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Victor Alkana – Giving the gift of genealogy to the Sephardic community
Originally published on the Seattle Sephardic Network Blog
Sadly, Victor Alkana passed away on May 4, 2023. Ke su alma repose en Gan Eden.
Dora Aboulafia Lipper, a first-generation Sephardic American, yearned to know more about her family history. After Dora moved to Seattle, a man named Victor Alkana commented on her post in the Sephardic Seattle Network Facebook group and offered to help Dora expand her family tree. Dora’s mother had two uncles, both named David Cohen, who she had heard may have died in the Shoah, but her family wasn’t sure what had happened to them. “[Victor] was able to tell us that they had been in Auschwitz and when they died. You would think that David Cohen would be like looking for a John Smith, but he was somehow able to trace it,” said Lipper. It’s been a gift for us that we now have these yahrzeit dates for these parts of the family that were completely wiped out and there was nobody saying Kaddish; now we are able to do that, which means a lot to us.”
Victor Alkana is a 74-year-old Sephardic Jewish man living alone in rural Texas. This self-taught genealogist is responsible for compiling one of the largest known genealogical trees of the Sephardic community (Jewish diaspora from the Spanish Inquisition), a database that spans more than 273,000 people. The sheer volume of information represents a powerful tool for connecting contemporary Sephardim like Lipper and their ancestors.
Alkana’s genealogical database is his life’s work, his “reason to keep living,” and it all started with a pit stop in Salt Lake City he took during a road trip with his ex-wife. The couple decided to stop at the Mormon Temple’s library and discovered her family tree in the archives. Immediately fascinated by the process of putting together the historical puzzle pieces of his wife’s family tree, Alkana succeeded in tracing her family tree back to 18th century Virginia. He has been hooked on genealogy ever since.
Alkana is a second-generation Rhodesli, someone who traces their roots to the Sephardic community of the Island of Rhodes, formerly part of the Ottoman Empire. His genealogical project was sparked by an email he received in 1997 from a Greek man, Petros, saying that his wife’s great-great grandmother was Sarah Alkana, and he wanted to know if they were related. Because Alkana did not know whether they were related, he and Petros started working together on their family trees. They connected with about 20 other people of Rhodesli ancestry, mutually sharing information with the goal of helping each other expand their family trees. After six months of genealogical research, Alkana was finally able to discover that Sarah was in fact a relative of his. Eventually, Petros lost interest in the project, but for Alkana, it sparked an obsession with the subject of genealogy. He collected all their trees and started to weave them together. He noticed that he was able to see genealogical connections that others could not. This insight was the catalyst for him to collect more and more, building a database spanning all Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire, as well as Romaniote, Mizrahi and Persian Jewish populations. Twenty-five years later, Alkana has helped thousands of people discover their family trees and engages people with his work through numerous Facebook groups that he has started and belongs to.
Genealogical research has proved to be Alkana’s greatest link to his own Sephardic identity. Growing up in the 1950s in the suburbs of Los Angeles, the Alkanas were one of the few Jewish families in the neighborhood and the only Sephardic family around. Alkana always knew he was Rhodesli and was proud of his heritage, but his family had a tenuous connection to their Judaism. His Sephardic father, Samuel Alkana, came from what Alkana describes as a “dysfunctional” family and was raised in a Jewish orphanage in Brooklyn. His father, an atheist, grew to be resentful of his religious upbringing and cared little for instilling Judaism in his own children. His mother Jennie Salfati Alkana, also Sephardic, desperately wanted her sons to be bar mitzvah and eventually wore down her husband’s reluctance to pay for lessons. Victor Alkana and his brother started learning Hebrew in preparation but didn’t get very far.
“One day my dad, who already didn’t really want to spend the money on it, came to pick [my brother and I] up. Well, the elders at the temple were playing poker. My dad, as religious as he was, says ‘THIS IS SACRILEDGE!! My kids aren’t gonna go to this synagogue!!!’” Alkana recalls. “Whatever. So, he yanked us out. I saw through it. At my young age, I could tell my dad was B.S. He just didn’t want to pay for it, and he used that excuse. And my poor mother, she just threw up her hands and gave up. So, we never got our bar mitzvahs.”
As a result, Alkana experienced his Judaism mainly through Passover seders at his aunt’s house each year. The ritual meal was peppered with Sephardic foods, and a few scattered Ladino words and phrases. As a student at Long Beach City College, Alkana yearned for a deeper connection with his Jewish identity, going so far as to apply to rabbinical school. When they discovered he had not even had his bar mitzvah, they laughed in his face and turned him away, he said.
