Kopkind Colony

A red sun at night, meteorologists say, signals high pressure and pleasant days ahead. ‘Red sky at night a sailor’s delight’ and all that. That red sun from the vista where Kopkind convenes signifies pressure, for sure; as for pleasant weather, sociopolitically speaking, that’s something that people have always had to imagine and strive to realize.

Kopkind’s summer project turned 25 this year. Twenty-five years of bringing together left journalists, activists and filmmakers, and providing a space for people to ‘dream, dream big’, as one of our participants once said; to analyze the contemporary situation, learn together, think together, imagine paths forward and strategies to get there. And, along the way, to breathe, to recharge. To take pleasure in the good that life, nature, art and camaraderie have to offer. To remember history, its numberless named and unnamed people who have always had to fight, who faced times far harder than ours and sought to make a world fit to live in.

At Kopkind we’re grateful to everyone who has contributed to this project over the years with their time, their ideas, their donations, their words and images, knowledge and experience, their force of personality and generosity of spirit, their physical labor, their challenging questions, their social memory, their ability to create moments of profound collective insight and joy. We all will need such gifts — and spaces to share them and more — going forward. It’s not going to be an easy time. It never has been easy. And the pressures aren’t just national and global; they’re on us individually and organizationally.

So here comes the money part. Whether Giving Tuesday or Giving Anyday, this project needs you. Please help Kopkind continue to help the organizers, the writers, the mediamakers and sensemakers, the researchers, the artists, the thinkers and doers, defenders and troublemakers, workers all, as we strive with others for that better day. Thank you, with urgency and commitment.

In this, Kopkind’s 25th year, whether you can give $25 or $250 or $2500 or anything in between, please hit the Donate button in the top bar here; or, if you wish to write a check, please make it payable to Kopkind and send c/o JoAnn Wypijewski, 356 East 13th Street #11, New York, NY 10003. All gifts to Kopkind are tax deductible to the full exent allowable by law.

We leave you here with one more picture because, when words aren’t fully adequate, nature reminds us that even as night bears down, there will be light.

We first met filmmaker Ann Bennett in the summer of 2009. She had a formidable body of work by then, having been involved in the making of Citizen King, the Emmy-winning Hymn for Alvin Ailey, the mini-series Africans in America and America’s War on Poverty, all for PBS. She came to film camp, Kopkind’s partnership with the Center for Independent Documentary, with a project she was co-producing about photography in Afro-American life. In a sunny morning seminar she laid out her own mind-picture of moments preserved in numerous private snapshots and professional photographs, all of them accumulated in a documentary album, telling a story of a people whose histories were often undocumented and unparticularized when they weren’t caricatured. As she spoke, it was as if the images were spread out on the table before us, the memorialized individual instances of black people seen through black eyes, revealing something about collective experience that had been long obscured.

Ann was born on March 16, 1963, in Baltimore. She died at 61, on November 15, 2024, in New York. An obituary page photo gallery of her public life evokes that summer memory: pictures of her with collaborators and friends, of her alone (as in the uncredited image above, which sure looks to be set during the golden hour at Tree Frog Farm), the array reflecting the qualities that people who loved and admired her would try to put into words. Ann was wise, generous, a mentor to younger filmmakers and women in tech, a person who thrived in collaboration with others, a woman who was dedicated, who sparked one to think afresh, whose smile was pure sunshine, who exuded joyfulness, even when in considerable pain.

The next time Ann came to film camp, in 2018, her health problems were evident; her passion and radiance, undimmed. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, directed by Thomas Allen Harris, had come out in 2014 to much acclaim. A community engagement project, which we had been invited to imagine with her in that long-ago summer, had taken off in multimedia roadshows called Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, with audiences exploring the role of photography in the contest between “self-affirmation and negation,” and celebrating a common humanity. She came to the film workshop again the next year, 2019, bringing a work in progress she was co-producing about the battle between public housing residents in Miami’s Liberty City and a combine of government officials and real estate interests determined to drive them from their home. She brought the film’s director, Katja Esson, who had to leave suddenly one day, upon learning that bulldozers were moving again on the storied black inland neighborhood — high ground, now called a potential “goldmine” by speculators foreseeing the fate of beachfront as the oceans rise.

Razing Liberty Square aired as part of the PBS Independent Lens series this past January. The public housing project, which readers might recall as a key location in Barry Jenkins’ great film Moonlight, is gone. The developers, who had assured residents of their right of return to bright new buildings, broke their promises. They also tried to stop the documentary from being aired. The film is the record of an assault on a community, and a vehicle for ongoing popular resistance. It has a continuing life in discussions on confronting climate gentrification; in organizing against further displacement, and understanding, across the country, the mesh of climate, race, class and housing justice; in agitation by those who’ve been disbursed and those still living in Liberty City to restitch their community. “Please don’t give up,” Samantha Kenley, one of documentary’s main characters, said at a public meeting in March. “Please do what y’all need to do because if we shut up, nothing is going to happen.”

