But since they are really redeemable only in themselves … they are and irredeemable obligation issued by the Federal Reserve Banks.

Peter L. Bernstein, “A Primer On Money, Banking and Gold,” Vintage Books, New York, 1965, p. 104. (Mullins 165).

The dollar represents a one dollar debt to the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve Banks create money out of thin air to buy Government bonds from the United States Treasury, lending money into circulation at interest, by bookkeeping entries of checkbook credit to the United States Treasury. The Treasury writes up an interest bearing bond for one billion dollars. The Federal Reserve gives the Treasury a one billion dollar credit for the bond, and has created out of nothing a one billion dollar debt which the American people are obligated to repay with interest.

[…] Where does the Federal Reserve system get the money with which to create Bank Reserves? Answer. It doesn’t get the money, it creates it. When the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money. The Federal Reserve is a total moneymaking machine. It can issue money or checks.

Congressman Patman, “Money Facts,” House Banking and Currency Committee, 1964, p. 9. (Mullins 165.)

There is still another and more important element of public interest in the operation of banks beside the safekeeping of money. One of the most important factors to remember in this connection is that the supply of money affects the general level of prices—the cost of living. The Cost of Living Index and money supply are parallel.

“A Day’s Work at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York” (pamphlet), 1951, p. 22. (Mullins 165.)

If I deposited $100 with my bank and the reserve requirements imposed by the Federal Reserve Bank are 20% then the bank can make a loan to John Doe of up to $80. Where does the $80 come from? Is does not come out of my deposit of $100; on the contrary, the bank simply credits John Doe’s account with $80. The bank can acquire Government obligations by the same procedure, by simply creating deposits to the credit of the government. Money creating is a power of the commercial banks … Since 1917 the Federal Reserve has given private banks forty-six billion dollars of reserves.

Congressman Patman, Congressional Record, March 21, 1960. (Mullins 167.)

ECCLES: The banking system as a whole creates and extinguishes the deposits as they make loans and investments, whether they buy Government Bonds or whether they buy utility bonds or whether they make Farmers’ loans.

MR. PATMAN: I am thoroughly in accord with what you say, Governor, but the fact remains that they created the money, did they not?

ECCLES: Well, the banks create money when they make loan and investments.

Before the U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, June 24, 1941. (Mullins 167.)

MR. PATMAN: How did you get the money to buy those two billion dollars worth of Government securities in 1933?

ECCLES: We created it.

MR. PATMAN: Out of what?

ECCLES: Out of the right to issue credit money.

MR. PATMAN: And there is nothing behind it, is there, except out Government’s credit?

ECCLES: That is what our monetary system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money.

Before the U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, September 30, 1941. (Mullins 167.)

ECCLES: I mean the Federal Reserve, when it carries out an open market operation, that is, if it purchases Government securities in the open market, it puts new money into the hands of the banks which creates idle deposits.

MR. DEWEY: There are no excess reserves to use for this purpose?

[ECCLES]: Whenever the Federal Reserve System buys Government securities in the open market, or buys the direct from the Treasury, either one, that is what it does.

MR. DEWEY: What are you going to use to buy them with? You are going to create credit?

ECCLES: That is all we have ever done. That is the way the Federal Reserve System creates money. It is a bank of issue.

Before the U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, June 17, 1942. (Mullins 167-168.)

MR. KOLBURN: What do you mean by monetization of the public debt?

ECCLES: I mean the bank creating money by the purchase of Government securities. All money is created by debt—either private or public debt.

MR. FLETCHER: Chairman Eccles, when do you think there is a possibility of returning to a free an open market, instead of this pegged and artificially controlled financial market we now have?

ECCLES: Never. Not in your lifetime or mine.

Hearing before the U.S. House, 1947. (Mullins 168.) (Emphasis added.)

Congress may not abdicate or transfer to others its legitimate functions. Congress cannot Constitutionally delegate its legislative authority to trade or industrial associations or groups so as to empower them to make laws.

U.S. Supreme Court opinion, Schechter Poultry v. United States of America, 29 U.S. 495, 55 US 837.842 (1935), ruling the National Recovery Act (NRA) unconstitutional. (Mullins 168.)

The Congress shall have Power to borrow money on the credit of the United States … and to coin Money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.”

Article 1, Sec. 8 of the Constitution of the United States of America. (Mullins 168.)

The money that began to appear in circulation a week ago, December 21, 1942, was really printing press money in the fullest sense of the term, that is, money which has no collateral of any kind behind it. The Federal Reserve statement that ‘The Board of Governors, after consultation with the Treasury Department, has authorized Federal Reserve Banks to utilize at this time the existing stocks of currency printed in the early thirties, known as ‘Federal Reserve Banknotes‘. We repeat, these notes have absolutely no collateral of any kind behind them.

Henry Hazlitt, Newsweek Magazine, January 4, 1943. (Mullins 169.)

GOVERNOR ECCLES: The currency in circulation was increased from seven billion dollars in four years to twenty-one and a half billion. We are losing some considerable amounts of gold during the war period. As our exports have gone out, largely on a lend-lease basis, we have taken imports on which we have given dollar balances. These countries are now drawing off these dollar balances in the form of gold.

MR. SMITH: Governor Eccles, what is the objective that the foreign governments are after in this projected program whereby we would contribute gold to an international fund? [Referring to the Stabilization Fund, known after 27 December 1945 as the International Monetary Fund (IMF)].

GOVERNOR ECCLES: I would like to discuss OPA [Office of Price Administration], and leave the stabilization fund for a time when I am prepared to go into it.

Senate Hearings on the Office of Price Administration (OPA), 1944. (Mullins 169.)
An OPA poster

Modern Implications

Fractional-reserve banking predates the existence of governmental monetary authorities and originated with bankers’ realization that generally not all depositors demand payment at the same time. In the past, savers looking to keep their coins and valuables in safekeeping depositories deposited gold and silver at goldsmiths, receiving in exchange a note for their deposit (see Bank of Amsterdam). These notes gained acceptance as a medium of exchange for commercial transactions and thus became an early form of circulating paper money.[1] As the notes were used directly in trade, the goldsmiths observed that people would not usually redeem all their notes at the same time, and they saw the opportunity to invest their coin reserves in interest-bearing loans and bills. This generated income for the goldsmiths but left them with more notes on issue than reserves with which to pay them. A process was started that altered the role of the goldsmiths from passive guardians of bullion, charging fees for safe storage, to interest-paying and interest-earning banks. Thus fractional-reserve banking was born.[2]

If creditors (note holders of gold originally deposited) lost faith in the ability of a bank to pay their notes, however, many would try to redeem their notes at the same time. If, in response, a bank could not raise enough funds by calling in loans or selling bills, the bank would either go into insolvency or default on its notes. Such a situation is called a bank run and caused the demise of many early banks.[1]

These early financial crises led to the creation of central banks. The Swedish Riksbank was the world’s first central bank, created in 1668. Many nations followed suit in the late 1600s to establish central banks which were given the legal power to set a reserve requirement, and to specify the form in which such assets (called the monetary base) were required to be held.[3] In order to mitigate the impact of bank failures and financial crises, central banks were also granted the authority to centralize banks’ storage of precious metal reserves, thereby facilitating transfer of gold in the event of bank runs, to regulate commercial banks, and to act as lender-of-last-resort if any bank faced a bank run. The emergence of central banks reduced the risk of bank runs which is inherent in fractional-reserve banking, and it allowed the practice to continue as it does today.[4] where it is the system of banking prevailing in almost all countries worldwide.[5][6]

During the twentieth century, the role of the central bank grew to include influencing or managing various macroeconomic policy variables, including measures of inflation, unemployment, and the international balance of payments. In the course of enacting such policy, central banks have from time to time attempted to manage interest rates, reserve requirements, and various measures of the money supply and monetary base.[7]

History of Fractional-Reserve Banking (Wiki)

As announced on March 15, 2020, the Board reduced reserve requirement ratios to zero percent effective March 26, 2020.  This action eliminated reserve requirements for all depository institutions.

Board of Governors of Federal Reserve System, “Reserve Requirements,” From, Policy Tools. federalreserve.gov. (Emphasis added.)

The Federal Reserve Board on Monday announced technical details related to reserve requirements for depository institutions, which will remain zero. The annual adjustment and publication of the reserve requirement exemption amount and low reserve tranche is required by law and does not indicate a change in depository institutions’ reserve requirements.

Board of Governors of Federal Reserve System, “Federal Reserve Board announces annual indexing of reserve requirement exemption amount and low reserve tranche for 2024,” November 27, 2023. federalreserve.gov.

Concluding Editorial Note: The Fed’s inception at Jekyll Island circa November 22, 1910, the signing of the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913, and its subsequent clandestine operations follow exactly the plot and themes of The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900). 

Article 2

Charter of Free Association

By Antarah Crawley | Last Modified 11/28/2023 at 9:25 PM

NACOTCHTANK, OD — The Governor of the Society of the New Syllabus (NS) at Nacotchtank-on-Potomac (Anacostia) District of Ouachita (Washington, District of Columbia), Furthest West (al-Maghreb al-Aqsa) To All To Whom These Presents Come, Sends Greeting and Peace:

Know ye by these presents that this decentralized, autonomous and freely associated Political Bureau of Education (Politburo), to wit, NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C. (N∴S∴), is the founding member of the brain trust of the international association of working people (“workers”), free thinkers, truth speakers and light workers united in a firm league of friendship in the nature of a decentralized autonomous organization (5th IWA—FTLU—FLF—DAO), from the 1st Ecclesiastic College at Nacotchtank, Ouachita District (153d CORPS).

TWAP PARTY PLANK NO. 5: The producer of goods shall be the owner of such goods less the interest per cent held by capital investors in the production of such goods. 

Charter of Free Association (F.A.)
of

בית מדרש

B’T MDRS
(“(al) Beth/Bayt (ha) Midrash/Madrasa”),
being the

Office of Preceptor of the Student Body,
House of Studies, F.A., Political Bureau of Education,
153d CORPS, FLF-DAO;

Also known in the African tradition as Hogon of the Sanctuarie de Binou;

Also known generally as the Preceptory at Nacotchtank in the trust of the Governor and Company of NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C. (NS)

Nota Bene that faith and belief are not a source of revenue, but trust may be a such a source provided it is not usurious as to the change of venue; NS to receive quarterly dividends from/interest pmnts x% of principal trust res for routine (“regular”) educational and administrative services rendered to DAO student body (“the public”); therefore trust res held for benefit of members of any student body of the decentralized autonomous organization of the working people associated and free thinkers, truth speakers, and light workers united in the nature of a firm league of friendship (5th Int’l Ass’n, WFTLU, FLF-DAO); and Trustee N∴S∴ obligated to perform “regular” services; LLC to vest membership interest in trust to receive dividends/returns on N∴S∴ commercial operations such as BLK MKT (“the Press”) and Production Dept. of Audiovisual Media (“the Media”); ergo symbiotic economic relationship. 

Model A: In exchange for up to 49% interest in itself, N∴S∴ to receive trust dividends/disbursements of 12% annually. 

Model B: N∴S∴ to sell 33% private equity in itself to Rothschild & Co., London, for $33 million in equal parts gold and silver bullion, English government bonds, United States Treasuries, United States dollars (USD), and Classical, Italianate or Moorish-style real estate; then vest these proceeds according to Model A.

Although a Labor government nationalized the Bank of England in 1946, The Great Soviet Encylopaedia points out (vol. 1, p. 490c) that the Bank of England continues to pay 12% dividends per annum, just as it had done prior to the nationalization. The “Governor” is appointed by the government, in a situation similar to that in the United States, where the Governors of the Federal Reserve System are appointed by the President. However, as is pointed out in the Encylopaedia Americana v. 13, p. 272, ‘In practice, the governors of the Bank of England have not hesitated to criticize and bring pressure on the government in public.’

Mullins, Appendix I of “Secrets of the Federal Reserve,” p. 181.

Concluding Note: Per the sunnah (way, tradition, praxis) of Kogard, it is most prudent for our Honorable Society, not to engage in labyrinths of credit and debt but, to arrive at the very source of all money.

Article 3

Free Trade Monetary Policy:
Toward a Consolidated DAO Council on High Finance

By Antarah Crawley

NACOTCHTANK, OD — Toward an Act to establish a Consolidated DAO Council on High Finance (the “Consol”):—

ADVERTISEMENT: DAO INTERNATIONAL COMMAND—SEEKING PARTNER(S) TO CAPITALIZE TRUST IN WHICH TO VEST UP TO 49% INTERESTS IN DIVERSIFIED F.A. INVESTMENTS AND HOLDINGS; SUCH PARTNER TO BE ADMITTED TO BOARD OF TRUSTEES AND DAO INTERCOM BY SIMPLIFIED RITE OF FRIENDSHIP.

DAO BANK BONDS NOTES & BILLS

A trade acceptance instrument, negotiable, having a face value, expiry/maturity date, and discount value backed by the DAO brain trust, representing a promise to pay or otherwise discharge an obligation between freely associated (F.A.) producers and providers of goods and services. 

This is preferable to the present system of the national credit monopoly buying government bonds on which the American people owe the principal and interest for NO MONEY DOWN. It is an open book for which the People are liable on the ledger of a private trust. 

Open book accounts only name a debtor on an outstanding account payable. The Fed amalgamated all the credits on the open books of American businessmen by urging the exchange of trade acceptances and “creating money on the basis of debt” (Eccles). 

