In December 2023, South Africa filed a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. The government in Pretoria framed it explicitly as an act of conscience. It was the de facto heir to Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid legacy, a nation that knew what it meant to be on the receiving end of systematic oppression and chose to say so in the highest legal forum on earth. The case resonated across the Global South. In Washington, it was treated as a curiosity, even a provocation.

That disconnect is revealing. The Mandela South Africa invoked at The Hague was a man who believed in organized international solidarity, armed resistance when necessary, and the use of legal institutions as weapons of the historically powerless. He was, for decades, a designated U.S. terrorist. The Mandela that Washington has spent thirty years celebrating was someone else entirely.

The Saint and the Guerrilla

The reconciler who donned a Springbok jersey; who established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and who became the world’s most beloved statesman was authentic. A construct for that specific moment. But Mandela 2.0 existed because of his much older, more militant version.

A man who, in 1961, co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC). Who endorsed sabotage and guerrilla warfare as deliberate instruments against apartheid infrastructure. At the Rivonia Trial in 1964, Mandela told the court: “I do not deny that I planned sabotage.” The conviction that followed was factually accurate under the law of the regime he was dismantling.

So explosive was Mandela’s persona that the United States kept him on its terrorism watch list until July 2008, fourteen years after he was elected president, nine years after he left office, and just a few months before his ninetieth birthday. George W. Bush signed the removal bill. It required an act of Congress. That designation was far from a bureaucratic accident. It was the sticky residue of a policy.

What Washington Was Doing Instead

While Mandela was incarcerated on Robben Island, the Reagan administration was practicing what it called “constructive engagement” with South Africa’s apartheid government. The theory was that quiet diplomacy and strong economic ties would nudge Pretoria toward reform. It didn’t work. By 1985, the apartheid state had grown more repressive, not less, apparently buoyed by Washington’s protection.

Reagan went as far as condemning the ANC in a 1986 address, warning of its “calculated terror.” His Defense Department listed the ANC among the world’s most notorious terrorist groups in a 1988 publication with a foreword by President-elect George H.W. Bush. Congress eventually overrode Reagan’s veto to impose comprehensive sanctions against South Africa—the first time in the twentieth century a foreign policy presidential veto had been overridden.

Foreign Affairs would later conclude Reagan’s policy failed. That’s understating it. Constructive engagement extended the life of apartheid while branding its most effective opponent a criminal.

The Architecture of Amnesia

American culture has a system for processing figures such as Mandela. It waits until they are safe—imprisoned, elderly, or dead—and then celebrates qualities it finds tolerable while quietly excising the bits it finds indigestible. The civil rights movement, for example, is stripped of economic radicalism and its armed defenders. King is presented sans his opposition to Vietnam. Sanitized and sainted, Mandela loses his twenty years of organized militancy.

That transaction is hardly random. Scholars of racial representation have documented how American film and literature habitually position Black heroes as vehicles for white emotional resolution, often as sources of forgiveness and wisdom whose suffering enables others’ (often white) growth. Mandela’s American image slides easily into this template. His reconciliation becomes a gift. It allows audiences to feel good about the end of apartheid without dwelling on who financed the regime, who armed it diplomatically, and who called its chief opponent a terrorist while it ran.

Militant Mandela disrupts this. He suggests that the end of apartheid required sustained, organized counter-pressure, not only dignity and patience. He implicates not just the architects of the system but those who accommodated it. That version of the story is structurally harder to absorb into a redemption mythology.

What South Africa Remembered

When Pretoria filed its genocide case at The Hague, it drew explicitly on the moral authority of the anti-apartheid struggle. The ANC’s historic solidarity with the Palestinian cause traces back to the period when both movements were designated terrorist organizations by Western governments. For South Africans of Mandela’s generation, that shared designation was not incidental. It was the starting point of a political kinship.

The ICJ filing was, among other things, an exercise in the kind of international legal strategy Mandela spent his life validating: the systematic use of every available institution against entrenched power. The irony is precise. The same tradition of organized resistance that Washington spent decades branding as terrorism — and then sanitized into symbol — South Africa deployed as the basis for a legal action at the world’s highest court.

The Cost of the Clean Version

I remember watching the televised Rugby World Cup final from Ellis Park in Johannesburg on June 24, 1995. The stadium held sixty-three thousand people. When Mandela walked onto the pitch wearing the Springbok jersey, a symbol Afrikaner nationalism had made its own, the sound was extraordinary. Not the roar of a crowd watching sport, but something closer to mass disbelief, the noise a nation makes when it’s surprised by its own capacity for something better.

That moment did not arrive from nowhere. It came at the end of three decades of organized resistance, imprisonment, sabotage, international pressure, and strategic confrontation. Mandela earned the authority to offer reconciliation because he had already helped make the alternative untenable. The gesture only worked because of everything that preceded it. The mythology keeps the gesture. It discards the preceding three decades.

What gets lost when the radical is erased is not just historical accuracy. It’s analytical capacity. A generation inheriting the sanitized Mandela, one of patient endurance rewarded by moral suasion, is poorly equipped to understand how structural change happens. The South African experience suggests it requires sustained organized pressure, international solidarity, economic consequence, and yes, occasionally, the credible threat of worse. None of that fits on a classroom poster.

The ICJ case is still pending. The outcome is uncertain. But South Africa’s willingness to bring it, and the global response it generated, reflects a political tradition that the sanitized Mandela cannot explain. The world watching Pretoria at The Hague was watching the legacy of a man who understood that legal institutions and liberation movements are not opposites. They’ve always been tools used by the same people against the same systems.

Washington preferred the saint. It’s worth remembering the whole picture. Especially on a day that looms large for every South African, representing the sheer power of the vote and the far-reaching results of true leadership.

Quietly, while we were distracted by jibes at the pope and AI generated images, a bill passed both chambers in Tennessee. That bill now sits on Governor Bill Lee’s desk. And it carries a name that marks exactly where we are: the Charlie Kirk Act.

House Bill 1476 and Senate Bill 1741 require every public university in the state to adopt, nearly verbatim, the University of Chicago’s 2015 statement on freedom of expression and the 1967 Kalven Report on institutional neutrality. They bar disinvitations based on anticipated controversy or ideological opposition. They mandate disciplinary action, suspension or expulsion, against students whose organized protests ‘substantially disrupt’ invited events. Walkouts, noise, physical obstructions. These now carry formal risk. Most provisions take effect July 1, 2026.

The naming is the signal. Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who built Turning Point USA, assassinated last September at Utah Valley University. The law that bears his name is a memorial of sorts, but also a temperature check on our direction of travel. When the invitation to debate can invite lethal violence, something has broken. But the legislative response reveals something else: how thoroughly the right has captured the language of liberty to enforce its own speech regime.

