Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] The Philosophy of Murray Bookchin: An Interview with Debbie Bookchin

Episode Date: April 16, 2022

[Originally released Feb 2018] Debbie Bookchin is a widely-published journalist and author whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Nation, and numerous other publications. She served as press secretary to Bernie Sanders when he served in the U.S. House and she recently co-edited a book of essays by her father, Murray Bookchin, called The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso Books 2015). Debbie joins Brett to discuss the life and work of her father, Murray Bookchin, as well as the Rojavan Revolution, the rise of fascism, Social Ecology, Marxism, Anarchism, her father's legacy, and much, much more!  Find Debbie, and much of her work, on twitter: @Debbiebookcin  Learn more about and support the legacy of Murray Bookchin here: MurrayBookchin.org Outro Music: "Opening Salvo" by Blue Scholars, find and support them here: http://bluescholars.com Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

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fight for the working class hard for equality fight against the right free fascist ideology Turn it in and turn it up loud. Revolutionary Left Radio starts now. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Ann Comrade, Brett O'Shea.

And today we have on Debbie Bookchin, the daughter of Murray Bookchin, to talk about her father's work, his philosophy, and also touch on some of her ideas, especially around Rojava, what's happening right now in northern Syria. So we're going to cover a lot of ground today. I'm extremely excited to have Debbie Bookchin on. I'm honored to have her on. Debbie, would you like to introduce yourself and maybe say a little bit about your background for people who don't already know who you are?

Sure. Thanks, first of all, Brett. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, I am one of two children of Murray's, the other one being my younger brother, Joe, who works in film. And I grew up in New York City in the late 60s and 70s, becoming a journalist, a journalist after college. and really working mostly in Vermont, which is where my parents moved to in the 70s, kind of as part of an outmigration from the cities in order to live their decentralized political ideas.

I spent most of my adult life doing investigative reporting. Like, for example, I wrote a book with my husband based on an investigative article we did for the Atlantic magazine, on was about how the polio vaccine was contaminated with a cancer-causing simian virus that was given to a hundred million people due to willful government neglect and the usual revolving door between regulators and big pharma executives and so it's a book that i'm pleased is actually still in print even though it was written some time ago and it's considered an important book I did do a lot of daily reporting in Vermont for a long time. In fact, I covered Bernie Sanders really from the time he first ran for mayor.

And eventually I spent three years as his press secretary, his first press secretary when he was elected to Congress. But I've also done a lot of other types of writing about politics, environment, that sort of thing. Since my father died in 2006, I've been mostly focused on stewarding his work, which is happily enjoying a resurgence right now. Yeah, absolutely. And we'll get into some of the influence that he's had on the Rojavan Revolution and other movements of the past couple decades. But maybe we start with some memories of your father growing up. Like what kind of father was he? What kind of person was he?

And what are some of the most prominent memories that you have about your father? You know, I think it's hard to believe for a lot of people who are most familiar with his later life polemics, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a bit. But as a person, Murray was incredibly warm. He was a very attentive parent in all kinds of ways. And I think really a good friend to the people that he was closest to. he um you know was busy all the time writing and and uh very active politically both as a writer as an activist but he made time for for his family and and and frankly for anyone who needed him he loved to talk as you can imagine enjoyed good company um there's a lot of aspects about him that aren't really visible uh in his work but he was, in a certain sense, very deeply, I would say very deeply human.

You know, he was, he was sentimental even in some ways, you know, a television program about disappearing guerrillas, for example, could move him to tears. He loved music, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. And some of my early memories of him, I guess, really were, you know, just about, about that confluence between his tremendous commitment and focus on politics and also his commitment to family. I mean, like an example, you know, he was very excited when my mom brought me home as a newborn from the hospital, so much so that he got the idea to sprinkle alcohol all over the apartment and ruined the wooden parquet floors, you know.

At the same time, he took me to civil rights demonstrations when I was at the same time. toddler. And later, when I was old enough to hold my own sign and a march, I can remember once that he practically killed a counter-protester who tried to grab my sign away. He was someone who never really had a family when he was growing up because his father left his mother and him when he was just five years old. And his grandmother, whom he was closest to, died when he was nine years old. And his mom wasn't really competent to take care of him, so he was supporting her from the time he was 12 or 13. So family life was very important to him. And just in another sort of funny anecdote, you know, even though he and my mom divorced after only 12 years of marriage, he actually

continued to live with her for a total of 35 years. And they collaborated his whole life for about 57 years, they work together. And actually, I'm proud to say that she's still working on his ideas with a new generation of municipalists in Burlington, Vermont right now, even at the age of 88. So, you know, Murray was somebody who really, I think, he was somebody who, on whom the Great Depression made a huge impact, but he never really much cared about. making money himself beyond what was necessary to support his writing and activism, basically a born-and-bred revolutionary until the day he died. And for me, there were certain aspects of that that were very funny.

You know, he went around, for example, constantly with a leather pouch hanging off his hip with two or three books in it, one of which was often Hegel's phenomenology of mind, which he went back to over and over. I can remember, for example, being really excited to see the movie Mary Poppins when I was a kid. And this would be typical of him. He would take me, tuck me to the movie, sat me down, spent five minutes in the movie with me, and then said, I'll meet you out in the lobby when it's over. And I'd go out there and find him, you know, reading, I don't know, Hans Jonas or Buber or whatever was on his plate for the day.

So he managed a great balancing act as a parent and as a, as a, as a. activist. Yeah, when you talk about his sentimentality about, you know, tearing up over watching shows about disappearing guerrillas or something, you know, that's something that I myself have like a very sentimental side. And I think that that's ultimately rooted in like compassion and empathy for other people and other sentient beings. And those sorts of people tend to really focus on politics and especially revolutionary politics because the world as it is right now is so barbaric and so needlessly cruel. And I think in a lot of ways, empathy and compassion for others and a sort of intuitive hatred of unfairness and injustice is something that

drives a lot of revolutionaries. So I think that's extremely interesting little aspect of him that I never knew about. Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I think that in many ways, one of the things that's, you know, of concern about society and about what capitalism is doing to all of us is that it has such a dehumanizing aspect. And I think it is important to maintain that, to be able to feel that sense of empathy for other people and to really be committed to changing the world for the better. Yeah, and if any counter-protester tried to rip a sign out of my daughter's hand, I would be very angry as well.