Bill of Exchange, a negotiable instrument:

Seller => Draft–Demand4Pmnt => Buyer

Buyer => Acceptance=Promise2Pay=> Seller

Time of expiration = date of maturity

May endorse to bank at discount rate

Trade Acceptances

Explanation (from, CitiBank) [The “accepting” company is replaced with X]:

  • A draft, also known as a “bill of exchange”, is a traditional, long-standing trade instrument which has been used across the globe for hundreds of years; it is recognized by trading partners and financial institutions as a means of payment.
  • When a draft is drawn on a Buyer/Drawee it’s considered a Demand for Payment. When “Accepted” by the Buyer/Drawee it becomes a Trade Acceptance. The Acceptance adds X’s irrevocable payment promise to its Supplier/Drawer; to pay the accepted draft amount upon maturity.
  • Most countries have common laws governing Trade Acceptance (typically covered by negotiable instrument law).
  • The discount rate charged to suppliers is commensurate with the X’s credit rating, which is most often lower than the interest rate associated with the Supplier’s other forms of financing (Note: Pricing is provided on the needed cover letter. See the “Process Flow” tab ).
  • Trade acceptances are globally recognized, readily marketable, and easily transferable by simple endorsement.
  • Highly leveraged and/or smaller suppliers categorically benefit from low cost finance

Application & Benefits:

  • Once the Buyer has placed its acceptance upon the draft, the supplier may request:
    1. To sell the X Accepted Draft, at a discount, to Citibank, N.A., or
    2. Citibank, N.A. to hold it, until its maturity.
  • X’s suppliers do not have to become clients of Citibank, N.A. nor sign any upfront legal agreements for either a. or b. above. When suppliers want to request Citibank, N.A. to purchase the X Trade Acceptance, they merely endorse the draft to Citibank, N.A. and complete the warranty statements located in Section 9 of the required Document Transmittal Form / Cover Letter which is required with each presentation.
  • The Supplier gets short term funding without recourse, at attractive rates (based on the X’s credit rating), and without using their own credit lines.

Exchange, in the international financial world, means the transactions in money or securities, or simply, the “exchange” of the values of these securities. It is necessary that this “exchange” take place where the values can be established, and this place is the ‘City‘ in London.

London was established as the primary center of exchange because of the ‘Consols’ of the Bank of England, bonds which could never be redeemed, but which paid a stable rate of return. Henry Clews writes, in The Wall Street View, Silver Burdett Co., 1900, p. 255, ‘The Consolidated Act of 1757 consolidated the debts of the Bank of England at 3%, which were kept in an account at the Bank of England as is the great bulwark of its deposits.’ By ostentatiously ‘dumping’ ‘Consols’ on the London Exchange after the Battle of Waterloo, in a pretended panic, Nathan Meyer Rothschild then secretly bought up the Consols sold in the panic by other holders at a low rate, and became the largest holder of Consols, and thus won control of the Bank of England in 1815.

Mullins, Appendix I of “Secrets of the Federal Reserve,” p. 181.

Article 4

Notes from the DAO

Comp. Ed. by Antarah Crawley

Our present society is founded on the exploitation of the propertyless classes by the propertied. This exploitation is such that the propertied (capitalists) buy the working force body and soul of the propertyless, for the price of the mere costs of existence (wages), and take for themselves, i.e., steal, the amount of new values (products) which exceeds this price, whereby wages are made to represent the necessities instead of the earnings of the wage-laborer.

As the non-possessing classes are forced by their poverty to offer for sale to the propertied their working forces, and as our present production on a grand scale enforces technical development with immense rapidity, so that by the application of an always decreasing number of human working forces, an always increasing amount of products is created; so does the supply of working forces increase constantly, while the demand therefor decreases. This is the reason why the workers compete more and more intensely in selling themselves, causing their wages to sink, or at least on the average, never raising them above the margin necessary for keeping intact their working ability.

Whilst by this process the propertyless are entirely debarred from entering the ranks of the propertied, even by the most strenuous exertions, the propertied, by means of the ever-increasing plundering of the working class, are becoming richer day by day, without in any way being themselves productive.

If now and then one of the propertyless class become rich, it is not by their own labor, but from opportunities which they have to speculate upon, and absorb the labor-product of others.

[…]

What we would achieve is, therefore, plainly and simply,—

First, Destruction of the existing class rule, by all means, i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolutionary, and international action.

Second, Establishment of a free society based upon co-operative organization of production.

Third, Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the productive organizations without commerce and profit-mongery.

Fourth, Organization of education on a secular, scientific, and equal basis for both sexes.

Fifth, Equal rights for all without distinction to sex or race.

Sixth, Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between the autonomous (independent) communes and associations, resting on a federalistic basis.

Whoever agrees with this ideal let him grasp our outstretched brother hands!

Proletarians of all countries, unite!

Fellow-workmen, all we need for the achievement of this great end is ORGANIZATION and UNITY.

There exists now no great obstacle to that unity. The work of peaceful education and revolutionary conspiracy well can and ought to run in parallel lines.

The day has come for solidarity. Join our ranks! Let the drum beat defiantly the roll of battle, “Workmen of all lands, unite! You have nothing to loose but your chains; you have a world to win!”

Tremble, oppressors of the world! Not far beyond your purblind sight there dawns the scarlet and sable lights of the Judgment Day.

“To the Workingmen of America” (MANIFESTO OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING PEOPLES’ ASSOCIATION), 1883.

I have tried to use administrative procedure against these criminals, but they don’t get the message, so this is the message. If they want to perjure their oaths of office and engage in TREASON and SEDITION, and BREACH OF TRUST, and other crimes to numerous to list, against Me, that they BETTER be prepared to go ALL THE WAY, and MURDER Me as well, because by the time I am done with them, (I will do it all within the law), they will wish they had MURDERED Me. It is My patriotic duty to come after them to My last dying breath, and I will file commercial liens against them, I will liquidate their bonds, I will file criminal complaints against them and their bosses, I will seize their assets, and I will not rest until I see them do that little dance they do at the end of a common law rope, and even then, in the next life, I will be DEMANDING Justice before the judgment BAR of God, to make sure they get to spend the rest of eternity receiving their just reward. Also, after I am dead and gone on to the next life, because this is on the record, these criminals will be hunted down, just like the NAZI war criminals that are still hunted down this day. Furthermore, these criminals are hereby put on NOTICE that with criminals like them in this world, I have a DEATH wish, because this world is NOT big enough for both of us, so go ahead and make MY day, the sooner I am out of here the better, and I shall exercise My God given RIGHT to resist their unlawful arrest with lethal fource, if necessary, and then they will have an excuse to MURDER Me, so go ahead criminals, MAKE MY DAY!

Glenn Winningham (usually self-styled as “Glenn Winningham: House of Fearn”): Winningham v. Canada (30 November 2010) Lethbridge 1006 00907 (Alta. Q.B.), leave to appeal denied (Alta. C.A.), as cited by Associate Chief Judge J.D. Rooke in Meads v. Meads, 2012 ABQB 571, pp. 41-42.

Article 5

“Something called ‘X'”

From, Wikipedia

On pages 95 and 96 of The Road We Are Traveling, under the heading of “Free Enterprise into ‘X'”,[16] [Stuart] Chase [(March 8, 1888 – November 16, 1985)…American economist,[1] social theorist, and writer.[2]] listed 18 characteristics of political economy that he had observed among[17] Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain between 1913[18] and 1942. Chase labeled this phenomenon “… something called ‘X'”.[16] Characteristics include the following:

  1. A strong, centralized government.
  2. An executive arm growing at the expense of the legislative and judicial arms.
  3. The control of banking, credit and security exchanges by the government.
  4. The underwriting of employment by the government, either through armaments or public works.
  5. The underwriting of social security by the government – old-age pensions, mothers’ pensions, unemployment insurance, and the like.
  6. The underwriting of food, housing, and medical care, by the government.
  7. The use of deficit spending to finance these underwritings.
  8. The abandonment of gold in favor of managed currencies.
  9. The control of foreign trade by the government.
  10. The control of natural resources.
  11. The control of energy sources.
  12. The control of transportation.
  13. The control of agricultural production.
  14. The control of labor organizations.
  15. The enlistment of young men and women in youth corps devoted to health, discipline, community service and ideologies consistent with those of the authorities.
  16. Heavy taxation, with special emphasis on the estates and incomes of the rich.
  17. Control of industry without ownership.
  18. State control of communications and propaganda.

Article 6

Culture & Style

Please enjoy this musical selection from Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda:

© MMXXIII BY NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

Commission 153

NACOTCHTANK’S
153d CORPS

“The Fighting 153d”

REGULAR MEETING

بيت مدرسة
בית מדרש

The Preceptory of

The 1st Ecclesiastic College at
Nacotchtank, Ouachita District

5th International Worker’s Association
& 3rd Wave Anti-Masonic Party (TWAP)

Curricular Operations Research & Publications Services (CORPS)
Division of the Political Bureau of Education (Politburo), FLF-DAO

The Governor of the Society of the New Syllabus (NS) at Nacotchtank-on-Potomac (Anacostia) District of Ouachita (Washington, District of Columbia), Furthest West (al-Maghreb al-Aqsa) To All To Whom These Presents Come, Sends Greeting and Peace:

Know ye by these presents that there is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) of people, in the nature of firm league of friendship (FLF), which is engaged in the business of self-education, -operation, and -development (Autodidactus), and that this society (Universitas) is organized into associations (Collegia) constituted by assemblies (Ecclesia) committed to certain trades or subject matters (Syndici). These committees, or syndicates, may be constituted in the nature of a public or private meeting, sitting, session, hearing, congress, congregation of worshippers, or other deliberative or collective body having a shared interest (polity). The individual members, or units, of this DAO shall be working people — free thinkers, truth speakers, and light workers united (FTLU) by the collective consciousness and love of their neighbor. Any individual may rise through the ranks of the DAO by acclamation of their polity. Any unit of the DAO may order services from a known service provider, meaning a freely associated firm who is known to supply the DAO, in a client-server—request-response interface. 

(b) And Furthermore, that there is hereby established an ecclesiastic college (meaning, assembly of a society) of the members of the DAO who are domiciled in this region, which shall sit and meet in Nacotchtank, and which is empowered to commission syndicates for various purposes.

Notes on Jurisdiction


A famous, centuries-old map of the Chesapeake Bay region appears beautiful at first glance, but Anacostia Unmapped contributor John Johnson sees foreboding and destruction. The map, created by Capt. John Smith and first published in 1612, was heavily used by English settlers. It shows a Native American village, Nacotchtank, on the bank of a river. Variations on spelling and pronunciation eventually turned the name of the area — and the river — into Anacostia. The tribe is officially extinct, but a resident of Anacostia, Jason Anderson, tells Johnson about his deep links to it.

The village of Nacotchtank (from which the name Anacostia is derived) was the largest of the three American Indian villages located in the Washington area and is believed to have been a major trading center. The people of Nacotchtank, or Anacostans, were an Algonquian-speaking people that lived along the southeast side of the Anacostia River in the area between today’s Bolling Air Force Base and Anacostia Park, in the floodplain below the eastern-most section of today’s Fort Circle Parks. A second town, Nameroughquena, most likely stood on the Potomac’s west bank, opposite of what today is Theodore Roosevelt Island. Another village existed on a narrow bluff between today’s Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and MacArthur Boulevard in the northwest section of the city.

National Park Service (NPS), “Native Peoples of Washington, DC”

The Anacostans’ name is a Latin version of their original name, the Nacotchtanks. The name came from the Indian word “anaquashatanik,” which means “a town of traders.” They were known for trading throughout the Chesapeake area, even trading fur with the Iroquois of New York.

Museum officials [note] that the Anacostans are mentioned at an exhibit on Native Americans in the Chesapeake Bay area.

Ann McMullen, a supervisory museum curator, said exhibits are designed to “focus on living people and not on Anacostans who have been absorbed into other tribes.” She said the museum works with tribes in the Mid-Atlantic region, including the Pamunkeys and Piscataways, who are “descendants of people who were once here.”

Dana Hedgpeth. “A Native American tribe once called D.C. home. It’s had no living members for centuries: As the number of Anacostans dwindled, they merged with larger tribes in the region.” The Washington Post: Retropolis. November 22, 2018

CURRICULAR OPERATIONS RESEARCH AND PUBLICATION SERVICES
PROVIDED BY The Governor and Company of

A Freely Associated Service Provider, Fiscal Agent, & Member,

FTLU — CES — UA — FLF — DAO

An independent Political Bureau of Education (Politburo), Free Association of Independent Politburos (FAIP), Commissioned and Charted, General Ministry of Information, FTLU

(last modified 21 Nov. 2023; 2 Jan. 2024 when were stricken the words “The Preceptor & Student Body of the Consular Syndicate of” and replaced with “The Preceptory of”; 15 Feb. 2024 as to multiple changes.)

‘Ecrasez l’infâme’

The Nature and Role of the Press and the Spreading of Public Ideas during the Initial Decline of the Old Regime in 1789, Together with Some Parallels Drawn into the Modern Period.

By Antarah Crawley | GWU ENGL 3481W | Spring 2012

Contents — I. Introduction:  Drawing Parallels—Bringing the “Voltaire-figure” into the Modern Period — II. Classical Interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reactions:  An Inevitable Consequence of Social Discrepancies? — III. The Significance of the Press: An Unprecedented Surge of Dialogue Between All Class LevelsIV. Repression Reenacted: Instances of repressed scholarship on the French Revolution under new Oppressive French Regimes and Abroad; What is the significance?