Despite being deprived of the formal Jewish education he had always wanted, Alkana found a way to learn about his culture through the process of documenting, researching, and preserving Sephardic genealogical history. “I learned very quickly that our elders were passing so it was important to get their information before they were gone. Genealogy [requires] a paper trail for everything,” he said. But there weren’t paper trails; He found that the records he needed were hard to come by. This led him to take an approach of combining traditional research methods, such as census data, and the oral history of Sephardim. If a conflict exists between verbal testimony and the paper record, Alkana defers to the record.
The urgency of his mission to record our oral history while the people who have the knowledge still live “keeps me going,” he said. Since he was a little boy, Alkana has always loved helping people and he takes pride in the moments when his genealogy successfully connects someone – like Dora Lipper – to a deeper understanding of their family history.
In addition to the historical significance of genealogy and his desire to help others, Alkana is motivated to continue his work by his simple love of research and problem solving. Having worked as a computer programmer from 1974 to 1999, he has the computer literacy necessary to build a database of such massive proportions. He always loved doing complicated jigsaw puzzles, and as he puts it, “genealogy is the best jigsaw puzzle in the world.”
One of Alkana’s best success stories comes from Jane Belmont, who reached out to him because she had been unable to trace her Belmont lineage after more than 35 years of futile effort. Alkana was able to solve the puzzle in two short hours, which he said, “felt great.”
Due to health problems, Alkana doesn’t sleep much anymore and in the middle of the night he will wake up with the solution to some genealogical problem. The work keeps him alive. He finds that the more he does it, the easier it is for him to keep going.
People and groups have reached out to Alkana for his data. But he is skeptical of their motivations, voicing concerns over whether they want to sell people’s data for profit. When he is no longer able to work on genealogy, his cousin Brian Mendelson will take over the database and the Facebook groups.
Alkana would rather help others than be helped. But in his recent time of need, the Sephardic community came to his aid. After being evicted from his Los Angeles apartment in 2012, he moved in with a friend in Portland, Ore. After 10 years of living together he determined it was time to find another living situation. Ultimately, he asked his genealogy Facebook group for help. He eventually connected with a woman from Dallas was able to find him a place in Lubbock, Texas, where he has now been living for almost a year. Another member of Alkana’s Facebook group started a still-active GoFundMe campaign, which raised $13,000, enough to cover his expenses to move to Texas, set up his new house, and buy a new computer. Although inflation is taking its toll, and the cost of living is going up, Alkana can now say that he has what he needs. Although living in Texas is not ideal, he said he’s getting used to it day by day and enjoys the warm weather. Occasionally, Alkana needs help with the time-consuming work of transcribing, and those willing to help can reach out to him through Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Panamahat.
Victor Alkana is a man who laughs often, cares deeply about helping people, and has contributed an invaluable archive to the Sephardic community. As Lipper said, “what he does is a real gift. He spends hours and hours of his life doing this for no gain, just the joy of doing this for people.” For us, the children of multiple diasporas, Alkana’s legacy illuminates the importance of forging meaningful connections with the history and culture of our ancestors in whatever way brings joy.
[Vida Behar is a freelance writer, artist, and illustrator based in Seattle, Wash. Reach her at vidabehar@gmail.com. View her writing portfolio at https://vidabehar.wordpress.com.]
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Constructing the U.S. Narrative Around Protests in Haiti
May 11th, 2021:
America’s ongoing neocolonialist involvement in Haitian politics is an attack on democracy in Haiti, which also has the reflexive effect of hollowing out democratic norms in the U.S. It is something that the people of neither country have consented to. If Haitian democratic norms are merely instrumental in the eyes of the American ruling class, then this diseased logic inevitability spreads to their view of the U.S. as well. This infectious reciprocity is a form of what Aimé Césaire terms “the boomerang effect of colonization” (p. 41). The dogma of America being a democratic country whose international involvement is pursued in the name of spreading democracy is one of the core ideologies that Americans have been indoctrinated with since elementary education, but the government’s lack of commitment to democracy in Haiti reveals the lack of normative regard they have for democracy as such. In order for America to continue to undermine the sovereignty of Haiti while propping up the myth of democracy at home where voters have no real say in foreign policy, the real causes of the ongoing protests in Haiti must be obscured and omitted from the public discourse.