So that's an interesting little thing, too. Can you maybe talk about Murray's ever-evolving political development? because I know he went through a lot of different sort of tendencies on the left as he as he grew up. I know he started off, I think, as a communist organizer and eventually ended up creating his own sort of, you know, tendency on the left. So can you talk about where he started politically and what phases he went through? Yeah, you know, as I mentioned, he kind of grew up in an unusual household. He kind of grew up on the knee of his grandmother, who's a socialist revolution. revolutionary from Russia.

And, you know, in that way, he kind of from really, I think, his own earliest memory had a sense of the heroes of the great, you know, of the German revolution, of the Russian revolution. When other kids were talking about the alone ranger, he was saluting Rosa Luxembourg or Bukharin, you know. So what happened, you know, obviously coincidentally, is that after his grandmother died when he was just nine years old. He was approached by a couple of kids who came knocking on his door, and they were members of the young pioneers, which is, of course, you know, the communist youth group. And that really started his trajectory in the Communist Party.

So he basically began an intense education in Marxist theory at the age of about 10 years old. And, you know, he went through the sort of process of the party. He, you know, earnestly believed that if they could eliminate private property and the causes of class conflict, that they could recreate a utopian society. He was apparently a very astute student. And even before the normal minimum age of 14, he was proopted, as they used to say, into the Young Communist League, where, you know, readings, education, discussion, and

oration were really an important part of life. And also, along with a lot of activism, pickets, defending people from evictions, May Day demonstrations. It was during the Great Depression. There were also hunger marches and leafletting in front of factories. And after high school, he went to work. Well, first full-time as an apprentice, electrician, and later as a foundry men pouring molten steel, and he became a shop steward and secretary of his local. So he basically did about sort of 10 years as a labor organizer, not including a stint in the military. He had worked also after the military for General Motors. But even, you know, before the Hitler-Stalin pact, he began reading Trotsky's literature as well.

And I think, you know, he admired Trotsky's lone voice against Stalin. So he went through kind of went from being a communist into being a Trotskyist. But eventually his history in the left and the failure of early revolutionary theories made Murray feel that it was necessary to develop an approach that went beyond class analysis that didn't depend on the idea of an industrial. working class making the revolution, and also that avoided the kinds of centralized government control and bureaucracies that he felt had undermined the Russian revolution. So he began to feel that it was very important to look at the myriad of ways in which capitalism impacts, not just economic relations, but every aspect of life. And I mean, I should emphasize that, you know, for him, it was not about discarding class analysis at all.

And he certainly was a great appreciator of Marx until the day he died. But for him, it was more of an effort to go beyond it. You know, it was becoming clear to him in the 1940s that capitalism was having a strong impact on other aspects of life beyond the economic. He was looking at things like the use of chemicals and food, the impact on the industry. environment, air and water pollution, radiation, cities, the impact on cities. Of course, he lived in New York. He grew up and lived in New York for many years where Robert Moses was destroying entire neighborhoods to build highways. And he was witnessing the disappearance of agricultural lands just really right outside of New York City in favor of, you know,

shopping centers. And Murray felt all these developments had to be considered as part of a re-evaluation of the impact of capitalism and the broader question of why there hadn't been a workers' revolution at the end of the war. So eventually, he really abandoned Marxism. He became involved with a group called Contemporary Issues in the 40s and 50s, which ultimately led him to morph into anarchism by the 1960s. and I think many people sort of associate him with reviving anarchist theory in America, and he remained an anarchist for several decades.

And the conclusion I came to is this, that the workers' movement never really had a revolutionary potential, that the factories, and I had worked in factories for 10 years, and had worked in factories partly as a labor organizer in the old CIO, before it united with the AFFL, when it was still in a very militant, you know what I mean, stage of its development, that this workers' movement had never really had the revolutionary potentialities that Marx attributed to it.

That in point of fact the factory, which is supposed to organize the workers in Marx's language, mobilized them, and instill in them the class consciousness that is to stem out of a conflict between wage, labor, and capital, in fact, had created habits of mind in the worker that served to regiment the worker that served in fact to assimilate the worker to the work ethic to the industrial routine

to hierarchical forms of organization and that no matter how compellingly Marx had argued that such a movement could have revolutionary consequences in fact such a movement could have nothing but a purely adaptive function an adjunct to the capitalist system itself

and I began to to try to explore what were movements and ideologies, if you like, that really were liberatory, that really freed people of this hierarchical sensibility and mentality, of this authoritarian outlook, of this complete assimilation by the work ethic. And I now began to turn very consciously toward Anacus' views. because anarchism posed the question not simply of a struggle between classes based upon economic exploitation. Anachism really was posing a much broader historical question that even goes beyond our industrial civilization. Not just classes, but hierarchy. Hierarchy as it exists in the family.

Hierarchy as it exists in the school. Hierarchy as it exists in sexual relationships. Hierarchy as it exists between ethnic groups. not only class divisions based upon economic exploitation. And it was concerned not only with economic exploitation. It was concerned with domination, domination which may not even have any economic meaning at all. The domination of women by men in which women are not economically exploited.

The domination of ordinary people by bureaucrats, in which you may even have a welfare, so-called socialist type of state. Domination as it exists today in China, even when you're supposed to have a classless society. Domination, even as it exists in Russia, where you are supposed to have a classless society. So these are the things that I noted in anarchism, and increasingly I came to the conclusion

that if we were to avoid, or if we are to avoid, the mistakes that were made over 100 years of proletarian socialism, if we ought to really achieve a liberatory movement, not simply in terms of economic questions, but in terms of every aspect, of life. We would have to turn to anarchism because it alone posed the problem not merely of class domination but hierarchical domination. And it alone posed the question not simply of

economic exploitation, but exploitation at every sphere of life. And it was that growing awareness that we had to go beyond classes into hierarchy and beyond exploitation into domination that led me into anarchism. But eventually moved, as you said, to his own sort of synthesis. of anti-stateism and direct democracy based on ecological ethics, which was sort of a set of ideas that he called communalism. And I think we'll touch on communalism in a little bit. Maybe we can talk about it as an outgrowth of this next question, which is what is social ecology? And what out of what values that your father held did the idea of social ecology kind of blossom? Well, social ecology is really both a critique of current social and ecological crises

and also an effort to provide a coherent reconstructive vision. You know, it takes up ideas about the kind of social organization necessary to achieve not only an ecological society, but for Murray's freedom, which was really the underlying project that he had. had. So social ecology challenges capitalism, but it also challenges all forms of domination and hierarchy. And it suggests that only when we eliminate these social forms of domination, will we be able to eliminate the essentially rapacious attitude that we have towards nature. Social ecology looks at science and technology and reason and analyzes both the oppressive ways in which they've been used and their liberatory possibilities.