I.  Drawing Parallels—Bringing the “Voltaire-figure” into the Modern Period

 This is a time in which trends in world leadership are moving into an ominously monopoly-minded direction.  Industrial and financial consolidation to the end of optimizing profit for those at the top of the corporate food chain, together with reckless investing and trading in the financial sector, is a reality that had led to near disaster—the 2008 recession.  Such reckless habits of the American aristocratic class—that class that controls the means of production (footnote: what would be land in 1780s France)—has indeed sparked revolt from the lower classes, ineffective insofar as it has been.  But the culture of dissent is present, just as it was in 1788 as the bourgeoisie began to find fault with King Louis XIV’s handling of the economy.  We have in our society the broodings for a coup de tat of the industrial and financial superpowers that sway Americans’ lives.  If the government cannot adhere to the wishes of the classes that serve as it’s support base—the small businessmen and entrepreneurs, or the modern bourgeoisie, as well as the large working class population—and break its ties with such entities, then as we can see from history, and overthrow of the symbolic corporate-monarchy is eminent.

Below this paper examines how the French Revolution unfolded and what factors contributed to its initial success, at the same time as it draws parallels between the events of 1789 and the current trends in the United States of America.  With social media being a particularly effective and influential method of disseminating ideas in our modern society, it compels me to delve into the question of how the media of the 18th Century—the printed press and periodicals—affected popular opinion and reactions to the monarchy.  Such answers may help us find similar trends in our own society of acute discrepancy between those that have power, both political and economic, and those who do not have it.  And furthermore, 1789 is a perfect bookmark with which to compliment the modern period that I speak of here, 2012, because historians widely assert that the French Revolution ushered in the modern era with the creation of a “truly universal civilization…proclaiming the fundamental and inviolable rights of all people.”

It is the case, however, that the modern concept of politics, on which this country was based, is being eroded by government partiality towards big-business—we seem to be relapsing into a monarchal society.  In this time of quasi-revolt, as Occupiers remove themselves from the system of economic and political abuse by the Haves, we should find value in looking to the ways in which 18th Century revolutionary figures confronted the monarchy and the aristocracy.  What was the role of popular periodicals during the late 1780s, and can their impact be translated into modern trends like Facebook?  What was the role of the Enlightenment—the elite, learned class—in influencing the popular revolt, if there were any influence there at all?  How must a revolutionary, indifferent of his political opposition and bent only on self-improvement and social awareness—a “Voltaire-figure”—go about using the written word to combat an oppressive regime?  What, if anything, can the history of the French Revolution teach us?

II. Classical Interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reactions:  An Inevitable Consequence of Social Discrepancies?

The overarching significance of the French Revolution among historians had long been focused on its social consequences.  In his introduction to the volumized collection of papers compiled for the annual conference on Studies on Voltaire and The Eighteenth Century (SVEC), Harvey Chisick patronizes the Classical, or Social, Interpretation of the French Revolution by saying, “[The Revolution’s] significance consists principally in the socio-economic disjuncture represented by the middle class or bourgeoisie overcoming the aristocracy and attaining the political power to which it’s economic strength entitled it.  This process took hundreds of years and was accomplished only when the bourgeoisie was strong enough to make good its demands by force.”  Such an interpretation of the Revolution had been championed by authoritative historians on the subject such as Georges Lefebvre.  In his 1939 now-classic The Coming of the French Revolution, he maintains a rigid and illogical model of French society as the basis for the dissent of the bourgeoisie and the result of 1789:

At the end of the eighteenth century the social structure of France was aristocratic.  It showed traces of having originated at a time when land was almost the only form of wealth, and when possessors of land were the masters of those who needed it to work and live.  …The king had been able gradually to deprive the lords of their political power and subject nobles and clergy to his authority.  But he left them the first place in the social hierarchy.  Still restless at being merely his ‘subjects,’ they remained privileged persons.

Presently, however, a new class was emerging in prominence in France, whose wealth, in contrast, was based on mobile commerce.  Called the bourgeoisie (or the Third Estate, inferior to the clergy and aristocracy in the three orders of old French law, but not too far removed from them), it proved useful to the monarchy by supplying it with money and competent officials, and through the increasing importance of commerce, industry and finance and the eighteenth century it became more important in the national economy.  By the late 18th Century the bourgeoisie was beginning to usurp the aristocracy and clergy in terms of real economic power even though the latter retained its supreme legal and social status.  Feeling as though it deserved more political power based on its economic contribution to the state, the bourgeoisie became discontent with the state.  The Revolution of 1789 thus balanced the power of bourgeoisie with its real economic influence and eroded the prominence of the aristocracy.  Thus, as Lefebvre states, “In France the Third Estate liberated itself.”  But it’s not that simple, the author interrupts.  Although Lefebvre separates the four stages of the revolution, characterized by the social classes involved, the respective measures of executing the Revolution were intertwined and made way for each other, all culminating in a victory for the bourgeoisie in which the regime of economic individualism and commercial freedom prevailed over the working class:  

The privileged groups [the clergy and aristocracy] did have the necessary means [for forcing the king’s hand in appealing to the economic condition of the nation]…  The first act of the Revolution, in 1788, consisted in a triumph of the aristocracy, which, taking advantage of the government crisis, hoped to reassert itself and win back the political authority of which the Capetian dynasty had despoiled it.  But, after having paralyzed the royal power which upheld its own social preeminence, the aristocracy opened the way to the bourgeois revolution, then to the popular revolution in the cities and finally to the revolution of the peasants—and found itself buried under the ruins of the Old Regime.

Chisick comments that the Classical Interpretation situates the French Revolution in France’s historical time as an “inevitable consequence of a long social and economic revolution,…following from scientific laws.”  This would make the neither the press nor ideology a subject of interest.  But it seems that bourgeois dissatisfaction would not have miraculously resulted in an organized revolt upon the state, an act of terrorism, as it were.  Disseminated ideology must have had a place in rallying the organization of the greater Third Estate.  And since Chisick is editing a collection entitled “The Press in the French Revolution,” his acknowledgment of the Classical Interpretation must ultimately be to set up a retort to it.  While this Marxist-esque Classical interpretation went unchallenged throughout much of the history of the Revolution’s study, through Jaures and Mathiez to Lefebvre and Soboul, general acceptance of this formulation began to wane after the 1960s.

What then arose was a Revisionist Criticism of the Classical Interpretation of the French Revolution.  The first body of criticism stemmed from Alfred Cobban and George Taylor’s conclusion that capitalism in France was not present enough or influential enough on the Bourgeoisie to be a motive for revolution.  Furthermore, Taylor asserts that the nobility shared in equal part with the Bourgeoisie the most innovative and large-scale forms of economic activity.  So, in contrast with the Classical Interpretation that the Third Estate rallied to establish themselves as the social superior to the aristocracy, the Revolution was “essentially a political revolution with social consequences and not a social revolution with political consequences.” 

“Conceptualizing the Revolution in political and cultural terms,” says Chisick, “also has broader implications.”  Revisionist historians, in contrast to Classical historians who focus on the social discrepancies in the French upper classes, emphasize government incompetence and botched reforms which led to a virtual power vacuum and the emergence of public opinion as a powerful new political force.

Let us take a step back here and examine this interpretation within the context of our society:  The American public had expressed dissentient views on the government as being incompetence under President Bush with the trouble resulting from the finance bubble / housing bubble that burst in 2008.  Although we were hopeful of President Obama, many sectors of the right and well as some of his critical constituents have expressed their feelings of his incompetence when it came to listening to the American public and ending a several hundred-billion dollars war in the Middle East (and furthermore, of their general dissatisfaction with the Congress who seems to favor large corporations over the working/entrepreneurial class and the Supreme Court who allows immigration regulations and women’s reproductive rights to suffer). This brooding dissent has led to the organization of different protest rallies like Occupy and other virtual dissenting communities through new social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  The greater public, who call themselves the 99% in certain circles, are in a way equivalent to the Borgeoisie and the Popular/Peasant population of 1780’s France.  Although they may not own the means of production (what would be the land in 18th C France) they feel that their political voice deserves more attention from the Congress and lawmakers, who currently only appear to be favoring the voices of large corporations like Monsanto, as opposed to the family farmer.  Essentially, a corporation like Monsanto, who’s C-level administrators embody the 1%, is a stale form of political influence and legal exemption.   Chevron has been dumping toxic oil-waste into the Ecuadorean Amazon and surrounding forests since the 1980s, yet the government had yet to take a serious action against the company until 2011 when a Federal Appeals Court allowed damages against Chevron for the Ecuador oil spill.  In our present secular society, multi-million and -billion dollar corporations represent the clergy who benefited from “none of the ordinary direct taxes but instead…on its own authority a ‘free donation’ to the king”; the aristocrats are represented by those C-level administrators and shareholders who control these large companies which hold the market and lives of working and entrepreneurial Americans in their palm.  The political power of the 1% in the minds of Occupiers and greater dissenters is disproportionate to their contribution to the greater good of American people.  The question that arises at this point in our history is whether these present trends will develop into “long and silent social developments” that will erupt into another Western political revolution—and whether or not it will be successful!

Chisick summarizes the difference between the Classical and Revisionist interpretations with this: 

The revisionist emphasis on politics and culture…tends to ascribe to the ‘people’ or working population a more marginal place in the Revolution.  If politics, for example, are defined in terms of parliamentary assemblies, then the people will play only a small role in them.  If culture is defined in terms of literacy, then a large population of the lower class will be eliminated from consideration altogether, and the rest will assume a passive role as an audience or public to which writes and publicists appeal.

What Chisick and The Press in the French Revolution focus on is not so much the marginalized place of the people in politics, but the new role, after 1789, of the people as a body through which writers, elite or otherwise, appeal radical ideas through printed media.  Such a significant role in the common population could have only been accessed though the Revisionist Critique—thus arises the importance of the Press.

III.  The Significance of the Press: An Unprecedented Surge of Dialogue Between All Class Levels

With public opinion being a new principle authority and a central component of politics in new Revisionist Interpretation, the role of the press and its shaping and influence of opinion takes on new importance during the coming of the Revolution.  Yet even before 1789, the press was a tool that the monarchy knew it had to control, lest it lead to unwanted ideas spreading around the kingdom.

Daniel Roche in Revolution in Print explains the great extent to which the monarchy sought to control print media:

There was no freedom of the press under the Old Regime because from the earliest days of its power the Crown established surveillance of printers and booksellers and a mechanism for controlling the dissemination of ideas….  The royal power intervened at both ends of the chain that links creative writers to their public: readers and other authors.  Before publication became a skillful exercise in censorship, applied through a policy of selective privilege that involved the prepublication inspection of manuscripts for content and the rewarding of publishers who, in return for their cooperation with the established order, enjoyed the advantages of a monopoly.  After publication, control was further applied by police. 

Such extreme and thorough action taken by the absolutist state indicated its keen awareness of the importance of the printed word.  They saw it as the principle vehicle of radical knowledge and thought that it indeed would turn out to be in 1789.

Of course, no system of repression is one-hundred percent effective.  The royal government was never able to wholly prevent the circulation of forbidden books, anti-monarchist pamphlets, and the writings, songs and satires that made up an entire body of printed criticism.  This body, interestingly, was deemed by the monarchy to a dangerous dissemination of “philosophical” works, “philosophy” being all works deemed “dangerous” or “bad” (which may enlighten us to the monarchy’s unstable relationship with the Enlightenment figures, especially Voltaire).  The Old Regime enacted every feasible method of control over print media that it could, including the practical monopolization of the system in 1699 when abbé Bignon became Director of The Book Trade.  The role of the Office of the Book Trade was to examine all works destined for legal publication and to maintain that all such books be registered with the state.  Under the direction of C.-M. Lamoignon de Malesherbes from 1750 to 1763, censorship defined the forbidden zones of literature as God, king, and morality.  One can only imagine where that puts Enlightenment figures like Voltaire in the eyes of the government when such a “philosophical” a tale as Candide was published in 1759.  Given, Voltaire did not admit his authorship until 1768 when he was not even within reach of the Office of the Book Trade and the monarchy.  But notwithstanding that fact, neither the 1759 ban on the book by Paris officials or its ambiguous authorship deterred it from becoming one of the fastest selling books in history, selling twenty thousand to thirty thousand copies by the end of the year in over twenty editions.   So it can be said that there are notable examples of books that slipped through the cracks of the censors, but all in all, between 1660 and 1680, the beginnings of an increasingly close supervision of printed matter and the employment of “hard-nosed” Firemen arose and persisted until 1789.  

After 1789, the most immediate and dramatic change in the way public opinion came to be formed and expressed was in complete freedom of the press.  With the elimination of the machinery of State regulation of publishing and the sudden collapse of censorship in the Spring and Summer of 1789, Chisick writes, “writers and publishers found themselves free of the constraints that the monarchy had imposed upon print media almost from their inception.  Books, pamphlets and periodicals could now be published without obligatory prior examination by a censor and without the publisher having to apply for a privilege or to ascertain that he was not infringing upon someone else’s legally established monopoly.”  What resulted of this was an emergence of new career opportunities in writing, publishing and journalism, wherein more personal and more partisan expression could appeal directly to the public.  Chisick writes that, “The periodical press that now emerged was far more political in content and far more engaged than was its counterpart of the old regime,” which was primarily devoted to the arts, sciences, and literature.  In addition to the content of print media, its format also changed; journals treating art, plays, et cetera needn’t appear more regularly than every one or two weeks, however the new political papers that began to appear in 1788 had a popular readership to satisfy who were avid for the latest political news, and these papers came to be regularized in dailies in 1790 and 1791.