Ann’s work succeeds her.

Desireena Almoradie, who was part of the film camp cohort in 2018 and who conveyed the sad news of Ann’s death, writes, “I first met her at Kopkind, and our connection grew to a deep friendship that included her consulting on my film, and me bringing breakfast to her every morning when she was in physical therapy rehab a few blocks from my home. Ann was generous, kind, and always happy to share her knowledge, her information about filmmaker opportunities, and her deep well of loving kindness. She urged us to do our thing and make a difference.”

Yesterday, in wishing John Scagliotti a happy birthday, we noted the many encounters with history that his filmmaking has provided. Here is one with Audre Lorde from After Stonewall: From the Riots to the Millennium. It offers words especially pertinent in this time. Put them in your backpack for the road ahead!

November 14:  Things already bad are about to get worse. The government-in-waiting is swiftly taking shape as a den of punishers, fraudsters, mercenary-symps, crypto freaks, opportunists and fascists-by-whatever-name. As a first order of business, the future ‘border czar’ declared, undocumented immigrants have every reason to be afraid. So do protesters, leftists, ‘vermin’, we have been told repeatedly. Fear is the point. We need clarity now, and courage. ‘Are we going to be okay?’ a liberal interviewer asked writer and Kopkinder Jeff Sharlet the other day. ’No’, Jeff said. ’Some people will not make it. There will be losses.’

November 14:  The ‘we’ is the question. ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’, the International Workers of the World affirmed. ‘Don’t mourn; organize’, Joe Hill said before he died. History has been one bloody thing after another, and the old lines still serve as practical, not romantic, guides. ‘In politics, no matter how bad the situation, there is always something to do’, the writer and veteran of decades of struggles Frank Bardacke, also a Kopkinder, remarked the other day. ‘You just have to find the other people to do it with.’  We have heard from our alums who are talking with others about mutual aid, survival projects, defense projects. It’s early days. We have had conversations with some of our people who say, Yes, but I still see that long game, building the left, building for a future, for humanity. 

November 14:  John Scagliotti, Kopkind’s co-founder, administrator and animating spirit, was born on this day 76 years ago. Humanity got a gift that day. A gay man, an anti-imperialist, a human liberationist and independent media pioneer, John is attentive to history. ‘We’ve always had to fight’, he says. He’s right. His life and work evince that. The same is true for Kopkind, which across 25 years has encouraged, connected, sparked hundreds of people in struggle, people with long memories or fresh hopes that another world is possible. 

So today we say Happy birthday, John. We salute you, with love and gratitude. We remember those whose trials and resistance you preserved for us on film.

And salutations to everyone who’s working to find a way. To anyone who’s able, we will gratefully accept a contribution to Kopkind in honor of John, his work and inspiration, and all the work we have to do together going forward. (Click the Donate button on the banner at the top.)

Film camp, a seminar/retreat collaboration between Kopkind and the Center for Independent Documentary (CID), begins on August 4, gathering documentary filmmakers from around the country to workshop their films-in-progress and refresh themselves for the work ahead.

Capping this year’s session, we are proud to present a wonderful new documentary, “The Blues Society”, by Augusta Palmer, on Saturday, August 10, at 7:30 pm, at Tree Frog Farm, 158 Kopkind Road in Guilford. This is a free public event.

Augusta, who will be on hand for the screening and discussion after, was at film camp a couple of years ago, workshopping this film, which tells the origin story of the first Memphis Country Blues Festival. It was 1969. In Memphis, a city with one of the richest musical histories of anyplace in the world, blues masters and beatniks created a festival that rocked the foundations of conservative America. Segregation may have been out by law but not in fact, and the violence that enforced it has never been legislateable. “The Blues Society” weaves hypnotic musical performances with animation, archival images and a chorus of voices to create a moving image mixtape that both celebrates the music and its makers and documents an era.

“There is always a disconnect in the deep context of the music, which is violence and pain and hurt”, one of Augusta’s interviewees says in the film. And still there is the sound, the musicians, the genius and their glorious legacy.

Please join us on August 10 for what promises to be a terrific evening.