And I think, you know, the central thesis of social ecology is that all environmental problems have their origin and social problems and that we can't begin to solve the ecological crisis until we deal with the social crisis, namely, you know, undertake a fundamental shift in every aspect of human relations, eliminating domination based on gender, race, sexual orientation, the old over the young, you know, all of those sorts of issues are necessary to address in order to achieve the kind of complete transformation of society that will lead to not just economic parity, but true freedom. Maybe we can move on because you mentioned earlier your father's sort of polemical confrontations

he had throughout his life, and he had him with very, like, a lot of different sorts of leftists. So we're going to spend some time right here talking about the exact kind of beefs he had with certain leftist tendencies. Let's start with Marxism. I know you've mentioned he kind of outgrew Marxism and became an anarchist and then eventually had a synthesis of sort of all the ideas on the left. But what were his major differences with Marxism and Marxists? Well, Murray had spent a lifetime on left, you know, deeply immersed in Marx's rioting and in the subsequent literature of Marxism and Leninism. And, of course, he lived through the post-revolutionary year of Soviet Stalinism. And he saw also during the 60s an interesting trend that concerned him very much, which was that the 60s, and I think it's hard for a lot of people to sort of even experience or understand this if you didn't live through it.

But it was such a unique time of social revolution, in a sense, the sense of possibility and all the different ways that people were thinking about what life could be. It was a time that he called post-scarcity, you know, a time of affluence in which the promise of technology was really exciting and powerful. And so there were groups that were forming like SDS students for a democratic society in the 1960s, you know, which were not only just, you know, powerfully anti-war, but we're really calling for a whole new way of living in society. And he was very concerned that Marxist groups, like at that time, Progressive Labor Party, were having a detrimental impact on this, on this

movement, this bold new youth movement that, that, you know, was looking for a revolution in everyday life. So, you know, along come these hardlines sort of Marxists with talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat when no one in labor and, you know, workers at that time even really thought of themselves anymore as the quote-unquote proletariat. And when capitalism was creating antagonists in all strata of society, not just within the working class, you know, but among people who were students, professionals, you know, and farmers. And then there was all this talk, you know, from the sort of Marxist left about central committees and vanguard. And he just felt, Murray felt that it was really impossible as much as he respected Marx, a profound respect.

He felt it was impossible for a theory developed 100 years before, long before technology had proven its promise. to emancipate ourselves, you know, and for this, for Marx to foresee the trajectory of capitalism and that to be wedded to these theories was simply unproductive. So, you know, he felt that the most emancipatory way to address people is not merely as workers, but as fellow citizens, as people who cared about their neighborhoods, their kids' health, about finding fulfillment outside of the workplace, and that it would be necessary to approach a whole strata of society that didn't identify in typical sort of Marxian terms. And he also felt that the whole emphasis on centralization was misguided, you know, politically, economically, and socially. I mean, he was moving to a position in which he believed that true freedom was really achieved by self-rule.

And that we had to look to new forms of organization and look at, for example, you know, ways in which we could decentralize power rather than centralizing. So, you know, I think – and a lot of these ideas are contained in his essay, Listen Marxist, which was written back in 1969, but I think it's actually still very relevant today. I remember he was doing an interview at some, I think it was a mixture of left and right libertarians, a conference, and he talked about how some Marxists would tell him that he would be put up against the wall if the revolution ever came. And he was kind of talking about it in a lighthearted way, but was that an actual thing that he heard Marxists tell him? The basic problem I really have is that whenever I meet leftists and the socialists and Marxist movements,

I'm called the petty bourgeois individualist. i'm supposed to shrink under this usually i'm called the petty bourgeois individualist by students and by academicians we've never done a day's work life in their entire biography whereas i have spent years in factories and trade unions in foundries and in auto plants so after i have to swallow the word petty bourgeois i don't mind the word

individualist at all i believe in individual freedom it's my primary and complete commitment and individual liberty. That's what it's all about. That's what socialism was supposed to be about or anarchism was supposed to be about

and tragically has been betrayed. And when I normally encounter my so-called colleagues on the left, socialist, Marxist, communists, they tell me that after the revolution they're going to shoot me. That is sad with unusual

consistency. They're going to stand me and Carl up against the wall and get rid of us real fast. I feel much safer in your company. Well, he's gotten criticisms from all kinds of people and all kinds of strad over the years. I mean, the situationist, the international, you know, situationalist international, expelled him at one point and he wasn't even part of their group. he you know certainly had serious running with deep ecologists and you know with this sort of anarcho-primitivists so um i think he it wasn't there was some definitely some contentious uh back and forth there yeah

did he ever have um did he ever talk about his views on the black panther party that rose in the late 60s and early 70s just had a curiosity well you know i think that what that one thing that concern Murray was a tendency within the left sometimes to sort of glorify militants, you know, at the expense of social organization. And, you know, to their credit, the Panthers were involved in, and, you know, doing the sort of hard work in the local community. And, in fact, I actually have a picture of Eldridge Cleaver. with a copy of my dad magazine in Arcos tucked under his arms.

So there was definitely a kind of a, you know, a give and take of ideas there. But I think that, you know, when the Panthers evolved, you know, ever into sort of ever more militant organization and the idea that somehow we were going to make the revolution, you know, as an armed revolution, that that was something that Murray disavowed very strongly, and it was also obviously huge criticism for him of the, like of the, when it went really bizarre with the weather underground. Yeah, yeah. That's extremely interesting.