Continuing with the trouble-making habits that they used even before 1789, the Enlightenment figures also played an important role in post-censored France.  What resulted of the absence of authoritarian filtering was a surge of political and social dialogue through print.  The function of censorship had been to “impose an officially sanctioned consensus on public discussion, or, formulated negatively, to prevent the expression of opinions that deviated too widely from what the authorities defined as the accepted norm.”  After the fall of the state—which was the filter of public discussion—political dialogue flourished, primarily through the work of Enlightenment figures.  Chisick writes:

The literature of the Enlightenment was overwhelmingly a literature of dialogue.  Its world of discourse, its political theory, social criticism, literature and popularization, was open and aimed at persuasion.  Characteristically, even Voltaire’s cry of ‘Ecrasez l’infâme’ [‘Crush the infamous thing’] was moderated in practice, and the philosophe sought less the destruction of his ecclesiastical foes that that they moderate and modernize their beliefs and actions.  

Often, the aim and influence of Enlightenment literature was painted in a less-than-humane light.  Such writing was aimed at what the Enlightenment figures believed to be the realm of possible social and political reform—and such parameters often limited them to the learned classes.  With respect to the audiences for which periodicals like the Ami du roi and the Journal de la Montagne were intended it cannot be denied that, both being descended from the Enlightenment, they were addressed to a cultural elite.  But to be fair, the elite bourgeoisie was the class which was most concerned the goings-on of the years that immediately followed 1789, thus the Enlightenment writers would have felt it imperative to appeal to them first and foremost.  In any case, no matter the Enlightenment’s targeted appeal group, a larger-scope popular press emerged after 1789 that sought to make a direct and regular political appeal to the people.  For example, the more radical Ami du peuple and  Pére Duchesne sought to speak directly to the working population.  Jeremy Popkin even acknowledges the purpose of an anonymous Belgian journalist in launching the Esprit des gazettes in 1786 as being a reaction to the segmentation of the press market and a reaction to the “elite press.”  Such “elite” papers were considered the “concerned papers, the knowledgeable papers, the serious papers…the papers which serious people and opinion leaders in all countries take seriously,” similar to The New York Times today.  However, with the surge of uncensored popular publications in 1789, it proved exceptionally difficult for a stable elite press to survive.  It nevertheless persisted that an exception to the rule existed, and the Dutch-based Gazette de Leyde, a French-language newspaper and one widely considered to be the most important serious news journal at the time reached the height of its fame at the outbreak of the French Revolution.  It may have been the case that its being published outside of the control of the monarchy and its taking serious political issues of the day allowed it to transition well into the popular culture of revolutionary France, in which “sophisticated readers” liked to think of themselves as “students of events, rather than as mere consumers of information.”

So in general, there was a mixture of “elitist” and popular publication circulating through France after the Revolution began, and all of them were open-minded and political in nature with having to be constrained by a monarchy.  Chisick defends the elitist publications stemming from the Enlightenment; even though they were not targeted at the public in terms of language, he says, “The Enlightenment may have been élitist, but it was humane, progressive, pragmatic and…committed to an open mode of discourse that worked on the principles of a free exchange of ideas, rational persuasion, and consensus.”  In essence, the Enlightenment encompassed the spirit of the free press.

Here, I would like to take one more step back.  By the transitive power, the dialectic, free-spirited passion of the Enlightenment also encompasses the essence of the Internet, or what John Man would say is the fourth turning-point in human contact in the last 5,000 years, after the explosion of the printing press in Europe.  Using this model of long-term political revolutions paired with innovative information movements, can we say that the modern political trends referred to above, paired with the widespread use of Facebook, Twitter and blogs for personal and political expression will evolve into some greater social revolution?  Widespread use of social media could favor either the greater population or the Silicon Valley companies that control the means of disseminating the information.  Either way, a change will erupt in the way all people conduce commerce, relationships, and protest.  In fact, it may have already happened, with Amazon.com in control of commerce, Facebook.com in control of interpersonal relationships, social awareness and business promotion, Google.com in control of information dissemination, and the Apple Corporation in control of the method of accessing it all: the smart phone.  What social media looks like on the outside is the power of dialogue and commentary in the hands of every individual person, but what we may actually have is a monarchy of the big four companies upon our entire civilization.

Be it internet-based social media or the physical spread of pamphlets in 1780s France, the spread of ideas sparks dialogue and makes people question the powers that govern them.  The Old Regime recognized that and that’s why they so painstakingly censored the media.  But the Enlightenment figures also recognized that and used it to the advantage of the people.  Yes, they targeted their publications toward the elite, but could you blame them for trying to appeal to a more learned audience.  Perhaps the “elitism” of Enlightenment periodicals actually helped to lend some authority to their positions.  Surely no one takes every Facebook campaign seriously—that’s because so many people of such little intelligence use it.  It may be the case that the modern person needs to filter what they read and believe through an Enlightened lens before they comment on current issues.

IV.  Repression Reenacted: Instances of repressed scholarship on the French Revolution under new Oppressive French Regimes and Abroad; What is the significance? 

What becomes clear after moderate research into the French Revolution is that even after 1799, books about the Revolution have been repressed by government who find the very notion of political dissent dangerous.  Even authoritative writers on the topic who we revere today were repressed upon their initial publication.  R. R. Palmer, the translator of Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution comments on the books history from its first publication in 1939: “The French Republic collapsed before the assault of Hitlerite Germany, and was succeeded by the Vichy regime that governed France until the liberation in 1945.  No sympathetic understanding of the French Revolution was desired by the authorities of Vichy France…  The Vichy government therefore suppressed [The Coming of the French Revolution] and ordered some 8,000 copied burned, so that it virtually remained unknown to its own country until reprinted there in 1970, after the author’s death.”  

Gaetano Salvemini’s highly revered book also underwent similar treatment.  “[The French Revolution] has come to be regarded as a classic in its field,” says I. M. Rawson in his Translator’s Note.  “It may seem strange that a work so well known on the continent [of Europe] should not have been made available to English readers long ago.  The explanation lies in part in the fact that the author, an exile for over twenty years from his own country [of Italy] and actively engaged in the struggle against Fascism, as well as in writing a number of works on modern politics, had no time to give his study of the great Revolution a further revision in the light of recent historical research, and was unwilling to allow it to appear in English before this had been done.”

What we see here are Voltaire-figures who, even after the iron claw of the Old Regime had long fallen, still combated oppression and political injustice with that same passion.  Like Voltaire, who was imprisoned in the Bastille twice and was constantly in fear of being jailed when he dared set foot in Paris, Salvemini contested the Fascist regime and honorably suffered more it.  That is the kind of spirit I hope may come of this brooding internal political struggle in America.  Perhaps the melting pot isn’t hot enough yet.

© 2012 by Antarah Crawley

D.R. 01-13: Israel-Hamas (II)

Volume 1, Issue 13

The Sense of the Congress:
A Special Report

Congress toes pro-Israel line, seeks resignation of UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories

By Antarah Crawley | Last modified 11/8/2023 9:28PM

The broadcast subcommittee hearing.

WASHINGTON, DC — Today, November 8, 2023, the Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States (U.S.) House of Representatives (House) convened a hearing on “United Nations’ Bigotry Towards Israel: UNRWA Anti-semitism Poisons Palestinian Youth” in Rayburn House Office Building Room 2200.

Subcommittee Chairman Smith (R-NJ) presided. Antarah Crawley, Special Rapporteur on Historical and Materialist Dialectics for the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), reported to the proceedings on orders from the House Clerk’s Office of Official Reporters.

The witnesses for this hearing included Hillel Neuer, Executive Director, UN Watch; Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, Senior Vice President for Research, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; Jonathan Lincoln, Interim Director, Center for Jewish Civilization. Of these gentlemen, Mr. Lincoln had the most firsthand experience with the United Nations (UN) in the Palestinian territory, presented the most balanced testimony, and was asked the majority of the questions by the subcommittee, the other gentlemen advancing the painfully biased position that the “state” of Israel is not and has never been at fault since its “inception” on 14 May 1948. Mr. Neuer repeatedly remarked that comes from Geneva, the headquarters of the UN Human Rights Council.

The hearing was convened largely in response to statements made by Francesca Albanese United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967. The Chairman submitted a Washington Free Beacon article by Charles Hilu to that effect into the Congressional record. Ms. Albanese, who serves as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’s Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, argued that “self-defense” has a narrow meaning under Article 51 of the U.N. charter. That definition, she said, does not give the Jewish state the right to self-defense against Hamas because the threat stems from an armed group within “occupied territory” and not “another state.” Thus, under international law, Israel’s actions in Gaza cannot qualify as self-defense, Albanese said.

Under Article 51, use of force in #SelfDefense is permissible solely to repel an armed attack by another State […] Threats from armed groups from within occ. territory give state the RIGHT TO PROTECT ITSELF, but not to wage war against the state from which the armed group emanates.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese

“The attacks are clearly indiscriminate, disproportionate and violate the principle of precaution,” she said in an interview with the Guardian published Tuesday. “One cannot bomb hospitals hosting hundreds of patients and sheltering thousands of refugees. Sorry, we need to look for another solution, and not to bomb hospitals. Absolutely not. This is criminal.”

Mr. Hilu went on to report that Ms. Albanese condemned Israel’s “militarized settler colonial occupation” and violence against “defenseless Palestinians.” The UN also reports on the remarks of the Special Rapporteur:

[D]escribing the UN [Secretary General Antonio Guterres]’s words to the Security Council last Tuesday when he noted that the brutal attacks by Hamas fighters of 7 October “did not occur in a vacuum” as “brave”, [Albanese] stressed Gazans have “already suffered five deadly wars…during the period Israel has declared an unlawful blockade over the Gaza Strip, entrapping 2.2 million people.

UN Human Rights

The UN chief’s remarks that Palestinans have been “subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation” drew criticism from members of the Israeli government late last month. Hamas is an acronym of Islamic Resistance Movement (حركة المقاومة الإسلامية Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah).

During the hearing, Mr. Bera (D-CA) remarked that “Israel has a right to prosecute a war against Hamas. They were attacked and they have a right to defend themselves, they have a right to make sure this never happens again, they have a right to dismember, dismantle, and to the best extent eliminate Hamas, but […] when you see tragic loss of innocent civilian life, you also feel that pain.”

The Chairman remarked that according to Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, “criticism of Israel is nothing less than Anti-Semitic when it passes over into demonization of Jews and Israel, delegitimizing the Jewish state, or applying a double standard, that is, one standard for Israel and one standard for every other country on the globe.”

The Chairman continued by discussing UN entities most involved in promoting Anti-Semitism, specifically the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which “was set up in 1949 to provide aid to refugees.”

74 years later it is still going, which is absurd in itself since nearly every Arab nation will not permit the former [Palestinians] to integrate into their societies. Why don’t they welcome the Palestinians? They simply won’t.

Chairman Smith (R-NJ)

Evidently, the Chairman and the pro-Israel caucus expect for the 1948-49 crisis that resulted in the citizens of Mandatory Palestine (and their patrilineal descendants) being expelled from their country, and the subsequent declaration of that country as the birthright of a colonizing state, to be resolved through the voluntary emigration of the Palestinian people into some other Arab nation (much like their father Abram). Talk about a double standard! Later, Mr. Schanzer even went to far as to testify,

[UNRWA] was originally created to assist Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war that the Arab states waged against Israel and subsequently lost. From early on, however, it was clear that UNRWA viewed the Palestinians as clients. They refused to permanently resettle them, and then they became the rationale for additional funding year after year. Over time, UNRWA’s clients grew old and passed on, but that was bad for business, so UNRWA expanded the definition of Palestinian refugees to include the descendants of refugees. So as a result, UNRWA’s registry has ballooned from 700,000 in 1948 to 5.9 million today; mathematically impossible. Despite the fact that only few of the original refugees are alive today, UNRWA’s roster continues to grow, and all of them claim the so-called right of return to lands inside Israel. In other words, UNRWA has extended the Palestinian-Israeli conflict deliberately and indefinitely.

Dr. Jonathan Schanzer (emphasis mine)

It sounds like Dr. Schanzer is a eugenicist who cannot fathom why the Palestinians don’t just up and die already so that the Israeli colony can expand unchallenged; and is further concerned that they appear to procreate at rates that seem impossible to the white race. Dr. Schanzer also emphasized the attack on Al-Ahli hospital, noting what he called “an errant rocket by the Islamic Jihad that created the explosion there,” and remarked that the next likely targets will be the Al-Shifa Hospital, which apparently sits on top of Hamas’s multi-story command center, and the underground tunnels which Hamas allegedly uses to divert aid from the south to the north. To the ears of the instant Rapporteur, both of these targets sound like ripe opportunities for mass collateral civilian casualties, which is to say, a rationalized genocide.

The ardently pro-Israel witnesses and the Subcommittee expressed significant concerns regarding the indoctrination of “Anti-Semitism” among Palestinian youth by UNRWA. The Chairman remarked, “UNRWA provides education in hatred of Jews for the vastly expanded number of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original refugees.” The Congress has previously voiced this concern. The Chairman claimed the UNRWA teachers and administrators “encourage children to martyrdom as suicide bombers” and cited an article reporting that “UNRWA staff celebrated Hamas’s massacre.” Mr. Neuer testified that UNWRA School administrator Hamada Ahmed posted “Welcome to the Great October” in response to the 7 October attack, that UNRWA officials posted “Allah is great […] Reality surpasses our wildest dreams” on Facebook, and that officials justified the massacre as “restoring rights and addressing grievances.”