We often hear Haiti described as “the poorest country in the world,” but why is Haiti so poor? This can be answered with another question—why is the U.S. so wealthy? The U.S. never forgave Haiti for being the first nation to free themselves of slavery, and since then has waged a spiritual vendetta against the nation to undermine its sovereignty, degrade its people, and insult its culture, pursuing an imperialist agenda with a distinctly sadistic edge. To briefly summarize the 20th century history between US and Haiti, in 1914, the U.S. Marines raided Haiti and stole their gold reserve. From 1915 Haiti was under U.S. military occupation until armed resistance in 1921 and later popular opposition with the formation of the Haitian Communist party forced them to withdraw in 1934. The U.S. continued to provide military aid to despotic rulers and organize multiple coups at various points throughout the 20th century (Dunkel, 2015) In 2004, in a coup d’état backed by the U.S., France, and Canada, democratically elected President Aristede was kidnapped by the U.S. Marines (Laurent, 2014) and since then Haiti has been under a brutal multinational military occupation by the UN army, whose awful crimes are too numerous to list in this essay (Pierre, 2015). In conjunction with the second military occupation of Haiti, this coup established the CORE group, composed of white representatives from the UN, U.S., and France, among other countries, as the self-appointed determiners of Haitian politics whose aims are carried out by puppets such as Moïse (Pierre, 2021). Moïse refusing to step down after his term ended on February 7, 2021, in violation of the Haitian constitution, sparked the most recent wave of anti-imperialist protests starting in January (Dilawar & Ives, 2021).
My effort to trace the official narrative about Haiti’s ongoing protests starts with statements made by the U.S. Embassy in Haiti on the election of President Moïse and his meeting with Pence in 2017. “The Vice President congratulated President Moïse for his election earlier this year, and recognized Haiti for filling key government leadership positions. The two leaders stressed the importance of pursuing an economic reform agenda to attract investment and generate growth” (2017). This implies that the approval of the US is contingent on the Moïse’s continued submission to the neoliberal economic policies that are being repackaged as “economic reform.” The language of “common commitment” and “mutual interest,” falsely presents these leaders as being on equal footing. In reality, the threat of another coup is always implied, so working towards “mutual interest” really means the U.S.’s interest. The U.S. funneled $30 million into Haiti’s 2015 elections in what has been called an “electoral coup” (James & Lopes, 2015). Voter turnout was at just 18%, and 23% of votes were never counted (Moran & Shahshahani, 2015). A special electoral commission in Haiti recommended holding a new vote due to their finding that the number of untraceable votes almost exceeded the number of legitimate votes (Oduor, 2016). In this context, “congratulated” and “election” are a mendacious choice of words. What is left unsaid is just as, if not more, important than what information is actually presented.
On February 15th 2019, in the wake of widespread protests, the embassy stated “Since February 7, the Haitian people have suffered increasing violence, resulting in the death of innocent civilians and the destruction of public and private property. The United States Government urges all […] to express themselves peacefully. Violence leads to further instability and suffering for the Haitian people. We commend the Haitian National Police [HNP] […]” (2019). This statement omits both why people are protesting and who is perpetrating violence against them. The use of the passive voice obscures who is responsible for the violence. If the perpetrators were to be named, it would be clear that the U.S. is backing many of them, directly or indirectly. The threatening tone comes through in how the writer commends the police and warns of continued violence against innocent citizens should the protests continue, while also implying that the protestors are to blame for the police violence they face. By syntactically grouping property destruction with death of innocent civilians, the writer reveals the age-old conflation of property destruction as a form of violence, a logic that only makes sense in terms of the capitalist valuation of private property above life. In fact, the State Department is doing much more for the HNP than “commending”—in 2019, the State Department funneled $12.4 million into the HNP, including the provision of riot gear and tear gas, a sum making up 10% of their annual budget (Johnston, 2020). Based on these statements, the US Embassy’s rhetorical playbook consists of heavy use of the passive voice to avoid naming the perpetrators of violence, victim blaming, omission of key historical context, and language such as “congratulate” and “commend” as a veil for providing concrete material support.
The scope of this table is the leading mainstream print media news sources in the U.S. based on a list of the top 10 national media corporations with the largest audiences, in descending order (Business Insider, 2012). The only sources from this list that were not included were NPR, Cox Media group, and Hearst Corporation because the first two do radio and TV, which is outside the scope of my research and the latter does not own any national news outlets. In their place I chose Bloomberg and the New York Times because of their perceived journalistic integrity and also because they both donated to the Clinton Foundation (Gerstein, Parti, Gold, & Bryers, 2015).
The Clintons have a long history of neocolonial involvement in Haiti, including using the Clinton Foundation’s Haiti recovery fund to build sweatshops (Robinson, 2016), and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State facilitating the 2010 ‘silent coup’ through massive election fraud (Moran & Shahshahani, 2015). Although directly unverifiable, donating to the Clinton foundation gives the appearance of a potential pro-Clinton bias.