So you mentioned some of his beefs with anarchism, and we're going to get into deep ecology and anarcho-primidivism in a second, but he also had a very famous sort of confrontation with what he referred to as lifestyle anarchists. So can you talk about what he thought of that and what that, what that, what. that confrontation was about? Sure. You know, Murray, as I said, identified himself for many, many years with anarchism, and that's, you know, partly because he felt very strongly, he was a, you know, very

anti-state and the statism that he really, he felt that anarchists really had a good critique of the state and that it was very important to be able to, you know, create forms of organization that would dismantle the state. And at first, his differences with anarchism could be described as more what he called, you know, like you referred to lifestyle anarchism, which could be called sort of almost, differences of style you know he was concerned that the sort of glorification and romanticism of anarchism was making a lot of young people feel that if they went around and dressed in black and smashed windows that they were somehow really developing a revolutionary consciousness and he felt

that that was that was very counterproductive and that it also really neglected the kinds of forms of social organization that you need to undertake in a systematic way, you know, and these are, the anarchist tradition has some, is wonderful, you know, it has concepts like mutual aid and solidarity and ideas about prefigrative politics, which is, you know, trying to live the ideals that we believe in as part of any revolutionary change now, sort of It was creating that within the shell of the old here. But he felt that it was very problematic when these kinds of ideals were translated just into kind of lifestyle activities. And that, you know, it's not – and for that reason that activities like by the black block that consisted mostly of just going to demonstrations of smashing windows weren't really helping to promote.

cause and weren't really doing the hard work locally that needed to be done. And of course, you know, that concern developed into even a more fundamental critique of anarchism because many anarchists denigrate voting, for example, or don't really want to deal Murray felt with the issue of power and political organization. And, you know, for Murray, it was important that people understood that power. doesn't simply dissolve as much as, you know, some anarchists might like to think that that can happen, that power is always going to exist. And the question is, in whose hands will it reside? And he felt that it was important that we start working on the community level and building

organizations. And that includes voting people into local city councils. And with the idea that they are not representatives in the classic case of voting for a representative going into a ballot box and just pulling a lever, but that you work together first to form a group that has principles and that has ethics and that the person who is ultimately running for candidacy, say, for city council is not so much a representative as a delegate from the group, you know, the idea being that a person would be ultimately recallable if they don't really represent the group. So those kinds of things, I think, ended up severing him from anarchist philosophy and putting him a perfection of communalism, this idea that, you know, if we can develop

an institutionalized general assemblies on the local level, then we really reempower ourselves as active citizens, that we can start to do the educational work. and also the political work to understand what it means to be a fully engaged political creature. And, you know, he distinguished politics. He liked to distinguish politics from statecraft, you know, which he said statecraft is just this sort of idea where you go into the voting booth and you vote for the lesser of evil. But politics going back to some of the rich traditions, you know, from, for example, the Athenian polis, these kinds of these kinds of exciting. discussion, debate, working together to chart your sort of collective future, that that is where politics in the United States needed to go. So that was really what led him to ultimately

break with anarchism and embrace what he called communalism. That's really interesting. It's not surprising that he made so many enemies on the left because he's critiquing everybody and everything. But I think it's important to have a figure like that to keep all of us no matter what tendency of the left you have, you should take those critiques to heart, and a lot of them are still relevant to this day. Part of Murray's background is an orator, and he was, as I said, fiercely trained by the Communist Party,

was that he could certainly be, you know, rhetorically intense and rhetorically powerful. And there are ways in which, you know, I'm sure you're familiar, or you may be familiar, some of your listeners with his pamphlet or sort of a mini book, you know, social anarchism or lifestyle anarchism and unbridgeable chasm that I think did alienate a lot of anarchists. And I, you know, I'm obviously very fond of my dad and I support his work. But I also understand, you know, nobody's perfect.

And I also understand that how that kind of tone in that booklet or whatever you want to call that article at first could have alienated a lot of people. And I mean, my feeling is that we have to, on the left, try to bring people along with us. I mean, I like to, when I'm talking to people who are anarchists, I like to talk to them about how I think communalism or what Murray called libertarian municipalism also, you know, that sort of part of the political part of voting of working in the community is more like a logical extension of anarchism and that we don't have to. be at war with each other over it. So, yeah, you're right. There were certain ways in which he polemically, you know, was so forceful that it got a lot of people angry. So you mentioned his sort of confrontation with deep ecology and anarcho-primitivism. Can you elaborate on that? You know, in order to elaborate on that, what I'd like to talk about for a minute, perhaps, is a kind of foundational aspect of Murray's project that he called dialectical.

naturalism, one of his principal sort of project was really trying to ground his ideas about social change and freedom on an objective basis. In other words, he was trying to derive an ethics that could provide a framework or basis for our decisions about how we choose to organize society. And in a sense, it's almost impossible to properly understand his entire life's work without understanding this commitment, as well as, you know, some of the polemical issues that he got involved in. And these ideas, by the way, are laid out in a series of essays in a book of his called the philosophy of social ecology for anybody who's particularly sort of philosophically oriented. And he sort of, he uses, he employs a dialectical approach to history and reason to ask and answer the questions, what is nature and what is a human being's place in nature? And how can we intervene in nature in a rational way? So for him, the need to create an ecological society, you know, based on directly democratic forms of social organization, isn't just a random choice that we make. Like, oh, you know, this society is a bit nicer than one in which all decisions are made, say, by, you know, representatives in parliament or a central committee.

For him, the imperative to create an egalitarian society really stems from a recognition that it's the most obvious rational choice that if we look at nature dialectically and see it as an unfolding of ever greater consciousness and think about what role human beings have, you know, we can say that there's a tendency in nature toward ever greater complexity and diversity and reason really. with human beings serving as an example of nature rendered self-conscious. So Murray really believed that humanity has a vast capacity to alter nature, but it's itself a product of nature and doesn't have to be in opposition to nature. So basically, if you look at nature as striving towards ever greater complexity and consciousness and subjectivity, you can see the imperative for human beings to to take a kind of stewardship role. And in a sense, almost to call it, you might almost call it a moral responsibility that we have, that towards nature, you know. So in the sense of creating societies that are based on the sort of ecological ideas of cooperation, creativity, and,

freedom and socially that means, you know, an ecological or socialist and feminist society. So for Murray, this was extremely important. And when his debate, in a sense, with the people who were sort of biocentric or what you would call anarcho-primitivist, centered around the fact that, you know, there was an obscuring for him in that attitude of the of the institutional problems of capitalism and you know I'll just give you an example you know I remember going to the Museum of Natural History with him when I was a kid and we used to do that a lot he loved the American Museum of Natural History in New York and there was an exhibit about population explosion and part of the exhibit was a mirror