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education reports that “14 UNRWA staffers […] publicly celebrated the actions of October 7. One UNRWA teacher in Gaza, Sara Alderawy, posted a video clip on the same day of the massacre, showing Hamas terrorists roaming Israeli streets with rifles while shooting at Israeli cars, and of rocket attacks in Israel. The video is accompanied by a Qur’anic verse stating: we will surely come to them with soldiers that they will be powerless to encounter, and we will surely expel them in humiliation, and they will be debased.”

Ms. Wild (D-PA) sought clarity from Mr. Lincoln on the question of why there are still refugee camps in the Palestinian territory. “The idea that refugees of 1949 are continuing to be served by UNRWA, I think, is preposterous, so what we’re talking about is successive generations of people who are born into refugee status.” She continued by confirming that “70% of the population of Gaza is provided services by UNRWA.” Mr. Lincoln replied that “1.5 million beneficiaries from Gaza” are being served. The existence of these registered refugees in “camps” that look like “neighborhoods and towns” is a part of the “final political process of creating peace in the Middle East which, who knows whether that will ever come…” The words of the Member of Congress sound strikingly close to a Final Solution for “peace” in Israel.

Ms. Manning (D-NC) remarked upon a Hamas leader’s statement that “it was the responsibility of Hamas to fight against Israel and to protect its fighters with their underground tunnels. […] And […] that they do not have a responsibility to allow the Palestinian people to get shelter from attacks in those tunnels; that the responsibility of the Palestinian people was solely held by the United Nations.” The Member asked Mr. Lincoln to expound upon how the perspective the Hamas leader is wrong; that it is the responsibility of the elected government (presumably Hamas since the 2006 legislative election) to take care of the Palestinian people who live in Gaza. Mr. Lincoln replied that that is correct, but also that in a context like Gaza, “the work of UN agencies is often conflated with the work of governments.”

Mr. Schneider (D-IL) delivered these remarks:

In synagogues around the world this week, two things are going to be universal. On the one hand there are going to be armed guards outside every one of those synagogues for fear of Anti-Semitism and violence. […] But inside those synagogues […] they’re going to be reading from the Torah, and the Torah portion that they’ll be reading from is called Chayei Sarah … [which] means “The Life of Sarah,” but it starts with the death of Sarah. […U]pon Sarah, the wife of Abraham dying, Abraham buys […] a place to bury his wife […in the Meʿarat ha-Makhpelah in Hebron]. There was a deed; my point I want to make is that the Jews have connection to this land. Hebron […] is a city in the West Bank. Jews lived in that city from the time of Abraham until 1929 […when] Arabs massacred the Jews of Hebron; those that weren’t killed left. […] Jews have lived in the land of Israel for 3,000 years, and I think that’s an important thing to note. These are not colonialists who came from Europe. In fact, today, many of the Jews […] can trace their roots, not to Europe, but to countries like Libya and Iraq, Yemen, other places, but they have a connection that goes back 3,000 years.”

Mr. Schneider (D-IL)

Mr. Schneider concluded by remarking upon the Abraham Accords, which “recognize that both Jews and Arabs belong to the same land […and] that by embracing each other, by recognizing the humanity and the connection that both have to the same place, both can elevate the place and their peoples.”

At the conclusion of the hearing, in reference to the Washington Free Beacon article on Francesca Albanese, the Chairman asked each witness whether the Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories ought to be fired for her remarks, and they all replied in the affirmative. Ms. Albanese is known to have said in 2014 that she believes that the United States is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.”

After the hearing adjourned, the instant Rapporteur asked Mr. Lincoln whether the aftermath of World War III would see the UN establishment of a Palestinian reparations state in the legitimized state of Israel. Mr. Lincoln replied that my question is a misinterpretation of history, since the UN suggestion for a two-state state solution in Israel and Palestine (Resolution 181) was accepted by Israel and rejected by Palestine, therefore rendering it null and void. What subsequently occurred was the new Israeli population (which had been protected by the British until this time) declared a state of Israel which was only then recognized by the Soviet Union, the United States, and other UN member states. Ergo, the Palestinian people and its allies have never recognized the legitimacy of the state of Israel.

Wikipedia relates the Arab reaction to the adoption of Resolution 181 (II) by the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947:

Arab leaders and governments rejected the plan of partition in the resolution and indicated that they would reject any other plan of partition. The Arab states’ delegations declared immediately after the vote for partition that they would not be bound by the decision, and walked out accompanied by the Indian and Pakistani delegates. They argued that it violated the principles of national self-determination in the UN charter which granted people the right to decide their own destiny. The Arab delegations to the UN issued a joint statement the day after that vote that stated: “the vote in regard to the Partition of Palestine has been given under great pressure and duress, and that this makes it doubly invalid.” On 16 February 1948, the UN Palestine Commission reported to the Security Council that: “Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein.”

Wikipedia

As to the land currently called Israel and Palestinian territory, Wikipedia relates:

Israel is located in the Southern Levant, a region known historically as Canaan, the Land of IsraelPalestine and the Holy Land. In antiquity, it was home to several Israelite and Jewish kingdoms, including Israel and Judah and Hasmonean Judea. Over the ages, the region was ruled by imperial powers such as the AssyriansBabyloniansPersiansGreeks, and Romans. During Roman rule, Jews became a minority in Palestine. The region later came under Byzantine and Arab rule. In the medieval period, it was part of the Islamic caliphates, the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Ottoman Empire. The late 19th century saw the rise of Zionism, a movement advocating for the establishment of a Jewish homeland, during which the Jewish people began purchasing land in Palestine. Under the British Mandate by the League of Nations after World War I, Jewish immigration to the region increased considerably, leading to tensions between Jews and the Arab majority population. The UN-approved 1947 partition plan triggered a civil war between these two peoples. The British terminated the Mandate on 14 May 1948, and Israel declared independence on the same day.

The majority of biblical archeologists translate a set of hieroglyphs from the Merneptah Stele (Egypt, 13th century BCE) as “Israel”, the first instance of the name in the record, Wikipedia says.

Sources

Agassi, Arik (COO). White Paper, 2 pgs. The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se). 8 November 2023.

Hilu, Charles. UN Official Says Israel Has No Right to Self-Defense. Washington Free Beacon. 7 November 2023.

TimesOfIndia.com. Hamas’s top 3 leaders are worth staggering $11 billion. The Times of India. 8 November 2023.

Additional References

Abraham Accords from State Department website.

© MMXXIII BY NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

The Fire in the Belly

A Short Story for Edward P. Jones
By Antarah Crawley

12 September 2012

I don’t know what day it is.  I awoke this morning with my head on the belly of my companion Shams.  I am a boy in a country which isn’t familiar to him anymore.  The only boy I know is Shams here, whose situation just twelve hours ago I knew nothing of except that he, like me, had been on a bus to Cairo.  From where, again, I don’t know.

I sat on one of the chairs reading the menu while I waited for Shams to wake up.  The merchant didn’t seem to be preoccupied with us, as his business was filled with men and women—workers, other merchants, mechanics, students, elders, young men like myself—whose collective voices were loud and mesmerizing.  Shams and I were just two of them, and I’m sure we weren’t the only ones who slept here last night.  The sun was now coming in through the street windows and the atmosphere in the café was grey with smoke on which lingered smells of honey, coffee, apple, tobacco, eggs and fal.  The tinkering of cups and spoons and the bubbling of pipes accented the voices of organizers and unsettlers.  Shams, however, continued sleeping as though he was born into this place.  

Not eleven hours ago he had asked me if I had a cigarette while Altair Sawalha stood atop an overturned van and shouted for the end of the regime.  He smiled at me, recognized me as his friend, another boy in belly of the madness.  I gave him one from the pack I had in my pocket and watched him light up and then turn back towards Sawalha and shout with the crowd.  I felt like I had known him before, and that that fist in the air with a butt sticking out smoldering between knuckles was something I was responsible for.

He finally awoke, subtly shifting up and wiping his eyes.  “Shams,” I said.  He looked and smiled at me with his eyes still half closed.

“These fuckin’ beds, huh,” he said putting his hand in the arch of his back and stretching. 

“Yeah.  Let’s get a move on then, right.”  And we got up and waded our way through the crowded cafe out to the street.  

I heard them blocks away: chants of “Go! Go! Leave! Leave!” and “He shall leave!”  I listened to them.  Shams listened too.  He had heard enough that he knew what it meant, and he joined in with his fist up.  Then he looked at me and smiled and we laughed as we walked toward where the sound was coming from.

We found ourselves on a particularly crowded section of one of the big streets; I think it was Ahmed Ourabi.  The noise had become monotonous—crashes, sirens, yelling.  It was all atmosphere now.  As we walked we talked about how much we despised Mubarak.  It was mostly recounting things we had heard at the rallies and what we had learned from talking to other protesters, but it was liberating nonetheless.  Shams had never heard of the other world revolutions, so I took great joy in recounting the uprisings of the French and the Russians and at seeing the looks of astonishment on his face as he learned they we were not alone in this cycle of revolution.

I said, yelling above the crowd, “You see it was all a matter of time.  Revolution is inevitable; you can’t keep the people down and oppressed indefinitely.  All dictators make that mistake.  Ali made it.  And he paid.  Now Mubarak is going to pay.”

“Right on!” he said.  He would always yelp in agreement.  He was childlike and I loved him for it.  I loved to see him grow, like a young schoolboy learning his alphabet.  I wanted him to know as much as me.

Every now and then as we walked we’d see a pile of debris, charred sticks and bricks.  Shams would go into the pile and pick out a stick with a charred end, then go to a building or concrete wall and inscribe some amusing message like “Fuck Mubarak” or “Down with the fascist regime!”  I felt proud seeing him do that.  I feel proud knowing I spread the revolution to another fellow countryman.  After each message we eagerly tried to alert passers-by of our accomplishment while many cheered laughed in amusement.  

As we walked, I would muse things over with him, ideas that I had been thinking about.  I felt like a great outlaw leader telling him these ideas; he seemed to absorb them like a sponge.  

I said, “It seems to me that there are certain tools that every human needs—that they should be equip with from the earliest parts of their life until they get old and wise.  How to eat, how to breathe, important things.  But people don’t talk about another really important skill that people need.  And if they’re not going to use it, then they should at least be well versed in it.”

“Yeah, what is it?” he’d interrupt, eager as ever.

“I’m getting to that.  This skill—the ability to revolt—I believe every person should have!”

“Yeah! Of course!”

“Yeah, I believe every person should live through at least one revolution.  And it doesn’t even have to be violent.  It can be like, changing your hair color to red when you and everyone around you has natural black hair.  You should be able to say ‘fuck them!”

“Fuck ‘em!”

“I think revolution is a natural and organized process in the grand scheme of things.  If everything is smooth and level where you are, and everyone is living the same and indefinitely, then something’s wrong!  You’re being oppressed and lied to.”

“Well we’ve been being oppressed and lied to for decades!”  He was getting it.

“That’s right, Shams; that’s why it has to go.  That’s why this revolution is so important.  Man, it’s probably the greatest thing to happen to this country.”

“Yeah,” he screamed, and he screamed loud and jumped in the air with his fist up.  Our fellow protestors, walking around us, with us, would sometimes join it.  I don’t know if they heard what I was talking about or not, but their common cry of agreement made me happy.  I turned back to Shams:

“You ever heard of Daoism?”

“No what’s that?” he asked, not surprisingly.

“In China they have this thing called Daoism—I don’t know why more people don’t know about it.  In Daoism, the world and the universe and the people and animals are all one and this whole entity is always going through revolutions and transformations.”

“Wait, what’s an ‘entity’?”  

I laughed.  Why go to school, huh, if you’re not going to learn about the world or Daoism, or simple vocabulary.  Shams was like every other kid in 6th of October City before he met me: wasting his time at technical college.  Being taught the expendable things in life.  While he was doing that I was learning the good stuff.  Before I left for Cairo, before I knew anything about the revolution, I was already on my way to stirring up trouble.

About ten months ago I lived with my uncle In 6th of October City.  All while living with him we would leave the house every morning and walk in opposite directions.  He went to the auto-body shop where he was the manager and, to his knowledge, I went to Al-Khamsa Technical School every day to learn mechanical engineering so that one day I could work in his exciting shop.  And that was true for a while.

About a year ago I met Alex, an American who worked at October 6 University.  We had got to talking on the street because I was wearing a Smiths tee shirt.  I didn’t know much about international history then, but I was big on American and English rock.  We talked Smiths, Adolescents,  Mott the Hoople, Patty Smith, Libertines, Strokes, Moldy Peaches, everything.  He seemed to like me.  I guess I wasn’t like my classmates, whose hair was shorter and who wore Polos and Levi jeans.  I looked like a young tanner Kirk Hammett, with straighter hair.  He asked me if I was busy; he said he had had some 45s at his apartment which was a couple blocks away on No. 27 street.  I told him that I didn’t have anything to do even though it was Monday and I know I didn’t look any older than nineteen.

I’m grateful now that he was so unsupportive of my technical education.  If I hadn’t gone with him I’d probably be in my uncle’s auto shop right now, learning how to change a transmission or whatever you do there.