Hypocrisy at the Core

The law’s proponents frame it as restoration. Universities have for years permitted a heckler’s veto to silence disfavored ideas, they argue. Taxpayer-funded institutions have functioned as ideological filters. The solution is statutory protection for all viewpoints. This sounds, on its surface, like classical liberalism. It isn’t.

The legislation does not protect all speech equally. It protects certain speakers, conservative, religious, gender-critical, and disciplines certain forms of opposition. The marketplace it claims to save is one where conservative voices receive statutory safeguards while protest, walkouts, and disruption face statutory penalties. The very anthesis of the free market of ideas, it props up a rigged market where one side has enlisted the state to punish the other’s tactics.

The provision’s reach is specific: student organizations may deny membership or leadership to students whose ‘lifestyle’ they find objectionable, and separately, universities may not revoke recognition from groups that hold positions on abortion, homosexuality, or transgender identity. A gay student’s mandatory fees may subsidize a group empowered by state law to exclude them. That is what ‘neutral’ looks like here.

The hypocrisy sharpens further when you look at what the same political movement is doing at federal level. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and permanent legal resident, was arrested by ICE agents in March 2025 for his pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts doctoral scholar, was detained after co-authoring a student op-ed critical of university policy on Gaza. The administration has threatened universities with funding cuts over political speech it dislikes.

If the state may discipline students for disrupting a Charlie Kirk event, may it discipline students for disrupting a drag queen story hour? If institutional neutrality is now law, does that prohibit universities from issuing statements about reproductive rights after Dobbs? The law does not say. It protects the speech it prefers and leaves the rest to fight for whatever tolerance remains.

This is viewpoint regulation dressed in the language of liberty. The right spent a decade warning against state coercion in the marketplace of ideas. Now it wields state coercion to enforce the marketplace it wants. The principle was never the point. The point was power.

How Far the Drift Has Gone

Tennessee’s law is not an aberration. According to a January 2026 PEN America report, lawmakers enacted 21 higher education censorship bills in 2025 alone, every one in a Republican-controlled legislature. More than half of U.S. college and university students now study in a state with at least one law restricting what can be taught or how campuses can operate. The Charlie Kirk Act is the latest entry in a long column of legislation, not an outlier.

What these laws share is the claim that universities have become ideological capture zones for the left. That claim has merit in particular cases. Disinvitation patterns do skew against conservative speakers. Security costs do price out controversy. Certain topics carry professional risk. But the legislative cure is not correction. It is counter-capture. The state is not restoring a neutral forum. It is building its own.

The drift matters because it reveals how thoroughly the liberal principle has collapsed on both sides. The left abandoned ‘more speech, not less’ when it reframed certain ideas as violence and disruption as moral witness. The right abandoned it when it decided the solution to campus illiberalism was state-enforced listening. Both sides now want the state to enforce their preferred speech regime. The Tennessee law is what happens when that faith dies.

What the Law Gets Wrong About the University

The legislation misunderstands, perhaps deliberately, what a university actually is. A campus is not a public square. It is an institution with a pedagogical mission. It employs faculty who have expertise, curricula that reflect disciplinary consensus, and a responsibility to students who are there to learn. The state mandating that universities treat all viewpoints as equally worthy of platform does not make them so. It transfers the decision from educators to legislators.

The Kalven Report, which the law requires universities to adopt, argued that institutional neutrality protects academic freedom. But the report assumed universities would exercise judgment about which speakers to invite. It did not envision state legislators overriding that judgment with statutory mandates. The University of Chicago’s 2015 statement on free expression was written to prevent administrators from disinviting speakers under pressure. It was not written to require universities to host speakers they would not have invited, or to punish students for protesting those they did not want.

The law takes two documents written to protect institutional autonomy and weaponizes them against it. The irony is sharp. The hypocrisy is sharper. PEN America’s Kristen Shahverdian put it precisely: “This bill claims to protect” free speech but places demands on universities that diminish free expression, and when a walkout is defined as requiring a pause of any duration, paired with mandatory expulsion, the result deters counter-speech altogether.

The Temperature Reading

Tennessee’s law reveals where the drift is heading. A state that punishes protest, mandates viewpoint neutrality by legislative fiat, and protects certain speech while disciplining opposition has abandoned the liberal bargain. The right has captured the language of liberty to enforce its own speech regime. The left abandoned that language years ago. What remains is a contest of power, fought through legislation, litigation, and the carceral tools of the state.

The question for those who object is not whether the law is hypocritical. It is. The question is whether the resistance will match the ambition of those who passed it. Legal challenges take years. Student organizing takes discipline. Coalition-building takes work. The alternative is watching the marketplace of ideas become a marketplace where one side holds the gavel, sets the rules, and punishes anyone who objects.

The statute is what happens when the habits of the heart fail. The resistance is what might restore them. Every lawmaker who voted for the Charlie Kirk Act while saying nothing about Mahmoud Khalil has already answered the question about which habits they intend to restore.

On the morning of February 28, 2026, U.S. and Israeli warplanes opened a new chapter in the Middle East. The target set spanned radar sites, command bunkers, and air defense nodes across Iran. By March 2, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz. IRGC naval units broadcast VHF warnings to all commercial vessels; the world’s most critical oil chokepoint went dark. Triggered by Iran’s nuclear defiance, the crisis escalated rapidly.

Then came loaded language. On March 6, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” The phrase echoed 1945, when Allied leaders demanded nothing less from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. But the parallels ended there. In 1945, unconditional surrender was followed by occupation, dismantlement, and reconstruction: the Marshall Plan architecture. In 2026, as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified, “surrender” would be determined unilaterally by Washington based on removing perceived threats, with no commitment to occupy or rebuild.

A performative rhetoric of total victory is being applied to a limited war where the victor has no intention of administering the vanquished. This is far from a strategy for peace; if anything, it is a declaration that the only currency that matters is power, and that legal architectures of the post-war order—the UN Charter, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the very concept of negotiated settlement—are irrelevant when a great power decides to act.

By March 19, the U.S. launched “Operation Epic Fury” to reopen the strait. CENTCOM would later report more than 11,000 strikes by March 29. Iran maintained a “toll booth” system, selectively allowing vessels from China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iraq, and Malaysia through a managed corridor north of Larak Island. The stage was now set: a superpower demanding total capitulation from a regional power that refused to bend, using a chokepoint as both weapon and battlefield, while the institutions meant to prevent such confrontations looked on helplessly.

The Melian Dead-End

The United States finds itself cast, wittingly or not, as the Athens in this modern Melian Dialogue. In Thucydides’ account, the Athenians offer the islanders of Melos a stark choice: surrender and become tributary subjects, or resist and face annihilation. When the Melians appeal to justice and the hope of Spartan intervention, the Athenians reply with the famous axiom: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Iran today stands in Melos’ position. It has refused the demand for unconditional surrender. It has calculated that it can endure the bombardment, that the U.S. will not escalate to a ground invasion, and that its own missile capabilities pose enough retaliatory risk to deter total war. The Melian argument, that there is a realm of right and wrong beyond raw power, is being tested once more.