And the sign above it sort of said, look in the mirror to see who's the problem. And of course, you'd walk up to it and you'd see yourself, you know. And, you know, Murray said, you know, how can you equate a small black child, say, coming from a New York ghetto, you know, an impoverished neighborhood staring in that mirror? You can't blame them for ecological devastation the way you can an oil magnate from Exxon, you know. and to do so as sort of a product of a muddled logic that allows capitalism to really remain unaccountable for its grievous insults to human beings in the natural world. And so, you know, the problem is that when you get into a situation where people like the deep ecologists just take a blanket approach, somehow all human beings are bad, you know, as opposed to Murray's

idea that human beings have the capacity to actually steward nature. And when you have this idea that as many of the deep ecologists said, you know, that we should just let nature take its course, AIDS is nature's revenge on human beings. I mean, Murray just found that to be a deeply, deeply, you know, problematic theory. And in a similar way, I mean, you know, anarcho-primitivism, which sort of, as far as I understand, advocates. sort of the industrialization and the abandonment of advanced technologies in favor of a more primitive lifestyle, you know, it obscures the question of what is technology itself the problem or is it the social formations that govern its use? I mean, clearly there are some technologies that are bad, like, you know, nuclear power plants, we can all agree should be banned. But there

are millions of other types of innovations that while destructive under capitalism can be used productively in a socialist society. So I think that my father was bothered by a kind of almost like an arrogance among, you know, I could say, Western white men. And a lot of them have been men, you know, arguing that somehow, you know, the idea that the, the idea that the, um, the, the, the, the, the We are all so bad that nature just, you know, deserves to take its course and that we shouldn't intervene in the natural world at all ever. And he really saw, as going back to that earlier point about dialectical naturalism, that human beings had in a certain sense, not only the right to intervene in nature, but in a certain sense you could call it our highest calling. So that was a dispute. I'm very philosophically inclined to myself, as listeners of this show know, and dialectical naturalism has a big impact on me.

It's one of the aspects of Murray's thought that I really embrace. And it actually has some really interesting parallels with Buddhist conceptions of human consciousness inside nature, which I think are interesting, but it obviously escapes the confines of this conversation to go deep into that. But the notion of walking into the museum and having the mirror show your own face as you being part of the problem, really to me kind of highlights the sort of liberal individualism that wants to take the heat off of capitalism and make it about individual consumers. And the modern outgrowth of that, in my opinion, is like this notion of green capitalism, of buying green products, of changing light bulbs in your house and of sort of shifting the burden onto individual consumers as opposed to this huge. system that is environmentally nihilistic to the core. So it's kind of an outgrowth of that sort of bourgeois individualism. Absolutely, Brett. I think that's a really important point.

You know, I think that we have been brainwashed somehow into thinking that the ravages, the institutionalized ravages of capitalism can be solved if we will only do a little bit more recycling and that it's a travesty and that it's also, you know, know, very detrimental to left politics. I mean, one of the things that's happened even over the last several decades is that so much energy that should be being geared towards profound social change has been siphoned away through, you know, through, and often actually through sort of NGOs, you know, where people are put into positions where they are working on one little small subject area and that somehow if we can improve this one thing, you know, be a little bit

more energy efficient or, you know, be a little bit, you know, kinder in terms of how many grants we give for home fuel aid, heating fuel aid, that somehow that's going to make a difference. And that's really been a shame. Absolutely. Well, let's move on to something that's in the news right now. and I know it's extremely important for a lot of leftists on our sister podcast, The Guillotine. We just did a whole episode talking about Afrin and the Turkish invasion of Rojava, and your father's work had a huge impact on what is now the Rojavan Revolution. Can you talk about what influenced Murray Bookchin had on the Rojavan Revolution? How are they implementing his

ideas? And what would your father think of the movement if he was alive to see it himself? Sure. I'm happy to talk about it. I think it's really one of the most important. important issues right now facing the world and especially because it is so interwoven with the overall kind of rise of what I'm sorry to say is some serious fascist tendencies all over, including in the United States. And as I'm sure most of your listeners know, it's really here in the midst of a terrible civil war, there's been this extraordinary moment of democracy, this project of democracy that is developed in that area called Rojava, which consists of primarily Kurdish, but also a variety of ethnicities living in these what they call three cantons. And by now there's been reports in a whole lot of venues ranging from the New Yorker in the New York Times to Rolling Stone about the fact

that a lot of the ideas that inspired the new form of social organization that they've been working on there, which is very directly democratic grassroots type of social organization and with a profound commitment to ecology and to women's rights and really the abolition of hierarchy in all its forms, that a lot of this has been adapted from my dad's ideas by the Kurdish leader, Abdullah Achan. A lot of my father's work was translated into Turkish and read by Achelon after his capture by Turkey in 1999. And it really changed his ideas. And as it that was filtered down through the various Kurdish leaders into the Kurdish population, really changed their ideas about what it means to create a revolution.

You know, Jalan is widely known as having been a Marxist Leninist, and he abandoned this whole idea of seizing state power in favor of using this municipalist approach, what I said earlier, you know, that my father called libertarian municipalism, which is going into every city in town in Bakur in the southeast part of Turkey, which is a largely Kurdish area, and electing people to local office and trying to. to re-empower people at the neighborhood level. And so those ideas were sort of already brewing just even before the Syrian War broke out. And when it did, they were kind of in place in a sense. They had been talking about these ideas, reading, discussing, and working on slowly even subterraneously building organization. It's like this in northern Syria and have put into place this remarkable system are really fabulous. I mean, I think perhaps in addition to what's going on in Chappas, Mexico with Zapatistas, it's really probably the most extraordinary sort of revolutionary projects in Spain in 1936 in the sense of its profound.

empowerment of people at the local level and and uh you know in terms of i mean you know and i i won't go into all the forms of organization how many but you know basically people just very quickly you know on the on the very local level people meet in their a certain number of families you know in each part of a neighborhood and then they send delegates and they discuss everything and they have commissions on every aspect of the economy and women and and, you know, all kinds of different aspects of education and they are making decisions about what they want, how they want their communities to be run, whether it's, you know, what hours there should be electric power available to, you know, what kinds of cooperatives should be authorized to do agricultural work or, you know, to the extent that they can, production. of goods and services and and I think it's just it's it's something so exciting and so important that that one of the things that is I mean I know that my father would have been just overwhelmed by the

dignity and the commitment shown by the people of Rojava um what's surprising to me is that the left in this country hasn't been more supportive or even the international left yeah and so I want you to touch on that in one second. I just want to make a couple points before we get into that because I think that's an important part to talk about and it doesn't get talked about enough. But you're talking about the Spanish Civil War and the revolutionary Catalonia in 1936.