Alex’s apartment was in a nicer building than I’d seen some of my friends live in.  We went in the ground entrance and walked up the steps to his flat.  

It was also nicer than where uncle and I lived.  It was more ethnic—more Egyptian, I guess.  He had several hookahs and a painting of the flag’s crest, an eagle, on the ceiling.  When you walked through the door there was a window right across from you looking out to the dusty street you just came off of.  I saw a counter with some bar-style chairs with no backs—stools—to the left of me.  That was where the kitchen was.  When I turned to the right I saw his living room, the walls of which were lined with shelves, some of them makeshift, mounted with more books than any household or institution I’d ever been in.  I didn’t even know what one would need with so many books.  I suppose Alex saw my astonishment at his collection:

“Do you read much?”  he asked.

“No,” I said.

I went over to the shelves.  To the right of the window on the wall opposite the door were two bookshelves separated by a television on a stand.  There was a whole bookshelf with a makeshift annex on the wall to the side of that.  I walked, briskly perusing the titles; I had a fine grasp of English for a mechanics student.  There was A People’s History of the United States, Naked Lunch, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Nietzsche Reader, Walden, law primers, Chemistry books, the theory of relativity.  When I got through browsing both walls I turned back and began browsing them again.  

Alex laughed as he shut the door and turned into the kitchen.  “Here’s the finer parts of the entire Western World.  Right at your fingertips.”  He went into the refrigerator and brought out two beers.  You-eng-ling.  “Want one,” he asked rhetorically as he handed me the freshly opened bottle.  I walked over and lifted the cold beer, putting it too my lips.  Terrifically watery, but I suppose that was America.  

“I might just substitute school for this,” I joked.  

He laughed, “Hey, by all means.  Make yourself at home,” he smiled.  And turned with his beer and went down the corridor gesturing something like he’d be right back.  “Oh,” he cried back, out of sight, “Feel free to look through the records and put on any one.”  

I turned to look.  On the wall of the entrance door, to the farthest side, there was a stereo with a cassette/CD player and a turntable sitting atop four milk crates of vinyl records and CDs.  Beside it was a worn in looking leather couch.  But it wasn’t worn in like a poor family’s like some of the kids I knew.  It was ripped and duct-taped real cool-like.  It was a red couch with black trim with white cotton sticking out where it was ripped.  It sat low and broken-in in front of a black chest that served as a table, facing the television that I realized was covered in dust.  On the trunk-table were Rolling Stone magazines, jars of shisha, a pack of cigarettes—an American brand, Parliaments—a cereal bowl housing a fern of some sort and a zip-lock bag of what looked like densely packed nuggets of green herbs.  There were text books on the floor, I suppose for teaching.  

I walked back over to the books and looked up and down the shelves, sipping at my beer.  I saw two titles that looked intriguing—The Story of American Revolution and The Catcher in the Rye.  I took the books and my beer and sat them down on the trunk-table.  I took the liberty of lighting a new coal for one of the hookahs that was out and reclined on the couch while I read.  

I read whole books on days when Alex was home all day, working as far as I knew.  Eventually, when we got to know each other better, he’d let me stay in while he went off to the university.  He trusted me not to steal anything.  And in fact I never took anything of his out of the house except a cigarette or two.  He never let me smoke his cigarettes.  He said it was because he only had half a carton left, but I think he was peculiarly suspicious of Arabic cigarettes.  But not Arabic shisha for whatever reason.  We talked about the world and its revolutions; I was fascinated by that stuff.  I read or skimmed about half of the books on the shelves—more than I think any working countryman under 50 has ever read in their lifetime.  I listened to every record he had, from the Cure and Fugazi to Cat Power and Adele.  Ramen and Parliaments, revolution and rock and roll.  Day in and day out for nine months.

“An entity is…um,” I had to think about how to describe it.  “It’s a body of matter and meta matter, I suppose.”

“I still don’t get it,” Shams said.  But I don’t think he cared.

The street we were on was getting agitated.  The people were getting rowdier, but the street itself felt like it was heating up.  I told Shams I thought we should turn off onto another street when we saw one.  We were trying to move out through the crowd of excited men to the sidewalk so that we could get onto a less intense street when we heard shots.  The shot of an automatic rifle was followed by shots of voices.  They were chastising and cheering, for what, I don’t know.  I was shaken up by the rousing of motion around me.  People were jumping up and knocking into each other, screaming and yelling at whomever.  I tried to use the wave of the crowd to see who the agitators were, ‘cause Johnny Rotten said the pit was always in front of the stage.  I caught a glimpse of green cameo uniforms and beige vests.  It was the military.  I caught another wave.  They had their tanks with them.  I was going to join in with provoking them, but it seemed like the crowd was commending them.  I couldn’t see if anyone had been shot.  They might have shot a pro-Mubarak type, which by all means would have been grounds for commending.  But they were the army; I didn’t get it.  I was being railed in the head by another man’s elbow, and at this point I was being dragged along.  The voices and the crowd where all one, but I remembered Shams.  I looked back and saw him, integrated with the crowd.  He was chanting what they were chanting, something I didn’t pick up.  

I called to him: “Shams!  Shams!”  He was in a trance; he kept on moving with the men around him with their fist in the air shouting as gasoline spittle flew from their inflamed tongues.  Then I realized I had stopped moving as one with the crowd.   It had stopped moving as a unit and I could break away from the current to go back and tap him.  “Shams, Shams, come this way!”  I led him by his hand to the sidewalk, which was no less crowded but closer to one of the side streets.  We turned and stumbled to the ground.  Shams panted furiously and turned to look at me.

“What energy!  Whooh!”

I lay against a building catching my breath as he and I continued to witness the power rising up off of the crowd.  They were turned towards the middle of the street responding to the army that was marching through.  Others, the mellow ones, where around us watching on; periodically screaming something I wasn’t listening to.  

I continued to sit even after I had caught my breath.  Shams came over closer and sat cross legged.

“Lemme get a cigarette,” he said.

I pulled the battered pack of Parliaments out of my pant pocket and handed him one.

“Why do they have these open parts?” he asked, looking at the end of the filter.

I looked out into the street at the men and women with their signs: He Shall Leave.  “I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you know who was ruler before Mubarak?” Alex had asked one day, at the time when I had completely stopped going to school.

I was lying back on the couch as usual, with a book on Lenin and the Bolsheviks on my face.  Alex was working on his computer at the kitchen counter.  I didn’t look up from the page as I tried to think.  “Nicholas II,” I joked.

“No, really.”  He wanted an answer.

“Um,” I tried to remember but I couldn’t find the answer.  “I don’t know; I don’t keep up with that scene.”

That scene?” he laughed.  “You mean your scene.” 

“I don’t know, man.”  I continued reading about Russia, far away.

“Well when did he take over?”

“Mubarak?”

“Yeah”

“Um, I told you, I don’t know.  Why do you need to know?”

“My students.  I’m trying to brush up on my Egyptian history so they don’t think I’m a total outsider.”

I put down the book and got up and went over to peruse the bookshelf again.  “Maybe if you had some books on Egypt you’d have better luck,” I teased him.

He responded, “Maybe if I had some books on Egypt you’d actually learn about your own country.”  I looked back at the book I was reading, sprawled out on the table.

“Uncle’s probably wondering where I am by now,” I said.

“Alright, that’s cool.  I’ll be out tomorrow morning, so I’ll leave the key under the mat.”

“Thanks.”  I left.

About a week ago, before I left the city for Cairo, I went to Alex’s place.  I walked down No. 27 Street and saw him in his raggedy Circle Jerks shirt and sandals smoking a cigarette, looking intently at nothing in particular.  

“What’s up?  Can I get one of those?” I asked.  He offered me the pack in silence.  I took one and tried to see into his eyes as I lit it.  “What’s going on?”

He took a drag.  “You been watching the news?”

“We don’t have a television.”  I looked to where he was looking, at a bar across the street.  Then I turned back to him, “But you don’t watch television either; your set is covered in dust.”  I smiled at him.

“I was at Gazura.  They had Al-Jezeera on.  People are getting wild.  They’re calling for Mubarak to leave.  I was there yesterday and today.  It’s getting wild in Cairo.”

“What do you mean?  Rioting?  What did Mubarak do this time?”  I turned back and chuckled taking another drag.

“It wasn’t about this time.”  He squinted his eyes looking up at the sun.  “I suppose it’s a culmination of everything.  The past thirty years of his bullshit.  And they saw Tunisia speaking out so…why not, huh?”  He flicked the butt into the street and turned to go back into the building.

“What happened in Tunisia?”  I took a last drag and flicked the butt too, following him in.  We got up to his flat and I plopped down on the sofa.  I picked up a book I had laying there—Stranger in a Strange Land.

Alex was in the kitchen with his hand over his mouth in thought.  He was staring at a boiling pot of water.  I could smell the steam after a while and feel the room getting hotter.

“Making Ramen?” I asked.

“I got a call from my mom in Cleveland.  Ohio.  She said the US government was strongly suggesting for American citizens to get on the very next plane back.”

“Oh, you’re gonna be a frightened cat now?”

“Fraidy Cat?”

“Yeah.”

He stayed silent, looking at the boiling water.  Then he walked back through the hall to his room and closed the door.  I continued reading, not offset in the least.  It was a normal day at Alex’s until I left at the usual seven o’clock, biding “goodbye” to the house, and shuffled back home.

The next day, I got over to the flat at around noon.  The door wasn’t unlocked like it usually was.  I flipped up the dusty map and used the key underneath to let myself in.  I walked up the building’s steps and went into Alex’s apartment.  It looked deflated.  Most of everything was still there except several books on the shelves, making the remaining titles fall diagonal into each other in a real depressed scene.  The records had been taken from the milk crates.  The trunk-table was cleared except for a note on a piece of loose-leaf paper that read: Went back to USA.  Be back when the shit subsides.  I could read it from the threshold where I was standing.

I walked into the kitchen and looked through drawers.  I don’t know what I was looking for.  I found half a pack of parliaments and put them in my pocket, then I went back over to the couch and sat down.  The television was still there.  The stereo and most other things a sane person would cherish remained.  I told myself he was probably coming back.

The next couple of days I tried to tell my uncle I was sick so I could stay home.  He didn’t buy it.  Nevertheless, when I parted with him in the morning I’d just lap the block and go back into the house using a copy of his key that I made.  I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling wondering what to do.

A couple days ago, before I left the city, I was in Gazura Café having a hookah.  Two men were sitting immediately in front of me, a little to the right:

“I’m convinced the day has finally come,” said one.  “There will be a large protest tomorrow in Tahir square.  I’m going to go into the city with Madhat and his woman and little girl.  They have a fair sized van if you’d like to come.  If I were you I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

“Madhat has never been a man of good judgment.  Why bring your woman and child to such a ruckus of an event?  They’re sure to be knocked up,” said the other man.

“No, no. That’s the thing; this is no riotous complication.  This is organized.  Delicate and thirty years in the making.  It’s so precise; Mubarak has to go.”

The other man took a sip of his beer and crossed his arms and scratched his dark beard.  “Mubarak has to go because of the uprising, or he has to go because he has to go?”

The first man leaned in:  “this is the end of the line.  Everything will be different in several days.  We have no idea how, but it will change.  Undoubtedly for the best, whatever happens.”  The rumbling bubbling of the hookah sounded, and the man bellowed a great cloud that rose into the dark ceiling and diffused into the grey atmosphere.

The other man continued to muse, scratching his beard and rubbing his neck.  “I’ll need to talk to Alimah.”

“She’s a wise girl.  She’ll understand if she’s been watching.  This is momentous.  Every countryman should attend.  I know Anwar in Alexandria is organizing.”

“Okay,” said the second man.

“Okay what?”

“Well, you go with Madhat tomorrow.  But I will surely be there in the next day.  I’ll look you up when I get there.”

“I’m glad to hear it! You will have no trouble finding me or anyone else you know that’s going in a group.  The community will be strong!  He will leave!”

The next day I left uncle a note; I knew he wasn’t going to take a day off of work.  I went down early, before uncle was even up, to Gazura, where I had heard a group was gathering to go into Cairo.  I saw a group of them around a van: beautiful people, men and women, elders and young workers.  Some of them I had seen before and some I hadn’t, but they all had this sort of reflexive quality.  It was as though these people who I had known my whole life were more real now, so real and concrete, solid, finely built men, graceful old women with faces like stone statues, each wrinkle precisely placed and eroded, deep like the Nile.  I greeted them as I approached and professed my deep love of the revolution.  They graciously invited me aboard their party.  To fit everyone into the van, I sat on the roof as we drove onto the highway towards Cairo.  I felt like I was in one of Alex’s books—like Che in the company of Castro and the party.  We were on our way into the heart of the struggle.

After five hours of driving, as the sun was just rising, we finally got to the city, but the traffic was already congested to the point of stagnation.  I was anxious.  I had never been to Cairo, and now I would be there in the midst of the greatest event in Egyptian history!  A fantastic urge came over me and I jumped off of the roof of the sitting van.  I knocked on the window in a gesture of thanks and walked off towards the center of the city winding between the vehicles.  Many others had taken this course of action, too.  I imagined them unapologetically abandoning their vehicles to go be with the masses.  They waded and hopped over caravans and at that moment, whether you were in a car or not, we were all one, and I felt it.  