What makes this moment different from 1945 is not rhetoric but institutional context. The liberal order that emerged after World War II was built precisely to prevent a return to Melian logic. The UN Charter enshrined the principle that force may only be used in self-defense or with Security Council authorization. The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials established that even victors must submit to law. The very idea of “unconditional surrender” was institutionalized within a framework of collective security and legal accountability.

That framework has now been bypassed. The U.S. acts without UN mandate. The UK explicitly distances itself. Prime Minister Starmer stated he does “not believe in regime change from the skies” and limits its role to defensive missile interception. The coalition is thin, any legal cover is absent.

Melian logic is not being applied by a victorious alliance within a new order; it is being invoked unilaterally to dismantle an existing one. Iran may suffer, but it is not alone in its suffering. The concept of a rules-based international system endures with it. The “strong do what they can” is no longer a cynical observation; it is an operational doctrine. And the weak, including the institutions that once constrained the strong, are learning what they must bear.

The Roman Piazza

While the bombs fall on Iranian facilities, a different scene unfolded on March 24 in the heart of Rome. Starting near Piazza del Popolo, women organized by Women Wage Peace (Israel) and Women of the Sun (Palestine) embarked on a “Barefoot Walk: Mothers’ Call for Peace.” They walked barefoot on ancient Roman stone, a visceral symbolism of vulnerability, of connection to the earth, of shared humanity. Their message was simple: peace cannot be achieved through more violence; it must be nurtured through dialogue and maternal protectiveness.

The contrast with the kinetic reality of Operation Epic Fury could not be more stark. In Tehran, planners in climate-controlled situation rooms review targeting packages; in the Gulf, autonomous systems track the stranded container ships; in the Strait, Iranian speedboats deploy naval mines. This phenomenon, networked alliances of states, private contractors, and intelligence services executing campaigns with clinical precision, insulated from public view, represents a new paradigm of power.

The Rome marchers embody the ancient democratic impulse. The belief that peace is a public good claimed by citizens in the streets. But the institutional pathways that once translated such sentiment into policy have been severed. Security doctrine is formulated in closed-door meetings, not in response to Piazza marches. The symbolic power of the barefoot women is real, but it operates in a different sphere from the kinetic power of the warlords. The former speaks to conscience; the latter controls geography and infrastructure. The former can inspire; the latter decides who gets to eat, who gets to ship oil, and who gets to breathe.

The impotence is structural, though not moral. The Rome march cannot reopen the Strait, dismantle Iran’s nuclear facilities, or alter Trump’s Truth Social calculus. In a world where might makes right, symbolic action is irrelevant.

The Great Schism

There is a point where “Melos logic” accelerates the fragmentation of the global order. The liberal consensus rested on the assumption that even great powers would be constrained by universal institutions, that sovereignty would be respected, that disputes would be adjudicated, and that the UN would provide a forum for the weak to be heard. That assumption is now shattered, and the world is dividing into parallel architectures.

China’s Global Security Initiative (GSI) has long existed as an aspirational alternative to NATO-centric security. Launched in 2022, it promotes “common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable security” and explicitly rejects “hegemonism and power politics.” During this crisis, Beijing has leaned into that framing. At a press conference on March 8, Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated: “Might doesn’t make right, and the world cannot revert to the law of the jungle.” The statement was deliberately general, but the subtext was clear: the U.S. campaign exemplifies the very “law of the jungle” that the GSI was designed to supplant.

Yet analysts note a crucial limitation: China’s support for Iran has been “largely passive.” Beijing has not sent military aid; it has not challenged the U.S. naval blockade directly; it has prioritized its own energy security. The GSI, for all its rhetorical power, remains “largely aspirational.” But aspiration matters when the alternative is openly Melian. The West operates a “Kinetic Bloc” that enforces will through blockade and bombardment, explicitly rejecting multilateral legitimacy. China offers an “Economic Shield,” a model built on infrastructure, investment, and non-interference. Both operate outside the UN framework. Both are exclusive. Neither acknowledges the jurisdiction of the other’s institutions.

The schism is not yet a physical wall but a conceptual one. The liberal order is being quietly abandoned as each bloc builds its own rulebook. The Rome marchers instinctively understand what is being lost. They gather in a piazza that has witnessed two millennia of history, the rise and fall of empires, and the birth of republics. They are pleading for something that is slipping away: the notion that peace is a collective achievement, that the strong are bound by rules, that the weak have a voice. Their bare feet on Roman stone are a reminder of the human body, of vulnerability, and of connection, all things “Melos logic” seeks to erase. But in the calculus of Modern Warlords, vulnerability is not a moral argument; it is a weakness to be exploited.

Liberal order did not perish in a single explosion over Tehran. It is being eclipsed in the silent spaces between decisions: when the White House posts an unconditional surrender demand without consulting allies; when the IRGC closes a strait with a VHF broadcast; when Beijing issues a principled statement but takes no physical risk; when Rome’s barefoot women are covered by news cameras but ignored by war planners. The world is learning the Melian lesson anew: the strong do what they can. The only question is whether the weak will suffer in silence or begin to build their own world in the shadows of the strong.

“I rebel; therefore, I exist.”

— Albert Camus, The Rebel (1951)

I.

I’ll just jump in with a small observation: most people who change the world do not exactly plan to. They aren’t born with revolutionary temperament. They come into this world, like anyone else, a person who needs sleep, worries about money, and prefers not to make scenes at checkout counters. The mythologized hero we like to admire is almost always a retrospective construction. We produce the hero after the fact because we feel we need a little extra since capacity for moral courage cannot possibly be, well, ordinary. Or common. It is, however, for many, a decision made under some duress, often in spite of everything. For some it’s an unstoppable force; for some, a fuckit moment.

Becoming revolutionary, reluctant or otherwise. is about that decision. It’s about the moments or conditions under which it becomes possible, and the conditions under which it is endlessly deferred. It’s what Camus called revolt: not revolution with its big dick ideology and violence, but the simpler, harder thing. The moment when a person just says no. When whatever has been tolerated becomes, without alarms or surprises, intolerable.

But there’s a question shadowing this idea: are such people born or made? Is the capacity a matter of temperament encoded, or innate? Or is it forged by circumstance, available to anyone willing to answer the call? The answer determines whether we hold ourselves responsible. It determines whether the injustices that persist are attributable to the scarcity of the brave, or to a more uncomfortable possibility: that most of us choose, often, not to be brave.

II.