The parallels between what's going on in Rojava right now and what went on back then are so amazingly sort of bright and brilliant. It's a fascinating sort of historical moment we're living through where you can go back and look at something that happened and then look right now, and a lot of those same dynamics are at play, it's happening in front of our eyes as we speak, and it's kind of sort of, I mean, it just kind of overwhelms me with the historical parallels there. I agree. I agree. And, you know, I think, you know, and one of the things that my father was concerned with and that he spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years of his life really working on was kind of analyzing. popular revolutions and trying to figure out kind of where mistakes were made and where and where, you know, things might have been, how things might have been different. And, you know, in Spain, 1936, we have a situation in which, you know, there was a point where the anarchists had really taken over so much of the countryside and had also been able to institute sort of,

of control of factories and there but there came a point where you know that power had to be sort of exercised by the leadership and it and it wasn't because the anarchists were concerned about you know about power relations and and ultimately as you know of course you know the movement was was crushed and I think that one of the things that is important is that I you know I would like there seems to be a idea somehow this enemy of my enemy is my friend, you know, and in this case the enemies of imperialist America being somehow more worthy of support than the Kurds who are fighting for their own sovereignty. I think it's incredibly that that is a narrow and defeatist way of interpreting what's going on

in Rojava, and I think it's incredibly important for the left to help the Kurds make good on this promise and that they could understand that they do have to have power over their communities and that for all sorts of reasons, you know, which we don't really have time to go into here, it was important for them to accept when they needed to accept air power support from the Americans where they would have lost the canton of Kobani to ISIS. And I'm just not sure, you know, what a principled rejection. of U.S. air power would have proven to the world if the entire project, Kurdish project, if self-rule were defeated.

So I think, you know, that that's an important issue, as you say, these sort of parallels and sort of trying to now hear, you know, all these decades later move forward in a way that will actually allow this revolutionary moment to survive and to take root. What bothers me the most about that argument that the Kurds should not have taken American air support is that a lot of this is coming from Western leftists sitting comfortably behind computer chairs talking about what they would do if they were in the situation when on the ground there not having that air support meant empirically more innocent Kurds are going to be slaughtered. And when you try to tell somebody halfway across the world how they should defend their people and their loved ones and their families and their children, and you have the arrogance to tell them not to support or take air support when they can get it. It just blows my mind. And the Kurds knew damn well that the U.S. was not their friend and that the moment it became inconvenient for them to be aligned with the Kurds.

They would drop the Kurds like a bad habit. So the Kurds never for a second were so invested in American help that they depended on it. They merely used it in the same way that the U.S. was using the Kurds. So that argument just really makes me angry. I think you're making an excellent point, Brett. I mean, first of all, shouldn't we defer to the wishes of the people on the ground in a situation like that? I mean, isn't it the height of Orientalism for us to sit back, as you said, in our armchairs and say what the Kurds should or shouldn't do when they're confronted with one of the most vile, murderous, sadistic forces to appear on the planet? You know, and now, as you pointed out about Afrin, now the attacks are being undertaken by Turkey and its mercenary army, which is killing and maiming hundreds of people, many of whom are women and children.

It's sort of shocking to me that people aren't up in arms about this. I mean, especially within the left. I mean, it's funny, you know, millions of people can be moved by seeing the totally devastating and awful. side of the tiny body of Alan Kurty, you know, when it washed up on a shore, a terrible casualty of the Civil War. And yet they're somehow unmoved by the violation of human rights of two million Kurds in Syria, who Turkey, and by the way, not just the Kurds, Syriacs, Turkmen, Arabs, you know, this is a very multi-ethnic society, and that, and as you know, the Kurds have gone out of their

way to ensure that people of all ethnicities are participating in democratic and federalism and that and that you know for example often a co-chair will be not only of any municipal authority will be not only a woman but a woman in an Arab or a woman in a Syriac so that the people can somehow not be moved by this violation of human rights and and not understand that you know, Turkey is this increasingly fascistic country wants to obliterate the Kurds because their self-rule is a threat to Turkish President Erdoganism, is really shocking to me. I mean, I personally have been working very hard on this issue, and I, and I, what I really wish is that the left would, you know, mount a campaign in support of Rojava.

I mean, and especially also the feminist left, you know, which is, which is, which is, which, which is, you know, of all people should be understanding the need to support women who are trying to emancipate themselves from centuries of domination in a patriarchal culture. Absolutely. And it's worth noting also NATO's complete and utter hypocrisy on this issue. If you go to NATO's website, Turkey is obviously a member of NATO, a U.S. ally, the second largest army in NATO. If you go to NATO's website, their About section says that they're dedicated to defending democracy. and preventing conflict. Meanwhile, they turn a blind eye to this illegal invasion of another

country by Turkey and the slaughter and mutilation and dismemberment of innocent human beings. I mean, we don't expect moral consistency from the West in groups like NATO, but it's just, it's worth pointing out just how rabidly hypocritical that this organization is. Well, I agree. And I mean, again, you know, I'm not a huge fan of classic electoral politics. I mean, I don't put much faith in my elected representatives, but I'd really think that actually having worked as somebody who worked on Capitol Hill, you know, during the three years that I worked for Sanders, I was down there a lot, would fly down with him every week. You know, I know that congressmen and women and senators do listen, surprisingly enough, if they get enough

feedback from their constituents, and especially phone calls for whatever reason. Letters don't make a big impact. But when people call on mass, when their constituents, their voters call, in other words, people who live in their districts, call in and complain about things, they listen or they start to listen. And it's one way to start to make change. I mean, this did happen with Kobani, as I'm sure you remember, you know, there was first this attitude that, oh, no, we're not going to intervene. There's nothing we can do. And there was such a public outcry that eventually the administration came in and started to help the Kurds. And what I wish is that, you know, even though generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of using

representative politics. In this case, I really wish people would pick up the phone and call their representatives and just demand and say that it's utter hypocrisy to turn our backs on the Kurds right now. I mean, for many reasons, not the least of which is that if people are worried about a resurgence of ISIS, you know, then you're really. certainly doing yourself a big disfavored, you know, by not supporting the one ground force that's actually been effective in fighting ISIS. But also, you know, this, as you said, this hypocrisy on the part of NATO, this whole line,