The key similarity between the U.S. press and the U.S. Embassy is their commitment to ignore the reality that the U.S. has been deciding Haitian elections for over a decade and that Haiti is a country under military occupation. The singular exception was in the ABC article, which stated that Biden wanted elections sooner than currently scheduled, a piece of information whose relevance is inexplicable without understanding Moïse as a puppet to U.S. interests. Thus, the approval of the U.S. is depicted as both supremely important to the success of Moïse’s regime while the reason why the U.S.’s approval is so important is nowhere to be found. The Embassy made zero mention of the fact that Haitians are angry at the U.S., and while two out of ten articles do acknowledge this, only CNN provides an explanation- simply for “supporting Moïse” (Hu, 2021). While the media occasionally affirms America’s support of Moïse, they obscure what form it truly takes. As far as the uniformed reader knows, this support is merely diplomatic. In reality, the word “support,” like the language of “commend” and “congratulate” used by the Embassy, acts as a euphemism for direct intervention.
In a notable departure from the Embassy playbook, all seven outlets with recent coverage mentioned the opposition gave explanation as to why people are protesting. Six out of seven identify Moïse’s term limit as the cause of protests, which is true in one sense, and disingenuous in another. Since September 2019, protests have been aimed at getting the CORE group and the U.S. out of Haiti in addition to demanding Moïse’s resignation. The protests are distinctly anti-imperialist in their goals (Dexter, 2019). Moïse’s term limit is important, but also is at the tip of the iceberg of the salient political background— Haitian protestors are well aware that Moïse’s presidency would not have been possible without foreign intervention. Most articles divert from the Embassy by specifying a perpetrator of violence, namely gangs, but like the Embassy all of them except the New York Times use the passive voice. This sterilizing tone downplays human suffering and questions of agency, emotionally distancing the reader from the content of the piece.
Bloomberg was the only publication that did not center the term limit contention—it was mentioned towards the end of the article but the headline simply states that protestors want Moïse to “cancel election and quit” (Wyss, 2021). The article heavily relies on a conversation with Haiti’s Election Minister, Mathias Pierre, the only source quoted throughout. According to Pierre, the protestors do not understand democracy and want to bypass the electoral process. Bloomberg uncritically echoes Pierre’s stance that “the protests have less to do with popular discontent than opposition leaders trying to destabilize the government and seize power that they could never win at the ballot box,” thus portraying the protestors as manipulated by the power-hungry opposition. CNN does a similar maneuver by quoting Moïse saying that protestors are ”a minority of people” without providing any further information (Hu, 2021). In reality, the protestors represent a broad range of people—youth, students, doctors, the handicapped, human rights lawyers (The Barbados Advocate, 2021), medical workers who were on strike in March (Dunkel, 2021), and school teachers who were on a national strike in April (People’s Dispatch, 2021). Bloomberg and CNN’s one-sided reporting through the use of biased quotations without any fact-checking faithfully reproduces the U.S. Embassy’s version of events.
These journalists are just as responsible as America’s ruling class for Haiti’s oppression. Whether reporters are acting in good or bad faith is irrelevant—regardless, they operate as defenders of neocolonial exploitation and are guilty of bamboozling the American people of the true crimes of the U.S. Empire. Controlling the public perception of U.S. involvement in Haiti is just as essential to maintaining the state’s grasp on power as direct involvement because without manufacturing the consent of Americans, the government has no means to perpetuate itself besides violent repression which is a fundamentally unsustainable mode of control.
As of June 1 2021, Joe Biden is picking up right where Trump left off by standing behind Moïse (Germain, 2021) despite his nominal support for BLM. Democrat or Republican, American imperialist foreign policy in Haiti and across the globe has remained the same from one administration to the next, aided and abetted by the corporate media. From the fact that America has no issue overturning democratically elected leaders in other countries it follows that those in power have no issue manipulating the outcomes of their own so-called “democratic” institutions. How can Americans participate in their own government if they are kept in the dark about what their government is doing with their tax dollars but without their consent?
Works Cited
The Associated Press. (2021, January 20). Hundreds in Haiti protest to demand leader’s resignation. ABC News. Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/hundreds-haiti-protest-demand-leaders-resignation-75387503
Business Insider. (2012, November 19). The 10 Media Companies That Control America’s News. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/10-companies-that-control-americas-news-2012-11
Césaire, A. (2000). Discourse on Colonialism (1376937845 1006179156 J. Pinkham, Trans.). Monthly Review Press.