Camus published The Rebel in 1951, in a Europe that had just demonstrated what happens when revolutionary logic is pursued to its conclusion. His question was not how to start a revolution but how to prevent small revolts from becoming revolutions. How to preserve a human kernel of resistance from being swallowed by ideology’s demand for totality.

Revolution seeks to remake the world entirely and to replace one absolute with another. It operates through certainty, through the willingness to commit any violence in the name of what history demands. Revolution, Camus insists, always arrives as liberation and always arrives, eventually, as a new tyranny. It is, in other words, NOT what we want.

Revolt is something else. It’s the downtrodden’s sudden kneejerk. The refusal of specific injustice, drawing a specific boundary. It is communal. The rebel may say I will not endure this; or even we will not, discovering in the act of refusal that others share the same limit. Revolt does not require certainty about what must replace the thing being refused. It requires only clarity about what cannot be accepted any longer.

The reluctant revolutionary lives in this Camusean space. They are not an ideologue. They are suspicious of those too comfortable in their righteousness. Their hesitation is not cowardice. It is a form of moral seriousness. They know confidence in one’s own virtue has historically been among the most dangerous of human emotions. They act out of necessity rather than certainty, and keep asking questions while they act. They maintain la mesure: proportion, balance, ethical limits against violence and the pursuit of absolute power.

And so, here you are.
A rebel.
One who refuses injustice without claiming absolute knowledge.

What now?

III.

Before we navel-gaze about what makes the reluctant revolutionary act, we need to understand what prevents them, because the forces of non-action are powerful, systematic, and largely invisible.

In 1964, Kitty Genovese was murdered outside her apartment building in Queens, New York, over approximately thirty minutes, while, according to early reports, thirty-eight neighbors witnessed her attack. None called the police. Social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley, galvanized by the case, ran experiments that produced findings replicated hundreds of times: the more people are present during an emergency, the less likely any individual is to help.

Not because people in groups are crueler. But because the presence of others creates a diffusion of responsibility: someone else will act. And because the apparent calm of the surrounding crowd creates pluralistic ignorance with each individual, seeing others do nothing, concluding that nothing needs to be done. The result is collective paralysis, produced not by indifference but by the very human tendency to read the world through the reactions of those around us. Someone will turn off the gas under the boiling frog.

By extending this into the political domain, one describes aspects of modernity. We live surrounded by others who appear not to be engaged. Social media is effective at generating an impression that little can be done. That everyone is talking yet no one is moving. Each person doomscrolling past injustice, sighing, normalizes doomscrolling for everyone who comes after. The political bystander effect is how we relate.

But Latané and Darley also identified an antidote: the moment a single person breaks from the group and engages, others follow. The diffusion of responsibility collapses. Pluralistic ignorance is punctured when a visible body does a visible thing. It is an argument for the profound influence of the first person to move.

IV.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in April 1963, in the margins of a newspaper and on scraps of paper smuggled in by a sympathetic guard. He was responding not to the violent segregationists, but to eight white Alabama clergymen who had called his demonstrations “unwise and untimely.” They supported his goals, they said. They simply counseled patience. They preferred order.

King’s response is among the most devastating pieces of political prose in the American tradition, not because of it’s eloquent but because it does not let its target escape through the comfortable cracks of good intentions. The white moderate, King writes, is not neutral. The preference for “a negative peace which is the absence of tension” over “a positive peace which is the presence of justice” is not neutrality. It is active participation in the perpetuation of injustice. Time, King insists, is not inherently on the side of progress. It is used by whoever uses it. The oppressor has always benefited from the victim’s willingness to wait for a more convenient season.

What King understood was that inaction has consequences as real as action. To not act is to act. To counsel delay is to choose status quo. The bystander is not a neutral spectator of history but a participant in it. He still functions, whatever his private allegiances, on the side of whoever benefits from things remaining as they are.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott worked on a parallel principle. Without Black passengers, the bus company faced financial ruin. The cost of political inaction suddenly exceeded the cost of political action.

The lesson is that bystandership is maintained through a careful management of costs, both psychological and material, and that it can be disrupted by changing the calculus. The reluctant revolutionary is someone whose personal calculus has shifted. For whom the cost of continued inaction has become, finally, higher than the cost of acting.

V.

All this brings us back to the question of birth versus making. Is the reluctant revolutionary someone with a lower threshold for outrage, a higher tolerance for risk? Or is he an ordinary person caught in extraordinary circumstances?

The evidence suggests the latter. Philip Zimbardo created the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, an experiment so disturbing it was halted after six days, during which ordinary college students assigned the role of prison guards began brutalizing their peers. He spent subsequent decades studying what he called the Lucifer Effect: the capacity of situational forces to overwhelm individual character. His conclusion is that most of what we attribute to character is, in reality, situation. The good person in a bad system will behave badly. The ordinary person given permission to harm will harm. Zimbardo replaces the “bad apple” theory with the “bad barrel” theory. The social setting and system are often to blame for corrupting individuals.

Conversely, an "ordinary" person is most likely to act heroically when they feel a clear sense of individual responsibility, rather than assuming someone else will step in. This transition from bystander to actor is further facilitated when the individual possesses a behavioral blueprint—often gained by witnessing others intervene—and when the required help is framed as a concrete, doable task.

The process typically moves through: the recognition that something is wrong; the internal refusal, the Camusean “no”; the assumption of personal responsibility despite the presence of others; the search for how to act; the first, tentative act; and then the discovery of solidarity. Finding that one is not, in fact, alone.

Hannah Arendt insists on what she calls natality: the human capacity to begin, to initiate something that was not there before.

U2 said it best:

One man come in the name of love
One man, he come and go
One man comes he to justify
One man to overthrow.

VI.

The costs of non-engagement are not abstract. They accumulate at every scale.

At the individual scale, psychologist Albert Bandura has documented moral disengagement: cognitive strategies by which ordinary people separate their actions from their moral standards. Moral justification, displacement of responsibility, dehumanization of those harmed. The last is currently having a moment. The dehumanization of “The Unhoused” demonstrates how a group can be pushed outside the “scope of justice.” Terms like “vagrancy” or “infestation” shift the focus from human beings to aesthetic problems. Soon people are viewed as “encumbrances” rather than neighbors, and it becomes psychologically easier to ignore their basic needs.

The trouble is that these mechanisms, deployed enough times, change the person who deploys them. The moderate who counsels patience long enough becomes someone for whom patience is a genuine value. The rationalizations calcify into character. The bystander who remains a bystander across a lifetime arrives at the end having become someone constitutionally suited to bystandership—and this is perhaps the deepest cost, because it forecloses future possibility.

At the communal scale, when citizens withdraw from political life, institutions hollow. What remains is not neutrality but capture: by organized money, by concentrated interests, by the small minorities who remain engaged because engagement serves their purposes.