January 1, 2024, will mark 30 years since the Zapatistas burst onto the world stage, rebelling — as Andy Kopkind wrote in The Nation at the time — against ‘a new world order … that intrudes in the most pernicious manner on the way of life of people always overlooked’. It was an armed revolt that regained some land plundered from indigenous people and was met with state terror, but inspired the desiring world anew. ‘They have infused left politics’, our companera Margaret Cerullo writes, ‘with an imaginative, literary, or poetic dimension—organizing horizontally, outside and against the state, and with a profound respect for difference as a source of political insight, not division.’ And they persist. This new year they will be celebrating their decades’ long phase in 500 years of indigenous resistance in the Americas.

The desiring world is the one we inhabit, perched between cynicism and hope, painfully aware of the bleak old world but rejecting its shackles on the imagination. The future will not be foreclosed, we say, never sure except in the belief that the opposite is unacceptable.

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Augusta Palmer, who at film camp in 2022 workshopped Blues Society, which promises to be a marvelous documentary on the Memphis Country Blues Festivals, held in the tumultuous years from 1966 to 1969, wrote John Scagliotti this year on his 75th birthday: ‘Film camp was a game changer for me. One of my characters says, “We were filled with eroici furori, poetic furor … I always thought that was the best thing that could happen to you, to be thrown together with this group of people who had a heroic enthusiasm.” He was talking about the blues, but Kopkind was like that for documentary. Thank you for that gift.’

Continuity and change have been central to Kopkind from the start. A living memorial that honors the past and feeds the future could not but be mindful of that duality. Now anticipating our 25th anniversary, we are mindful of it, also, in the people who remember, like Augusta, and those who, having been to Kopkind, then return, like our mentors this year, Jennifer Berkshire and Scot Nakagawa; like Jeff Sharlet, who was our guest speaker at a free public event this summer; like Bob Pollin, who since 1999 has come to talk to Kopkind’s journalists and activists on economics. This year he and his wife, Sigrid, brought Nancy Folbre, our new friend, talking about the astonishing, unmeasurable human capabilities in the unpaid work required simply to live, and the implications of this ‘care economy’ for women and girls especially, for families and the unfamilied, for any left political project that cares if people and communities can thrive.

We are mindful of it in the people who have paid the experience forward, and those who will, and all of you reading this who support Kopkind. And those, too, in our orbit who died this year: people who were important to the broad political culture and to early discussions about this project, namely Amber Hollibaugh; and people who, in addition, were closely involved with us for 20 years, namely Kevin Alexander Gray. In an earlier note on Kevin we wrote that, in short, he held to ‘a politics of humanity for humanity’. The phrase, which could be the subtitle to every theme of every Kopkind political camp across the years, is from the Zapatistas. So simple that almost no one can achieve it, though we must try.

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And so to freedom dreams … Recalling that these have been essential to every great movement for a politics of humanity, as Robin D.G. Kelley discussed years ago in a magical talk (with a bat and a broom) in the barn at Kopkind while he was working on his terrific book by that name.

In this time of remembrance and resistance, in this dark, terrible time for the world, we with Kopkind wish you light, courage, hope. On the cusp of our 25^th anniversary, we look back on spirits aflame, but ever forward. We will be celebrating Kopkind’s birthday on Andy’s birthday, August 24, at Tree Frog Farm. Stay tuned.

With poetic furor and warm wishes for 2024!

If you are able, please help with a year-end gift. And if you can spare $100, we have a treat: Zapatista Stories for Dreaming An-Other World, translated and with commentaries by the Lightning Collective. Allegorical tales with bite and humor and tips on taking the lion down. You can make checks payable to Kopkind and send to 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, Vt. 05301. Or press the Donate button above. If you would like the book for your $100+ donation, please write jwyp2000@gmail.com with your name and mailing address. Thank you!

Seventy-five years ago, on December 10, 1948, world representatives gathered at the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the brainchild of Eleanor Roosevelt and other internationalists who defied the idea that war, misery and oppression should be natural conditions of life. The declaration was always more aspiration than reality, but now, as the US enables a war of ‘unprecedented killing’ in Gaza, its provisions, for all people, must be our mandate. The recent death of Henry Kissinger was a reminder of the brutal continuities of US foreign policy. It should be an occasion as well to honor their opposite, and to remember those who in every age have resisted the tyranny of violence, at home and abroad, on city streets and in prisons, and the structures and ideologies that undergird it. The essay below, which originally appeared in ‘Sidecar’, gestures to continuities of defiance.