this latest line that they've been spouting that somehow the Kurds in Afrin are not the same as the other Kurds that they've been training, you know, that are part of the SDF. I mean, it's really, it's really shameful and somebody should hold their feet to the fire. And, you know, and by the way, if I may say something, as a member of the press corps or, I mean, as somebody who's a long time journalist, I would like to also just as an aside say, and I feel I can say this because I've spent so many years doing this kind of work, that there's, I think the press corps is very, very culpable in a lot of this. I mean, first of all, you know, there's already been a lot of discussion about the press with respect to Trump's election and, and how really bad, you know, the reporting was that, I mean, it's much better now. You know, you have the New York Times and the Washington Post being very diligent about fact-checking and that's commendable. But there's

still so much sloppy reporting. I mean, for example, you know, especially with respect to Rojava and here too I wish people would hold the feet to the fire of the press. You know, a New York Times reporter, and this is very typical just recently. Carlotta Gail, the Times reporter, used the word terrorist referring to the Kurds in one of her articles a full six times without ever giving them a chance to respond to that designation, which obviously comes right from Turkish President Erdogan's mouth. You know, she wrote an article in which it wasn't until the 17th paragraph of her story that she finally even quoted anyone from the Kurdish region. I don't understand how a story like that makes it past editors. But, you know, the fact is that over and over again, the press corps repeats the same storyline about the Kurds.

They say things like, and, you know, trying to fighting Turkey to have a separate state, when in fact it's very well documented that the Turkish and Syrian Kurds are not asking for. a separate state, that what they want is some measure of self-rule within existing borders. And so this kind of thing has been, personally, to me, very disturbing. Yeah, it's disgusting. And speaking, you mentioned Trump, so I do want to kind of move on to Murray Bookchin's legacy and kind of talk about what he might think of some things happening now. So what would your father have thought of Trump?

I wish he was around to write about him. And particularly of the resurgent, far-right-wing fascist movements that are emerging all over the West today? Well, it goes without saying that it would have been very disturbed about the sharp rise and fascistic rhetoric and activity, both in the U.S. and abroad. I think that he would have seen Trump much more as a symptom than a cause of this situation, you know, because his ascendance isn't an accident. It's really almost predictable as a product of neoliberal ideology,

an ideology that's really consigned the vast majority of the population now to poverty and misery. You know, that doesn't take away from the fact that Trump is essentially normalizing the transition to an explicitly authoritarian oligarchy that he's using language really normally reserved. for the most dictatorial regimes and making it seem acceptable. And I think that that's something that is actually very worrisome. I also think that, you know, he would have been upset in a way that all of this is happening, you know, in part sort of because of a failure of the left to offer a viable alternative, you know, which is to say to organize on the local level.

in such a way as to, we call it, headed off some of this collective craziness, this incredible despair, which is what we're seeing in the population that supports megalomaniacs like Trump and others, you know, around the world. What preoccupied Murray in the last years of his life was the question of why the left was refusing to do the basic work of organizing. You know, we hear a lot about intersectionality now, but for the last few decades, the hard work of transforming society, you know, which in his view meant creating a new politics on the local level, that really wasn't done and hasn't been done. And why the left could never kind of coalesce around this kind of a project or put its energy into this was for him. a nagging problem. You know, it's easy to go to demonstrations. It's easy to smash windows and think that you're smashing the state. But ultimately, you really have to do what, frankly, what the Republicans have been doing for the last four decades, you know, electing people to school boards going in and spreading their propaganda, talking about, you know, their vision of society.

And I think that, you know, it's a very dangerous time right now in a very serious time and that we all have to really rethink what kind of politics we're going to do. You know, I mean, you could go, there's so much to say about this. You know, you can lay a lot of the blame at the feet of Barack Obama. You know, people elected Barack Obama with this great hope, you know, this hope for a new world that he would. was going to create. And once again, it sort of shows that when you put your faith in representational politics, you often are disappointed. I think that a lot of what has happened

among the people who support Trump grows out of the fact that, you know, despite all the promise, Obama was, you know, continued the sort of same neoliberal policies. I mean, we never did. So many people were counting on him for health care, for a real true. true, not just Obamacare, but a real, you know, a system that wouldn't impoverish people, the middle class in particular, people who are ineligible for subsidies. And I think that there was a grave, grave betrayal of trust there, not surprising, but that a lot of those kinds of factors have led to the rise of Trump's popularity among, you know, a whole class of people. definitely and well as neoliberal late capitalism continues to intensify and as climate change continues to intensify how do you see your your father's legacy developing over time and what can leftist intellectuals and organizers of all stripes learn from bookchin in the in 2018 well um i would like to think that especially now with the resurgence of interest and as a work partly because of the

Kurdish autonomy movement, that his view of political and social organization would continue to take hold. You know, this most recent book of his essays that we just published the next revolution, Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy, really focuses on the question of organization. And I feel like in a lot of ways, it's almost like an essential manual right now for anybody. on the left who wants to think about how we can actually really create the institutions that will result in long-term social change.

You know, you see his influence and Murray's influence already in sort of aspects of the ultra-globalization movement and the whole process of, you know, affinity groups and those kinds of organization. And I think that that has kind of filtered down into what we're seeing called now like a new kind of municipalist politics. It's very exciting. And it varies obviously in degree in terms of its radicalism. But the point is that people are trying platforms like Barcelona and Camus in Barcelona and Operation Jackson, Mississippi. And, you know, examples that are really all around coming from all over the place all around the world are I think an exciting development so you know I would like to think that like in the immediate

future that that what people could take from from him is this passion for creating long-term change and it's not something that happens quickly and it's not as easy as you know just going out and holding a sign, but it's going into your community and really working with friends and forming affinity groups and studying and reading, reading books and reading, you know, and knowing history, but also then slowly engaging in the electoral process on the local level as a way of finally sort of forming a countervailing power to the nation state. I mean, in the long term, I would like to think that, you know, someday, people will really think of Murray's work and his project, you know, as comparable to some of the great social theorists in terms of the depth and breadth of his project, you know, in the sense of him really trying to trace the emergence of an unfolding natural dialectic that would help us reformulate how we think about nature and society so we can really finally address these.