At historical scale, consider a single data point. In 1966, with two years left to live, Martin Luther King Jr. had a favorable rating of 37 percent among Americans. More than sixty percent viewed him unfavorably. Today his image appears on postage stamps, his words are quoted by the politicians who would have opposed him. The distance between these two moments is not a measure of how difficult it is to recognize moral clarity in the moment. It is a measure of how reliable retrospective endorsement has always been, and how little that endorsement costs those who give it.

The question we are left with is uncomfortable but core: where would you have been in 1966? Not where you imagine you’d have been. Where would you, given your tolerance for social risk, your relationship to the opinion of others, your willingness to be associated with disruption, have stood? The question is diagnostic. And it applies to the issues of today, which no doubt will be legible in retrospect with a shrug. So, go on, where are you?

VII.

Again: born or made? It may be that the question is flawed. Evidence suggests that the capacity for reluctant revolutionary consciousness is ordinary, available, latent in most. And what determines its activation is not character per se but the presence of specific psychological and social conditions that either facilitate or suppress the movement from bystander to actor.

These conditions include:

• the presence of a clear, specific injustice that cannot be absorbed into existing frameworks;

• the withdrawal of explanations that have been used to justify tolerance;

• the presence of at least one other person who has already moved. because, as with dance parties, it is almost always easier to be the second person than the first;

• the existence of some plausible action, however small, that creates a connection between private conscience and public life;

• and time. Not the white moderate’s idea of time, more eternal deferral, but a genuine reckoning with the fact that time passes. That history is made in the present by those who act in it, and that the absence of action is itself a form of action.

Social psychologists call it the decision tree of bystander intervention: noticing, defining, taking responsibility, knowing how, acting. It is also a description of political becoming. The reluctant revolutionary moves through these stages, usually slowly, usually with setbacks, usually maintaining throughout the persistent doubt that is the mark of her moral seriousness. He does not arrive at conviction. He arrives at action despite the absence of conviction, which is braver.

The question “What can I do?” which appears as an expression of initial impotence, is actually a threshold. It suggests a moment when a person has already decided, implicitly, that something must be done. The only remaining uncertainty is about agency. And agency is not a fixed property. It is something that expands in the act of exercising it.

VIII.

There is a word that runs through this which deserves to be examined directly: reluctance. I use it as a term of honor. But it requires defense.

Reluctance can be, and often is, merely timidity in a party dress. The moderate who counsels patience is reluctant. The bystander watching from a safe distance is reluctant. The person with good values and never inconveniences anyone by acting on them is also reluctant. This kind of reluctance is not honorable. It is, as King saw clearly, a form of complicity.

The reluctance we are describing is different in kind. Timidity shrinks a person. It produces, over time, someone less than they began. The reluctance of the person who acts despite doubting, who intervenes without certainty, who builds solidarity without knowing where it leads produces someone bigger and bolder. Not more confident, necessarily, but more present. Responsible. Responsive. More real, in Arendt’s sense. More fully invested as political being. But how do you know? In short, you, don’t.

My dad’s favorite saying belonded to Hillel the Elder, a famous Jewish sage from the 1st century BCE. The full aphorism is found in the Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers 1:14):

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
But if I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?“

This leads cleant to Camus’s formula: I rebel; therefore, I exist. It describes a social fact: that the act of resistance creates between the rebel and others a form of solidarity that did not exist before the act. The rebel discovers it in the act. And this discovery changes what is possible for everyone.

Most decisions of the revolutionary kind are made not in moments of soaring clarity but in times of exhaustion, or doubt. On an ordinary Tuesday morning when you feel that none of this is your responsibility and that surely someone else is better positioned to handle it—but here we are.

Then you do something. You draw the line. And you say: Fuckit.

For decades, the American municipal project has operated on a comfortable, if fraying, myth: that the police are an organ of a state capable of self-correction through gentle nudging of “oversight boards” and “advisory committees.” It is a narrative of incrementalism, a belief that the machinery of justice simply needs a bit more grease, a few more body cameras, and a marginally more diverse recruitment brochure.

But in the drafty halls of Chicago’s City Hall, a more potent reality is taking shape. The re-introduction of the CPOP Referendum represents a fundamental collapse of faith in the advisory model. It is the political manifestation of Camus’s “revolt”. The moment when a community, fatigued by the performance of accountability without its substance, simply says no.

From Resistance to Governance

The Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression is not a new phenomenon; it is a multi-generational institutional memory. Born in 1973 out of the global mobilization to free Angela Davis, the Alliance has spent over half a century “holding the line” against what they define as a systemic “closed power loop.” For the Alliance, the current state of policing is not merely a series of budget disputes—it is an “occupation” that necessitates a permanent defense mechanism rather than a temporary protest movement.

This longevity provides the fuel for the “fuck-it moment.” This is the precise psychological and political tipping point where a community decides that the risks of challenging an entrenched status quo are finally outweighed by the daily danger of living under it.

While the Alliance has historically focused on defense—freeing the wrongfully convicted and supporting survivors through their CFIST campaign—the CPOP Referendum marks a pivot toward sovereignty. They are no longer asking for a seat at the table of “advisory democracy”; they are moving to rebuild the table entirely. By demanding the power to negotiate police union contracts and set the CPD budget, they are attempting to transform the “fuck-it moment” into a permanent fixture of municipal law.

Why Conventional Explanations Fail

Mainstream pundits often frame the CPOP referendum as a “left-wing” attempt to “defund” or “disrupt” public safety. This view fails because it ignores the historical-philosophical framework of the struggle. The Alliance is not seeking chaos; it is seeking the sovereignty of the neighbor. By demanding that District Council meetings serve as the primary site of safety discourse, they are attempting to repatriate power from an opaque bureaucracy back to the sidewalk. Conventional analysis sees a policy dispute; the Alliance sees a restoration of the democratic norm where the governed actually govern the force that polices them.

What is Actually Happening

We are witnessing the “diminishing returns of the $50 million hammer.” As municipal budgets expand to cover police settlements and militarized equipment, the social contract shrinks. The Alliance’s CFIST campaign—focused on freeing torture survivors and the wrongfully convicted—reveals that the institutional stress is no longer sustainable.

When a city’s legal apparatus becomes a factory for wrongful convictions, “reform” is an insufficient vocabulary. The demand for “Community Power Over Policing” is an admission that the existing institutions are not just broken—they are misaligned with the very concept of liberty.

Closing the Accountability Loop

The core of the movement rests on a simple premise: those who are policed should have the power to decide how that policing happens. Currently, the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability holds significant oversight, but the proposed referendum seeks to expand and “democratize” this body by:

• Direct Elections: Transitioning the Commission to an 11-person body where 9 members are directly elected by Chicagoans.

• Budgetary Control: Granting the Commission the power to set the CPD budget, ensuring taxpayer dollars align with community priorities.