Charles, J. (2021, March 28). Haitians march in favor of constitution as it turns 34 and president seeks overhaul. Miami Herald. Retrieved from https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article250270690.html
Dexter, J. (2019, November 18). Haiti protesters take aim at imperialism. Retrieved from https://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/americas/haiti/5736-haiti-protests-escalate-in-the-face-of-state-repression
Dilawar, A. (2021, March 5). Haiti’s Massive Protests Are a Repudiation of Authoritarianism and US Intervention: An Interview with Kim Ives. Jacobin Magazine. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/03/haiti-protests-us-intervention-jovenel-moise
Dunkel, G. (2015, August 3). Haitians remember U.S. invasion of 1915. Retrieved from https://www.workers.org/2015/08/21241/
Dunkel, G. (2021, March 11). Haiti protests: ‘Moïse, U.S., UN out!’ Retrieved from https://www.workers.org/2021/03/54989/
Germain, Atahabih. (2021, June 1) Biden Administration Extends Relief for Haitian Immigrants After Backlash Over Deportations. The Atlanta Black Star. Retrieved from https://atlantablackstar.com/2021/06/01/biden-administration-extends-relief-for-haitian-immigrants-after-backlash-over-deportations/
Gerstein, J., Parti, T., Gold, H., & Byers, D. (2015, May 15). Clinton Foundation donors include dozens of media organizations, individuals. Politico. Retrieved from https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/clinton-foundation-donors-include-dozens-of-media-organizations-individuals-207228
People’s Dispatch. Haiti: Teachers and students protest against increasing violence and insecurity in Moïse regime. (2021, April 22). Retrieved from https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/04/22/haiti-teachers-students-protest-violence-moise/
Haiti’s doctors, lawyers join pro-democracy, anti-kidnapping protest. (2021, March 9). The Barbados Advocate, p. 12.
Hu, C. (2021, February 21). Protests in Haiti as political standoff continues. CNN. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/21/americas/haiti-protests-continue-intl/index.html
Isaac, H., Paultre, A., & Abi-Habib, M. (2021, February 7). Haiti Braces for Unrest as a Defiant President Refuses to Step Down. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/world/americas/haiti-protests-President-Jovenel-Mois.html?searchResultPosition=1
James, S., & Lopez, N. (2015, December 14). Haiti: Massive electoral fraud ignored. Retrieved from https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/haiti-massive-electoral-fraud-ignored/
Johnston, J. (2020, August 31). State Department Awarded Contract to Politically Connected Security Firm [Scholarly project]. In Center for Economic and Policy Research. Retrieved from https://cepr.net/state-department-awarded-contract-to-politically-connected-security-firm/
Laurent, M. (2014, February 12). Haiti, Ten Years Ago: US-France-Canada Coup d’Etat: “Aristide Forced on a Plane, at Gunpoint” (Rep.). Retrieved https://www.globalresearch.ca/haiti-ten-years-ago-us-france-canada-coup-detat-aristide-forced-on-a-plane-at-gunpoint/5368274
Moran, K., & Shahshahani, A. (2015, October 13). Haiti: US interference wins elections. The Hill, Retrieved from https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/256679-haiti-us-interference-wins-elections
Oduor, M. (2016, May 31). Haiti’s special electoral body cite fraud in 2015 presidential tallies. Africa News. Retrieved from https:/www.africanews.com/2016/05/31/haiti-s-special-electoral-body-cite-fraud-in-2015-presidential-tallies/
Pierre, J. (2015, August 4). Haiti: The Second Occupation. Retrieved from https://thepublicarchive.com/?p=4639
Pierre, J. (2021, February 17). Haiti: Black Despots and White Rulers. Retrieved from https://blackagendareport.com/haiti-black-despots-and-white-rulers
Quran, L. (2019, December 5). Why Haitians say they won’t stop protesting. PBS News. Retrieved from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/why-haitians-say-they-wont-stop-protesting
Robinson, N. (2016, November 16). What the Clintons did to Haiti. Retrieved from https://blackagendareport.com/what_clintons_did_to_haiti
Sanon, E., & Coto, D. (2021, January 15). Haiti braces for unrest as opposition demands new president. CBS. Retrieved from https://www.cbs17.com/news/haiti-braces-for-unrest-as-opposition-demands-new-president/
Sanon, E., & Coto, D. (2021, January 14). Haiti braces for unrest as opposition demands new president. Fox News. Retrieved from https://www.fox44news.com/news/national-world-news/haiti-braces-for-unrest-as-opposition-demands-new-president/
Sheerin, J. (2016, November 2). US election 2016: What really happened with the Clintons in Haiti? BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37826098
U.S. Embassy in Haiti, U.S. Department of State. (2017, June 16). The Vice President’s Meeting with President Moïse of Haiti [Press release]. Retrieved from https://ht.usembassy.gov/vice-presidents-meeting-president-moise-haiti/
U.S. Embassy in Haiti, U.S. Department of State. (2019, February 15). U.S. Embassy Statement on Haiti [Press release]. Retrieved from https://ht.usembassy.gov/u-s-embassy-statement-on-haiti/?_ga=2.247679239.1687703082.1619473530-571053131.1618366515
Wyss, J. (2021, March 31). Haiti’s Leader Defies Protesters’ Calls to Cancel Election and Quit. Bloomberg. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-31/haiti-leader-defies-protester-calls-to-cancel-election-and-quit
Wyss, J. (2021, February 15). Haiti’s Power Struggle Raises Fear of Dictatorship. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/haitis-power-struggle-raises-fear-of-dictatorship/2021/02/12/6d71d7b0-6cf3-11eb-a66e-e27046e9e898_story.html
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Sleepy in Seattle
Coffee Prices on the Rise
February 25, 2022
Surely you’ve noticed that getting a drink at your average Seattle coffee shop these days will set you back at least $7 with tip. In 2022, the steeply rising price of Arabica coffee is now matching up with dizzying, mountainous altitudes at which the beans grow. Coffee was never cheap for American consumers, but for some it now seems like a ridiculous luxury to indulge in. For reference, Starbucks has increased its prices twice since October, and is planning to do so again this year. Global food prices reached a ten-year height by the end of 2021, but during a year of record-breaking inflation, the price of coffee has increased more than any other commodity worldwide—U.S. coffee futures are up more than 82%. Current affairs in the financial world, such as changes in the stock market, often feel irrelevant to the average working person except in times of crisis—the rising profit margins of mega-corporations typically have little tangible impact in their lives. For the first time in decades, this is no longer the case.