What About …

JoAnn Wypijewski

It is 1988, Santiago. Chile is on the cusp of a popular repudiation of the world that Henry Kissinger helped to make scream. Throngs of international observers have come to witness the plebiscite on Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. I am part of the US delegation organized by the National Lawyers Guild. At the first meeting in our precinct, local people introduce themselves by name and political identification, too many socialist tendencies to remember. They are good-humoured, optimistic, organized for getting out the vote. As has been said for years now, ever since mass protests began in the capital, ‘the people have lost their fear’. A cinema in the city centre is showing Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, the marquee illuminating the title in large letters.

Pinochet’s collaborators have been defecting by the day. None of this was supposed to happen. The 1973 coup against Salvador Allende – backed by the United States, fortified by international lenders and elaborated by the Chicago Boys’ economic violence programme – had been engineered for permanence. State terror was supposed to take care of internal opposition. The plebiscite itself – Yes or No, do you approve of our handiwork? – was intended as a bit of legitimating latticework. But after years of murder, disappearance, imprisonment and torture, the right’s plans have fallen to history’s penchant for surprises. ‘Joy is coming!’ announces the slogan of the No campaign.

I am staying with a working-class family involved with one of the socialist parties. Every night the power goes out. Every morning a little girl named Alejandra comes to my room, disciplined, intent on teaching me Spanish. She climbs onto my bed and points to the pictures in her primer, instructing me to sound out the words for animals, cooking utensils, common things. In the afternoon her grandmother takes me downtown on public transit. These tracks, she says, lie over mass graves.

In the aftermath of the coup, armed men came to this woman’s home one night and dragged her son away. Right there, in the kitchen, through the same door we use to enter and leave the house, in the same blackout conditions that now seem a reminder or a threat whenever the lights go out. For a long time, he was a desaparecido. For a long time, his mother haunted the entrances of police stations, prisons, hospitals, morgues. Eventually a prison sentry – sick of seeing her? moved by pity? – handed her a list of inmates. She found her son, alive but scarred by torture. Somehow, she got him out; somehow, he fled the country.

In 1975, Pinochet’s foreign minister visited Kissinger to discuss a problem. The junta had released a couple of hundred prisoners, trouble-makers, but couldn’t find countries willing to take them off Chile’s hands. ‘You will know what to do’, Kissinger said, as memorialized in official documents declassified years later. My host doesn’t need to know the numbers – which by 1990 will total 3,216 people killed, 38,254 imprisoned or tortured by official count, thousands more exiled. Somehow, she saved her son. Somehow, other women and men like her mustered the courage for defiance. Alejandra’s grandmother has her outfit planned for October 5, the day of the plebiscite, the red and black of her party.

In his memoir, White House Years (1979), Kissinger describes early 1970 – the year Allende’s election accelerated Washington’s counterattack on the Latin American left, Nixon invaded Cambodia, and the National Guard shot student protesters dead at Kent State – as ‘those faraway days of innocence’. Oh, there was a bit of ‘propaganda’ and ‘spoiling activities’ in advance of Allende’s election. Not enough: ‘I should have been more vigilant.’ Naturally, the US did some sniffing around among the Chilean military to test the feasibility of a coup before Allende’s inauguration, but it was slapdash. In any case, ‘we played no role whatever’ in the ‘conception, planning and execution’ of the coup three years later. Really, the US is a victim of its own benign incompetence:

Of course, covert operations have their philosophical and practical difficulties and especially for America. Our national temperament and tradition are unsuited to them. Our system of government does not lend itself spontaneously to either the secrecy or subtlety that is required. Those eager to dismantle our intelligence apparatus will have little difficulty finding examples of actions that were amateurish or transparent.

In Santiago, no one we meet has illusions about US innocence. An American warship is cruising off the coast. ‘Jakarta’, some say, has begun to appear scrawled on city walls, as it had in 1973, though I haven’t seen this prophecy of extermination myself. At a press conference at the US Embassy, The New York Times’ Shirley Christian, prototype media quisling of US policy in Latin America, asks a question about possible Cuban-backed plans to sabotage the referendum. On cue, other scribblers demand, Just what do we know about Cuban saboteurs? This happens to be the scenario that the former mistress of a general close to Pinochet related breathlessly the night before to a room of anti-Pinochet organizers in a middle-class high rise: if the outcome is looking bad for him, Pinochet will create some type of explosion, blame Cuba and Chilean leftists, and cement his position as supreme leader. Former exiles, recently returned, are popping tranquilizers at a luncheon with Bianca Jagger. Some are staying in safehouses guarded by men in sunglasses who lead us through confounding passageways to meet them.