• Contract Power: Allowing the Commission to negotiate police union contracts, a move intended to prevent “anti-accountability” measures—like the destruction of misconduct records—from being baked into labor agreements.

• Hiring and Firing: Giving the body the authority to hire or fire the police superintendent and members of the police board for cause.

The Opposition: A System Under Pressure

The push for the referendum comes in response to what activists call “provisions designed to shield police from accountability.” Recent victories, such as the City Council’s rejection of private arbitration for severe misconduct cases, have shown that public pressure works. However, organizers warn that without control over the police contract and budget, these gains remain vulnerable to legal challenges and behind-the-scenes negotiations.

“Our gains in the fight for accountability have been great, but until we gain control over the contract and the budget, we will continue to see the FOP erode the accountability we are able to achieve.” — CAARPR Statement

As Chicago approaches the 2026 midterms, the CPOP referendum stands as a test of whether the city is ready to move from oversight to true community control. The transition from refusal to realization now rests in the hands of the legislative process.

How to Join the Movement

The path to the ballot requires a majority vote in the City Council. Supporters are currently using the CPOP Action Toolkit to mobilize. Key actions include:

1. Contacting Alders: Residents are being urged to call or email their representatives to support Ordinance #O2025-0019935.

2. Community Canvassing: Using printable graphics and flyers to educate neighbors on the impact of a directly elected commission.

3. Weekly Strategy: The Stop Police Crimes Committee meets every Monday at 6:00 PM to coordinate citywide efforts.

The transition from passive observer to reluctant revolutionary is rarely ignited by a dense policy brief or sweeping ideological conversion. As the framework insists, it is a certain “pop-that-gum-one-more-time” moment. The instant when accumulated tolerance snaps under the weight of one more intolerable act.

For the Midwestern schoolteacher or suburban parent in recent months, that threshold crystallized not in abstract debates over immigration enforcement but in the visceral reality of federal agents killing American citizens: Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and poet, fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis on January 7 after attempting to drive away from agents surrounding her car; Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, killed by Border Patrol agents during an altercation nearby on January 24; Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old Black father of two, shot by an off-duty ICE agent outside his Los Angeles apartment on New Year’s Eve 2025.

These weren’t distant headlines. They were neighbors’ stories, community vigils, and local outrage that made silence feel like complicity. The limit had arrived: the point where the personal cost of inaction finally exceeded the perceived risk of stepping forward.

The Paradox of Scale: Us vs. The Machine

There is an inherent tension between the solitary revolt—the individual’s raw moral refusal—and the national apparatus needed to make it consequential.

The power of the No Kings movement resides in its Camusian essence: the simple, unadorned act of a person declaring, "This far and no further.” A schoolteacher who opens her living room for safety marshal training, a parent that signs up to host a small rally, and a retiree who joins a de-escalation session. None are gestures of grand strategy but rather refusals rooted in conscience. The solitary 'No' finds its collective voice through a sprawling infrastructure.

Over 3,000 events are registered across all 50 states and every congressional district for March 28, surpassing the October mobilization that drew an estimated seven million participants across 2,700 events. Indivisible handles registrations and communications.

The ACLU runs Know Your Rights sessions. The American Friends Service Committee trains safety marshals in de-escalation. The AFL-CIO coordinates labor support. Bruce Springsteen is scheduled to perform at the Minneapolis flagship. Events range from that march to gatherings in Mississippi suburbs and small-town New Jersey.

One risk is dilution. When moral outcry becomes a line item in a donor drive or a slot on a national map, does it lose its revolutionary heat? The coalition counters this by emphasizing local agency: safety trainings stress community-led de-escalation, and events range from flagship marches (Embarcadero Plaza to Civic Center in San Francisco, 7th Avenue and Central Park South in New York) to dozens in New Jersey or Mississippi suburbs. Accountability stays close to home even as numbers swell.

Competing Fires: Domestic Erosion vs. Global War

While the “No Kings” movement solidifies its domestic front, it faces a rival for the national psyche: the smoke from Operation Epic Fury. There is a calculated convenience in global conflict; power has always used the horizon’s flames to obscure the damage being done at home. As casualty reports and energy prices dominate the screens, the administration bets on a classic trade-off: that the American public will defer its quest for domestic justice in exchange for the perceived safety of a wartime footing. Operation Epic Fury’s escalating strikes in the Gulf, rising energy prices, and casualty reports—these dominate screens and conversations, a classic tactic of power: foreign crisis to justify or obscure domestic overreach.

As of March 24, at least 290 American service members have been wounded and 13 killed since the operation began on February 28. In response to U.S. strikes that "obliterated" Iran's nuclear infrastructure, Iran has launched retaliatory strikes against regional energy hubs, including major gas fields in Qatar and oil facilities in the UAE.

President Trump has claimed that Iran recently gave the U.S. a significant "present" related to the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting a potential diplomatic opening, even as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth warned that the U.S. is "negotiating with bombs."

The machinery of “Operation Epic Fury” and the domestic normalization of ICE-related violence are not static; they’re accelerating. We’re in a volatile window where silence is being codified into law. Every day without a collective “No” allows the extraordinary to become the mundane. If the infrastructure of resistance isn’t tested and solidified now, we risk waking up to a landscape where the right to gather is curtailed and the neighbor we failed to protect, gone. Hyperbole? Maybe. But is it worth taking the risk to find out?

The Iran war is also used to justify a partial government shutdown as the administration and Congress clash over DHS funding, directly leading to the chaos at airports. As of March 23, ICE agents have been deployed to at least 14 major U.S. airports (including JFK, O’Hare, and Atlanta) to assist with the TSA staffing crisis caused by the shutdown. Border Czar Tom Homan is managing the rollout, describing the agents as a “force multiplier” for tasks like line management and crowd control.

Power benefits from distraction; civic muscle atrophies in silence. By choosing to mobilize on March 28 despite the world being on fire abroad, we enact a secondary revolt. It signals that we refuse to let authoritarianism drift at home and be sidelined by “greater” overseas threats. It’s the harder path. Defending the neighbor at the door while the television broadcasts dangers across the ocean demands prioritizing constitutional erosion when global emergencies scream for deference.

The Historical Echo

The through line from the 2017 Women’s Marches is direct, and the evolution unmistakable. Back then, momentum was reactive, sparked by an election, bursting in single-day millions but struggling to sustain without deeper roots. The current movement is proactive and resilient: built on sustained resistance since 2025, with prior No Kings actions (millions in June, seven million in October) forging infrastructure and experience.

Where 2017 focused on general opposition, March 28 targets specific moral thresholds, channeling outrage into nonviolent, community-grounded actions across every state.

Power relies on the “good citizen” to remain distracted by the horizon while the floorboards are being ripped up beneath them. By prioritizing global casualty reports over the local killing of a nurse or a poet, we fall into a trap of strategic paralysis. To defer outrage is to subsidize our own disenfranchisement. The fire is not just in the Gulf; it is at the doorstep of every suburban home and city apartment mentioned in these vigils.

