Ray Lester Fitzsimmons

grew up in the Manhattan of the 1980s, as his Ohio-born father was making a killing in real estate and trying to move up into the city’s high society. His French mother taught art at Hunter College, before dying of cancer when he was 8. West Point Class of 1989, BA in International Affairs, wrote his thesis paper on Clausewitz. Fitzsimmons was stationed in Berlin in the early 1990s where he attended lectures on Hegel and Adorno, developed an interest in Weimar-era National Bolshevism and the RAF, and came into contact with far-left student groups. These contacts, his increasingly outlandish political opinions, but above all his outspoken opposition to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia led to his honorable discharge with the rank of first lieutenant in 1998. Upon his return to New York, he entered medical school but dropped out when he got lucky on the stock market during the dot com crash. Still thinks of himself as a sort of a Left Hegelian with national revolutionary sympathies. He recently married a cousin and spends most of his time raising their child, reading military histories and has now been persuaded to write on IR and geopolitics for SSAM while working out his own version of “the fourth political theory.” It will blow your mind—he assures us.

ARTICLES

The Great and the Good | Fall-Winter 2023

Imperiled Collectives | Fall-Winter 2023