There’s just one problem with Pinochet’s scheme, to which the working-class people who’ve lost their children are savvier: conditions have changed. In virtually every sector of the population there is opposition to the junta, including within the junta itself. The military is fractured. Reagan is a lame duck, his administration still reeling from the Iran/contra scandal. The likely inheritors of the Chilean government are not radical. The global neoliberal order has constricted the room for economic manoeuvre, for now anyway. Early that morning, the White House summoned the Chilean ambassador; Pinochet appears to be done for. If not, militants in La Victoria and other precincts of the poor have been preparing Molotov cocktails.

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Years of Upheaval, volume two of Kissinger’s memoirs, was published in 1982. It was five years since he left government, and Kissinger busily made the rounds, proffering his views on world affairs. Alexander Cockburn wrote in The Wall Street Journal at the time: ‘I had thought Mr Kissinger’s chosen mode, that of international superstar, café society’s preferred oracle would not for long endure; that the decline would be rapid, from special adviser to NBC, to guest on the Johnny Carson show, to final apotheosis on the Hollywood Squares. Not so.’ Volume three, Years of Renewal, arrived in 1999. Its publication may well have been the occasion of my only encounter with Kissinger.

It is night-time in front of the Barnes and Noble on Union Square in downtown Manhattan. Kissinger is to be interviewed, on camera, by Charlie Rose. A call has gone out for the indignant to distribute flyers. We are a small but peppy band. The flyers are brightly coloured and provide a counterpoint to Kissinger’s deceptions about US foreign policy. As the show begins, we figure it is foolish to stand in the dark talking among ourselves and head in to watch.

Inside, the store’s second floor has become Rose’s stage set: a round table with chairs on a riser; the two men under bright lights; some rows of chairs below for the audience; and, surprisingly, a substantial crowd of people seated on the floor and standing among the long bookshelves. I take up a position among the books, stepping up onto the lowest tier of a shelf so that my chin just clears the top.

The cameras roll and Rose leans in, unctuous as ever. Kissinger is absurd. He has been out of the game too long – there’s no inside baseball, none of the winking, I’m loathe to discuss covert ops but just this once, for you… (though that hasn’t stopped the obsequious entreaties from candidates, presidents and their advisers, ‘humanitarian interventionists’, even supposed policy rivals, seeking his counsel). Every answer is a platitude or the mumbo-jumbo of phony statecraft. Every question is inane. I feel a rumbling coming from my toes, an electric, involuntary quiver rising.

And then Kissinger says something akin to America is the most honourable country in human history, and as if in a slow-motion movie I have raised my hands to form a megaphone around my lips, and now I am raging: What about Chile… Vietnam… Cambodia… Laos… What about… What about… Bangladesh… East Timor… Argentina … Angola… What about…? I’m citing dates and statistics and bloody incidents in an unbroken chain of What abouts.

I’m hard to spot, with my head barely visible, and among so many other heads along so many rows of shelves. Another voice, coming from somewhere else in the room, begins chanting low and steady, like a death drum, ‘War Criminal… War Criminal…’ Only as the security guards have escorted me, still ranting, to the escalator do I realize that the bass line to my treble of indictment came from my friend Deborah Thomas of FAIR, who is also being removed and didn’t know the other voice was mine.

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Protest politics, whether heroic or, in the scheme of things, paltry, merited two phrases in the two front-page obituaries that The New York Times devoted to Kissinger on successive days: ‘Hey, Hey, Henry K, how many kids did you kill today?’; and ‘While protesters at his talks dwindled…’ Daniel Ellsberg gets no mention. The newspaper’s own publication of the Pentagon Papers serves but to illustrate Kissinger’s fury and obsession with leaks. Third World peoples count only in bulk: 300,000 killed in what would become Bangladesh; 10 million refugees driven into India; 100,000 East Timorese killed or starved to death; 50,000 Cambodian civilians killed by carpet-bombing (silence on the genocide it sparked); 3 to 4 million dead Vietnamese, whose armies and determination, at least, the paper cannot ignore. ‘I can’t believe that a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point’, Kissinger is quoted as telling his staff.

‘Critics’ abound in these tributes, to comment on the man’s ‘defects’ as well as his ‘brilliance’, on his strategies for supposedly managing the Cold War, and on ‘everything else’ – that is, the world beyond superpowers. ‘It was the everything else that got him into trouble’. This isn’t surprising (though an editor might have anticipated readers cringing over who was in trouble), but it’s nevertheless important to acknowledge that, loathsome as he was, the man was never the principal target of his opponents on the left, just as the Cold War wasn’t ever primarily about superpowers but about that ‘everything else’. Kissinger was a symbol, a servant, a latter-day ‘racketeer for capitalism’, in the words of Marine general Smedley Butler. He was also a failure. The objective of his foreign policy approach, he boasted, was order not justice. The world he’s credited with shaping has neither.