The Enduring Threshold

Outrage alone, like grief, is a powerful catalyst, but it has a shelf life. The transition to the March 28 mobilization represents the hardening of anger into a political shield. We have moving past the era of symbolic exasperation and disbelief and into tactical refusal. The question is no longer “How did this happen?” but “How do we make it stop?”

The ultimate measure of March 28 will not be the final headcount at Embarcadero Plaza or the dozens of events in New Jersey. It will be whether threshold moments endure. If the schoolteacher who hosted a meeting in her living room continues saying no to the normalization of violence long after banners are folded, if ordinary refusals harden into habits of civic vigilance, then the act of resistance succeeds in its truest aim: rebuilding trust when institutions falter, proving that revolt, in its simplest form, can outlast distraction and scale alike.

The threshold of tolerance isn't just crossed in the streets of our cities; it is being eroded in that queue for a flight to see family. By deploying unmasked ICE agents to manage TSA lines at JFK and O’Hare, the administration has turned the airport, a space of transient freedom, into a theater of domestic microaggressions. It does not portend well for the ‘26 midterms, with many suggesting that the normalizing of ICE at airports sets the scene for similar visibility at voting centers later this year.

When the state uses a global war as a pretext to normalize 'secret police' at the gate, 'No Kings' isn't just about policy quibbles anymore; it's about reclaiming the right to exist in public without the intimidating weight of an agent’s gaze.

In 1978, a Czech playwright who had been banned from having his work performed sat in his apartment and wrote an essay about a greengrocer. The greengrocer places a sign in his shop window: “Workers of the World, Unite!” He doesn’t believe in it. He barely reads it. He puts it there because everyone puts one there, because not putting it there would invite questions, inspections, and trouble. The sign becomes the price of being left alone.

Václav Havel wrote “The Power of the Powerless“ in 1978. It famously uses the “greengrocer” metaphor to describe how individuals in post-totalitarian systems participate in “living within a lie” by displaying slogans they don’t believe in to avoid trouble.

Václav Havel called this “living within a lie.” He did not mean dramatic falsehoods. He meant something quieter: the daily, ambient compliance that makes an authoritarian system function without needing to use force on most of its citizens most of the time. The greengrocer is not a collaborator. He is simply a man who wants to sell onions in peace. And that, Havel argued, is exactly what makes him indispensable to the machinery.

The Salsa Show

Consider the National Museum of the American Latino (NMAL) who paused a planned 2025 exhibition on Latino civil rights and youth movements following political pressure. It is being replaced by “¡Puro Ritmo! The Musical Journey of Salsa,” scheduled for April 2026.

The museum’s parent institution is undergoing an unprecedented White House review, ordered by executive decree to purge what the administration calls “improper ideology” from the nation’s largest museum complex. Eight museums have been directed to submit exhibition content, curatorial guidelines, staff credentials, and future programming plans for political vetting.

Replacing a civil rights exhibit (focused on struggle, systemic inequality, and activism) with a salsa exhibit (focused on music and cultural celebration) represents a pivot toward “unifying” content. Critics argue this is a form of pre-emptive compliance, where institutions self-censor to ensure survival and funding.

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III was ordered to submit thousands of documents, including wall texts and curatorial guidelines, for White House review. The administration threatened to withhold the institution’s $1 billion budget if it did not comply. His 2026 budget justification letter to Congress, once a three-page vision statement invoking diversity and climate research, shrank to a single page focused on the semiquincentennial and facility upgrades.

The painter Amy Sherald pulled her solo exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery after learning the museum was considering removing one of her works. Other museums have quietly followed. Exhibitions have been cancelled. Language has been adjusted. A Stanford art historian told NPR the atmosphere reminded him of McCarthyism.

The Architecture of Compliance

The pattern extends well beyond the Smithsonian’s walls. In May 2025, the administration proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts entirely. Within hours, hundreds of arts organizations received emails terminating their grants. In March 2025, an executive order was signed to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian. The administration launched a comprehensive review of eight museums to ensure alignment with “American exceptionalism.”

Over half of open NEA awards were cancelled. Senior directors in dance, theater, folk arts, and design resigned. A House subcommittee subsequently proposed slashing the surviving NEA budget by thirty-five percent. The Artistic Freedom Initiative, documenting the fallout, has counted fifty-eight laws and policies restricting artistic freedom passed or implemented in a single year, more than $250 million in funding cuts to cultural institutions, and nearly 7,000 book titles banned in public schools.

These are significant numbers. But the numbers are the visible architecture. Havel’s insight was about the invisible architecture: the way institutional pressure produces compliance without requiring direct orders. A theater company in Minneapolis cancelled a production because its plot too closely mirrored traumatic current events. A snow sculpture inscribed with “ICE OUT MN” was defaced and disqualified from a state competition. An art adviser at Sotheby’s observed, publicly, that collectors were retreating from work that “makes a statement” in favor of art that is simply beautiful. The market, too, was self-censoring.

Living in Truth

Havel spent five years in prison for his writing. He was a reluctant political figure who became, almost by accident, the moral center of a dissident movement. He did not set out to lead anything. He was a playwright who liked beer and found bureaucratic absurdity genuinely funny. What radicalized him was the recognition that the system’s real power lay in its ability to make the lie ordinary. To make compliance feel like common sense.

His counter-proposal, which he called “living in truth,” was deceptively modest. It meant simply refusing to participate in the performance. The greengrocer takes down the sign. A brewer speaks honestly at a union meeting. A playwright stages a banned play in a living room. None of these acts threatened the state directly. All of them threatened the state’s most valuable resource: the presumption that everyone agreed. Havel understood that authoritarian systems depend less on true believers than on the vast, quiet middle that goes along to get along. The system doesn’t need enthusiasm. It needs silence.

The Reluctant Threshold

This is where Havel’s greengrocer meets the psychology described by Camus, Zimbardo, and the bystander researchers: the ordinary person’s journey from acquiescence to refusal. The threshold is almost never ideological. It is personal. It arrives when the cost of continued compliance begins to feel heavier than the cost of acting. For Sherald, the threshold was a single painting. For the snow sculptor in St. Paul, it was a word carved in ice.

The question Havel poses to the present moment is uncomfortable precisely because it does not involve grand heroism. It involves the small, daily decisions made by curators, grant writers, university administrators, theater directors, and museum boards. Do you adjust the exhibition language before the review letter arrives? Do you steer the grant application toward semiquincentennial themes because the funding is conditional? Do you choose the salsa show? Each accommodation, taken alone, feels reasonable. Taken together, they constitute exactly the landscape Havel described: a society performing its own compliance, so the state rarely needs to enforce it.