The sharply inflated price of one beloved commodity is an expression of the everyday Seattleites’ now palpable experience with the global issue of inflation. In the midst of a global price hike, Seattle stands out as suffering from an exceptionally bloated market. Inflation has risen internationally, and the United States is among the most affected countries. Our nation is now experiencing the highest inflation rate seen since 1981. In a city known for its penchant for a morning latte, the rising cost of such commodities is among the most extreme in the nation, surpassed only by Atlanta. According to the Consumer Price Index (CPE), which measures price changes over time, Seattle’s inflation rate has soared to 7.6%, compared to a 7% increase nationally. People are getting tired, and its not just because they can no longer afford their morning cup of joe. The end result of these economic changes is squeezing people between an increase in the cost of living and insufficient wages, which despite some marginal increases are nevertheless lower in Seattle than other metros and are miserably failing to keep up with inflation.
Trying to grapple with a complex, abstract concept like inflation can make it feel like your head is inflating with so much jargon that it might explode. By answering the specific question of what is driving the inflation of coffee prices, hopefully the bigger picture will become clearer. Inflation can be defined as the depreciation of currency, occurring when the amount of money in circulation outruns the availability of goods and services. Brazil, the world’s foremost coffee producer, experienced the worst drought in almost a century as well as extremely uncommon frosts, which severely impacted the coffee yield for 2021. In addition to the ravages of climate change, the coffee trade was hindered by a shortage of shipping containers and increased gas prices. In response to this supply shock came cost-push inflation, which is when producers raise prices and produce less due to increased costs of wages, production, or raw materials. In response to the coffee deficit, companies over-bought leading to demand-pull inflation, a term which refers to when sellers view their product as more valuable and raise prices due to the amount of money in circulation surpassing the availability of goods.
Zooming out from the example of coffee, supply chain issues and labor shortages have generally been key causes leading to the mismatch between availability of goods and the amount of money in circulation. The other major cause of inflation is economic stimulus, when central banks like the Federal Reserve inject too much money into the economy and cut interest rates. The hope of such a strategy is that the extra capital is used to increase productive capacities, but humans are unpredictable and what actually happened is that these policies upset the delicate balance between money in circulation and the availability of goods and services. This is a preliminary explanation of course- the causes of inflation are hotly debated even among experts in economics. Despite previous repeated assurances from the Federal Reserve that the current wave of inflation is merely “transitory,” as of February 25 the Fed has now accepted that prices show no sign of a return to normal. In the midst of all this madness perhaps instant coffee will be making a comeback, much to the horror of Seattle coffee snobs, or even more horrifying, people will be drinking Chicory en masse.
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Treatise I, §13
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
The slave revolt in morality arose from the ressentiment of the downtrodden caste, a bitterness and hatred from being denied true vengeance through deed. This ressentiment “becomes creative and gives birth to values,”[1] taking an illusory retribution on the noble oppressors by reversing their values—thus its movement is primarily reactive, its values defined in relation to the external enemy.[2] In §13 Nietzsche turns to the problematic origin of “good” as devised by “the man of ressentiment.” Ressentiment capitalizes on ‘free will’ as a justification for holding the strong morally responsible for their maltreatment, and subsequently as the basis for the slave’s construction of “good,” lauding humility, submission, and meekness as a choice made by those who are truly virtuous. In his critique of slave morality, Nietzsche drills down into its fundamental metaphysical error: the imaginary distinction between act and actor, and the subsequent fabrication of ‘free will’ as the causa sui of action. This deep-rooted assumption has grown out of the soil of language itself.