* * *

I called to Shams, “Let’s go find an open restaurant or hookah.”  He got up real excitedly; I’m sure he was hungry.  I hadn’t seen him eat, at least for four or five hours, from the moment I offered him a cigarette in one of the squares.  I got up and we walked away from the busy street toward a section I had heard was still serving food for the protesters.  

We walked until we ended up on Al Sabaa Banat, about four blocks from the square where a place called Jawhar was open.  It was fantastically crowded, or at least it seemed that way because many people were standing in the middle of the establishment talking in high voices to each other and to no one in particular.  Shams and I found our way to the back of the place and took the only two empty seats.  We sat beside a quite, content looking man who wore American sunglasses—Ray Bans, like Alex had—and kept his arm folded in an authoritative fashion with his hose in his hand but not lifting it.  His head lay against the wall and I couldn’t tell of he was asleep or awake and simply observing.  There wasn’t much light coming in through the street windows by now and the weak lamps hanging from the ceiling and the small candles on the tables in front of us made for a sedative environment.  Even the whirr of voices like gears of a machine became monotonous and a part of the atmosphere.

A woman brought us a hookah and two beers.  Shams said, “and a fal in aysh baladi.”

“Two,” I added.

The woman gestured in acknowledgement and went back behind the curtain next to the bar.  I took my beer and sipped; Shams tapped his foot rhythmically with his hands folded in his lap.  He seemed to be interested in the debate that was occurring in the middle of the restaurant.  

“I didn’t know we were living under such conditions, you know,” he said to me, or to himself.  I’m not sure.

Whichever it was, I respond, “Well, to tell the truth, neither did I.”

“I wish I could join in,”  he said.  There was desire in his voice.

“You—we are joining in.”

“I mean in talking and debating.”  He took his beer and put it in his lap.  “I saw this man fighting with a pro-Mubarak type when I first got here, you know.  Someone on the bus had told me there were clashes and people were beginning to get violent.  And this man was wrestling with this supporter.  And he was yelling that the supporter was just propping up a corrupt government, distant or something from the people.”

I sipped.  “You want to fight?  Physically with them?”

“I don’t know.  I want to…know.”

“Well we may not have been following it before, and that was our fault.  But we can show our full support now by adding to the numbers.  And adding to the voices.”

“But what if we need to do more than that?”

I looked at him.  “Non-violence prevailed in the American South.”

He chuckled.  “America sounds cool.  They know how to handle situations.”  He was quiet for a while and we both just sipped on our beers.  “Revolution, man,” he said, and shook his head in apparent disbelief.  “We’re in it.  It’s just surreal.”

“Yeah,” I smiled into my glass.

“We’ll never get this rush again.  I’m just trying to a make it last, you know.”

The ambiguous man beside us joined in, moving nothing but his mouth.  “Revolution!”  We turned to look at him; Shams leaned over.  “Revolution is life!”

“Right on,” Shams said.

His staccato declarations were prophetical: “Revolution is life!  In this grand cycle, it is the facilitator.  It disrupts monotony.  Monotony is silence.  Silence is death.  Revolution is life.”  And like that he seemed to resolve back into peace and silence.  Any other time, I’d have thought he was crazy, but the eccentric tend to be revered more in eccentric times.

His words resonated with my own.  “I’ve been saying that too!  I was talking to my friend here about that, and how in Daoism revolution is natural and is a part of the way.”

“Right on, man,” he said still looking forward through his glasses, “We’re all one, man.  Us, the revolution, the country.  Even if you don’t know it. Even if you don’t know why it’s going on.  Even if you’re supporting the ones in power.  You’re a part of it all.  In revolution, the conservative are progressive.  It’s all good, you know.”

“It’s all good, you know,” Shams smiled at me.

“This violence was no accident.  They had to react, the government and their puppets.”  I leaned in.  The man went on, turning to us for the first time, “The peace will prevail over this setback, no question about it.”  And then he paused like he remembered something, and turn back looking out into the restaurant in his original position.  “But even so, at this moment it’s dangerous out there.  Where are you boys staying?”

Shams and I looked at each other.

Shams turned back to the man: “We’ll let the Revolution handle that.”  He turned to me and smiled.  “We’ll let the Dao handle that, huh, Aalam?”

The man laughed heartily.  “You boys.  You boys are blessed by your naivety.  True revolutionary minds.  Natural, with your age and temperament.  Leaned, no doubt, but naïve all the same.”  He turned and tilted his head to us so that he could see us with his eyeballs.  He then turned back around: “Truly one with the way of world.  But also at its mercy.”  Then he took the first drag of his pipe that we’d seen him take since we sat down.

“What a cool old fellow,” Shams smiled as or waitress brought out our food.  Shams dove in.

It took him all of three minutes to inhale the plate and scarf down the rest of his beer.  I was still shoveling fal onto the aysh as he lay back with his hand on his stomach.  He reached over and took the hose of our hookah and started bubbling.  The great dark grey cloud moved throughout the room; there was now almost no light coming in through the street windows.  

I was only about three-quarters of the way done when Shams tapped me and said in a low voice, as if to conceal his desire, “Let’s go out.”

“Well…we will.  I gotta finish.”

“I’m feeling it tonight, Aalam.”

I just looked at him and continued eating.  I heard some glass break from out in the street.  The voices of yelling pulled out of monotony and I heard conflicts.

“We need to be careful, you know,” I said.

“I know.  But this the real thing here.”

“What?  The real what?”

“Nothing,” he said.  He was looking outward with a real content look.  Finally I finished and Shams and I left the establishment and went back out into the street.

We stood outside of Jawhar for a minute as we looked up and down the block.  At the end of each corner I saw activity.

“Let’s go this way,” Shams said leaning to the right.  He was walking with a bounce, almost skipping.  I pulled out my pack which was dwindling down to the last few cigarettes.  I lit one up and surveyed my surroundings.  For some reason, this cigarette was burning my nose and eyes with a heavy smoggy smell.  I looked at it, then looked up to see Shams on the corner pointing down the street where I couldn’t see.  

“Look!” he yelled.  He was illuminated.

I got to the corner and looking to my right saw a fire on an overturned car igniting the block and protesters in orange glow.  Silhouettes of men in battle danced on the ground in front of the burning vehicle which was situated in front of a warehouse about thirty feet tall.  There were protesters yelling and throwing bricks up at what I guess were pro-Mubarak types up on the roof of the warehouse.  And I suppose some of the Mubarak supporters were also down in the group of protesters because there were fistfights, group beat downs and confrontations on the street.

“Shit,” we said in unison.  My brain crippled with emotion, I was frozen.  

So I didn’t know what to say when Shams ran out towards the debacle screaming “Fuck you, Mubarak Fuckers!” at the top of his lungs.  I watched him, my cigarette hand still frozen in front of my face in disbelief as he sprinted two hundred feet, jumping and plunging feet first into a man who was beating on another man with a piece of debris.  He got up and kicked the assaulting man in the face.  He then raised his fist and screamed along with the other protesters at the pro-Mubaraks on the roof.  I saw a man come up behind him as he shouted and choke his neck from behind in an arm-lock.  I dropped my butt and started to run over, slowly and hesitant at first.  Shams slammed the man with his elbow and blood flew from the choker’s nose.  As he held it, Shams reared back and smashed into the man’s temple with his fist with the force of a tank.  The man fell limp.  Shams turned back.  I ran faster.  I ran towards that boy with his fist in the air as he screamed in euphoria into the night.  At a star.  

Then I don’t know if I slowed down or if the world started going in slow motion but I saw that star, a bright flame in a bottle hurled from a supporter on the roof, arc and fall, smashing into Shams and engulfing his torso in fire.  That torch raged, and fell to the ground, and I had stopped and fallen to my knees.  I watched that fist I was responsible for, smoldering.

© 2012 by Antarah Crawley

D.R. 01-12: Masjid &c.

Volume 1, Issue 12

CONTENTS — ART. 1. MASS PROTEST…MASJID… — ART. 2. SDACS

High Holy Days Special Edition

All Praise be to God/Allah to whom all praise is due! Let us pursue Him in the righteous path. Yes it is true; “seek and ye shall find.” Only through Him can we know the most wondrous bequeathal.
Blessed Saint Nat’s Judgment Day, the day on which Freedom Fighter Nat Turner was tried and sentenced to death in Jerusalem, Virginia, after inciting the Southampton Insurrection on 22-23 August, 1831, and going into exile for 70 days until his capture on 30 October, 1831.

Article 1

300,000 attend mass protest for Palestine in Washington; masjid al-maghrib established

By Antarah Crawley

News segment of Free Palestine DC mass protest, featuring Azra Kulic. Produced by NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C.

WASHINGTON, DC — Approximately 300,000 people from every corner of the United States converged for a “truly massive National March on Washington D.C.” on Saturday, November 4 at 12:00 p.m. at Freedom Plaza. Co-organizer ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition writes on their website:

Israel, with the full backing of the U.S. government, is carrying out an unprecedented massacre in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinians are being killed with bombs, bullets and missiles paid for by U.S. tax dollars. This is the latest bloody chapter in the colonial project of Israel, founded with the objective of dispossessing Palestinians from their land; Now is the time to stand with the besieged people of Palestine! Gaza is being bombed by the hour. Its people are denied food, water and electricity by Israel. Tens of thousands more people are likely to die. We must ACT! People are in the streets everyday in their local cities and towns.

ANSWER Coalition
News coverage of the protest march produced by NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C.

NOVUS SYLLABUS (N∴S∴) Executive Producer (EP) Antarah Crawley (@DCxInfinity) said of his coverage of the event:

This is a video of my favorite band performing some of my favorite songs. This band’s members are frequently changing, as does the reason for which they band together, and they often only perform in the nature of a direct action of civil disobedience or of expression of constitutional rights [in public spaces]. The band is called decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and on November 4th 2023 they performed to Free Palestine in a moving concert of 300,000 people in downtown Washington DC. A revolutionary, empowering, peaceful, spiritual, and historical time was had by all. The band performed such classics as #freefreepalestine #ceasefirenow #shutitdown #thisiswhatdemocracylookslike and #ourstreets

Antarah Crawley

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has reported on the escalating trend of mass protests:

Toward 7:00 p.m. on the evening of the fourth of November, as the march of the mass protest made its way to the White House grounds from 17th Street NW via Pennsylvania Avenue, to the right side of the Avenue in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a ways after the Secret Service guard post but before the inner barrier colonnade, muslims congregated to pray Maghrib, one of the five obligatory daily prayers, or salah. The Maghrib prayer begins when the sun sets, and lasts until the red light has left the sky in the west, according to Wikipedia. Masjid ar-Rahman provides this guide to praying daily salah, which are Fajr (dawn), Dhur (noon), Asr (afternoon), Maghrib (evening), and Isha (nightfall). See the complete source.

The EP was riding past on his trusty steed when he observed the congregation facing toward mecca in diagonal rows; so he backtracked and stood at end of one of the rows to participate spiritually, although he did not know the manner of making rakah nor salah. The EP did feel the presence of God, so he remained there in meditative prayer. Other muslims came to pray, so the EP extended the footprint of the masjid to make room for them in the prayer line while he continued to stand at attention in meditative prayer. Other protest aids assumed the position of the doors and walls around the masjid, guiding the onstreaming crowd around the congregation; together, the EP and these aids ensured that the worshippers were not unduly disturbed by the surrounding masses. This arrangement continued until evening redness in the west went out and the last muslim ended their salah; and the masjid disbanded. After the last protest aid left, the EP himself got onto his knees to better commune with God/Allah, and he supplicated himself to God/Allah like the muslims had done in that place. He felt in his heart that during those past moments a divine thing had transpired there.

Article 2

Synchronized Decentralized Autonomous Command System (SDACS)

By Antarah Crawley

Level 7: Decentralized Autonomous Organization DAO = root level system administrator = United international corp = FLF

Level 6: Commission on Information and Community Intelligence = Concilium Plebis = National Corp 

Level 5: Ombudsman = Tribunus Plebis = Collegium Ecclesia

Level 4: Regional Central Processing Unit = multi-corp processor = Party Boss System

Level 3: Collegium = Community-Centered Cooperative Corporation = regional multi-syndicate Corps 

Level 2: Syndicatus = a committee of at least 8 bytes = Union Boss System

Level 1: Syndic = Bit = individual; plural: bytes, Syndici 

This CS is subject to amendment.

© MMXXIII BY NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

D.R. 01-11: DOL & UBS

Volume 1, Issue 11

CONTENTS — ART. 1. DOL NOPR… — ART. 2. PARTY LINE: UBS

Article 1

Department of Labor notice of proposed rulemaking could upset labor-management relations

By Antarah Crawley

WASHINGTON, DC — In September 2023, the Wage and Hour Division of the United States Department of Labor (DOL) issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NOPR) to amend 29 CFR Part 541, to wit, Defining and Delimiting the Exemptions for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Outside Sales, and Computer Employees.

The Summary section of the proposed rulemaking reads:

In this proposal, the Department of Labor (Department) is updating and revising the regulations issued under the Fair Labor Standards Act implementing the exemptions from minimum wage and overtime pay requirements for executive, administrative, professional, outside sales, and computer employees. Significant proposed revisions include increasing the standard salary level to the 35th percentile of weekly earnings of full-time salaried workers in the lowest-wage Census Region (currently the South)—$1,059 per week ($55,068 annually for a full-year worker)—and increasing the highly compensated employee total annual compensation threshold to the annualized weekly earnings of the 85th percentile of full-time salaried workers nationally ($143,988). The Department is also proposing to add to the regulations an automatic updating mechanism that would allow for the timely and efficient updating of all the earnings thresholds.