The Sign in the Window

The coalition statement released by more than 150 cultural institutions last August was titled “Cultural Freedom Demands Collective Courage.” It is a fine title. But Havel would have noted that collective courage is precisely the thing a system of individualized compliance is designed to prevent. The greengrocer does not know whether his neighbors also despise the sign. He only knows the cost of removing his own.

What Havel’s life demonstrates, and what makes it relevant to a section called Reluctant Revolutionaries, is that the first person to take down the sign rarely does so out of confidence. They do so out of a threshold crossed, a limit reached, an accumulation of small surrenders that becomes, on an ordinary Tuesday, intolerable. The act itself is modest. Its consequences are not. Because in a system sustained by the fiction of universal agreement, one honest gesture is an existential threat.

American cultural life in 2026 is full of “greengrocer’s signs.” The question is not whether someone will take one down. The question is whether that person is, perhaps, you.

AMSTERDAM, 1943. In the meticulous machinery of Nazi occupation, the deadliest tool was not a rifle but a filing cabinet. By early 1943, the Amsterdam Population Registry at Plantage Kerklaan 36 had become a high-precision death engine. Its drawers held duplicate identity cards for every Dutch citizen—names, addresses, birthdates, religions—cross-referenced against the forged papers the Resistance was frantically producing to shield Jews and political fugitives. A single mismatch meant arrest, deportation, or worse.

Willem Arondéus understood filing cabinets all too well. Born in 1894 in Naarden as the youngest of six children to a fuel trader father and a mother from a theatrical family, he had lived openly as a gay man in a society that tolerated artistic eccentricity but punished personal truth. He trained as a painter and illustrator, landing commissions like a large mural for Rotterdam City Hall in 1923. Later he turned to writing, novels such as Het Uilenhuis (1938) and a biography of the painter Matthijs Maris, yet success always hovered just out of reach. He scraped by in bohemian poverty, his sexuality an open secret that kept him on society’s edges.

When the Germans invaded the Netherlands in May 1940 and the country fell in five days, Arondéus chose not to hide. He joined the underground, first producing the clandestine newsletter Brandarisbrief, then merging it with the artists’ resistance paper De Vrije Kunstenaar. There he met sculptor Gerrit van der Veen, a master forger of identity cards, and the lesbian cellist and conductor Frieda Belinfante. Together they realized the fatal flaw in their work: no forgery could survive scrutiny if the original records still existed.

The solution they conceived was audacious. An architectural and bureaucratic assassination. On the night of March 27, 1943, a team led by Arondéus and van der Veen, with Belinfante deeply involved in the planning, struck. Disguised in police uniforms sewn by group member Sjoerd Bakker, they approached the night guards claiming to search for explosives. Two medical students in the group, Cees Honig and Willem Beck, injected the guards with phenobarbital, rendering them unconscious and carrying them safely to the nearby Artis zoo. Inside the vault, the saboteurs opened drawers, piled thousands of cards on the floor, doused them in benzene, and set timed explosives stolen from a munitions depot. They escaped before the blast.

The fire that followed was no accident. Sympathetic Dutch firefighters, tipped off in advance, deliberately delayed their response and then hosed the building with water instead of foam, ruining far more paper than flames alone could have. When the smoke cleared, approximately 800,000 identity cards, roughly 15 percent of the entire registry, were destroyed. Six hundred blank cards and 50,000 guilders were spirited away for future forgeries. No one was killed in the attack. Thousands of Jews and others gained precious months (or years) of anonymity.

The action was a tactical triumph. But betrayal arrived swiftly. Within days, a traitor (never conclusively identified) pocketed a 10,000-guilder Nazi reward. Arondéus was arrested on April 1 after a notebook in his apartment revealed names. He refused to talk, even under interrogation. Most of the group were rounded up. Belinfante escaped by disguising herself as a man, eventually fleeing on foot across the Alps to Switzerland and, later, to the United States.

On June 18, 1943, Arondéus and thirteen others stood trial at the Tropenmuseum. He pleaded guilty and took full responsibility, possibly sparing two younger doctors from execution. Twelve men, including Arondéus, were sentenced to death. In the final days before the firing squad in Haarlem, he composed his last message, not to his family, not to the Resistance, but to history.

Speaking to his lawyer (or a friend, accounts vary; one source names attorney Lau Mazirel), he said: “Tell people that homosexuals are not cowards.” In Dutch: “Zeg de mensen dat homoseksuelen niet per definitie zwakkelingen zijn.” He wanted the world to know that he and at least two other executed men—Sjoerd Bakker and Johan Brouwer—were gay.

The execution came on July 1, 1943 (some records list July 2). Arondéus was 48. He had destroyed a Nazi filing system to save strangers. With his final sentence, he addressed something more stubborn: the quiet assumption, shared by many of his own countrymen and even some fellow resisters, that a gay man was inherently soft, weak, or cowardly. Unfit for the “manly” work of sabotage and sacrifice.

For decades, the Netherlands honored only half of his legacy. Immediately after the war, his family received a posthumous medal. In 1946 a plaque appeared at the ruined registry site. But the “tell the people” bit was quietly sidelined. Textbooks and early resistance histories celebrated the artist-hero while airbrushing his sexuality. Homosexuality remained criminalized in much of Europe; the idea that a gay man could lead one of the most daring operations of the Dutch underground did not fit the postwar narrative of stoic, conventional masculinity. Arondéus became a straight-washed icon. Brave, sure, but conveniently neutered.

Correction arrived slowly. In 1984 Arondéus was awarded the Resistance Memorial Cross. On June 19, 1986, Yad Vashem in Israel recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations. Only then did Dutch historians and the public begin to reckon fully with the defiant coda he had dictated from his cell. A 2023 documentary, Willem & Frieda: Defying the Nazis (hosted by Stephen Fry), finally brought both Arondéus and Belinfante’s intertwined stories to international audiences.

Today the story reads like a parable about the politics of the archive itself. The Nazis built a registry to categorize and exterminate. Postwar society built a different archive. One that filed heroes into comfortable, heterosexual boxes. Arondéus refused both. He burned the first with explosives and the second with his dying words. His sabotage was double: against the occupier who wanted to erase Jewish lives and against the prejudice that wanted to erase his own.

In an era when debates over identity politics, military service, and national sacrifice still rage. When marginalized communities are still asked to prove their loyalty, their courage, their right to belong, Arondéus’s final request lands with breathtaking force. He did not ask to be tolerated. He demanded recognition on his own terms: that homosexuals are not cowards and that the most excluded often fight the hardest precisely because their right to exist is never granted, only seized.

The population registry bombing bought time for thousands. But Arondéus’s last sentence represents something rare by itself: the slow, eventual acknowledgment that heroism has no sexual orientation prerequisite. He sabotaged invisibility itself. And in the end, that may have been an even more explosive act.