Nietzsche attacks the very concept of the “self” in slave morality through an allegorical metaphor in which a flock of lambsis being hunted and killed off by birds of prey flying overhead. The lambs feel anger toward the birds of prey that swoop down and eat them up. In their frustration, they construe the birds of prey as “evil,” while anyone who is least like a bird of prey is commended as “good.” Nietzsche holds that there is nothing inherently wrong in this valuation—what is absurd is for the lambs to resent the “great birds of prey” for devouring the lambs at all. This “ought” implies “can,” an attempt by the lamb to hold the bird of prey morally responsible for its predation. This is essentially a “demand of strength that it not express itself as strength, that it not be a desire to overwhelm, a desire to cast down, a desire to become lord […] [which] is just as nonsensical as to demand of weakness that it express itself as strength.” Nietzsche writes “to demand of strength,” not “to demand of the bird of prey”—this wording pinpoints the fundamental error of the sheep; they understand the bird of prey as an entity metaphysically distinct from its predation. Rather, the bird of prey is nothing but its rapacious drives, desires and effects; it has an internal teleology that makes its ‘doing’ coequal with its ‘being.’ To demand the bird of prey divorce itself from its rapacity is equivalent to annulling its very existence. This is not because it has no free will- rather, there is no bird of prey independent of its will.
Nietzsche points to the “seduction of language” as the source of the lamb’s erroneous belief that the bird of prey could choose to negate its rapacity. The grammatical contingency between subject and predicate has “petrified” the unfounded belief that all effects are conditioned on an effecting subject, thus grounding the fiction of a monolithic self that is the sole and necessary source of action. This linguistic structure is essential to the formation of slave morality; in order to attribute sin or virtue, it is necessary to be able to point to a unified subject that is the sole cause of the effect it produces. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche elaborates on the dangers of the unsubstantiated portrayal of the soul as a monad.[3] Rather, the body closer resembles a “society of souls,” writhing mass of competing drives and desires. What we experience as “free will” is actually an internal battle of commanding and obeying; one merely identifies with the winner and says that “I” willed X, thus glossing over the fundamental plurality of this process.[4]
Thus, Nietzsche rejects the concept of “subject” completely, instead characterizing the bird’s strength as a “quantum of power” amassed from an ever-flowing stream of drives, wills, and effects, that is precisely ”nothing other than this very driving, willing and effecting,” Nietzsche’s oscillation between verbs and nouns to describe the same phenomena indicates that neither form provides a sufficient account by itself. Forced to squeeze his pluralistic account of power into discrete units of nouns and verbs, writing within the very grammatical structures he critiques, Nietzsche has to fight with language itself in order to get his point across. This is exactly why the metaphor is so integral to Nietzsche’s literary technique: it allows him to figuratively evoke his philosophical account rather than bastardize his thoughts with explicit language that inevitably sterilizes and flattens.
The grammatical and subsequent moral isolation of the subject from its predicate effect lays the groundwork for the next logical abomination[5] seized upon by slave morality: cause and effect. Nietzsche illustrates the perceived causal relationship between the actor and act through the metaphor of a lighting strike. To the common people, the lightning is the doer which effects the flash, its doing. To Nietzsche, this distinction artificially imposes the concept of cause/doer and effect/doing onto a phenomenon that is purely a current of electrical force, thereby effectively doubling the lightning strike; “this is a doing-doing.”[6] Similarly, the morality of “free will” abuses causality by preposterously framing the subject as the causa sui of the will[7], “as if there were behind the strong some indifferent substratum that is free to express strength- or not to.”[8] Ressentiment exploits this belief in the claim that “the strong one is free to be weak, and the bird of prey to be a lamb,” thereby asserting that the bird of prey can be held accountable for its very essence.
“Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” (Romans 12:19) This divine ‘command’ epitomizes the dishonesty of slave morality, whereby the lamb conceals its inability to take revenge on the powerful behind the mask of virtue. The essential weakness of the weak is entombed in the illusion of free will, whereby “good” comes to mean humility and pacifism deliberately chosen by a neutral subject. Meanwhile, ressentiment finds an outlet in divine justice—faith in the Lord will ensure that the birds of prey will pay for their ‘sins’ by burning deep in hell for eternity.
[1] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark. (Cambridge: Hackett, 1998), §10
[2] Ibid.