underlying social issues that have resulted in such enormous ecological crises. So, I mean, that's what I would hope. And that's certainly what has motivated me to continue to try and spread his ideas and his work. Yeah, and one thing that we promote here on the show is the concept of building up dual power, of building up alternatives to this system inside the belly of the billy of the beast at the local level, getting involved in your community, feed the people programs. You can learn from a bunch of different leftist thinkers and traditions and pull from all of them. And I think Murray Bookchin and his life and his work are something that we should all pull from

and learn from and engage on that level of his work in our communities right now because it's so important and it is a long-term project. It's not going to be a glorious insurrectionary revolution tomorrow. It's going to take dedicated revolutionaries putting in the work. every day for a long time. Think 20 years out. Think 40 years out. Think about this as a generational struggle because that's what it is. Before we let you go, though, Debbie, can you maybe point listeners to where they can find some of your work and then maybe recommend a book or two of your fathers that somebody who's never read Bookchin before could use as a way to get into his ideas?

Sure, I'd be happy to. I mean, I'm not a big social media person, but I was finally convinced to open a Twitter account. So things that I write about or think are important, I tweet about, you know, at Debbie Bookchin. And so that's a great place to find updates also on Rojava and articles that I'm either working on or projects that are going to be coming up soon. One project that I'm excited about is that we're finally going to get a website up really dedicated completely to his to his work and his legacy and i will you know would urge people to

maybe check in three or so weeks for that it would be under murray bookchin dot org i i also would urge people to i've considered who are interested in rojava to check out the region dot org which has and roar magazine which both of which have all kinds of important and thoughtful pieces on democracy and the Kurds and social ecology in particular and also the work of eleanor finley who's another person to keep an eye on she's an anthropologist who has a deep knowledge of social ecology and she publishes in roar magazine as well which is also of course online. I mean, if I were going to recommend some books, I would say, I know, I know, Brett, that you have a lot of millennial listeners, and I know it's hard to recommend one single

book of my dad's, but for millennials, in some ways, I think one of his earliest books called Post Scarcity Anarchism is really a fabulous book, because as I said earlier, I think, somebody for a millennial, you know, it's very hard in this terrible and mind-numbing, body-numbing and spirit-crushing society to imagine that there once was, you know, a vision of a profoundly different future that really blossomed in the 60s. And the essays in this book and post-scarcity anarchism are very much a product of the era in which it was written. and that gives a real sense of the liberatory possibility, you know, inherent in social change in human society. So that's one book that I would recommend. I think that, you know, I mentioned the Next Revolution, which I think is a great book of essays that really explains why organization is incredibly important and sort of, you know, addresses some of his, difference with why he sort of moved on, let's say, beyond anarchism and Marxism.

And I think finally, I guess if I had to pick one book of my dad said, if I can only take one to a desert island, it would be the ecology of freedom, which is a book that's denser than the others, but it's really his magnum opus. He examines the emergence of hierarchy and argues that alongside the legacy of domination has always been a legacy of freedom. And that book is a beautiful and eloquent book that also reads in parts very poetically. I'd also recommend Andy Price's fabulous book called Recovering Bookchin, Social Ecology and the Crises of Our Time. it's a it's for people who are interested in that whole question of you know his debate with the deep colleges or an anarchist it's it's got a lot of um very very very uh salient sort of

critique in it and and it's also serves in a way as a nice introduction to his thought well debby there's nobody better to carry on the torch of murray bookchin than you you're doing excellent work it's an absolute honor to have you on this program. We thank you so much for coming on and for sharing all your wisdom and all your knowledge and all your life experiences about your father and then also you continuing his work and your own work. So thank you so much for coming on. It's been an honor to talk to you. Well, Brett, thank you for those incredibly kind comments and thank you for the pleasure of getting to talk with you as well. I appreciate it. It's been a pleasure for me too.

Thanks for all your hard work week after week with your wonderful show. Absolutely. We'll keep up the good work, Debbie. Let's keep in touch. Yeah, now. Now, it's the opening salvo. We're post-scoped of people like Muhammad and Malvo. A sample of the battle, we waged it against an animal made to snuff us out like the wick of a candle. And all the youth dressed in camo, been ready to handle. And no, this war was not scripted.

Can't change the channel. We can't cancel in all subscriptions. This is the last issue. When the casket clothes, can't take the cash with you. No post-mortem residuals. We individuals who, indivisible, become the most invincible, but that is not the issue of hand. We demand a simple right to question y'all people, where the fuck is freedom at? It's all we ask, but instead we get our asses assassinated fast.

If they got you talking trashed, if the first shall be laughed, it's time to repair. Black clouds, Scott falling, put a hand in the air. Yeah, my people building monuments to weather the flood. I'm a leave how I came screaming covered in blood. Died once, born twice, both times we knuckled up. Alongside the people we gonna struggle with love And my people building monuments to weather the flood I'm a leave how I came screaming covered in blood

Died once, born twice, both times we knuckled up Alongside of people we gonna struggle with love So struggle with love Struggle with love Now this here's for those who choose fights Whose fruits might never not ripen until after they life It's not right how they barter our leaders And target our children

Disrespect of sisters and wonder why we militant Beaks to my third world equivalent Even if I can't fight beside you I write what I can to get our famine Of the lands to understand your pain Because your beef is mine and we wanted the same And I know about this privilege But if you're from where I'm from

Then you know what bigger burden comes with it And that's what I carry when you see me on a hustle I'm talking as a walking document of our struggle Causeamas hold me down And remember that I love you with a Johnny Hold your head up if they ever take me from you And please tell him that I try Don't cry because no matter where you are

A struggle's nearby And my people build the monuments to weather the flood I'm a leave how I came screaming covered in blood Died once, born twice both times we knuckled up Alongside of people we don't struggle with love And my people building monuments to weather the flood I'ma leave how I came screaming covered in blood Died once born twice both times we knuckled up

Alongside of people we gonna struggle with love So struggle with love Struggle with love Right now I want to thank God for being me. My soul won't rest until the colony is free. 1896 revolution incomplete. Silence is defeat. My solution is to speak.

Reserect the legacy of martyrs I've a siege. Time to choose a side is the mighty verse to meek. My big brother Free brought the word from the east. Where the bullet in the middle of the belly of the beast. Thank you.