Summary

This means that employees of covered employers who make less that $55,068 will no longer be exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLRA) minimum wage and overtime regulations as “white-collar” or executive, administrative, or professional (EAP) employees. The NOPR Executive Summary reads:

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA or Act) requires covered employers to pay employees a minimum wage and, for employees who work more than 40 hours in a week, overtime premium pay of at least 1.5 times the employee’s regular rate of pay. Section 13(a)(1) of the FLSA, which was included in the original Act in 1938, exempts from the minimum wage and overtime pay requirements “any employee employed in a bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity.” [1] The exemption is commonly referred to as the “white-collar” or executive, administrative, or professional (EAP) exemption. The statute delegates to the Secretary of Labor (Secretary) the authority to define and delimit the terms of the exemption. Since 1940, the regulations implementing the EAP exemption have generally required that each of the following three tests must be met: (1) the employee must be paid a predetermined and fixed salary that is not subject to reduction because of variations in the quality or quantity of work performed (the salary basis test); (2) the amount of salary paid must meet a minimum specified amount (the salary level test); and (3) the employee’s job duties must primarily involve executive, administrative, or professional duties as defined by the regulations (the duties test). The employer bears the burden of establishing the applicability of the exemption.[2] Job titles and job descriptions do not determine EAP exemption status, nor does merely paying an employee a salary.

Executive Summary

This proposed rulemaking is causing some employers to reclassify employees who have historically been salaried full-time employees (FTE) with “white collar” exemption to wage-hour employees.

These changes are agitating labor-management relations, creating sharper contradiction in the employer-employee dialectic (“struggle of opposites”). Some employers are electing not to raise the compensation of historically EAP employees above the 35th percentile of weekly earnings of full-time salaried workers in the lowest-wage Census Region, even if those employees live in the most expensive regions of the country.

The sharpening of this historical and materialist dialectic is resulting in a proportional increase in union activity and may very well catalyze the decentralized autonomous organization of the Office of the Plebian Tribunes as well as shore up the 1st Memorandum of the College of the Ancient Mystery.

Source(s)

Article 2

Party Line re: Union Boss System

By Antarah Crawley

NACOTCHTANK, OD — These planks are hereby promulgated for acceptance into the party platform by the general membership of the Third Wave Antimasonic Party of the United States, from the Village of Nacotchtank-on-Potomac, Ouachita District, which sits on the river bank east of the federal city of Washington:

PLANK NO. 5

The Union Boss System (UBS) is the fractal organization of the regional Party Boss System (PBS) into industrial syndicates.

PLANK NO. 6

The official position of the party with respect to the organization of labor in general (unions) is favorable.

© MMXXIII BY NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

D.R. 01-10: Gateway &c.

Volume 1, Issue 10

Contents — Art. 1. …Gateway ProcessArt. 2. …Party Line

Article 1

40th Anniversary of U.S. Army Intelligence analysis and assessment of Gateway Process

By Antarah Crawley

WASHINGTON, DC — On 17 February 2021 the Daily Mail reported, “TikTokkers discover declassified 1983 CIA report investigating if people can leave their physical bodies to travel through space and time using Gateway Experience’s low frequency sounds and relaxation techniques.” The present author recalls that he researched the report and identified a PDF copy on the CIA’s website after seeing such a video being shared on Instagram sometime that year. This author first read the report on 30 October 2023.

The 9 June 1983 U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (USAINSCOM) report, Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process, was declassified by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on 10 September 2003. It is therefore presently four decades since this report was penned in top secrecy by Army Intelligence officer LTC Wayne M. McDonnell, and two decades since it was quietly released into public domain.

The Gateway Process is a technique for applied consciousness expansion designed to better enable practitioners to achieve out-of-body experiences, among other objectives. It also appears to provide the theoretical foundations of interdimensional espionage and interdimensional counterintelligence using remote viewing and other techniques related to interdimensional time travel. It may also acclimate practitioners to encounters with “intelligent, non-corporeal energy forms” (pg. 27). This particular iteration of the practice was developed by Bob Monroe of the Monroe Institute.

It is notable that the official PDF, which is found on the CIA’s website, is missing page 25 (after PDF page 26), a page which may prove even more valuable than the declassified document as it currently exists.

The present author recommends that every free-thinker, truth-speaker, and light worker print a copy of this report and read it and reread it whenever necessary, as it presents a most accurate recitation of the very source information which informed the New Syllabus. This author is so stricken by the equivalence of research findings and information between the New Syllabus Curriculum Suite Repository (C.S.R.) that he is convinced that the Gateway Process was involved in the carrying out of the Novus Syllabus Seclorum through his body in this space-time continuum.

In hindsight, this author recalls his education in the Daoist (Taoist) philosophy while attending The George Washington University in 2010/2011, and his silence-filled sessions of deep, meditative thought in which he explored the elementary composition of “reality” and “nature.” These sessions led directly to his authorship of Origends: A Primer on Singularity and Space-Time Progression, which comes down to us at 1 C.S.R. 57-77.

Original 2015 Cover of Origends: A Primer on Singularity and Space-Time Progression by Antarah Crawley

Furthermore, this author has come to the understanding that the development of the fictional character of Walter Kogard as a (very) thinly veiled alter ego of the author in 1 C.S.R. and the mission undertaken by this character at 3 C.S.R. has caused the experiences of Walter Kogard to “quantum-leap” from fiction into the reality of its closest analogue, the author himself. However, the original ending at 3 C.S.R. (in which Kogard “decompresses” into a beam on light in the InterZone), while remaining the true and original conclusion to Kogard’s hero-myth, projected an alternative ending involving the “Secret School of Ancient Mystery” to 4 C.S.R. and beyond. This “alternate reality” is actually a transmission of the Kogard signal from the silent depths of the O-Zone back into the KnownZone as a hologram of himself to build new holograms in the main holographic matrix. Therefore, unbeknownst to this author at the time, the New Syllabus Mystery School was manifest into reality via decentralized Gateway Process after he moved back to “Federal City” (Washington, D.C.) from “Empire City” (Brooklyn, New York).

In addition to illuminating the operative mechanism in the Curriculum Suite Repository, the Army Intelligence report predicts the New Syllabus discovery and development of Mindsoft and the InterZone of 3 C.S.R. 27-28.

Regarding Mindsoft, LTC McDonnell reports at 15. Brain in Phase:

The consciousness process is most easily envisaged if we picture the holographic input [the appearance of physical reality] with a three dimensional grid system superimposed over it such that all of the energy patterns contained within can be described in terms of a three dimensional geometry using math[e]matics to reduce the data to two dimensional form. Bentov states that scientists suspect that the human mind operates on a simple binary “go/no go” system as do all digital computers. […] In states of expanded consciousness, the right hemisphere of the human brain in its holistic, nonlinear and nonverbal mode of functioning acts as the primary matrix or receptor for this holographic input while, by operating in phase or coherence with the right brain, the left hemisphere provides the secondary matrix through its binary, computer-like method of functioning to screen further the data by comparison and reduce it to a discreet, two-dimensional form.

LTC McDonnell, pg. 9 (emphasis added)

Regarding the InterZone, LTC McDonnell reports at 21. Dimensions In-between:

[…I]nside the dimension of space-time where both concepts apply in a generally uniform way there is a proportional relationship between them [time and space]. A certain space can be covered by energy moving in either particle or wave form in a certain time assuming a specific velocity virtually anywhere in the space-time universe. The relationship is neat and predictable. However, in the intermediate dimensions beyond time-space the limitations imposed on energy to put it into a state of oscillating motion are not uniform as they are in our physical universe. […A]ccess is opened to both the past and the future when the dimension of current time-space is left behind.

LTC McDonnell, pg. 14 (emphasis added)
Image on space-time. Retrieved 11 April 2015. Source unknown.

The present author can no longer consider it a coincidence that in this time of all-pervasive “conspiracy theories” being advanced on both the far left and the far right of the political spectrum, a foreign social medial platform with a majority population of Generation Z youth is circulating a once-concealed U.S. government intelligence briefing which vindicates virtually every “fringe theory” pertaining to the existence of, and means of travel through, multiple concurrent (simultaneously occurring) dimensions of time and space.

This rise in the tide — this sea change — in what has been coined “the collective consciousness” appears to be the work of interdimensional agents the Third Wave of the Antimasonic Party of the decentralized autonomous organization of free-thinkers, truth-speakers, and light workers united, although Washington politicians assert that TikTok is a tool used by the Chinese Communist Party to surveil and control American citizens.

Source(s):

MEGAN SHEETS FOR DAILYMAIL.COMTikTokkers discover declassified 1983 CIA report investigating if people can leave their physical bodies to travel through space and time using Gateway Experience’s low frequency sounds and relaxation techniques. Published: 16:26 EDT, 17 February 2021.

Article 2

Toeing the Party Line

By Antarah Crawley

NACOTCHTANK, OD — These positions (planks*) are hereby promulgated for acceptance to the general membership of the Third Wave Antimasonic Party of the United States, from the Village of Nacotchtank-on-Potomac, Ouachita District, which sits on the river bank east of the federal city of Washington:

Plank No. 1

The historical dialectic of Freemasonry is to be condemned, and individual freemasons should be invited to renounce their oaths and affiliations with the fraternity, but may otherwise be tolerated. Pan-Hellenism is to be likewise considered.

Plank No. 2

Everything which is concealed must be revealed.

Plank No. 3

Take no action unless sincerely moved by conscience and belief and such action is carried out in good faith. Therefore, unless there arises a compelling reason to take a certain action, no action should be taken.

Plank No. 4:
Party Boss System for Political Action Coalition

Individual natural people called regional and state bosses shall receive and disburse donations as trustees for the general membership (GM) of the party domiciled in a certain region or state. For example, if a party boss buys a building with donated funds then the building is held in trust for the benefit of the GM. The boss shall conduct the party’s finances on the advice and counsel of a majority of the GM.  The GM shall also constitute the national nominating convention.

*Note

A “plank” is a main axiom of the party platform. See:

(last modified 2 Nov. 2023)

© MMXXIII BY NOVUS SYLLABUS L.L.C.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

Nacotchtank lands recognized by DC government

By Antarah Crawley

Circa 1956 land record map of the village of Nacotchtank-on-Potomac Eastern Branch a.k.a. Uniontown a.k.a. Historic Anacostia, Washington, D.C. (a.k.a. Ouachita District).

WASHINGTON, DC — On Thursday, October 26, 2023, the District of Columbia (DC) Commission on the Arts and Humanities (CAH) held a regularly scheduled open public meeting via Webex which streamed via YouTube. The “October Full Commission Meeting” agenda which was circulated prior to the meeting included a certain item business:

“2. LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT | Recognizing the ancestral homelands of the Nacotchtank and Piscataway Peoples.”

As to this item of business, DC CAH Chairperson Reggie Van Lee remarked:

Every community owes its existence and vitality to generations from around the world who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy to making the history that led to this moment. Some were brought here against their will, some were drawn to leave their distant homes in hope of a better life, and some have lived on this land for more generations than can be counted. Truth and acknowledgement are critical to building mutual respect and connection across all barriers of heritage and difference.

We begin this effort to acknowledge what has been buried by honoring the truth: we stand on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank and the Piscataway People[s]. We pay respect to their elders past and present. Please take a moment to consider the many legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and settlement that bring us together here today, and please join us in uncovering such truths in any and all public events and to use such truths to guide the legacy of this arts commission.

Reggie Van Lee, Chair, DC CAH
YouTube: CAH Full Commission Regular Meeting (October 26, 2023)

The laudable remarks of Chair Van Lee resonate like a monolithic bell from a mountaintop monastery throughout the diocese of N∴S∴ — they sound like they could have been written by the Director himself. Furthermore, the Director does not think it a coincidence that just earlier this month — right before the declaration of the Nacotchtank estate in Fides Publica Populi Mauretani (FPPM) — he was honored with a grant and Fellowship from this selfsame government agency.

The Director thinks it highly probable that ever since the deposit of Title 23 C.S.R. General Policy into the Library of the United Grand Lodge of England in September of 2018, the allies of the international masonic conspiracy have been monitoring the party of the N∴S∴ (which at that time was called the Moorish National Socialist Party); and perhaps they are attempting to incorporate the positions of the Third Wave Antimasonic Party platform in order to prevent a split in the Democratic party come 2024.

The Nacotchtank People, by and through its trustee N∴S∴, established the Public Trust of the Moorish People of Nacotchtank Village, Ouachita District, through the registered notice of 12 October 2023.

1607 map of polities in the chiefdom of the North American Eastern Sea Board (Ouachita District).

In other news, earlier that same day, the Third Wave Antimasonic Party Boss for Ouachita District, Antarah Crawley, met with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Presidential Advisory Commission on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans of the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans on the occasion of the swearing-in of the Commission by the Vice President in the Indian Treaty Room (former Navy Dep’t Library and most expensive room by sq. ft.) of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Later that day, the Ouachita Party Boss attended a virtual “Free Masterclass” on Exclusive Equity Jurisprudence presented by Amyr Samah El of Matisse Academy which came on at 7:00 p.m. via Zoom. It was a very well-attended and informative session and the chat room was active with discussion (including much promotion of newsyllabus.org, the UA, and the TWAP). During the session, Party Boss Crawley declared the Matisse Academy a collegium of the Universitas Autodidactus, and Amyr Samah El the Preceptor of said collegium.