[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge University Press, 2001), §12
[4] Ibid, §19
[5] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §21
[6] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, §13
[7] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §21
[8] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, §13
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Reflecting on the Black Friday Fare Strike
The myopic approach of Puget Sound Anarchists results in failure
November 30th, 2019
While many Seattleites on Black Friday scrambled for the best sales of the year, Puget Sound Anarchists organized a fare strike in which black-clad protestors fought for a 100% off discount on bus fare. Leading up to November 27th, 2019, activists were energized by the political uprising sweeping across Chile that had been sparked by a similar fare strike just a few weeks earlier, and numerous posters declaring the upcoming fare strike peppered the streets of Seattle. At the actual rally, however, attendance was lacking and strikers failed to live up to their own lofty revolutionary aims: a photo taken directly after shows a modest gathering of only 8 protestors, dressed in black and waving an Anarchist flag.
In a city with some of the best public transport in the country, a fare strike may seem unnecessary or misdirected. However, Sound Transit’s draconian policies have incited widespread public outrage. Puget Sound Anarchists cited the skyrocketing cost of living in Seattle — what they call “the squeeze” — as a key motivation for the strike, as well as the discriminatory nature of fare enforcement policy. Repeated fare evasion offenses are met with $124 fines and criminal charges, policies that disproportionately punish those who can’t afford the $2.25 fare with even greater financial strain. Transit policy effectively penalizes poor people for being poor, rather than working to make the city more accessible —a fact that boils down to a fault in the city’s allocation of finances. Statistics from just a few months prior to the protest show that fare enforcement officers disproportionately target African Americans and the homeless. In September, local news blog The C is for Crank reported on controversy that exploded on the first day of school, when fare enforcement officers issued over a dozen children with formal warnings for “fare evasion,” 76% of whom were people of color. For their part, Sound Transit denies allegations of racism, arguing that their policies are “color-blind” because officers systematically check with every passenger on a train.
In the wake of all this transit turmoil, activists were hoping to win a victory against the fare enforcement and ultimately the crushing wave of neoliberalism taking over Seattle—a profit-oriented political agenda responsible for the city becoming exponentially more unlivable each year. According to an anonymous report from the day of the protest, as well as two different anonymous report-backs published the next week, a group of roughly a dozen protestors left at 12pm from the Mount Baker light rail station. The group boarded the light rail, chanting, “Tax the rich, not the poor!” “No fare is fair!” and “Eat the rich, arm the poor!” and handing out pamphlets. While many riders offered encouragement, the strikers were forced to get off the bus when an onlooker got the police involved, effectively ending the demonstration
The success of the 2004 Chicago fare strike in reversing the fare hike and delaying service cuts provides a useful counterexample to the failure experienced by PSA. Midwest Unrest organizers were able to put real pressure on local transit authorities by empowering thousands of acts of fare evasion during the two-day strike. This was accomplished by passing out pamphlets to riders and drivers in the weeks prior to the strike, putting up posters in both Spanish and English, and even sending out a press release that prompted coverage from major media outlets. By contrast, Seattle activists did very little organizing prior to the strike. The posters say nothing about the location, time of day, or the dress code PSA confirmed was in effect. Because the group left so promptly many protestors arrived at Beacon Hill to be greeted only by police, a mishap that seemed to greatly impact the number of strikers. The fundamental problem, however, was their feeble efforts at outreach outside of their own small network of radical leftists prior to November 27th.
The trivial impact of the strike was exacerbated by the decision to appear in black bloc, a classic Anarcho-Communist uniform of all-black attire and face-concealing accouterments. Black bloc functions to protect protestors from criminal prosecution by obscuring their faces and confounding attempts to distinguish between individuals. Despite its advantages, this strategy ultimately hurt the aims of the protest by alienating onlookers from spontaneously participating and thus preventing the strike from reaching a wider audience. An anonymous striker critiqued the use of black bloc, “While it certainly has its advantages, it can come off as specialized or pigeon-holed in the minds of many. Are there ways we can appear to people as if they could easily be one of us?”
In the wake of the fare strike, a January 16th article by The C is for Crank reports Sound Transit’s defense of its fare enforcement policies, stating that they have no intention of reducing the number of fare enforcement officers nor of eliminating fares. Nevertheless, Sound Transit expressed a desire to continue reformative measures for equitable transit, such as giving passengers with warnings a clean slate after six months (instead of 12), and moving fare enforcement from trains to station platforms. These incremental changes are neither significant nor guaranteed, and likely serve to mollify dissatisfied citizens with breadcrumbs rather than actually address the root cause of this dissatisfaction. With at most 20 acts of fare evasion, strikers reached nowhere near the threshold of financial burden on Sound Transit needed to catalyze real change. While the strike was certainly a good idea, PSA’s failure to mobilize the larger Seattle community resulted in their fare strike being overshadowed by the mortal enemy of Anarcho-Communists everywhere—Black Friday.
Vida Behar 
